Resident Alien

He sits in a light mist on the steps in the square. His thin frame rattles slightly in the cold. From a decade before, back in some Midwestern autumn, he remembers insulation; he remembers football, the breath of the players and the crowd, the band, the cheerleaders, the hot dog sellers, the dropouts, rising up to form its own fog under the lights—dusky red near the scoreboard, like a police car suddenly stilled. He is almost 30 now, and from thousands of miles away, his memory changes to include her, midway up the home side bleachers, in a clay-colored turtleneck his grandmother had given him on some long-ago birthday, the thought becoming less impossible the longer he thinks it.
   Getting up in still-novel creaks he makes his way through the winter market crowds, considers mulled wine then decides against it (she'd always maintained it was a festive drink, and there seemed nothing on this dark afternoon to celebrate), shakes his head at a small boy selling teddy bears in traditional costume, adding the sad smile of the poor in spirit, and goes back to his desk. Photos of people's internal organs, translation rights, documentation of scientific fact. These things no longer interest him—bleached by false memory's light, a glimpse of brownish wool.

...

   In the evening going up the stairs. He counts them up the seven flights, "one hundred six, one hundred seven, one hundred eight." The two-tone holler of an ambulance follows him, dopplering, up. The sirens over the phone when he calls are proof to her he's not somewhere—anywhere—other than where he says he is. He has never been fully real to her: a collection of letters, a handful of kisses, a park, a drive, two airports, an afternoon. Once on the phone from home a dog barking, his mother saying good-night. Her breath catches when she hears these things; she dreams and dreads to.
   This room of his, which she has never been to, is quiet. The lights from the small city are diffuse near the top of the building—the effect is more that of a lone plains streetlight than a middling industrial center: pouring through the arched nouveau windows in a seeming single stream across the pocked wood floors. He gets a white beer from the kitchen, leans for a bit looking out at the rotating sign for the car plant where Heike was an engineer.
   It's cold tonight and he lets the wind in, both a little penitentially and for the excuse to build a fire. The beer goes up to condense on the deep green mantle; a Lutherian-looking ceramic tile relief glares at it disapprovingly. He squats down and the tinder and compressed fuel bricks go in the tidy grate. His hands wonder a minute at the smallness and neatness of things here—the briquettes, the laundry soap, old women's hats. As the fire catches, he closes the fireplace door, one hand resting a minute on the warming wire-spring handle, thinking starkly (the concision, the warmth) of the curve of her hip as she slept, at the merest moment before she rolled toward him: the moment of decision, the capitulation before the act itself. The thought makes him fall back on his heels. He stands up slowly, takes the beer from the mantle, then sits on the rug awhile, watching the flames through the grate's tiny bars. When he wakes up, the fire is out, the outside of the bottle is warm and dry, and the light is coming in from everywhere.

from The Book of the Living