What Remains
Illustration: Ansellia Kulikku. A lamp dimly lights the sage walls of a hotel room. Curtains pulled tight. Beneath a few layers of blankets and sheets, a body: female, approximately age twenty. Skeleton supine. Her back curved, like a shell.
The girl’s mother kneels by the bed. “Do you want to go for a short walk?” Formerly muscular from running, the girl’s limbs are a specter of their old strength. The girl looks up, eyes glassy, and nods. Her mother’s hand supporting her back, she eases a leg from the mattress. Without warning, her head begins to rock from side to side on its own. Within her skull, the sensation of mist enveloping a mountain, everything clouded. The urge to coax sounds from the back of her throat: eh, mauh, ah, ah, mauh, mauh. The mother smooths her daughter’s body back down. “Rest,” the mother whispers. She runs her fingertips along the contours of her girl’s face.
Since returning from a study abroad trip in Peru, the girl has succumbed to neurological episodes. The strange spells leave her with gaps in memory. She does not remember the long flights from Lima to Miami to Raleigh. Or her legs crumpling from under her on a mountainside outside of Arequipa. Or the afternoons her mother has spent waiting in the hotel room, making to-do lists, pacing. In sleep, her fingers curl around the convex of her eye, an echo from when she was a baby.
Later, when the girl flickers into awareness, her mother asks, “What happened to you while you were gone?”
Arequipa is bathed in sunlight. In front of a rust-red building, a poster shows a gold statuette adorned with red and yellow patterned textiles. A bright tuft of feather protrudes from his shiny head. “This is where we will see a mummy,” Raul tells us. He is our Peruvian guide. Stout and wry, he has gained popularity with our class by stopping at the cheapest liquor depots on our many bus trips, sharing pieces of history, and offering pertinent advice. Drink water constantly. Nap. Eat enough food.
“No photos,” he warns. Some of my classmates grumble; they take photographs everywhere we go. They pay to hold baby llamas. They jump over the same spot on a water-soaked bog thirteen times to get the perfect shot. They pose like colonial explorers on the edge of islands, jutting out their chests. I am no different. Each of us crafts our own idea of what we want the country to be.
But this museum offers nothing for us to snatch up with a lens. We enter a room, air conditioning on full blast. The space, dimly lit, demands our silence. “They call this mummy ‘The Ice Maiden’ or ‘Juanita,’” Raul says.
The story Raul tells is born of science and artifact. As with any archeological find, Juanita has been studied extensively. Her stomach matter has been tested, clothes peeled away, bones scanned, teeth examined, hair plucked
