Charlie laughs conspiratorially at this, pointing vigorously at the screen, encouraging me to partake in the jollity—and normally I would; I can’t get enough of this kind of thing—but suddenly the sight of a beautiful sailboat going down, down, down has a very real, very personal, very doomlike aspect.

When Charlie realizes what a poor choice of cheer-up strategythis is, her face landslides into such an apologetic, helpless expression that I can’t help, finally, laughing. She starts to say something—she was dumb, she didn’t mean it like that, she wants me to crack the last can of Coco Rico—but I pull her down to me.

Charlie’s fragrance is different today. Underneath are the usual notes, but presiding over everything today is a powerful odor of peony and black cherry, and when her hair falls over my face and I am nearly suffocated in it, I realize this must be a new purchase. Charlie’s inveterate clumsiness extends to indextrous misapplications of perfume, especially new ones whose atomizers she hasn’t mastered. A crop-dusting like this on another woman would flay my odor receptors and induce a terrible headache, but it’s Charlie, and my brain is already awash in pleasure chemicals. The silk of her blouse is slick and slides against my body. Her pelvis begins to surge into mine but something sizzles on the stove and she tries to pull away.

“But dinner,” she says.

I don’t let her up.

“The stove.”

I renew my grip.

“It’ll burn.”

“Put it on auto-nav,” I say.

She does. Then, standing in my kitchen, facing me with her legs spread apart like a gunslinger, with her eyes all pupil and her heartbeat pulsing hard in her jugular, she looks so fierce it’s hard to tell if she wants to fight me or fuck me. When she unbuttons her blouse, when she hulas out of her skirt, when she thumbs out of her bra and panties, it is tender and intimate, but her face is brazen and reckless, nearly martial, as if issuing me a dare.

She undergoes the transformation. She has the grace.

Then, for the third time today, I lose track of my surroundings. I try to blink out of it, but it’s no good. I am totally locked in. When she moves across the room, presses her naked body against me, and puts her warm mouth on mine, my five senses go insensate to everything else—the eerie carless quiet outside my window, the wilted carpet crushed beneath my toes, every object and light source in my visual field—and all I see hear smell touch taste is Charlie.

Our Greatest Hit Hits Again, or: Who Is the Rat Burglar?

Afterward, as we lay together on the bed, with the blades of the fan overhead cutting stroboscopic ribbons of shadow into the ceiling, our skin dampening the sheets, Charlie and I stumble into it: our all-time, triple-platinum, greatest-hit argument.

The Rat Burglar.

When I get up to go to the bathroom Charlie makes the mistake of turning on the TV and there she is, Doreen Doherty, Patriot News telepromptress and all-around bigmouth, bracketed by an intake pic of the K’plua and the familiar graphic of a whiskery rodent beneath a dramatic floating question mark, recounting in excoriating detail the events of this afternoon. She has everything but my name. She has the location of the facility, the properties of the mask, its value, its owner, the fact that the mysterious thief disabled two security agents. Detective Nunes is not available for comment. Neither is Po-Mo but Doreen quotes a formal statement from him saying that Janus has no formal statement. In the pic, the K’plua’s expression is, if anything, even more hurt and reproving and Doreen’s manner is, if possible, even more smug than usual.