5.00 AM, and what I can see by day in the yard has not yet emerged from darkness. What do I see in the window? This room; the light from my desk lamp, the back of my monitor – this room, and behind it, the darkness of the night. This room and there am I, too, in the window, the light of my face, the green of my dressing gown filled with darkness as though I were already a ghost.
Am I dead or alive? For myself, now, it is as though I surprised myself returning from the day – as though I had met myself returning from the future. I crossed myself here, before dawn; my future came towards me and my past rose up to meet it. And who was I, at the crossroads?
The protagonist of Peace by Gene Wolfe is awoken from his grave when the oak tree falls that was planted on his grave. He wanders through an old house whose rooms are joined across the decades of his life: it is the house of his life, the closed space in which everything happened. To wake up at this time, before dawn, is to wander through that house where everyone is alive but you.
It is said that everything is recalled at the moment of death – you remember it all again, your life. And at the moment of awakening? It as though you recalled your death – that it is death that remembers, like the night behind your image in the mirror. What do I remember? Death remembers itself in me; death – forgetting – destroys my memory.
I lost my place in the night; I slipped from my place and all places. I should be asleep; I am not asleep. I should be dreaming, and my dreams anchored by my sleeping body, but I do not sleep and if I dream, it is merged with my wakefulness. It is very late or very early; this is the crossroads of the night where the soul wanders from its home.
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