Enter the Aardvark

by Jessica Anthony

  It is not the gruesome act of Downing having inserted her husband’s shellacked eyeballs into the eye sockets of a gigantic stuffed aardvark that bothers Rebecca Ostlet; it is her certainty that the ghost of her husband is looking for them, is still looking for them, that it could be nearby, which is why she glances nervously out the shopwindow, whispers faintly for the Brontës to come to her side, but the Brontës whine louder, scratching at the door leading upstairs to Downing’s flat, and Rebecca suddenly struggles to breathe in the cuirass.

  Potter and Skinner both look to the German man, malingering in the corner. “Get water,” they say.

  The German points at the aardvark. He knows all about them, he says, and has been to the south of Africa several times. He is about to go there again. Because Germany has a shot at a trade surplus. France now owns Algeria. Britain’s at the Cape. Even Portugal’s in Angola, Mozambique—but aardvarks, he says, do not have blue eyes, and points again. “Blaue Augen,” he says, perversely delighted, this aardvark has blue eyes, and it’s the same delighted look that he, thirty-six-year-old Heinrich Göring, will in three years give nineteen-year-old Franziska Tiefenbrunn, the young Bavarian peasant with astonishing bright blue eyes that, when she looks at him in the moronic way she does, will remind him of the aardvark which is about to come into his possession; “Fanny” Tiefenbrunn, soon to become Fanny Göring, will, halfway into their marriage, bear a fourth child, Hermann, who will inherit, to his father’s equal delight, the same bright blue eyes of his mother.

  “Are you sure you’re all right,” Walter Potter says to Rebecca, and at that moment the Brontës, united in their cause, at long last manage to force open the door.

  In a flying train of pink tongues, of rust-colored fur, the panting dogs tear up the staircase into Downing’s flat. The staircase is narrow, the dogs fight into a line, making headlong for Downing’s bedroom to reunite with their master, Sir Richard Ostlet, who is, as exactly no one could have guessed, lying bare-assed and prostrate upon a canopied bed decorated only with lush velvet drapes the color of aubergine.

  * * *

  Murphy & Milliken’s Funeral Home is a flat, one-story brick building that looks like something that survived the Eighties, but barely. It gets a 1.2 rating on Yelp. There is a sad little roundabout in front of the joint, a place for the Bereaved to pull up fancily in their cars, and the roof is gray, broad, its overhang sort of too-big, trying lamely to imitate the roof of a cozy thatched hut, and it’s all reminiscent of those motels you’ve seen along rural highways, like it’s the sort of place that might be a place in the outskirts of Roanoke, Lynchburg, but here, in Alexandria, the building has been forgotten, overshadowed by its more industrious neighbors, which are two seven-story parking garages, a long-abandoned stripe of the Metro, and a Crate & Barrel outlet that takes up most of the acreage and glows whitely behind the funeral parlor like some kind of alien spacecraft.

  You park your car in back. No one is here. No one is here because according to your phone it’s only 12:20 p.m.

  The funeral won’t begin for over an hour.

  At the front door, there is no sign mentioning anything about a service today, there are no flowers that have been delivered, there’s no guest book to sign, and through the building’s windows, which are decorated with these truly pall-looking purple faux-velvet drapes, the inside looks dark and all this must be, you deduce, because you are early, which is why you’re surprised, when you push the front door, that it opens.

  The smell hits you first—it’s a perfume you can’t locate, floral or herbal or something—and the brown wall-to-wall, which is everywhere, just absorbs it. You cross the carpet and walk silently through an atrium, wondering how in the hell Greg Tampico ended up in a place like this when you thought he had money, and if not money then, like, at least, taste, and it occurs to you that you actually know next to nothing about Greg Tampico’s friends or his family, nor even his coworkers from the Happiness Foundation, and maybe you don’t know any of them because you never asked, maybe it was never important, or maybe too dangerous, or maybe because what you’ve known about Tampico, up to now, has always been enough for you:

  Omnivore. He’ll eat anything.

  Laugh, when genuine, is embarrassingly high-pitched.

  Underarms, when wet, develop meat-scent.

  Smokes cigarettes on his back, with legs crossed.

  His voice-lull in bed, like a radio on low.

  You are inside for only a few minutes, wandering the parlor’s gloomy, scented interior, before you appear in front of a shop of some kind, and you have never conceived that there would be an opportunity to sell things at a funeral home, but this is America. There’s a counter, a register. They sell coffins.

  You have never seen a real coffin before. Not one up close and in person, and there are four options for coffins ranging in price from $895 to $3995, which to you sounds pretty cheap. Each of the coffins on display is lined with shiny white silk that is not silk, it’s sateen, padded with cotton, and some have frills, and all have lace or bows, enormous white pillows, and though they are made with hardwoods like cherry, walnut or mahogany, and are covered in so much polyurethane that they shine like new cars, and though you have never before thought seriously of your own death in your life, you make the decision, here and now, that when you die you will not go the burial route, you will go the cremation route, and you’re apparently not alone in your thinking, for across from the coffins, a much more diverse selection of urns ranging from $95 to $495 are displayed, and it’s clear that here’s Murphy & Milliken’s real business: selling urns.

  The urns display nameplates like Trinity Sunset, Everlasting Symphony, Majestic Star—all but the smallest and cheapest urn, the one that looks made of aluminum and resembles an old-fashioned milk pail and is named, in an exercise of zero imagination, “Infinity.” You pick it up, and the Infinity urn is lightweight, somehow weirdly appealing, and you glance around and consider stealing it when, from somewhere outside the store, a vacuum goes on.

  You put back the urn. You exit the store. The vacuum is still going, but it’s not close by, and just around the corner is a set of wide wooden doors, soundless when opened, which send you into what appears to be, at first glance, a small courtroom.

  It’s not a real courtroom. It’s a courtroom like what you might see in a grade-school production of Inherit the Wind, and you should know since it’s the only play in which you ever took part. There are church pews, six on a side, and the twelve pews all lead up to a podium that looks two-dimensional, next to which stands a plastic American flag on a pole. Running along the right side of the pews is a brown plastic room divider. A partition. This, you realize, is where Murphy & Milliken’s holds wakes.

  You were Meeker in Inherit the Wind in Ms. Sline’s class, the sweeping bailiff at the Hillsboro Courthouse whose words have always stayed with you: “Matthew Harrison Brady…” you recall. “I seen him once. At a Chautauqua meeting in Chattanooga,” and this you say out loud, it’s your favorite line, and how you drove your mother crazy saying it, you remember, over and over: “…a Chautauqua meeting in Chattanooga,” which came right before “The tent poles shook! Who’s gonna be your lawyer, son?”—and you stop.

  Because this, it’s what Greg Tampico said to you the night that you met, as he was loosening his tie in the foyer of his walk-up, and you suddenly start imagining scenarios: like Greg Tampico is here, and he is going to pop out from behind the partition and go, like, surprise or more likely hey, dummy; or, like, Tampico is going to do something bigger, like pop out of a coffin or something (ta-da); and you can so totally picture Tampico, like, hang gliding into the parking lot of Murphy & Milliken’s, but all you really want him to do is quietly open the doors, enter into this silent room, and creep up behind you on this wall-to-wall carpeting, and you can almost feel his broad chest pressing your shoulder blades now, his breath wet and warm on the back of your neck, when the eight lamps that hang down from the ceiling in pairs are
turned on with a click—

  “Greg,” you say, and face the doors.

  It’s not Greg Tampico. It’s a janitor, a vacuum in one hand, and around the other, the long vacuum cord is festooned. His nametag says MARLEN.

  “Can I help you,” he says.

  Marlen, not fat but wide-middled, displays crooked, nut-colored teeth and these awful peaked eyebrows that make him look shocked. Marlen likely never made it past high school, you estimate (this is the part of your job you are really good at), but most definitely has a family, maybe a son or two, full-grown with wives pregnant, and though you are maybe just ten years apart, in one glance you can see the whole future cut of Marlen, the outline and mold of the old man he’s on the cusp of becoming, and all this plant needs is a bit more sun and water, a bit more weathering of the skin, more ash in the hair, but he is well on his way, and his sudden appearance in the room, belt gripping his middle, ring of keys jangling a bad song off his hip, quite frankly makes you feel as though you’ve been cast into a boat departing the world of the living, and his vacuum’s the oar.

  As for you, you gauge quickly, it is likely that you appear to Marlen to be a young man too handsome to be trusted, one who’s never held in his life what Marlen would call “a real job.” For based on the look of your clothes, your hair, and the way you hold your shoulders back from your chest as you do, as though bearing wings; the way you are standing with your weight on one leg, shirtsleeves neatly rolled, the creamy flanks of your forearms unmarred by arm-hair (yes, you wax), you must be vain, too vain you are guessing he’s guessing, to be of any real use to anyone, and it is likely that you work in finance or sales.

  “I’m fine,” you say, thanking him in a manner that indicates you’re all set.

  But Marlen, like others you have met of his ilk, is not, and will never be, so summarily dismissed.

  “Not supposed to be in here,” he says. “Parlor’s closed,” and he professionally winds the cord in a loop, hand to elbow.

  You grin, showing off your white teeth. You walk toward him. You stick out your hand, turning it on: “I’m so sorry,” you say. “Nice to meet you. I’m Congressman Alexander Paine Wilson, First District,” and when you say this, the guy’s wacky eyebrows smooth out.

  “Voted for you,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Me and my wife, we both did. Whole family’s in Manassas.”

  “I appreciate it,” you say, and wait for Marlen to say something right back, but Marlens never say something back. They have spoken so little in life that their rhythm’s all wrong. “Thanks a lot,” you say once more, awkwardly splitting air. “It’s Marlen, right?”

  “Pronounced Mar-len,” he says, like he’s half Mark and half Leonard. “Not like Brando.”

  “Good to meet you,” you say. “I’m here for the two o’clock service, but I’m early.”

  “It’s Monday,” he says.

  “The two o’clock service,” you say. “Today is Monday. Is that right?”

  “Two clock—” Marlen says, and his head suddenly rips back, his mouth opening and his throat gagging like he’s either trying to speak a word he’s not accustomed to using or swallow something that got lodged there at lunch. His dry eyes squint. It goes on for far longer than comfortable, so long that you worry Marlen is, as Barb Newberg likes to say, a few french fries short of a Happy Meal, and you don’t know if you liked him better when you thought he was your adversary instead of your ally, and are sort of appalled when his eyes actually roll and he chokes a little and swallows, working out whatever ailment just visited him.

  “—been pushed to three,” he says, and points at the partition. “Fellow’s in there already, though. Don’t know if there will be a priest,” he says, and when you ask why not, Marlen smirks. “Fellow played for the pink team,” he says, and it’s the way Marlen has said “fellow” twice that’s made his dumb politeness go mean. That super stale line about the “pink team,” it makes you angry, worried that something more’s come out in the news, something intimate maybe about you and Tampico, or even just Tampico himself, but you have no reason to worry: Marlen only watches TV from when he gets home until bed, then reads a bit of the Bible. He does not, you are guessing, own, like, a real phone. He’s talking to you like he knows you, because he voted for you he knows you, thinks that while he wouldn’t seek you out as a buddy, you’d fit in just fine with the other lightweights at his wife’s church or something—and it’s true that Marlen has every right to assume what he assumes as you have a super long record of Opposing Equality; received a 0% Human Rights rating in your first term from the ACLU; vote regularly to roll back existing protections for people of varying sexual orientations; opposed the repeals of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; toed the line during the long, vocal battle for DOMA; and even now are having your staffers write at length about your support for an amendment to the Constitution banning gay marriage (and abortion) for good in Plaine Truth—and whenever pressed to further address why you don’t support the freedom to marry, especially now, when it’s law, you just shrug and say, dumbly, and with the requisite intransigence compelled by your Party, some laws were meant to be changed back.

  Because you’d rather not get into it with Marlen in the exact same way that you’d rather not get into it with anyone. Because, like, you are Not Gay, and how many times must you say it? And you don’t appreciate it when your staffers tell you to stop posing so gay in pictures, and stop dressing so gay in your cowboy outfit just like the one Reagan wore, and stop combing your hair that old-fashioned way that’s so gay, and stop laughing so gay, shaking hands so gay, smiling with a tilt of your head so gay, and you’ve worked pretty hard to fight this, and you even had photographers follow you once, into a gym, to photograph you doing something “manly,” and you were, like, lifting weights in a tank top, showing your guns, and what could be more manly than that? You have no idea why everyone singles you out all the time when there are plenty of people you know, people in positions much more powerful than yours, who vote one way in public and live another in private, and it’s hard to blame them; like you, they do not see themselves as hypocrites, they have simply seen how America works, have seen the oily machine of her power, and their desire to be included, to be a part of her Greatness, is so strong that they will create for themselves an Image.

  It’s been happening since the beginning of time. People like you who give no value to memory, who no longer imagine nor dream, should have evolved into something else a long time ago, but you’ve somehow endured without evolving; you make no sense and yet you are infinite, everlasting—and if you’re really going to go here, as you apparently are, you can drag it all the way back to Alan Brickmann’s marshmallow dick.

  You always dated girls, but in seventh grade, there was Steve Marcini. In eighth, Parker Colson, Jimmy Bender. In ninth, tenth, eleventh, there was the fat kid, Sam Levenson (when he broke it off, that’s when you punched him), and in twelfth, and even while at home from college, there was Chuck Myers, and you carried a thing for Chuck Myers through college, until senior year when you heard Chuck got married and you kind of went bananas and stopped tracking last names, sometimes even first names, and although you are Not Gay, there have always been men, young men, handsome even if they were not handsome, and it was only when you found yourself in your twenties in DC, clerking for a Republican congressman, when a woman walked by and was like Has anyone ever told you you look like Ronald Reagan? that the way forward made itself known: you became Ronald Reagan. And so to gay rights? Human rights?

  Look at your hair, coal-black and coiffed. Look at your cheeks, nose and jawline. Your closet is full of shiny men’s loafers, pastel summer sweaters, blazers with thick, padded shoulders, brass buttons. Look at your endless striped ties. You, you faggot, are an aardvark, an irrational, everlasting Earth-product, and whether you are ready to accept this or not, you have been, all this time, it must be said, wearing the skins of your enemy.

  “If you want a peek, go ahead,” Marlen says. “Y
ou won’t believe what they do with ’em. I half expect ’em to wake up, come to life like Lazarus,” he says, haha.

  “Who’s Lazarus,” you say, because even Marlen, with his Bible, reads more than you do.

  Marlen shakes his head at you. You are a politician, he’s thinking. Unlike you, he’s got real-world experience, he knows more than you do about the world, about life, he’s got the Bible and he’s got street smarts, and Marlen talks to himself as he leaves the room, vacuum in hand, as though you don’t deserve to hear what he says, but you with your incredible hearing catch him answering your question out loud from behind the closed doors:

  “Jesus brought him back from the dead! Resurrected him! Brought him out of his cave. And Jesus said unto them, ‘Take off the grave clothes and let him go…’”

  You are not ready to View Greg Tampico. This all could still be some kind of joke or some accident, you think. Like, maybe the wake Marlen is talking about is not Greg Tampico’s wake, you don’t know, but all at once you do not want Greg Tampico to be behind the room divider.

  Because if Greg Tampico is not behind the room divider, it means Vicky was right; it means Greg Tampico gave you the aardvark to get you to feel what you are feeling (love); to get you to realize that a public life in the private sector with Greg Tampico is a far, far better prospect than a private life in the public sector without Greg Tampico, and seriously now, like, all you need is for Greg Tampico to come up behind you, place his hands over your eyes and say what he said after you fled his apartment, that which you overheard on the stairwell through his weeping: “You’re so blind, you’re so fucking blind,” and while you thought at the time that he was talking to himself, cursing himself, you understand now that he was cursing you, and Alex Wilson, it is true, you have been so fucking blind.

  You walk over to the partition, grab the handles, and the whole wall accordions open.

  * * *