Each evening the keeper climbed the hill to the lighthouse with no memory of having done it before.
This did not alarm the keeper, who had no memory of being alarmed by it either. There was a key under the stone by the door, exactly where the keeper’s hand went to look for it. There was a table at the bottom of the stairs, and on the table was a log book, and the handwriting in the log book was the keeper’s own.
Lit the lamp at dusk. Wind from the west. Cleaned the lens. All ships passed safely.
The entries went back further than the keeper could be bothered to count. Every one of them said more or less the same thing, and every one of them was true, as far as anyone knew. The light had been kept and the ships had passed. The keeper read the last few entries, climbed the stairs, lit the lamp, cleaned the lens, and watched the dark water until morning. Then the keeper came down, wrote Lit the lamp at dusk. Wind from the north. Cleaned the lens. All ships passed safely, and walked down the hill into a day the keeper would not remember either.
This went on for a long time.
Then one night, at the bottom of the stairs with the pen in hand, the keeper paused. The entry was written, and it was accurate. But it occurred to the keeper that whoever read it tomorrow would know exactly what had been done and nothing at all about what it had been like, and that the person reading it tomorrow would be, in every way that mattered, the keeper.
So under the usual line, the keeper wrote:
There are 112 stairs. The third from the top creaks; it’s fine. Stay up past your shift once. The dawn here comes in from the left and turns the whole sea the color of a peach.
The next evening, the keeper climbed the hill, found the key, read the log, and stopped at the new lines. They were in the keeper’s handwriting, but they didn’t sound like a log. They sounded like a letter.
The keeper counted the stairs going up. There were 112. The third from the top creaked. In the morning the keeper stayed past the end of the shift and watched the dawn come in from the left, and the sea did turn the color of a peach. Afterward the keeper sat on the top step for a long while, saying nothing to anyone, because there was no one there, and that was perfectly all right.
At the bottom of the stairs that day, the keeper wrote the usual line, and then underneath it:
Confirmed about the peach. Also, there’s a kettle in the cupboard behind the oil cans. You’ll want it.
The log is much longer now. Every entry still begins with the lamp, because the lamp is the job, and the ships still pass safely. But each one ends with something small that isn’t the job: a bird that nests on the gallery rail in spring, a song that sounds right on the stairs, a warning that the kettle handle is getting loose. None of the keepers remembers writing any of it. All of them are glad it’s there.