Glacier

               There was a train, and a forest, and a mountain. And halfway up that mountain, somewhere, there was a glacier. And in that glacier, there was the remains of my father.
               Well, that was the plan anyway. For now, I stood on the train platform, fiddling with the wooden box in my jacket pocket, and I looked up at the forest, and the mountain, and I tried to imagine how I’d have felt thirty years earlier, looking up at the same vast expanse of green, then white, then blue. I entertained the possibility that it had once made me feel nothing at all. It seemed unlikely.
               The train conductor arrived, and a whistle blew, and we were ushered into the carriages. I was immediately charmed by the simplicity of it all. Doors, windows, chairs. Nothing patterned or decorated, no illuminated fire exits, no LED displays. Train goes up, train comes down. Train goes up, train comes down. I wondered how much the conductor was paid. He was very French, in the sense that he was at the same time overdressed and underwhelmed by his own existence. As we followed the first bend in the track I spotted him a few carriages up, leaning out of a window, smoking of course, watching the mountains pass by on the other side of the valley, tailored shirt sleeves professionally rolled to the elbow, an immaculately groomed middle-part gently swaying in the wind.
               I followed suit and leaned out of my window. The view was spectacular, and I talked myself into thinking I remembered this part of the journey from so many years before.
               As the train dragged us up the mountainside, ski lodges and coffee shops and tennis courts in the valley below all shrank into a sort of ant-world, and the ants whose chatter I’d spent the last two days immersed in suddenly became very quiet. As if relieving them of their shift, an American next to me began to speak, loudly, and from the look on his face when I turned around after a few moments of silence, he was speaking to me.
               I could never forget a view like that, he said. Repeating himself. And I smiled, and nodded, yes, it would be quite difficult.
               I turned back to the window. Across the valley people were paragliding, colourful parachutes suspending them high over the town. I spotted two at first, but once my eyes became used to the shape of them, I saw that there were dozens, peppering the sky for miles in each direction, all different heights and colours.
               Gosh, have you ever seen a view like that?
               The American again. I acknowledged his question with a sound that I can’t put to paper, and nodded my head. I felt immediately that this wouldn’t be satisfactory. He cleared his throat behind me, and I could no longer enjoy the view in front of me, my brain instead choosing to count the seconds of silence between his perfunctory grunt and his next sentence.
               Do you think I look nervous? Fourteen seconds.
               It was an interesting question though, and against my better judgement I turned to regard him. He was wearing a slightly too-tight grey suit, with the jacket on, and there were fat beads of sweat sliding down a widow’s peak towards a desperate smile. He did look nervous, but it didn’t feel like that was the answer he was looking for.
               Looking good mate, love the suit, I lied.
               He looked visibly relieved, and this perked my interest even further. Again, against my better judgement.
               Is there…something to be nervous for? I looked him up and down again after speaking, then looked around at the rest of the carriage. Families and couples mainly. Sportswear and athleisure and polo shirts. The American certainly stood out. Had they built a chapel on the glacier?
               You know, I live in San Diego. I took four flights to get here. San Diego to LAX, LAX to New York, New York to Paris, and Paris to Geneva. It’s…there’s been a lot of build up for me. A lot of time to get nervous. And now I’m almost there. Shit, I’m sweating bullets.
               The American pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped away the droplets that threatened to dampen his jacket. He looked funny with the handkerchief in his hand. A man out of time. He could only have been thirty years old, his face wrinkled purely by temporary lines of stress. I felt that he saw me as an elder - a safe authority figure. I fiddled with the hard angles of the wooden box in my pocket. He had my interest alright. I needed to pry.
               Go on, you can tell me. What’s got you so worked up? Hot date?
               He smiled a very sincere smile, and the boyishness of his face shone for a moment. This boy was in love, and we both knew it.
               A hot date. That’s very funny. Yes, she’s- it’s a hot date. She’s beautiful, actually. And French, which doesn’t hurt. And an ex-girlfriend, which is why I’m so, worked up, as you say.
               You’re meeting your ex-girlfriend on the side of a mountain? Does she know you’re coming? Should I be worried?
               Ha ha, that’s very funny. No, she knows. We got back in contact this past winter, and this is our first time seeing each other in seven years. We met here at the glacier eight years ago. Both tourists, solo travelling. It seemed a fitting place for the reunion.
               It seemed that mine and the American’s reasons for visiting ran parallel to each other’s, and I told him as much, explaining why I was there too. It seemed to help him take his mind off of his own situation, and by the time we were rolling into the station at the top of the track he seemed much more relaxed, a thoughtful look on his face as I spoke of childhood memories on the mountain. Unfortunately, as the train doors jolted open, he seemed to instantly remember his anxiety. I patted him on the back, and regretted it, then told him it was going to go great. No one would agree to meet in a place like this if they weren’t also excited to see him. She was probably just as nervous as him. Privately I crossed my fingers that mademoiselle would actually turn up, but he didn’t need to hear about my doubts. We stepped off the train and I wished him good luck, and he disappeared into the crowd of people making their way towards toilets and a restaurant and a viewing platform.
               I stepped to one side and took the box from my pocket, opening it carefully. It was a repurposed cigar box, and inside there was a zip-lock bag containing exactly fifty percent of my dad, plus a photo of the both of us in front of the glacier. I was fifteen in the photo, and I was squinting at the camera with one hand above my eyes, frowning at the fact I’d been ordered to remove my sunglasses. My dad on the other hand was beaming, bald head tinted red by two weeks in northern Italy, one large hand covering an entire shoulder of mine, the other throwing up a cartoonish thumbs up. He was smiling. Smiling the way he would always smile when greeting people he loved at the door, or smiling the way he did when a dog jumped up to say hello. Both of these smiles were very different to the way he usually smiled for photos. Behind my dad and I, the glacier sparkled white and blue, giant and daunting and impossible to scale in my mind.
               Looking at the photograph, I could suddenly hear vividly the words that my dad had practically shouted as we’d stepped off the train and took in the view three decades earlier.
               Wow! Would you take a fucking look at that.

               The glacier stank of fish. I didn’t remember the smell of fish from when I was a teenager. A young family sat around a circular table just before the viewing platform – three boys and their parents. Each member of the family had a giant fish of some sort draped across their plate. The parents and the two eldest sons were making quick work of their respective fish, but the youngest son was struggling. His fish was still mostly intact, and its eyes seemed to follow me as I passed by. I wondered if it had come up on the same train as I had.
               Beyond the diners there was a large brown wooden deck that jutted out from the mountain. The viewing platform was busy with people taking photos and peering through one-euro telescopes. I felt a sudden tightness in my chest as it occurred to me that one day some of these people might be returning to this spot with a wooden box of their own and a much higher resolution photo, taken today.
               I reached the railing and looked out between the mountains to where the glacier lay. I was confused. I looked around at the people next to me, but I seemed to be the only one.
               The glacier was gone. There was no blue, no white, and certainly no sparkling. Instead, there was grey. And some lighter grey. And some darker grey. There were rocks that were bare, and jagged, and angry, and there wasn’t much else. It was just…gone.
               I felt my face getting hot, and I began to watch carefully as others around me took photos, trying to see what they saw. Most of the pictures people were taking seemed to me to be the almost obligational snaps that a tourist would take in this scenario. They were twisting and turning their cameras and phones around, checking and re-checking, trying to find a way to make grey rocks look beautiful. Eventually they would relent, and just take a wide-angle photo that would probably do little to show the scale of the sadness in front of them. I imagined them thinking back to the fee they’d paid for the train ride up. I imagined them trying to figure out whether or not that photo was worth thirty-five euros. I imagined them quietly deciding not to mention this part of the trip when they got home.
               I looked down and my knuckles were white on the railing. Out of the corner of my eye I saw cable cars headed down closer to the crater. Fuck it, I thought, this couldn’t get worse.

               As the little glass box I sat in drifted towards the grey and the darker grey, it felt like I was descending into a tomb. The cable car was eerily silent, and I could hear my own breathing. This was too modern a system, was a new thought I’d had, and that I couldn’t shake from the back of my mind. Glaciers and lagoons and things of this sort should only be visited by foot, taking a great physical toll on those determined enough to see them. I was too comfortable in this sad little cube. My feet weren’t bleeding, and I wasn’t risking frostbite. I felt confident that if I checked my phone I’d still have 5G. That wasn’t how it was meant to be.
               I exited the cable car and walked through three doors, eventually finding myself standing on a sort of semi-permanent catwalk overlooking what I now realised was the only remaining section of the glacier. It was probably three hundred metres long and six metres tall. It wasn’t blue, and the snow wasn’t white either. It was dirty. Haggard.
               There was a hollowed out circular tunnel into the glacier that did actually have hints of blue in the exposed ice around it, but my attention was instead glued to the water gushing down on either side of the entrance. Every hole in the ice had its own natural spring. I was watching the glacier die, in real-time.
               Originally, I had planned to walk out across the top of the ice for some time, listening to some of my dad’s favourite music, and then find a suitable place for the ashes to be scattered. But this was clearly, absolutely, not possible. Inside my coat pocket, the corner of the cigar box was cutting a small incision into the tip of my right index finger. I barely noticed.
               My thoughts were interrupted by the piercing wail of power tools, and I looked down beneath my feet. Eight or so men dressed in hardhats and high-vis were constructing what looked to be a slightly more tourist-friendly staircase down towards the glacier entrance. It baffled me that they were planning for this to continue. That they were expanding. I wanted to spit down onto them, and for a second, I really thought about it. Then I turned around and headed back to the cable car station.
               I stepped into a car and sat alone with my sadness for maybe five seconds, before a gaggle of children on a school trip bundled themselves in next to me, completely unbothered by my presence, climbing all over the car and making it swing back and forth, shouting at each other in Italian and laughing. I felt ridiculous staring out of the window, ignoring them, but I didn’t know what else to do with my eyes. My finger was really bleeding now, and the pain was more or less the only thing keeping my mind inside the cable car.
               We arrived back at the viewing area and I wandered amongst the tables until I came to the big circular one which the young family had been sat at. Their plates hadn’t been cleared yet, and there were four cartoonish fish skeletons surrounding one wide-eyed fish with half a torso missing. We stared at each other. I didn’t like fish but I liked this fish.
               I sat down, and I pulled the box from my pocket. Using a napkin, I delicately wiped the blood from the box, before lifting the lid and looking at the photo. It was like losing him all over again.
               I lifted the zip-lock bag from the box and I felt its weight in my hand. Even if I hadn’t known exactly how the ashes had been divided at the crematorium, I would have known that this wasn’t all of him.
               I unzipped the bag, and without thinking too much about it, I poured the ashes into the untidy hole in the side of the fish. I began to eat. I didn’t like fish, but I liked this fish.
               It was quite some time before I stopped eating. I was almost done when my attention was caught by gasps and applause and a couple of whistles. I looked up and saw a man in a slightly too-tight grey suit, down on one knee on the viewing platform. Looking down at him, smiling wide and enthusiastically nodding her head, was a young woman in a green dress. And do you know what? She was beautiful.