When Alex came back from the dead, it was the summer of all the heat waves. Every time it got above 95 degrees, an alert on our phones told us to turn off the lights and keep our refrigerators closed. Something was wrong with the grid and they couldn’t or wouldn’t fix it. Sometimes they came down my block and tinkered and then left. There were blackouts for hours at a time.

I went to the salon to get rid of all the dust and DNA that had accumulated under my nails. I was working as an authenticator, sorting through luxury resale items to spot the fakes. Once you learned how to authenticate, it wasn’t a very difficult job: either the counterfeits were obviously bad and you could spot the differences quickly, or they were of such high quality as to be indistinguishable from the real thing. If you really loved expensive clothing, there was probably a thrill in handling it day in and day out. More evening gowns and old Chanel jackets and Gucci sneakers and Hermès bags than you would ever see in your life otherwise. You could study the stitching, test the weight of each material in your hand. But I didn’t have those instincts. I wasn’t a very good authenticator. I just followed the basic rules, inspecting the logos and shades and metal fixtures.

By the end of a workday, my fingernails were a mess. So I splashed out and went to get art done, my initials on one hand, Alex’s on the other, like a corny couple’s tattoo.

While the tech was filing, she held my pointer finger up to the light and squinted at it.

“There’s a hair under your nail,” she said, and laughed. “Where have you been, girl?”

She tried pushing under the nail with a manicure stick, but she couldn’t get hold of it. So she took out her tweezers and went over them with rubbing alcohol, and when she fished the hair out, it kept coming and coming, unspooling like a long dark thread, wet with blood at the end. She wrapped it in a tissue very carefully and gave it to me. 

“You’ve pissed someone off,” she said, “and they’re not letting go.”

I was at Whole Foods stealing the kind of prepared food that comes in little plastic containers and looks like slime when I saw Alex. It was Friday the thirteenth, which was just like him. He had a flair for the dramatic. I spotted him picking up packages of chicken, so I guess he was back on his high-protein diet. He was tall and stringy, like a cardboard cutout of a man, and he always tasted like salt. Even though he was a neat person, he looked perpetually disheveled: tangled hair, stained clothing, dark bags under his eyes. He was watching me put the food in my bag like he was the one who had seen a ghost.

“You could ruin your life that way,” he said. Though who was he to lecture me about ruining a life? He insisted that I pay for everything, and I bought his chicken along with my soggy noodles and rice. The whole thing was $56, and I resented spending so much money on stuff I would have gotten for free. He had always lived off me. He moved into my apartment just weeks after we met. His only real skill was breaking in when I had forgotten my keys. Otherwise, he used to lie immobile on the couch for hours at a time, lost to the world. My mother had always hated him. 

After he came home with me that day, I started taking notes on my phone about everything that had changed and everything that hadn’t. Things that were the same: his ugly teeth, the way his whole body moved in pleasure when he laughed, his twisted sense of humor, his tenderness when he put his fingers in my hair. Things that were new: his lackluster hair, his wistfulness, the way he stared out the window at a patch of dirt like he had never seen the world before. It was harder to read his expressions now, and I noticed little superstitions that seemed compulsive — finger tapping, stepping over the cracks in the sidewalk. He had lingered at the door of my apartment as if getting up the nerve just to step inside. This anxiety was new. He’d never been anxious. He’d never even been afraid of the normal things: embarrassment, loss, financial ruin. He said his own future was too abstract to plan for. Instead, he fixated on doomsday theories. He thought the world would collapse or burn before any of us reached old age. 

By the time it got dark, I was thinking about throwing him out of my apartment. He’d already left me, after all, in pretty much the most decisive way you could imagine. But then he scooted toward me on the couch, which wasn’t very big to begin with, and took my hand and gently sucked my fingers, one after another. The inside of his mouth was warm but not hot, like he was still thawing. It made me want to crawl into him and burrow in his soft places the way that carrion insects do. 

Whenever we had sex before, I used to close my eyes and imagine I was on a lifeboat, being rocked side to side by the cradle of the ocean. But that evening, it was too hot to have sex, so instead we just laid on the couch, him on top of me. He told me about solar flares, which he thought would eventually destroy society. According to him, there was a massive geomagnetic storm brewing that the government didn’t want us to know about. In the near future, catastrophic flares would spew plasma and radiation into the atmosphere with unprecedented velocity. The electrical grid would fry, planes would fall out of the sky, phones would burst into flames. Earthquakes would destabilize entire regions, icebergs would shift and release ancient, preserved viruses, and New York City would tumble into a sinkhole. Auroras would fill the whole sky. Birds would lose track of their flight patterns and might even participate in a Hitchcock kind of organized violence. It would be nothing short of the apocalypse. 

His obsessions, at least, hadn’t changed. I looked up solar flares on my phone so I could know enough to argue with him. He used to hate me for being contrarian — I was picking fights, he thought — but now he just laid there quietly and watched me with glassy eyes while I read off the search results. It was true, apparently, that solar flares had destroyed the telegraph system in the nineteenth century and created auroras so powerful and so bright that you could see them from the equator. But most of the time, the flares were perfectly harmless. You had to be particularly pessimistic to worry about things like that. There was so much else to worry about.

As we fell back into our old routines, I started to forget he had deserted not only me but the whole world. Every weekday, he followed me on my commute like he was attached to me by a magnetic force. He sat quietly in the corner of the stuffy office while everyone else went about their work as if he weren’t there. It was creepy at first, but also sort of romantic, like he had come back for me and me alone. Aside from work, I went almost nowhere. A few times a week, I would go to my grandmother’s assisted living home. Alex followed me there, too, but he stood outside her room to give us privacy. One day, she put her arm around me and whispered, “I don’t want to alarm you, but you’re being followed.” 

For a minute, I thought she was hallucinating, but then she turned and pointed through the doorway at Alex. I wondered if she noticed him because she was near death herself. It wasn’t clear she had even recognized who he was. Her memory was fading. 

“Oh, I know,” I said. “Alex is back, at least for now.”

She shook her head. “Let me tell you something,” she said. “Some people will never go away unless you put your foot down. Think about when the drain gets clogged and all that junk you thought was gone comes back up to the surface. It’s like that.”

My grandmother was always playing bingo for nickels with the other old ladies in the home, and she would ask me to go change bills for her at the corner store. The ladies all thought I worked too much. That day they told me I looked peaky and pointed out the circles under my eyes. They said I needed to find a new boyfriend before it was too late. 

“You have to get out there and try,” they insisted. “Your looks won’t last forever.” 

They said all men really cared about was a nice bust, even though these days everyone talked about long legs and big asses and high cheekbones. 

“And you have a nice bust even though you don’t dress to flatter it.”

“V-necks. Have you ever tried V-necks? ”

“We would never have gone around with our breasts sagging like that when we were young.”

My grandmother shushed them. It would take time before I was ready to date again, she whispered. The old ladies sighed and petted my hair and let me win at bingo. In the corner, Alex watched silently. I tried to make eye contact with him, but he avoided my gaze. 

The last time I saw him alive, he told me that he was sure I would move on quickly, that I would have my pick of new boyfriends. He said it without much bitterness, with a resignation that I found frightening. I didn’t understand that he wasn’t breaking up with me.

In the middle of August, they said on the news that there would be a geomagnetic storm in the region. Alex and I went up on the roof of the building early in the evening to watch, but the sky was bright from all the city lights, and the heat was unbearable. We went back down and stretched out next to each other on the couch. 

“Your grandmother is right,” he said. “You need to start dating again.”

We lay there in silence, facing opposite directions. Part of me wanted to turn around and embrace him, and another part wanted to shove him out the window. Instead I got up without looking at him and closed myself in the bathroom. I ran the shower as hot as I could bear, crouching under the spray. It felt melodramatic to cry in there, but it also felt good. After a while I started to hope that Alex would come looking for me, so he could see just how much I was suffering, but he didn’t. Eventually the water started to pool around my ankles, and then I had to get out. My skin was boiled red. I couldn’t find him in the apartment, and I wondered if he had gone out the window all by himself. When I leaned over the sill to check, my chest tightened with a familiar fear, but there was nothing on the street except trash. I went back up to the roof. It had cooled off a little and the asphalt no longer burned to the touch, so I sat down and stared up at the haze, trying to imagine the stars behind it.

I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up suddenly and he was standing over me. It was much darker now and the light had turned purple. I thought briefly that something celestial had happened after all. Then my vision focused and it was an ordinary night.

He crouched down beside me and whispered that he missed me. Then he was gone. I lay there for a while in the silence, trying to remember what it was like to be alone again. Eventually, I got up and climbed through the hatch in the roof. Right before I descended again, I thought I saw it again on the horizon, a whisper of color in the clouds, a flicker through the haze, but I might have been imagining it.

By September, it was hotter than ever, with no signs of fall in the forecast. Those first few weeks, I couldn’t sleep through the night. It was less like he had died all over again and more like missing a limb. The apartment was emptier. I started talking to myself. 

I went to get my nails done because they looked ragged. While the tech held my hand in her own, she told me she’d been keeping me in her prayers because of the long bloody hair. She had a small silk amulet at her station, to ward off evil spirits. 

“Nothing’s more serious than a ghost,” she said, shaking her head. 

When I got back to my apartment, it was dark inside. The power grid had cut again. When the electricity came back around dawn, the sudden flare of lights woke me up. 

I made myself go to work for the routine, but lately I’d been messing up even more than usual — missing fakes.

“No one would mistake this texture for caviar leather,” my boss told me. “The bubbles are really big. And look how sloppy the stitching is. ”

She got out a real Chanel bag to show me the difference. I could see it when she laid the two out side by side, but as soon as I was on my own again, sorting through items, I lost my focus. I fell behind on my quotas, staring at logos for so long that they started to swim before my eyes. She took me into her office for a chat. 

“We all think you’re great,” she said. “I just wonder if this is really where you see yourself long term. It’s important to know when to move on.”

I looked over at the empty corner reflexively and then remembered Alex was gone. He would have known how to talk me down.

At the end of the month, it was still intensely humid, a soupy kind of heat that pooled around you. I was home alone when the landline rang.

It was my grandmother. She had been watching TV and she wanted to know if I had ever heard of solar flares.

“They’re going to destroy everything we know,” she told me.

“I heard,” I said.

“It’s going to happen in your lifetime.”

I stared out the window, the other side littered with waste, the detritus of all the things that had come before.