So that I won’t forget, so that in a moment of forgetfulness it won’t slip my mind that I am existing still, I must leave a mark on each tree, to find my way back again, I will carve my initials in the brown bark. This is like a dream yet not, moving through the forest of night in the nearly evening, a bread-smelling granite meadow spreads itself out under the tides of night. Everything is familiar. Everything smells of endless othertimes.

First moving very fast through the trees, then through a cold-spired city of clockless cobbles and people without faces; then out into a vast corridor of space. A woman is walking in front of me. She walks and I walk. Coming up close behind her I can see she is old but has fine gold hair. Could I whisper in her ear? She seems unconcerned with my presence next to her, somehow expects it. Windowlights in the sky look into endless elsewheres, or perhaps it is the elsewhere looking in at me. She is walking toward the ramparts of a dream castle that slithers in inconstancy, like the quicksilver marks left by clouds across the sun. Without speaking she points to a doorway. I must go through. My first living thought in the hour of my birth is “What do I remember?”

The door is heavy but strangely warm; it pulsates with dusky life, it moves silently but heavily at my touch, then closes behind me with a sucking thump.

I am in a place beyond where the sun shines, a place the moon has forgotten, where fire has never burned, where music is silent and voices mute. Thoughts are not thought here, time is never wound, words are never written, never read. I am on the shores of nowhere waiting by a sea that is not green. In the background of the gauzy air is a continuous and rhythmic beating.

Oh, help.

Then endless space takes on limitations and feels safe again. An amber tinge in what might be a sky. And somehow I begin to remember this place.

“What are you doing here, Rose?”

Nancy’s voice comes from nowhere and everywhere. The far horizon blossoms into mauve and pink.

“Are you dead, Rose?”

“I was dead once.”

“You can’t be here unless you’re dead now.”

“I came to ask an important question.”

“We have no need for answers here.”

“But you must help me, Nancy.”

Her laughter sets the waves rippling. The beaung quickens for a moment, then setdes back, like the beaung of a heart.

“Help me the way I helped you, Nancy. Remember?”

The laughter stops. “I don’t mean to be cruel. It’s just that you wouldn’t understand.”

“Where are you? Why can’t I see you?”

“This is a waiting place, Rose. It only lasts a moment in the long unfolding of the universe. We don’t stay here.”