Snow
This story is filled with mentions of snow. The first line is "By the time Gerard leaves the office it has stopped snowing." He then muses about people's footprints in the snow as a reflection of the transience of human life, and by the end of this introspection it starts snowing again. This snow escalates into a blizzard that lasts for the remainder of the story. The snowstorm, besides being a motif, represents the swirling impenetrability of the affairs of the world; being an essentially dissociated person, Gerard feels like a stranger to the world. He can push back the sense of its enormity by making temporary connections with others, such as Lucy and Laurel, but as soon as he's no longer immediately occupied with them, the sheet of snowy introspection intrudes back on his consciousness.
Smells
Gerard has an unusual sensitivity to and unintentional obsession with smells. When remembering Issy's funeral, he randomly thinks that the air-conditioning in his rental car smelled like candy. The first thing he notices about Laurel's apartment is that it smells of expensive scented candles. When he gives Indira a hug before she leaves, he only notes that her hair smells of onions.
Even the words he uses to label the actions of others reflect this: when Lucy seems skeptical of his story, he thinks, "Lucy can smell a lie a mile off." This heightened sensitivity to physical sensations like smell might reflect his diminished sensitivity to immaterial things like emotions and abstract concepts.
Juxtapositions
Juxtapositions are a motif in this story, especially in the thought processes that occur in Gerard's mind. He routinely thinks of random and opposite things that usually pertain to an obsession with and dispassion towards death. For example, when he returns home and Lucy kisses his face, the text reads, with no transition: "She is kissing him all over his face. Gerard imagines her mother floating in the pool." Near the end, he thinks something similar: "He thinks of Issy. He remembers her laugh, then the roar of snapping flames at her cremation."
Laurel's Watch
Thinking about Laurel, Gerard causally remembers her watch, which he still has in his bedside cabinet at his house after she left it eight years ago. Sometimes he lays in bed and falls asleep holding the watch as it ticks and slowly drops from his hands. This is an uncharacteristically sentimental element in Gerard's psychology; it reflects the equally sentimental fact that she is the only woman he ever loved, and he impersonally acts accordingly, even if his vocabulary might not imply it.
Lucy
Lucy, Gerard's daughter, can be viewed as a symbol of his frail emotional connection to the world. He is, for the most part, completely dissociated from reality, only grasping the elements of the world by proxy of his memories. It becomes unclear whether he is, in fact, capable of any human emotion whatsoever. His daughter stands as a powerful counterargument to Gerard's inhumanity, proving that he has a capacity for constant emotion-fueled devotion, which his relationship with Laurel lacked.
