You close the lid of the coffin.

You feel like you might cry, so you take out your phone. You sit down on a pew. You now have 18709 unread text messages and 24002 unread emails. You’re being subpoenaed. A congressional committee’s about to be formed.

Scrolling through emails and text messages is what calms you, you are strangely calm, the roar of the media no longer troubles you, and it’s like the calm of a blind man who has at long last been given sight but realizes there is nothing to see; or maybe it’s like this guy Lazarus who, once he came out of his cave and Jesus wasn’t there because he was, like, done with him, must have realized there was not much more to do other than go on unceremoniously living, because after the miracle’s over, well, then what?

You feel this way, reading your emails, until you reach the part about who will be investigating you, and your phone nearly slips—movie-like—from your palms.

The leader of the committee who will be investigating the aardvark and who will, in a matter of weeks, uncover a host of financial improprieties, impeachable offenses, all, is none other than Representative William “Billy” Rutledge (D).

* * *

“What happened,” Downing had asked Ostlet last night.

It began with the aardvark. The night the hunter returned to camp with the aardvark, he left it on the ground to bleed out when he saw a light on in Richard’s tent. “It was late when he entered,” Ostlet said. “No one knew he was there, and I was lying down with a wet cloth pressing my eyes.” When the hunter said he had something to show him, Ostlet had apologized. Removed the compress. “Not now,” he said. “My eyes are killing me.”

The hunter, bone-thin but strong, knelt down next to him. “I’m a doctor,” he said.

“I’m fine,” said Ostlet, but did not protest when the hunter took the compress from him, nor when he placed a hand over his eyes.

That’s when, Ostlet told Downing, the hunter began moving his other hand down Ostlet’s plump British figure, unbuttoned his trousers and softly explained to him how Nature is not criminal; how common it was for certain African men on expedition to engage in what might be called “reciprocal sex”; how it was common for these men to declare more love for their boy-wives than their girl-wives, and why wouldn’t Sir Richard Ostlet, the hunter said, allow himself, as such, to no longer feel pain?—and that was the moment, Ostlet explained, when he realized he loved Downing, that what he had always felt for Downing was love, and Ostlet begged Downing’s forgiveness, but how could he possibly have known any sooner when there was no language to describe how he felt, no currency, and to even attempt to speak of it would have smacked of revolt, but a hopeless revolt, one toward a freedom that Ostlet knew did not exist—for Britain, didn’t Downing know, was perfectly content to ignore them so long as there remained ambiguity, and hadn’t Downing grown up reading, as Ostlet had, for decades, about the thousands of souls who tried to love one another unambiguously, or those who got caught and were tried all over England at the courts of assize, the quarter sessions and—hung? Was Downing so thick as to be unaware of the Offences Against the Person Act, and risk the both of them landing locked up for years, as men were, in Reading Gaol?