“But why,” Downing asked. “Why do it?”

“The pain, you see,” said Ostlet, and he reached blindly for Downing’s thin waist. “I could no longer bear it—”

“Dickie,” Titus heard himself whisper, and he touched the bandage wrapped around his lover’s face.

“It’s me,” Richard said, and the two men grabbed each other’s forearms.

And Downing grinned, weeping, and Ostlet opened his own mouth and, in his way, wept, knowing now that as everyone believed he was dead, they could at long last live, retire to Downing’s farm in Northumberland as Downing always had dreamed, and from here on out all things were possible, and all they needed do now was sell the gigantic taxidermied aardvark for the highest possible sum—

Exit the aardvark, enter the evening. It is August. Enter a warm, passing breeze through a window left open as Titus Downing sits up in his canopied bed. His hand holding the camphor, it throbs. The scar, he observes, looks like half a halo. He is forty-one years old.

After Ostlet explained what had happened, Downing, comforted believing that souls are not destroyed at death, not merely created and then destroyed but infinitely transferred, passed on, waited until his lover was sleeping, then crept downstairs, into his workshop. There he stood in his dressing gown in front of his battered pine workbenches, his rows of glass bottles of salt of tartar, of palm wine.

He removed the cloth bag from its nail on the wall and selected the piercing awl. He went to the aardvark.

Tipping her on one side, he carefully etched under the mount made of Leadwood, deep in the grain, a good luck symbol, a little hooked cross, the Hindu symbol for the nature of the machine of the universe, for how the jiva cycles peacefully on, into infinity.

How many lives have I already lived, Downing wonders, undressing himself. He folds his clothes neatly in squares, as though the clothes are a body he wears for one season, removes for the next. If his soul will never expire, the next season will simply bring, the taxidermist thinks as he ingests the camphor pills, one by one, more of the same.

Whatever comes next will be nothing more than a new arrangement of skin.

* * *

“When you can’t make them see the light,” Ronald Reagan famously said, “make them feel the heat,” and it’s the quote Rutledge spoke upon seeing Images of Greatness adorning your coffee table the first time.

Enter Rutledge, six months ago, into your townhouse. Enter, like you, a young and handsome upcoming congressman, amply-muscled and blond, who quoted Ronald Reagan the day he met you, destabilizing you into trusting him despite the fact that he was a Democrat. Enter Rutledge, who once told you, shaking his head sympathetically, that he’s known Nancy Beavers since Georgetown and you’d “better look out ’cuz she’s tough as nails.”

While you had presumed Rutledge had left three days ago for his vacation at his farmhouse with his wife and five sons while Congress was not in session, clearly Rutledge was not at the fucking farmhouse; Rutledge was trolling 2486 Asher Place, watching you in a way that you did not know you were being watched—and it could have been, like, as recent as last week over lite beers and peanut butter sandwiches and Scrabble in your kitchen that Rutledge casually told Olioke about an address you often visited on King Street in Alexandria, an address belonging to the name “Gregory Tampico,” and, by chance, did Olioke know this Tampico guy?