ife and tried to "start over fresh", which means he is in a place where no one knows him (120). The movers ask if he is Suzy, whose name is on the shipping order. The movers are delivering someone else's used furniture which the narrator and Suzy had planned to use to start their new life. The son of the former residents of the house has sneaked his girlfriend into the house and the girl's father, Mr. Grey, mistakes the narrator for the former tenant. Even the boy who used to live in the house, and knows the narrator is the new tenant, is actually unable to see him because of the dark.
What is significant about all these mistaken views of the narrator is that he eventually begins to play the parts people assign to him. He becomes the former tenant in his conversation with the girl's father. He tries to be someone else to the bitter end as he attempts to 'see' himself in the boy and as he tries to establish a friendship with him. The narrator has even negated himself in his fantasy of being dead in a morgue in China. The fact that he is of Chinese ancestry is the single specific detail that the reader learns about the narrator, yet it is revealed in negative terms. He imagines himself "dead in a foreign land where the language of Suzy wasn't spoken" (122). Significantly, he does not picture a foreign land where his language is spoken, Instead his fantasy is a kind of double negative--he is dead and her language is not spoken.
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