It's probably nothing, but Harry can't let go. A faulty TV set could burn the house down. He reaches for the remote, squints in the dark to set his fingers on power and volume buttons both at once so he can keep this quiet and avoid waking the wife.

Zick. The sound comes on -- he punches it down low -- and the still-warm screen wobbles back to life. The gangster film is gone, replaced by the Weather Channel. This seems wrong to him but he can't be sure; he's never really understood how the cable set-up works.

And then his scalp prickles.

Lorraine's eyes twitch open. She wasn't asleep, or not fully, and when Harry picks it up she hears it too, flicking in a second or so after he switches on the TV. A kind of electrical echo, bouncing off the walls and carpet and ricocheting up the stairs. But not an echo, really.

There's a second television set in the den downstairs. It has just come on.

If you should ever find yourself in a similar situation, here is how to confirm your worst suspicions. Pick up the remote control, as Lorraine is doing just now, and keeping your ears tightly tuned to whatever audible frequency represents prowlers in the house (or worse), turn the television off yet again. What do you hear now?

Fated to become lovers, it was likewise inevitable that they take up the Routine:

"Tell me Natasha," said Boris in the Boris voice. "Why are heroes of decadent western cartoon two boyce living together, while so-called villains are regular koppel, just like everage spies and molls?"

"You are mistaken, Boris dahlink," she explained. "Heroes of cartoon are not man and man. They are..."

"Of course!" Slap forehead for effect. Moose and squir-rel."

Okay, so a little of this goes a long way.