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ragtag theater company of trannies and egotists, still her friends, doing improv and performance pieces in shifting venues. But back before that, when she was unfolding in her unmarried mother's womb, she needed a name (her mother thought) that such a girl as she growing up would want and need to have, a name sturdy and lusterless but not plain or gray; and so she got the name that nuns and her stepfather and unemployment offices would all call her, if no one else. Her mother believed she'd made the name up herself, and in a sense she had, though it wasn't her daughter alone who bore it.
    This was her door. On it was a big decal, the red oval of the Holmes Security Agency, an armed Athena and a sunset or sunrise. Premises Protected. He doubted that; a piece of city irony. He listened at the door to what he might hear within (nothing) and then he knocked, and found that so far from being locked it wasn't even shut.
    "Charis,” he said. “Hey."
    The door opened at his push and he saw her rising from a sofa, or a mattress clothed in figured stuffs, a stricken look for a moment on her face that cut him as the same face could in dreams. Then that passed, and simple delight replaced it.
    "Oh my God! Pierce!"
    He opened his arms, hands displayed, here I am, as I am. She opened her arms too and they embraced lightly, tentatively.
    "Pierce,” she said. “My god. Back in the big city."
    "Just for a day."
    "Then home to the country?"
    "No. I'm going to Europe."
    "Gee, wow,” she said. “Europe. How fun. You'll love it."
    They stood together in the doorway a long moment, uncertain. Then she pulled him into the apartment.
    It was as he imagined it might be, just as. Here were the ad hoc furnishings made from street finds, the walls of alligatored tenement paint disguised in hangings, like a khan's tent. Here were the things she now made her living buying and selling, gathered on her daily hunts through junk shops and rummage sales and the Salvation Army store. She'd once told him that when she was young she thought the Salvation Army had been formed for just this, the salvation of your old stuff from eternal discarding: your hats and coats and sunsuits and stopped clocks and three-legged chairs.
    She took a seat, her seat, on the pillowed mattress on the floor, folding up with an easeful practiced motion, like a cat. “So hey,” she said; she looked at him, and laughed, as if he'd prompted a funny memory of their life together, though he'd done nothing.
    He sat on a low velvet hassock.
    "You going alone?” she asked. “All by your lonesome?"
    "Yep.” He nodded, nodded, no help for it.
    "I'd go,” she said.
    "Hey,” he answered, and opened his hands again, ready when you are, any time; and he felt a long impossible future come to be and then burn out.
    "So you didn't get married, out there in the country,” she said to him.
    "No. Nope."
    "Nobody good enough for you."
    "Right."
    "You're a good guy,” she said. “You deserve somebody good."
    "Don't say that,” he said.
    She picked up from the cluttered low table beside her—it was a wooden cable spool, he guessed, covered in scarves—a cigarette holder, jade.
    "How's your mother?” he asked.
    "Aw. The same."
    He thought of her mother's apartment, a big old-fashioned place on the other side of town, where at Christmas once an old Gypsy woman had told his fortune. An old, old Gypsy; and her mother; and her.
    "And you?” he asked. “Steady guy?"
    "Two,” she said, and laughed. “Yeah. I sort of got them spelling each other, you know?"
    "Do they know about each other?"
    "Actually no. One of them works way downtown, days, and I see him at night. The other is up around here, and works nights. So."
    "Cox and Box,” said Pierce.
    "You're not kidding,” she said. “Anyway it's fun.” She turned the cigarette holder in her small smooth hands. “So come on,” she said. “Tell me how you've been. You know you don't look all that hot. I don't know about the beard."
    He had