Carry-On Only

The afterlife smells like Cinnabon and carpet cleaner, which honestly tracks.

I'm standing in what is, without question, a budget airline terminal. The lighting makes everyone look slightly post-surgery, and the floor has a stickiness to it that has no traceable origin. A Hudson News sells magazines from 2011. A single electrical outlet is being fought over by three dead people. And there is the Cinnabon. The smell hit me from sixty feet away. Even dead, my body wanted a cinnamon roll.

I'm holding a boarding pass I don't remember receiving. My name is on it, spelled correctly, which already puts it ahead of most boarding passes I've had in life. Seat assignment: middle seat. Obviously. Departure time reads NOW-ISH.

The PA system crackles overhead. "Attention passengers. Flight 7 to Reincarnation, Southeast Asia, is delayed due to cosmic weather. We apologize for the inconvenience. Connecting passengers to Void, Non-Refundable, please see your gate agent."

Right. So I'm dead.

The line behind me goes to the horizon. Actual, visible horizon. A small child is kicking a vending machine with the determination of someone who has given this his full career. A man in a bathrobe is arguing with a potted ficus. He's losing. I have been in this line for what could be forty minutes or four hundred years, and the difference does not seem to matter here.

I reach the counter. The gate agent doesn't look up. Polyester uniform. Nametag blank. She's working with the focused indifference of someone who has handled ten billion souls and expects to handle ten billion more.

"One carry-on," she says. "Standard size. It'll be at the counter."

"Sorry," I say. "One carry-on to where, exactly?"

She looks up. Her expression is the face of a person who has heard this question an uncountable number of times and finds it no more interesting now. "The afterlife, sir. Whatever fits, you take. Whatever doesn't, stays. No checked bags."

A suitcase appears on the counter. Hard-shell, scuffed, one wheel slightly crooked. The kind you'd grab from a Marshalls clearance bin on the way to a trip you didn't want to take.

"What happens to what doesn't fit?" I ask.

"Goes back on the belt."

The conveyor belt beside her hums to life, and my entire life begins arriving in physical form.

I wish I could tell you it was impressive.

My career arrives first. It's a participation ribbon. Blue and white, slightly crinkled, and printed across the front in block letters: SHOWED UP MOSTLY. I hold it between two fingers. Twenty-two years in account management. I learned the difference between a pivot table and a VLOOKUP, and I weaponized that knowledge at every available opportunity. And the universe, having reviewed my full professional file, has rendered its verdict. I set it down and honestly cannot argue.

My unrealized potential comes next. It's a seven-foot inflatable dinosaur, still sealed in the box. SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED. I never assembled it. I kept it in the box and put the box in storage and renewed the storage unit every year like paying a subscription fee for a future self I intended to become next quarter. The gate agent glances at the box, then at me, then back at her screen. She doesn't say a word, which is somehow a complete sentence.

My money rolls out. A single crumpled dollar bill. I made more than this in life, obviously. But here it is, wadded up and pathetic, the accurate conversion rate for everything I ever earned versus everything it ever actually meant.

My marriage arrives as a cake topper. Two little plastic figures standing next to each other, not quite touching, and across the base: CONGRATULATIONS, YOU TRIED. I pick it up. My marriage lasted eleven years. We were good at the beginning and tired at the end, and somewhere in the middle, we stopped reaching for each other and just gradually became roommates who remembered to say Happy Birthday. I hold it a second too long, and the gate agent clears her throat.

My gym membership slides out in its original envelope. Sealed. Mint. A mirror rolls past showing a version of me with better posture and a jaw that suggests someone who takes cold showers by choice. An overdue library book from 1997 arrives next. The fine must be cosmological.

The belt slows. I exhale.

I stare at the suitcase. I stare at the belt.

I leave the ribbon. The dollar. The cake topper, the gym membership, the library book. I watch them ride the belt away, and I do not watch them go for long because there's nothing to mourn there. That wasn't a life. That was furniture.

A new item arrives, and something in my chest moves.

It's a crayon drawing. Purple house, yellow sun, two stick figures holding hands. One labeled ME. One labeled DAD, the letters backwards. My daughter made this. The paper is crumpled and soft at the edges. It feels warm. I put it in the suitcase.

A Tupperware container comes down the belt. I pop the lid. Garlic. Crushed tomato. The particular warmth of my mother's kitchen on a Sunday, every Sunday, until there were no more Sundays. The container is empty. The smell is everything. I close it, pack it.

A small glass orb rolls toward me, buzzing faintly. I pick it up, and I can hear it. Laughter. My best friend Danny, a bar in 2003, a joke I never fully understood. I couldn't repeat the joke to you right now if my afterlife depended on it. But the feeling is in this orb, warm and buzzing, and I pack it next to the drawing.

One winter glove. My wife's. Left in my coat pocket after a walk we took in January, back when we were still good. We walked for six blocks without talking, and it was the easiest six blocks I ever walked with another person. I carried it through every coat I owned for eleven years and never once thought about why. I set it in the suitcase carefully.

The belt goes still.

I reach for the zipper. It doesn't close.

The belt hums back to life. I look over.

It's a brick. A single, standard, red-clay brick. It rides the belt with the unhurried confidence of an object that has been here before.

Written across the front in handwriting I recognize but wish I didn't, small and shaky, the letters pressed too hard into the surface, is the word DAD.

Not my daughter's dad. My dad. The man who lived in our house until a Tuesday in April when I was nine, and then drove away in a Buick with a cracked taillight and didn't come back. No phone call. No explanation. Nothing on the other side of that Tuesday except a lot of quiet dinners and a mother who started locking the front door during the daytime.

I pick up the brick. It is heavy. I have been carrying this brick for thirty-seven years. I carried it into my marriage and set it on the table between us. I carried it into my daughter's nursery. I carried it into every room I ever entered and spent decades wondering why I was so tired all the time.

I try to fit it in the suitcase. I rearrange the drawing. I shift the Tupperware. I push the orb into the corner. I shove the brick in and press down on the lid.

It won't close. Not even close.

"Sir." The gate agent taps her watch. The watch has no numbers on its face.

Behind me, someone yells, "COME ON, MAN." Someone else groans.

I push harder. Both hands on the lid. The brick sits there, solid, refusing. And I realize something. The drawing weighs nothing. The Tupperware weighs nothing. The orb, the glove, all of it. Feathers. Air. The brick is the only thing in this suitcase with any weight at all. It was always the only thing with any weight.

I pull it out. I hold it in both hands. I read the word again. DAD. I turn it over. The other side is blank. Smooth. Nothing. Thirty-seven years of turning this thing over, and the back of it has been empty every single time.

I set the brick on the belt. I open my hands. I watch it ride away, slow and steady, into whatever dark mouth the belt feeds into.

My hands are empty.

The suitcase clicks shut. Instantly. The zipper runs clean in one motion, like it was always going to, like the only thing that was ever in the way was the one thing I put down.

I stand there. And something happens that I don't have a name for, except that my entire body feels like it just put down a bag of concrete it forgot it was holding. My shoulders drop about three inches. My spine straightens. I take a breath, a real one, the kind that starts somewhere around my ankles, and I exhale so long and so deep that the guy behind me in line actually takes a step back.

The gate agent stamps my boarding pass. Red ink. APPROVED. She slides it across the counter without ceremony.

"Gate's that way."

I pick up the suitcase. It's almost funny how light it is. I could carry this thing with my pinky. I take a step toward the gate, and it's the easiest step I've taken since I was eight years old.

"Sir?"

I turn.

"Would you like to upgrade to First Class Eternity? Only two hundred dollars." She's already looking at her screen. "It's the same destination. The seats are just slightly wider."

I stare at her. She does not blink. I shake my head.

I make it four steps before I stop. Turn back. She's already processing the next person, a woman clutching what appears to be a bowling ball with the word SISTER written on it.

"What would've happened if I'd kept the brick?"

She doesn't look up. "Suitcase wouldn't have closed."

"And if the suitcase doesn't close?"

"You stay in the terminal."

I look back at the line. Hundreds of people. Some of them are clutching bricks. I can see them now. Red-brown, rough-edged, heavy. One guy near the back is holding so many bricks he's built himself a small wall, and he's standing inside it reading a magazine from 2011.

"The other stuff," I say. "The drawing. The Tupperware. They all fit."

"They always fit." She stamps the next person's paperwork. "They don't weigh anything." She pauses. The tiniest crack in the polyester armor. A fraction of a second where something almost human crosses her face. "It's only ever about what you put down."

Then it's gone. She slides a receipt across the counter toward me without looking. Forty-seven dollars. Afterlife processing fee. Non-refundable.

I pick up my suitcase. I walk toward the gate.

I don't look back.