William Carpenter: THE KEEPER

I forget everything. I forgot faces, I forget the plots of movies, how anything turned out, who is divorced - what couples are having an affair. I am not fit to be alone. You say I am like the Baron de Charlus who could never be outside without his keeper. I should have a keeper, one of those unsmiling plainclothed men that forms circles around the President. He would be physically large, he would be trained in Chinese methods of restraint for times when I forgot myself at parties or began speaking alound in the public street. He would have reproducible features; he could stand in at annual family picture. He would remind me of lectures himself while I sat attentively in the first row. He would grow rabbinical with learning, the keeper, he would grow old, bits of food would appear in his thick beard like insects; there would be insects in his beard. He would accept all my insomnia, he would lie there in the night recalling the details of my life, baffled with guilt, baffled with failing to reach out when things went by. It would be good sleeping while he stared into the night. It would be good dreaming of a simple, phenomenal world, of the great translucent forms of giraffes. It would be good to rise, like an idiot, in a morning totally new, it would be the body of the keeper beside the door, it would be his death on the last day and not my own. It would be I who kept on living here and kept forgetting.