There’s a human arm in my luggage. I say this to the woman in the seat next to me: ‘I have a human arm in my luggage.’ She smiles politely and laughs, though her eyes tell me she doesn’t understand the joke, then pointedly goes back to her book. The man next to her has been sleeping from the moment he sat down, head tilted back, mouth open, and shoulder wedged against the window. He probably has a dead arm too, I think and I’m pleased at my wit.
Technically, it’s true. Probably. It’s easier for me to think of it as an arm rather than a selection of samples from all over her body.
I don’t really know how things go from oven to container when they cremate someone. Do they sweep it all up with a special broom? Or is there a sieve that it all falls through afterwards? Is the way the ash settles in the container roughly akin to how the body once was—head ash, torso ash, leg ash? Or is it all mixed up from the outset?
At the funeral I couldn’t stop the stream of questions and pictures squalling through my mind. I stared straight ahead at the ornate coffin with the silver handles and wondered if it would go in the oven too, making wood and body into one, both a useless dusty chimera and a waste. Or maybe I had read somewhere that they would take the body out and place it in a more burn-friendly container—but then what would happen to the coffin? Would it be reused? Thrown away? Burned somewhere else?
I imagined her shoulder-length blonde hair on fire, her face peaceful, untouched. I imagined the dust of her on the bristles of a broom, getting washed away down a sink. Do they hose down the oven afterwards? Or do fragments of strangers mix in perpetuity? Is it not just her I have in this bag?
Correction: a third of her.
*
The last time we were in Europe, she and I had been the only women in our group who brought backpacks, and I hated her, just a little bit, for diluting my glory. All the others dragged around ungainly wheelie bags that made our last-minute sprints through train stations unbearably slow. We’d arrive at the base of a huge, crowded staircase, puffing and wheezing, and inevitably the boys—because although we were all nineteen, somehow they were boys and we were women—would each grab a handle and heft them all the way up. The owners of the bags would trail behind, awkward and light, while Alicia and I would bring up the rear, stoic, straps digging into our shoulders as we tried to race one another without letting on that was what we were doing.
In photos from that trip I look tense, even in moments when I know I was having a good time. Everyone else looks relaxed—arms flopped over the backs of chairs, legs kicked out under heavy wooden tables; it creates a sense of belonging. Alicia looks mid-laugh, beautiful, in almost every shot.
On the train into Venice, I had anxiously counted down the stops, moving closer and closer to the edge of my seat the nearer we got to our station. Behind me, half our group drank beers from their bags, played snap with an incomplete deck of cards, told me to chill out when I gave them a two-stop countdown reminder. I watched as Alicia shuffled the deck with an elegant riffle.
Five of us made it onto the platform in time to watch the doors close on the rest. As Alicia’s mouth formed a muted gasp behind the glass, I thought, You chill out, bitch, even though she hadn’t been the one to say it.
By the time they caught up to us at the hostel we had already sussed out the lay of the land, could tell them exactly how much cash they had to pay the receptionist for the unofficial-but-obligatory city bribe, and had taken all the bottom bunks.
Alicia walked into the room we’d booked out, dropped her backpack to the floor and rubbed her shoulder, wincing as she raised her arm to climb the ladder of the nearest bed. She barely had time to sigh before I said, ‘Hey, no, let’s swap,’ and cleared my stuff off the bed.
*
The sleeping man has wheelie bag too—I watched as he struggled to put it in the overhead locker. It’s surely too big for the hand luggage limit. He must have got lucky. Or maybe, because he’s over six foot, the bag looked proportionately small.
Ever since I was a child I haven’t been able to look at a wheelie bag without wondering if I’d be able to fit in it. I own three and I can technically squeeze and contort my body enough to fit inside all of them, though I can only close the lid on one.
I reckon I could get three quarters of me into the bag currently in the overhead locker. The best method would be to tuck my head under my left arm, leaving my right leg hanging out. Or, if the walls were strong enough, I could pull my knees to my chest, angle my feet and just have my head and right shoulder sticking out.
When Alicia’s mother brought out the urn, I was taken aback by how it was somehow both too big and too small. Reduced to ash. I had, irrationally, been picturing a small triangle of grey dust, sitting on the countertop—not a tall, beige tube containing a bag.
She carefully placed the bag on a stainless-steel kitchen scale, put the number into her phone and divided it by three.
‘I’m not great at arithmetic,’ she said with a small smile. She then carefully scooped out brown spoonfuls of her daughter, keeping an eye on the numbers. Afterwards we had tea, and as she built a wall around the hole in her life with talk about books and the weather, all I could think about was what she would do with that spoon after I left.
*
The plane is going to land in Rome, and maybe this time I’ll get to see the Trevi Fountain. I thought about scattering her there, but then I thought too deeply and the imagery began to horrify me. What happens to cremains in water? Do they float? Or do they start to absorb water, become a strange kind of sludge, something that might block the pipes? I imagined a gust of wind picking up at the wrong moment, blowing her into the faces of tourists, into their photographs—a strange, modern immortality. Even if I wanted to, it has to be against some kind of law, maybe? I started a half-hearted Google search, but all I could find was a man asking advice about scattering a few grams of his father at the Vatican. He was worried people would think he was a terrorist.
Before we visited, I hadn’t realised that Vatican City was its own country, and none of us realised that the Sistine Chapel was housed within a museum. As a result, we walked around the whole thing twice, before finally handing over pride and asking for help. I sweated through the top that I’d budgeted at least two more days wear out of, but was only a little grumpy. ‘How often do you walk around an entire country twice?’ Alicia kept saying.
The chapel itself was crowded, too crowded, and the air thick with schadenfreude from whenever the designated guard would yell at another tourist for taking photographs. What were they even trying to capture? The only thing I could see clearly, unobscured by an errant elbow or mop of dirty hair, was the famous painting running overhead. Afterwards I enthused about how great it was to see in person and tried to tamp down the thought hovering around the edge of my mind that maybe, actually, it looked better on the overpriced postcards I’d bought on the way out. That night I lay on my bunk and imagined spending years that way, running a brush along the ceiling. My eyes followed cracks leading to beams leading to spider webs, and I wondered what I would paint, if given the opportunity, if forced. What feeling could I dedicate years of work to? What image best represented my soul? My mind was empty of everything except for cracks and beams and spider webs, and I fell asleep thinking that this meant I was empty too.
As I watch a man on the other side of the plane press the attendant button and be brought six small packets of milk, I think: Perhaps I can recreate that walk for her one last time. I could tear the lining of my jacket pocket, poke a hole in the bag, and leave a trail of Alicia one step behind me.
*
After I bought my ticket, I changed the wallpaper on my phone to the picture from our trip that got over a hundred likes. Everyone from the group is huddled in front of some statue, each person frozen in the shape of one of the stone figures. Alicia is right in the middle, arms raised, face twisted into a bemused caricature of scolding while the rest kneel and look up at her.
I’m not in it—I was the architect. It was my voice that directed the others into supplication.
Looking at it now makes me feel like my feet are an inch off the ground, though I don’t know whether it’s because I feel powerful or as though there is not enough of me for the earth to hold onto.
*
Who, outside of an Agatha Christie novel, has a reading of the will? It was even in a building that looked like it had been frozen in 1920, complete with red velvet on dark wooden chairs and a podium that looked as though it had been carved by a master who left school at fourteen to immerse himself in the craft. I was vividly imagining this man’s rise through carpentry—a boy learning to sand a chair leg becoming a man running his own business, then an arthritic elder still applying lacquer with a steady hand—when the lawyer walked in.
I’d been summoned there by Alicia herself. When the handwritten letter arrived in the post, complete with wax seal, I was furious. Not just because it was so goddamned pretentious but because it was cruel. It felt like she was saying, Look how much time I had to plan. Look how much time you had to stop this.
When the lawyer read out the bit about the ashes I laughed, too loud, before cutting myself off. It wasn’t legally binding, I was later told. Just a request. I didn’t have to do it.
*
Even though I’ve got all the correct paperwork and talked it through with airline staff beforehand, I start to panic when filling out the customs form. There’s a lot to declare, and the more times I read over it, the more I begin to take each question literally. My spiral is nipped in the bud by the arrival of the food trolley, and for one insane second I think about tearing my bread roll in half and putting it in my bag. For Alicia. It’s the polite thing to do. But I wriggle my shoulders to snap myself out of it, carefully prise up the tinfoil cover and then wonder why they have given me a metal fork but a plastic knife. The fork is just as easily a weapon, I think, stabbing at a noodle.
Waiting for me at the carousel will be the same backpack from our original trip, and my collarbones already hurt in anticipation.
By now I should have decided what I actually am going to do, but all I really know is that I will arrive in Rome then, two weeks later, will leave from Barcelona. It felt poetic, somehow, to do our trip in reverse. Maybe I could go back to the same places, sprinkle a bit of her at each. But then would it be all or nothing? Some at the Spanish Steps, sure. But then, for the sake of completion, some at the club we paid ten euros to get into only to find it was empty? Some on the steps of hostels? At the opera? At that train station we spent seven hours at because it didn’t seem worth booking accommodation for so short a stay?
Someone in the row in front of me is watching a film I’ve already seen, and soon I am watching their screen too, filling in the dialogue silence with patchy memory. As it cuts from a shot of trees to a shot of two people talking, I feel a jolt behind my sternum—the feeling of something being wrong. It takes me a minute to realise it’s because a scene has been cut, censored for a cramped audience. There is a hole in the film and no one is acknowledging it.
When I think about the letter, I get what feels like a photocopy of my original anger. It’s still there; it’s just flattened and a little bit fuzzy. I think about booking a ticket for that train in Venice and leaving her there, looking through the closed doors at what’s left as it whizzes off without me.
But not knowing where she’d end up would erode my serenity. Eternity in lost and found. Destroyed by a bomb squad. Tossed into the garbage along with candy wrappers and a few lost playing cards.
*
There is no air in the ziplock bag. I made sure of it: carefully leaving a gap before blue met yellow, pinching the top to make sure no powder escaped, before squeezing the whole thing flat. Afterwards I gave it a poke, just to be sure, and the brownness moved like something halfway between putty and liquid. I worried that some of the grit would rub against the inside, form a hole, let it all stream out in my backpack, felt my lungs tighten at the thought. So I got a second, bigger bag, and dropped the first one inside it. Aesthetically strange and emotionally disrespectful, but safe.
*
They’ve dimmed the lights, but I’ve never been able to sleep on planes so my face is lit by my phone as I scroll through pictures that are almost ten years old. Me at Pompeii, my arms held stiffly out at my sides. All of us stretched out on a lush lawn at Aranjuez, where for once I look relaxed, though I am half a foot too far away from the rest of the group. I look like I’ve been photoshopped in afterwards. Alicia finishing off everyone’s tiramisu because she was the last one to get sick of the dessert that seemingly came with every meal in Germany. Me, sick as a dog, with my head poking out from the top of three bunks, smiling while everyone else plays a complicated hand-clapping game from childhood.
I get to the end, then start back over, this time putting my thumb over myself in every shot to see if the overall mood changes. When I do the same thing with Alicia, the pictures stop making sense. There is a hole in the photographs. The point of focus is gone. I blink.
Next to me, the woman is now also asleep, her book lodged between her thighs and her chin at her chest. I clear my throat gently to see if she’ll stir, but nothing. So I press the button and the attendant comes, leaves again to go fetch the tea and spoon I asked for.
‘Thank you,’ I say, as I feel the steam on my face. I slide down, just a little, and reach into my backpack, keeping an eye on both the sleeping man and woman as my fingers wrap around the bag, as I undo one layer, then two.
This will be the first of many. I picture the coffee shop where we laughed at the boy who got a frothed milk when he asked for a latte. I can almost taste the tiramisu at that first German bierhaus. But first, we’ll have tea.
‘Let’s try again,’ I say as I quickly stir, then raise the cup to my lips. ‘Let’s do things right.’
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