The Keeper of Memories leads a solitary existence. She neither needs nor craves companionship. Yet she is as gracious a host as any to those who wander into her domain. Visitors do travel where the Keeper ranges, and they are legion.

Call them Nomads, humans who, by some quirk of fate or self-inflicted act or sheer dint of age, have lost the ability to create new memories. They are the comatose, the amnesiacs, the senile, the traumatized, the psychologically deranged, and the wretched substance abusers among us who can no longer weave conscious threads of their being with their lives. They arrive with no purpose save to view the remnants of what they still may (or care to) remember.

The ritual is always the same: The Keeper greets each by name, leads the Nomad to the bank where his or her drawer lies, pulls it open, and retrieves its entire cache as fibers writhing into a Möbius strip of gossamer fabric. The Nomad kneels, and with the reverence we accord our dead, the Keeper wraps the Memory Shroud around the head, neck, shoulders, and heart of the visitor, surrounding the latter with animated vistas of the Past, the infinite loop of a bygone symphony to be replayed over and over as often as desired.

There the Nomad remains, with countless others similarly accoutered, languishing in limbo until its bodily form in the Present becomes sentient again or dies without recovering. When that happens, the Memory Shroud flutters down in a wrinkled heap. Then the Keeper returns it to its compartment, where it changes back to the original bits and pieces of the Nomad’s Past in the chronological order they were stashed away.

(This post is a continuation of The Keeper of Memories made in November 2007 and The Hands of the Keeper of Memories (I) written in January 2008.)

Posted in: Illustrart, Rough Sketches, Exit Stage Write | Comments(0) | February 2008