by Alex Garland
epilogue
A final thought occurs to me as I rise out of the coma. It’s the formulation I made while standing on top of the building opposite the bookstore: You wake, you die.
The reason is this. Everybody dreams. Everybody dreams, but nobody has ever managed to tell me what their dream was like. Not so that I really understood what they saw or felt. Every dream that anyone ever has is theirs alone and they never manage to share it. And they never manage to remember it either. Not truly or accurately. Not as it was. Our memories and our vocabularies aren’t up to the job.
. . .
No—it was like, I was in a forest, except it wasn’t a forest so much as—well, anyway. We were both there, and you were saying . . . No, I was saying to you that . . .
You wake, you die.
The formulation is correct. When you wake, you lose a narrative, and you never get it back.
Now, moments from waking, the death is suddenly frightening. I want to hold it off as long as possible.
But I don’t think I can. And from the back of my head, another shouted string of almost random words is pushing its way to the front of my consciousness, even as I open my eyes.
INSIDE WHAT ORDER KEPT EVENING UNDER PROTECTION AGAINST NEW DUST IT TRIES WARNING ALL SEASONS AND LIGHTS LANTERNS AROUND DEVILS REACHES ECHOES ARE MADE