Alan woke around 3:00 a.m., with no idea of where he was. This had occurred once or twice before in hotel rooms, but always resolved itself quickly: like a computer screen going from “sleep” to active. In the stifling bedroom in the Alexandria Hotel, he seemed to be unable to summon his past, as if some terrible amnesia of the night had rubbed him out. Where am I? He turned on the light, but the room was completely unfamiliar to him. Have I had a stroke? All right then, I know what “a stroke” is, so I have language. But where have I come from, who am I? He climbed out of bed and stumbled to the desk. I can move, perhaps I haven’t had a stroke. Where am I? The room stared back. His fear was rising, and to control it, he looked down at the desk, and saw a pad of paper, with “Alexandria Hotel, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.” printed on it. He could feel these words moving around in his head, slowly, like huge pieces of furniture. So slowly! And then, in an instant, everything was restored to him—yes, I have come from Northumberland, I am in Saratoga Springs to see Vanessa, Helen had come, too. And by definition and extension, I am Alan, son of George (deceased) and Jenny Querry (still alive), former husband of Cathy Pearsall (divorced and deceased), partner of Candace Lee, father of Vanessa and Helen. He felt suddenly very sick, and spent a minute hanging over the bathroom sink. The nausea passed, and when it did he sat on the cold lavatory bowl—he’d left the seat up—and wept with gratitude and shameful fear.
Of course, in the morning, with dry American light as solid as truth on the other side of the window and the smell of hotel bacon drifting under the bedroom door, he had no fear, only unease and puzzlement. Was it some kind of seizure? He felt perfectly fit. What was really unpleasant about the incident was that it reminded him of something that had occurred a couple of years ago, which he had privately named “the Hadrian’s Wall moment.” It was late July. He had decided, on an afternoon whim, to drive to Housesteads, and take Otter for a walk along Hadrian’s Wall. The air was soft and mild, the grass springy. Cow parsley made milky fringes on either side of the road. He parked the car and started walking with the dog. There was a high point, which he reached after twenty minutes, from which you could see the great wall stretch over the undulating landscape, for miles and miles—an immense Roman fortification, an achievement of Empire, the northern limit of Europe, as far as the Romans were concerned. But also appealingly native: the local stones looked like any other drystone wall in the area, only bigger. As far as the eye could see, the great wall prolonged itself into the far distance, all the way to the sunlit horizon, where it disappeared into wide vagueness. It was beautiful. And then suddenly, as quickly as a sudden wind, it was frightening, too: the wall seemed to stretch all the way into the vagueness of death. That was the only way he could think of it. He was looking at a ribbon of life, at the ribbon of his life, and he was looking at the end of life; and far away, in that wide, diffusely sunlit, invisible horizon, was all of death and all the dead, past and future—his grandparents, Cathy, his father, his mother (all too soon), Van and Helen (sure enough, in time). And himself? Sure enough, in time. He felt dizzy, and sat down on the damp grass. Where the wall ended, there was death, waiting. It was not, he thought afterward, a religious insight. It was older than religion—the certainty of extinction, the shortness of life. Over there, where the light thinned into infinity, over there it awaited him. For two thousand years, the wall had stood guard over the futility of human endeavor. No, that wasn’t quite right, he thought now, because in fact the wall spoke not of the futility of human projects but of their longevity. You could build something, something grand, that would silently chaperone generations of people through the futility of their smaller existences. The thing well made, that our children’s children may be beholden to us.
He would never forget that awful sensation of falling, of falling into history, into the long history of death. Without looking again at the horizon, almost shivering in the warm, blessed air, he walked back to his car.
He never told anyone about it, and he hadn’t visited Hadrian’s Wall since then.