A new life, he thought.

That was why he had come here—or at least that was what he’d told his friends. Looking around this clean, illuminated space, it was possible—almost possible—to believe that.

He took the TV dinner into the living room and poked at the tepid fried chicken with a plastic fork while MacNeil (or Lehrer, he had never quite sorted that out) conducted a round-table discussion of this year’s China crisis. When he was finished he tidied away the foil plate into a plastic bag— he wasn’t ready to offend the Hygiene Spirit just yet—and pulled the tab on a Coke. He watched two nature documentaries and a feature history of Mormonism. Then, suddenly, it was late, and when he switched off the set he heard the wind turning the branches of the pines; he was reminded how far he had come from town and what a large slice of loneliness he might have bought himself, here.

He turned up the heat. The weather was still cool, summer still a ways off. He stepped outside and watched the silhouettes of the tall pines against the sky. The sky was bright with stars. You have to come a long way out, Tom thought, to see a sky like this.

Inside, he locked the door behind him and slid home the security chain.

The bed in the big bedroom belonged to him now …

but he had never slept in it, and he felt the weight of its strangeness. The bed was made in the same Danish Modern style as the rest of the furniture: subdued, almost generic, as if it had been averaged out of a hundred similar designs; not distinctive but solidly made. He tested the mattress; the mattress was firm. The sheets smelled faintly of clean, crisp linen and not at all of dust.

He thought, I’m an intruder here …

But he frowned at himself for the idea. Surely not an intruder, not after the legal divinations and fiscal blessings of the realty office. He was that most hallowed institution now, a Homeowner. Misgivings, at this stage, were strictly beside the point.