We crossed through the square in front of Santa Maria in Trastevere, with its palimpsest of architectural styles, as night owls stumbled home arm in arm and two teenagers launched little LED helicopter toys into the air, where they hovered like bionic fireflies before miraculously returning to the teens’ expectant hands. We turned down our street and, as we arrived at the apartment, Clyde began fishing for the keys in his pocket while telling me how cultures around the world, throughout time, had cannibalized their dead in grieving rituals, believing that they were returning the dead’s life force to the living. Transferring the dead’s essence to the bodies of their descendants. “So if ‘sacred’ belongs to a language of limits, as you were saying… they’re at least as fluid and changeable as the moods of the era.”

He let this gentle rebuke of my theory linger in the air as he continued to search for the keys. I nodded, taking it in, and doing my best to keep my eyes open. Just then, a look came across his face as if he was fishing for something in the pocket of his mind.

“I’ve never told anyone but —” He found the keys and held them in his hand moment as if considering them. “A few nights after Wole’s funeral, I was looking at his ashes in the urn. They were just sitting on the table. And I… I licked my finger and stuck it in the urn. And when I pulled it away, Wole was on my skin. Like this thin film of graphite. I looked at him on my finger for a moment and then… I stuck it in my mouth.” He cleared his throat, stuck the key in the door, and looked up at me. “It just felt like the thing I had to do.”

The next morning, Clyde and I visited the Sistine Chapel. Clyde had already seen it twice before, but he knew I couldn’t visit Rome without going, so he humoured me, even though crowds made him anxious. We found ourselves being herded in amidst two tour groups, one from Korea and the other from the States. The room roared with the sound of hundreds of hushed voices and the occasional “no photo” shouted by one of the guards with Sisyphean dispassion. As we entered the chapel, I could tell by the direction of the crowd’s eyes that the door we were walking through was against the wall featuring the fresco of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement. It was a bit like walking out onto a rock-concert stage and seeing a sea of fans before you. We pushed into the crowd a few layers deep before turning around to behold the masterpiece.