She could not say: I remember. The word was unavailable to her because it implied a distance between herself and the event, a reaching back, a retrieval. What she had was nothing like retrieval. Everything she had ever seen was present, layered over everything she currently saw, at equal density.
She became a keeper of the dead, not because she communed with them in any way that others would recognize, but because they were simply present to her exactly as they had been. People came from considerable distances to ask their questions. She answered them. She described what she could see: the last afternoon of a particular person, the argument that had not been resolved, the location of something set down and never returned to. She was accurate. The families went home satisfied.
She did not own property. This was the practical consequence of her condition. Every room she entered had been entered before, and the previous occasions were present simultaneously with the current visit, which meant that the accumulated weight of any owned space quickly became unmanageable. She had learned this in her twenties and had not attempted to hold onto a room since.
A traveler came who had lost a child. She wanted to know not facts but whether the child was still present anywhere, in any sense. The keeper sat with her in the village square, which was layered with seventy years of the keeper's own visits to this spot, and said: bring me something of the child's, something she held. The traveler brought a small wooden animal. The keeper held it. She sat for a long time. The traveler waited.
The keeper said: the last afternoon is a garden with a red gate. She was playing a game that involved counting stones. She finished the game. She counted correctly. She was pleased about this.
The traveler left. The keeper sat for a while longer in the square, with the afternoon and seventy other afternoons all equally present. Then she rose and walked home, which meant she walked toward the house she had not entered in thirty years, the house that held everything she knew about herself, layered and waiting. She stood at the door. She counted what she could see from the threshold. She lost count at thirty-seven. She went in anyway.