Many memories are stored in the form of complex proteins in the brain. As we age, some break down and enter the bloodstream, where they may migrate across the lung's pink membranes and be expelled from the body in the breath. This is why, if you get right into the face of a very old person and inhale deeply, you can sometimes catch a momentary fragment of one of their lost memories. Just a piece, really. You might taste taffy or feel the rush as the ferris wheel comes down, but the carnival is lost.

Most rescuers sense this, as we're forever leaning down into the personal space of older people, asking them questions and straining to hear their gasped replies over the sounds of a siren. We capture their breaths accidentally in greenish oxygen masks and feed them pure, memory-free air. We sometimes wonder, as we turn a fast corner into the emergency room, why we find ourselves thinking about the touch of someone's hand whom we've never met.

Someone tells Susan about a psychic they went to and the amazing, unknowable things they were told. She wants to call him. Susan stands astride the space between the world of scientific certainties that I have been taught to accept and a place of something more mysterious, where I cannot go. She is comfortable in either realm. She would like to talk to her father, and I -- wanting but unable to believe -- would like to say hello or goodbye to the people who died in my presence.

Standing in the kitchen with our neighbor Sara, we talk about the dead people we would so much want to hear speaking again. "I doubt they even remember me," I say of my ghosts. But Susan thinks these lost people would remember the last person they saw alive. The last person. There is a shiver in the kitchen, a flicker of glassy membrane as the camera momentarily refocuses. There are two rooms, one full of spies flowing around the daily details of our lives, observing and bestowing on us their unknown blessings (anger, forgiveness, yearning, care) and one in which the smell of coffee suggests only that the morning is fast escaping us and that there's work to be done.