The Last Lighthouse Keeper
On the night the automated system was installed, Marco lit the lamp one final time — not because it was needed, but because some rituals deserve a proper ending.
The ferry had brought the engineers in the morning, young men with laptops and toolboxes, and they had worked all day without speaking much to Marco. He had made coffee at noon and left it on the kitchen table. One of them had said thank you.
By evening, the new system was running. A small green light on a panel near the door confirmed what Marco already knew: the lamp would now turn on by itself, extinguish by itself, sweep the dark water in its long slow arc without any hand to guide it.
He sat outside on the stone step as the engineers packed their van. The younger one, the one who had said thank you, paused at the gate.
“You’ll still be here? For the transition period?”
“Six more weeks,” Marco said.
“Right.” The young man seemed to want to say something else. He did not.
After the van’s tail lights disappeared around the headland, Marco went inside and climbed the stairs. He did this by memory — sixty-three steps, the fourteenth slightly higher than the rest, a detail he had noticed on his first week and never quite stopped noticing. At the top he opened the hatch and stood in the lamp room, where the light was already going through its automatic rotations, indifferent to his presence.
He had tended lights for twenty-two years. Before this posting, Capo Duna. Before that, two years on the small rock station off the northern coast, where in winter the spray reached the glass and you could feel the tower move, a millimetre or two, in the worst storms.
He had never thought of himself as a man who needed ceremony. He had said as much to his sister when she called last week, suggesting he do something to mark the occasion.
“You could write it down,” she said. “What it was like.”
“I’d only write the mundane parts,” he told her. “The ledger entries. Wind direction. Visibility. Lamp hours.”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” she said.
Now he stood in the lamp room and watched the light cross the water, and felt, for the first time, that something was expected of him. Some acknowledgement. He could not think what form it ought to take.
He climbed back down. He made supper. He sat at the table where the engineers had left a ring from a coffee cup and wrote, in the margins of the log, three words in his small careful hand.
Still here. Still.
In the morning he crossed them out, as he crossed out all his marginal notes. But he had written them. That was the thing. He had written them, and for a while they had been true.