There was a king who could write any memory onto a stone and drop the stone in the river, and the memory would go with it. The river was patient. He had been using it since he was twenty.
He erased his failures first, because they were heaviest and he felt their weight in his decisions. Then he erased his shames, which were numerous and which he had been carrying since boyhood. Then he erased the people who had disappointed him, which took longer than he expected, because disappointment had accumulated detail over decades and required many sessions and many stones. The river changed course around them, eventually. The stones were too numerous. The riverbed rose on the east bank and the water went west.
He grew lighter. His advisors said he was well. The palace continued. The administration of the kingdom proceeded without incident.
But in the corridors of the palace, which he had walked for forty years, he began to find himself stopping. His feet would slow at a particular turn and then stop, as if waiting for something. His hands would reach for a door he had no memory of knowing. He would enter a room and stand in it without knowing why he had come, and the standing had a particular quality: expectation, without content.
He tried to erase the residue when he could find it. But residue does not write cleanly on stone. It is too diffuse. When he tried to hold it still long enough to write it down, it went shapeless. He dropped stones that felt blank and achieved nothing.
His oldest advisor came to him one evening in the throne room. The advisor was seventy-three and had known the king since childhood and had watched every stone go into the river. He said: there is a traveler at the gate. A woman who says she has lost something and has been told you might know where it is.
The king said: I know nothing about anything she has lost.
The advisor said: that is what she expected you to say.
The king sat on the throne and looked at the window. The window was on the right side of the room. He was fairly certain, without being able to say how he was certain, that the window had not always been on that side.