Charlie gargles a turbid imprecation at the screen.

Doreen says, “So you are saying that you believe the Rat Burglar—”

“Polecat.”

“Is a woman?”

For a long moment there is just dead air. The split screen shows us Quackenbush. His jaw drops. My jaw drops. Charlie’s jaw drops. We look like synchronized swimmers working on a questionable new move.

“That’s right. And if we look at what the Polecat is accomplishing in Iraq, where looting is...”

Charlie is the first to recover the power of speech.

“This is outrageous.”

“I know!” I say, still completely amped to be in agreement with her. In fact, I am so pleased not to be arguing with Charlie about the Rat Burglar this time that my reaction to what is transpiring on-screen sounds more joyful than I mean it to.

“This is beyond credulity. This is just beyond...beyond.”

“Beyond beyond. Right. I think so, too.”

“I can’t even . . .” And Charlie makes strangulation gestures at the screen.

“Same here!”

“I hate that miserable Spivey.”

“Me too! Oh man, this is great!”

“That thesis she is espousing is mine.”

“Mine too!” I say, comradely and bright. Then, one moment later, “Wait, what?”

“That is my argument. Mine. I sent Spivey a paper for publication in her journal on this very subject, making the same exact arguments, using the same exact examples, and she gave me a pass. A thanks-no-thanks. She said the same stupid things that my department head told me. I could practically hear her laughing when she wrote the note. And now she has the gall to come on TV and pretend it’s her scholarship. It’s simply . . . rank . . . plagiarism.”

Needless to say, I am vexed. I had thought, briefly, that Charlie was coming around to my side. Probably because of the day’s events, I am not capable of exercising the restraint that is normally required to dodge the subject. I sense a flare-up coming. Before it occurs, however, there is a moment when I can still pull back, but I don’t. Whenever I have this argument with Charlie I always lose my cool. Probably it’s because she’s a professor and is accustomed to polemics and I most often argue with two-dimensional characters painted on canvas, but I always end up feeling wrong. And not just in a factual way. I feel as if everything I have ever done since that day in the Chaffee Planetarium is wrong. Like my whole life is wrong. Which makes me tetchy, and tonight, even though I have a dreadful checkmate feeling, I am incapable of stopping myself. So we have at it. Boy do we ever. We argue over whether it’s theft, who has the moral / legal / financial right to various works, and, like all of New York City, like the whole country, we argue over those five words: who is the Rat Burglar.

My dialectic is not characterized by dignity and sangfroid. When Charlie affirms her belief in the Polecat business, I make cheese-gobbling noises to which I append, with a finger pointed at the TV, “Rat!” When she expounds on the economics of the museum industry³⁶ I can’t resist making an overbitten, gnawing gesture. When she says something further about war and the abuses of first / third-world diplomacy,³⁷ I hold my hands up to the TV in the manner of a B-movie director parsing a scene and reiterate, “Filthy rat!”