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Davenport lives in a tiny village of other gnomes, where they tinker and make magic and at night you can always see the stars. He does not remember how he got here and so can only conclude it is where he has always been, and it is just as well because it is as if someone had picked him out the perfect home. The people there treat him kindly and he is technically skilled and besides he can't seem to think of anything he had ever done before this.
He focuses on his work because he can't focus on anything else. He builds a bag of holding and a driftglobe and every once in a while his fingers move the parts into something he doesn't recognize and yet knows exactly how to build. He takes it apart every time because his mind won't allow him to even begin to contemplate what it is or what it could be, and then he forgets it ever happened at all.
At night he looks up and sees the stars and for a second he knows that there is something about the moon and the stars and the planes that is important, something he meant to do, but it's gone like forgetting your purpose for entering a room the moment you actually walk in. It's a dream you forget as soon as you wake up, slipping through his fingertips like water or sand from a beach he's certain he's never been to. His head keeps going back to it but there is nothing there but empty space and static, and soon he wonders how he's managed to spend an hour looking at the sky alone and doing nothing.
Davenport's head is tuned to the wrong channel and all it gets is static, static, static. He slides from one thought to the next, unable to keep them too long or consider them in depth because there is simply so much that he cannot think. He gets used to the crackle and buzz of the empty spaces in his brain and eventually he hardly notices them at all.
One day he meets a woman in white and her face is like expecting there to be an extra step at the top of a staircase but there isn't and your foot lands later than you feel like it was supposed to and you almost trip. She has come to offer him a job and she keeps asking questions he can't answer.
What is your name? "Davenport." This he knows. It is something he holds onto.
How are you? He feels a lot of things but when he tries to give them words he ends up in vacant places. "I...Davenport."
What? "Davenport."
She is confused and she asks a few more questions before she turns to someone else and asks them something, and he sees them shake their head at her and he sees her heart shatter in real time. She looks like she is about to cry, and when she asks him if he'd like to come with her he only nods.
I'm sorry. she says, Something went wrong. It looks like she wants to say more but she doesn't, and he doesn't understand what she could possibly be talking about anyway. He calls her The Director and he is fairly sure she has a name and that he knows it but his brain keeps running into more electricity so he stops trying to think about it at all. The moon is beautiful and his work is mostly clerical and when he looks out his window he gets a nagging feeling he can't name that is gone the moment it arrives.
She tells him that collecting these grand magical objects is her life's work, and Davenport tries to remember what his was but he can't. What makes a life? What makes a person who they are? What did he dream of when he was small, who did he look up to and what places has he gone to and what did he do there, what was it he spent hours and days and weeks and years and decades and so, so much his life just studying and planning and preparing for? He thinks of the moon and the stars and the planes and something red but it's not there anymore. It has all been ripped out, every bit of it. Between all the holes in his head, what could possibly be left?
"Davenport." he says, and The Director smiles at him, a little sad.