Outside the funeral home, it is a hot blue American day. Cars have begun to enter the roundabout, and out from them spill strangers, black people and white people, young and old, who all knew Greg Tampico, who liked and loved him, and they are dressed simply, respectfully, in black suits and black dresses, they all seem to know each other—through tears, they embrace—until enter the florist with bushels of flowers, you have no idea what kind, they are yellow and white, they’re going inside by the armload as more people arrive with the food, a huge spread of what looks and smells like some kind of African fare, and someone else is unloading a large funeral guest book, a cheap gilded sign for out front that just sounds wrong: CELEBRATING THE COMPLETED LIFE OF GREGORY ALLEN TAMPICO.

You do not participate. You climb into the Tahoe, which won’t be yours for long. You close the door.

And here is where you sit, your hands gripping the wheel, your forehead resting on top of them for thirty-two minutes, the amount of time it will take for the paparazzi and Officer Anderson and Brian Castle to find you, and you sitting here, alone in the Tahoe in the parking lot of a budget funeral parlor in Alexandria, Virginia, with your head on your hands as though privately sobbing, this will be the final broadcasted image of your undoing, and my god, what will you think when you see yourself in such a state on TV, as you most certainly will? Or, like, when the memes all start coming like they came for Keanu eating lunch on that bench, and they will say SAD FASCIST IS SAD or SAD ALEX WILSON IS THE NEW SAD KANYE IS THE NEW SAD KEANU, or you will appear to be weeping over a volleyball which has been photoshopped onto your lap: WIIILSON!

But they’re wrong. As you sit here, waiting for the world to descend, you are not sobbing. You are wondering what they have done with the aardvark.

The last time you saw her, she was in your Tahoe and Olioke was in the kitchen, making himself a peanut butter sandwich with his rust-dotted paring knife, waiting for you to turn on the TV upstairs, and the moment he heard your TV go on, he must have put down the knife and walked through your living room. He must have opened the door to your garage, where, when he turned on the light, there must have stood Rutledge, waiting at the back of the Tahoe.

And Rutledge embraced the aardvark by her mount, lifting her as though she weighed nothing at all (he benches 280), then carried her upstairs to the kitchen, stashed her under your custom Calacutta Italian marble breakfast bar ($12487), and slipped, undetected, into his room as Olioke returned to the kitchen. And Olioke, he did not speak, or even move from his seat, when your bedroom door slammed shut, when you dashed through the living room, flew downstairs into the garage and backed the Tahoe out into the street to drive to Alexandria for Tampico’s funeral this afternoon—Olioke was just waiting, calmly eating his sandwich at the sink, as you roared off toward Murphy & Milliken’s, as all the reporters and paparazzi packed up their white vans and followed you, and at last, when everyone had fled 2486 Asher Place, Rutledge only then emerged from his room and asked: “Is he gone?”