The Keeper of Forgotten Things
The Keeper of Forgotten Things
There was once a man who remembered things that had never happened to him.
He remembered the first bird discover the sky.
He remembered the whales first dive into the open ocean.
He remembered the astonishment of the first flower when a bee landed on it.
He remembered being rocked in the arms of a woman who'd died three hundred years before his birth.
And sometimes, waking suddenly in the night, he remembered the last thoughts of children whose names he did not know.
This made sleep difficult sometimes.
When he was very small, he assumed everyone remembered things like these.
"Do you remember when the elephants were afraid?" he had once asked his mother.
"Nope."
"They were walking."
"Where?"
"I.... don't know."
"Then how do you know they were afraid?"
He considered this.
"Because they told me."
His mother touched his forehead.
"You haven't got a fever."
"I'm not sick."
"I know."
But she didn't look convinced.
So the boy decided that some things were better left unsaid, even to mothers.
So he practiced saying nothing very carefully.
His name was Kael.
He lived at the edge of a country that was divided by a wall.
No one remembered who had built the wall. This didn't prevent everyone from having an opinion about it though.
People on the eastern side said the western people had built it. People on the western side said exactly the opposite.
Children occasionally asked why they didn't just knock it down. Adults explained that the children would "understand when they were older."
Kael found that this was usually what adults said when they had forgotten the answer. So he remained suspicious of growing older.
Kael discovered his occupation by accident.
One morning an old woman knocked on his door carrying an empty wooden box.
"I've lost something" she said.
"What?"
"If I knew that, it wouldn't be lost."
This seemed reasonable so he invited her inside. She put the box on his table.
"My husband gave me whatever was in here before we were married. He died eleven years ago. Yesterday I opened the box and it was empty"
"Was it stolen?"
"No."
"Did you misplace it?"
"No."
"Then what do you want me to do?"
The old woman looked at him. "Remember."
Kael placed his hands around the box. For a while nothing happened.
Then he smelled oranges and saw rain against a window. He heard a young man laughing. And suddenly he knew!
"It was a ribbon"
The woman covered her mouth as she gasped. "Blue?"
"Yellow."
She began to cry. Kael didn't understand.
"It's only a ribbon."
"No," she said. "It isn't."
That was how he became the Keeper of Forgotten Things.
People brought him peculiar losses.
A soldier brought him the memory of his own kindness.
A mother brought the sound of a baby's laughter.
A wealthy man came looking for the moment when enough had become too little.
A woman asked Kael to find the exact afternoon on which she had stopped loving her husband.
He could not.
She was furious. "You call yourself a keeper?"
"I don't think you stopped."
"I did."
"No. You only buried it."
"That's the same thing."
"It isn't."
She slapped him.... Then she returned three days later.
"Where did I bury it?"
Together they looked.
Children visited often. They rarely wanted anything recovered. Instead they brought him things they were afraid the world might make them forget:
The smell of snow.
The names of imaginary friends.
How enormous their father's hands seemed.
The absolute conviction that stuffed animals became lonely.
A particular patch of sunlight on a bedroom floor.
Promises made to cats and dogs.
The exact shape of the moon seen through a car window.
Kael stored everything. He had shelves stretching from floor to ceiling. Bottles. Boxes. Envelopes. Jars.
One time, a girl brought him nothing at all.
"What am I keeping?"
"This." She opened her empty hands.
"What is it?"
"Nothing."
"I can see that."
"It's the feeling of holding out your hands when you don't have anything to give somebody."
Kael stared at her. Then he found his smallest silver box. He placed her nothing inside. For reasons he couldn't explain, he considered it among his most valuable possessions.
There were things Kael could not keep. Truth was one.
People frequently asked him to store it though. They arrived carrying truth in magnificent containers and demand that he protect it. But when Kael opened the containers, he found opinions, grievances, fears, ambitions, half-memories and occasionally outright lies.
"Where is the truth?" they demanded.
"I don't know."
"But you're the Keeper!"
"Of forgotten things."
"Truth has been forgotten."
"Frequently."
"Then find it."
Kael really tried. He discovered that truth behaved unlike anything else in his collection. It could not survive inside a box. The moment he sealed it away, it changed.
So he began leaving his windows open.
One evening he found a lady sitting on his roof. Her name was Esa Rian.
"You're trespassing" he said.
"So are the stars."
"The stars were here first."
"Prove it."
He liked her immediately. This worried him.
Esa had come to retrieve something she claimed Kael possessed.
"What?"
"My heart."
"I don't collect hearts."
"You have mine."
"I've never met you."
"Well that's inconvenient."
She kissed him. This was even more inconvenient.
Esa was unlike the children. Children gave their hearts without understanding what they were doing. Esa understood perfectly.
Sometimes she loved Kael with such tenderness that he wondered how he had survived before her. Sometimes she disappeared for days. Sometimes she lied. Sometimes she told truths designed to hurt more efficiently than lies.
She could enter a room and make every other person disappear from it. Kael hated this power. He also loved it. That frightened him.
One night she asked him, "Do you trust me?"
"Nope."
She laughed. "Then why do you love me?"
"I'm not sure."
"That's a terrible answer."
"It's the only true one."
She touched his face. "You think love and trust are the same thing."
"Aren't they?"
"Nope."
He wished she had said yes.
Eventually Esa left.
She didn't betray him spectacularly. Kael almost wished she had. Spectacular betrayals give a person somewhere to actually put the pain.
Instead, she simply chose something else. There was no villain. No crime. No satisfying hatred. Just an empty chair.
Kael discovered that absence has weight. He stopped sleeping.
The forgotten memories became louder. Dead children. Wounded animals. Burning forests. Frightened soldiers. Hungry people. The oceans were full of voices.
He began putting his hands over his ears but it made no difference. The voices were inside him.
"Make it stop" he begged one night. He didn't know whom he was speaking to. God, perhaps? Or the darkness. Sometimes they felt distressingly similar. "Please."
Nothing answered.
So Kael became angry.
This was new. He had always believed anger was something one should overcome. Now he discovered that anger could also be a form of grief standing upright.
He was angry with Esa.
With the wall.
With rich men who forgot what enough meant. With people who hurt children. With people who hurt animals because animals couldn't testify against them. With rulers who sent young men to die and called themselves brave. With people who poisoned rivers then sold clean water. With anyone who discovered another person's weakness and immediately wondered how it might be useful.
Most of all, he was angry with God.
"You made them" he said.
No answer.
"You made all of this."
Silence.
"You could stop it."
The universe remained offensively enormous. Kael picked up a stone and threw it at the sky. It came back down.
This seemed like a very poor design.
The next morning a boy was waiting outside. Kael recognized him. He had visited several years earlier to leave the memory of his mother's singing.
"What do you want?"
"My memory."
Kael found the jar. He handed it to him.
The boy, now a man, shook his head. "I don't want it back."
"Then why are you here?"
"I want to add something."
Kael sighed. "What?"
The young man looked embarrassed. "My own singing."
"Why?"
"My daughter was born yesterday."
Something inside Kael moved. Very slightly. "Congratulations"
"I couldn't remember my mother's song, exactly. So I made one up."
"Then it isn't the same song."
"No." The young man smiled. "It's mine."
Kael looked at the jar. For years he had believed his task was preservation. Keep everything exactly as it had been. Protect it from alteration. Prevent loss.
But the boy had forgotten part of the song. And because he had forgotten it, he had created something brand new.
Kael didn't know what to do with this. So he put both songs in the same jar.
Years passed. The wall remained. Esa did not return.
Kael continued keeping forgotten things, although differently now. When people came asking for the past, he sometimes asked why they wanted it. This generally irritated them.
"Because it belongs to me."
"Does it?"
"Of course."
"What will you do with it?"
"Remember it."
"And then?"
Few people had an answer. Kael began to suspect that remembrance without transformation was just another kind of box.
Then the sickness came.
It began in his hands. Some mornings his fingers refused to close. Later came pain. Then exhaustion. Then nights when his body begged for sleep while his mind remained mercilessly awake. Racing.
The physician gave the illness a long name. Kael immediately forgot it. This amused him greatly.
"You are the Keeper of Forgotten Things," the physician said.
"Apparently I'm becoming selective."
But the illness worsened. Kael grew frightened of his own body. It had always been the house from which he encountered the world. Now doors stuck. Windows cracked. Floorboards gave way. Sometimes pain became so complete that he could not imagine anything existing beyond it.
On those nights, the forgotten voices returned. But something had changed. He no longer heard only their suffering. He heard their endurance.
The frightened soldier had still carried his wounded friend. The starving mother had still divided her bread out. The injured bird had still attempted flight. The abandoned child had still loved.
Life was astonishingly unreasonable about continuing.
One winter morning, Kael discovered that the wall had a crack.
It was a tiny crack. Hardly worth mentioning. He pressed his eye against it. There was a little girl on the other side.
She screamed. He screamed. Then they both laughed.
"Are you one of them?" she asked.
"One of whom?"
"The bad people."
"Um, I don't think so."
"That's what a bad person would say."
"Good point."
She considered him through the crack. "Do you eat children?"
"Only on Thursdays."
It was Tuesday. This seemed to reassure her.
They began meeting at the wall. Kael learned that the people on the other side told almost exactly the same story about his people that his people told about theirs. This delighted him.
Human beings, he decided, were enormously creative except when inventing enemies. Then they became quite repetitive.
The girl brought other children. Kael told them stories through the crack. The children told him theirs.
Eventually someone enlarged the crack a bit. No one admitted doing it. Then someone else enlarged it more. Years of rain helped. So did roots. Walls, Kael discovered, dislike trees.
One morning a section completely collapsed. Adults arrived immediately to determine who was responsible. The children simply climbed through.
By then Kael was old. Or perhaps merely tired. Pain makes counting the years difficult.
He began giving things away:
The soldiers' memories went to children studying war.
The memories of dead children went to mothers who would always speak their names.
The songs went to anyone willing to sing them, even badly.
The memories of animals went to people planting forests.
He even opened the silver box containing the little girl's nothing. Inside was still nothing. It remained absolutely magnificent.
Finally only one object remained. A tiny seed.
Kael did not remember collecting it which troubled him. He remembered everything in the house. Or had.
He rolled the seed between his fingers. "What are you?"
Naturally, it refused to answer, so he planted it.
That night Kael dreamed of Esa. She was sitting on his roof.
"You got old," she said.
"So did you."
"This is your dream. I can look however I want."
"Then why did you choose old?"
She smiled. "Perhaps you finally understand me."
"Nope."
"Good." She moved closer. "Do you still love me?"
Kael considered lying. "Yes."
"Do you trust me?"
"No."
Esa laughed. For the first time, Kael did too.
Perhaps love and trust had never been the same thing. Perhaps forgiveness and return weren't the same thing either. Perhaps one could love something without permitting it to destroy you....
This seemed like the sort of knowledge he should have acquired earlier.
"Why did you leave?" he asked.
"You already know."
"I want you to say it."
"No."
"Why?"
"Because this is your dream." She touched his cheek. "Stop asking other people to tell you what you already know."
Then she disappeared.
"That's extremely irritating!" Kael shouted after her.
He woke up laughing.
Spring came late. Kael became weaker.
The children visited him. Some were children no longer. They brought their children now. He found this very offensive.
"You weren't supposed to grow up."
"Well, you did."
"That was different."
"How?"
"I didn't know any better."
One afternoon a young woman asked him what would happen to all the things he had kept.
"They aren't mine anymore."
"Whose are they?"
"Yours."
"All of them?"
"Everyone's."
"What are we supposed to do with them?"
Kael looked toward the window. Outside, the seed had produced one thin green stem.
"Remember."
She nodded solemnly.
Kael shook his head. "No. That's not enough."
"What do you mean?"
He struggled to sit upright. "Remember what I've told you."
"I will."
"No." He took her hand. "People say that when they mean, don't forget my words. That's not what I mean."
"Then what do you mean?"
Kael looked around the room. Boxes. Jars. Letters. A hundred years of preserved sorrow and wonder.
"Don't remember me."
She frowned.
"Remember what I told you."
"I don't understand."
"You will."
Kael died sometime before morning. Nobody knew exactly when.
There was no thunder. No stars fell. The earth didn't tremble. His heart simply stopped beating.
This annoyed some people who thought important lives should have important deaths.
The children buried him beneath the tree that had grown from the seed. Someone suggested carving his wisdom into stone. Nobody could agree what his wisdom had been. Someone suggested building a monument.
The children objected.
"Why?"
"He hated walls."
"A monument isn't a wall."
"Give people enough stone and they'll turn anything into a wall."
So they planted things instead.
The tree grew. Years passed. Its roots spread beneath the place where the wall had once stood. Birds nested in its branches. People quarreled under it. People kissed under it. Children climbed it despite repeated instructions not to.
Once someone carved two names into its bark. Someone else became furious about this. The tree appeared unconcerned.
The country changed. Then changed again. Some injustices ended as new ones were invented. Human beings remained human beings.
But scattered among them were people who remembered.
Not Kael. What he told them.
A physician sat beside a frightened child longer than was necessary.
A soldier refused an order.
A wealthy woman discovered that she had enough and to spare.
A man forgave his brother without inviting him back into his house.
A girl rescued an injured bird.
Someone questioned a story everyone else believed.
Someone opened a window rather than putting truth inside a box.
Someone listened.
Someone created.
Someone planted.
Someone loved despite having excellent reasons not to.
And somewhere, every time this happened, something forgotten returned to the world. Not unchanged.
Alive.
Centuries later, no one remembered Kael. His house was gone. His country had another name. Even the tree eventually fell.
A little boy found a piece of its wood buried beside a river, and brought it home.
"What is it?" his sister asked.
"Nothing."
"Then why are you keeping it?"
He shrugged. "It feels important."
She rolled her eyes.
That night the boy placed the wood beside his bed. Just before he fell asleep, he heard something. He sat up.
"Did you hear that?"
"Hear what?" his sister asked.
He listened.
It sounded almost like a bird discovering the sky.
Almost like an elephant walking somewhere very far away.
Almost like a woman singing to a baby.
Almost like the earth remembering every living thing it had ever held.
"I don't know" he whispered.
His sister was already asleep. The boy lay back down. And although he would never know the name of the man who had lived centuries before him, something in him had changed.
The next morning, on his way to school, he saw a little girl sitting alone. Normally he would have walked past. Instead he stopped.
"Do you want to come with me?"
The girl looked up.
And somewhere beneath their feet, deep in the dark where forgotten things become roots, something began again.
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