Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

Why should the Prophet Muhammad get a whole visit from an archangel? Why should Saul get to see the literal light of heaven on the road to Damascus? Of course it would be easy to establish bedrock faith after such clear-cut revelation. How was it fair to celebrate those guys for faith that wasn’t faith at all, that was just obedience to what they plainly observed to be true? And what sense did it make to punish the rest of humanity who had never been privy to such explicit revelation? To make everyone else lurch from crisis to crisis, desperately alone?

He liked how the Quran put it that way, not “until you die” but “until you are of those who perish.” Like an arrival into a new community, one that had been eagerly waiting for you.

Before getting sober, Cyrus didn’t write so much as he drank about writing, describing booze as essential to his process, “nearly sacramental”—he really said it like that—in the way it “opened his mind to the hidden voice” beneath the mundane “argle-bargle of the every-day.” Of course, when he drank, he rarely did anything else but drink.

Everything didn’t have to be as complex as Zee constantly made it, Cyrus thought. Sometimes, life was just what happened. What accumulated. That was one of the vague axioms from his drinking days to which Cyrus still clung, even in sobriety. It wasn’t fair that just because he was sober, everyone expected him to exhaustively interrogate his every decision. This job or that job, this life or that. Not drinking was Herculean enough on its own. He should’ve been afforded more grace, not less.

“There’s no difference to the outside world between a good guy and a bad guy behaving like a good guy. In fact, I think God loves that second guy a little more.”

“Do you have this organ here?” Cyrus asked her, pointing at the base of his throat. “A doom organ that just pulses all the time? Pulses dread, every day, obstinately? Like it thinks there’s a panther behind the curtain ready to maul you, but there’s no panther and it turns out there’s no curtain either? That’s what I wanted to stop.”

I remained. But so did the dread. I thought getting sober would help, that came later. Recovery. And it did, in its way. Certainly it made me less a burden to the people around me, created less dread in them. But it’s still in me, that doom organ.” He pointed again at his neck. “It’s in my throat, throbbing all day every day. And recovery, friends, art—that shit just numbs it for a second. What’s that word you used?” “Palliative?” “Right, palliative, yeah. All that stuff is palliative. It stills the suffering, but it doesn’t send it away.”

“If you’re coasting, it means you’re going downhill.”

“Recovery is made of words, and words have all these rules. How can anything so limited touch something as big as whatever the fuck a ‘Higher Power’ is? How can it get rid of the big ball of rot inside me? It feels like this giant sponge sucking away anything in the world that’s supposed to feel good. What words can touch that?”

“That’s it, really. The big pathological sad. Whether I’m actually thinking about it or not. It’s like a giant bowling ball on the bed, everything kind of rolls into it.” “Maybe you don’t believe God wants you to be happy? God, your mother, poetry, whatever. What makes you so special that everyone else deserves that except you?”

“Do you know what the first rule of playwriting is?” Cyrus shook his head, barely. Even allowing Gabe’s questions felt like a concession. “You never send a character onstage without knowing what they want.” Cyrus frowned. “I know what I want,” he said. “Do you?” Gabe was hunched over, his big palms flat on the round table making it look like a wooden dinner plate. “I want to matter,” Cyrus whispered.

What do you, specifically, want from your unprecedented, never-to-be-repeated existence? What makes you actually different from everyone else?” Gabe picked his teeth with his pinky nail. He was missing an incisor, which made him look a little boyish. Cyrus paused, then said, finally: “I want to die. I think I always have.” “Hm.” Gabe squinted. “We’ll revisit that. Keep going.” “Jesus, I don’t know. My mom died for nothing. A rounding error. She had to share her death with three hundred other people. My dad died anonymous after spending decades cleaning chicken shit on some corporate farm. I want my life—my death—to matter more than that.” “You want to be a martyr?” Gabe asked, raising his eyebrows. “I guess. Yeah, actually. Something like that.”

“Can you imagine having that kind of faith?” Cyrus asked. “To be that certain of something you’ve never seen? I’m not that certain of anything. I’m not that certain of gravity.” “That certainty is what put worms in their brains, Cyrus. The only people who speak in certainties are zealots and tyrants.”

Ali’s anger—a moon. It grew so vast it scared him, so deep it felt like terror.

That Ali’s family, his friends, could put words around their anger meant it was a different thing entirely from what he was feeling. Ali’s anger felt ravenous, almost supernatural, like a dead dog hungry for its own bones.

Arash’s parents, then his sister, and now his brother-in-law and nephew had all left him to be feasted on by his ghosts.

When people think about traveling to the past, they do it with this wild sense of self-importance. Like, ‘gosh, I better not step on that flower or my grandfather will never be born.’ But in the present we mow our lawns and poison ants and skip parties and miss birthdays all the time. We never think about the effects of that stuff.” Roya was working herself up. “Nobody thinks of now as the future past.”

When you are ten, shame stitches itself into you like a monogram, broadcasting to the world what holds you, what rules your soul.

She didn’t know what kind of future she wanted for herself, but when she tried to imagine it, there were no dining tables, no kitchens either. Mostly there was open space, freedom and passion, heat obscuring everything like a candle flame smocking its wick.

It was like the language in the air that night was a mold he was pouring around his curiosity. Flour thrown on a ghost.

“Angela Davis would say we’re all selling our bodies,” I said, smiling. “That the only difference between a coal miner and a prostitute is our retrograde puritan values about sex. And misogyny.”

“That’s the thing, I don’t really know. For it to mean something? I’ve been working this job and studying all these people who died for what they believed in. Qu Yuan, Joan of Arc, Bobby Sands. Dying. It feels like such a throwaway to just die for no reason. To waste your one good death.”

she saw a private nobility about feet, the way, like the body’s most intimate parts, they mostly stayed hidden from the world. But unlike those tucked away bits, she’d said, feet were constantly performing thankless and often demeaning work while mostly the other parts drowsed, swaddled in nylon or cotton or lace. Even wearing something open like sandals or heels, the soles of one’s feet were concealed, secretly pressing themselves into and pushing back

Like one of those perpetual motion swinging ball cradles, his desire to die kept striking back equal and opposite against his desire to make his dying dramatic, to make it count. Was it ego? Was it fear of being forgotten?

You’re talking about people who die for other people. Not dying for glory or an impressable God. Not the promise of a sunny afterlife for themselves. You’re talking about earth martyrs.”

I am setting out to write a book of elegies for people I’ve never met. Yes, there is an unforgivable hubris in my imagining any part of their living, and presuming to write about it. There is also hubris in writing about anything else.

Living happened till it didn’t. There was no choice in it. To say no to a new day would be unthinkable. So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.

He had a decent life, didn’t need to work too hard to stay where he was. His rent was cheap, he had friends, there were books he was excited to read. But some days, that all felt so abstract as to become totally meaningless. Cyrus often wept for no reason, bit his thumbs till they bled. Some nights he’d lie awake till morning, frightening sleep away with the desperation of his wanting it.

So much of his psychic bandwidth was taken up with conflicting thoughts about political prepositions. The morality of almond milk. The ethics of yoga. The politics of sonnets. There was nothing in his life that wasn’t contaminated by what he mostly mindlessly called “late capitalism.” He hated it, like everyone was supposed to. But it was a hate that made nothing happen. He wanted to be on “the right side of history,” whatever that was. But more than that (he admitted this to himself when he was practicing being rigorously honest), he wanted other people to perceive him as someone who cared about being on the right side of history.

not unlike the library you believed yourself dangerous and you burned,

it’s lonely here in the future with all our drugs and knowing,

“Expendable” may seem a bad word to use to describe your own life, except I actually find it liberating. The way it vents away all pressure to become. How it asks only that you be.

time flattens everything. Family, duty, whatever. Into dirt. There’s something comforting about that, something vast and, yes, inescapable. Like bright ink spilling over everyone at once.

I remember in school Agha Pahla holding up a stone suspended in the air by a string, telling us how the stone was full of potential energy—potential energy, the names we give things!—and how when the stone is dropped all that potential energy gets converted into motion, into kinetic energy, action, something like that. And that transformation, potential energy into motion, is what makes stones powerful, terrible, how they can crush people. Sometimes I feel like that, like I’m walking around all stuffed up with potential energy, a stone hanging in the air with no knife sharp enough to cut the rope.

Gilles Deleuze called elegy la grande plainte, “the great complaint,” a way of saying “what is happening is too much for me.” In Iran, Ashura is a day of elegy where people fast and mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hussain, killed in 680 CE on his fifty-fifth birthday in the Battle of Karbala. A day of elegy. “What happened thirteen centuries ago is still too much for us,” Iranians say. It is in our blood, la grande plainte. Shekayat bazorg. We remember. Of course we remember.

It was like Americans had another organ for it, that hate-fear. It pulsed out of their chests like a second heart.

At the intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness was pathological politeness, an immobilizing compulsivity to avoid causing distress in anyone else. Cyrus thought about this a lot. You cooed at their ugly babies, nodded along with their racist bullshit. In Iran it was called taarof, the elaborate and almost entirely unspoken choreography of etiquette that directs every social interaction. The old joke, that two Iranian men could never get on an elevator because they’ll just keep saying “you go,” “no you,” “no no please,” “I insist,” as the doors opened and closed. Midwestern politeness felt that way too, Cyrus learned, like it was burning cigarette holes in your soul. You bit your tongue, then bit it a little harder. You tried to keep your face still enough to tell yourself you hadn’t been complicit, that at least you weren’t encouraging what was happening around you. To you.

Cyrus tried hard to focus on her eyes, which were the kind of blue many blond people’s eyes are. So common you forget how pretty they are. Like pigeons.

She was gorgeous in that aggressively American way, the kind of woman you might see in an ad for cold medicine.

Cyrus felt new. Sinless. Invincible. He would think about this a lot in the years to come. Before addiction felt bad, it felt really, really good. Of course it did. Magic. Like you were close enough to God to bop him with an eyelash.

I never really loved being alive. It’s hard to get there without some sort of distance. Hard to describe the shape of a cloud from inside the cloud.

He felt a flash of familiar shame—his whole life had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much. He realized he was perhaps doing what Sad James had once called The Thing, the overliking thing, obsessing over something in a way that others felt to be smothering.

Maybe part of it is just wanting my tiny little life to have something of scale. For the stakes to matter.” He paused, then added, “For my having-lived to matter.” Orkideh smiled, placed her hand on Cyrus’s. It felt cold, dry, like canvas. “We won’t grow old together, Cyrus. But can’t you feel this mattering? Right now?”

It feels so American to discount dreams because they’re not built of objects, of things you can hold and catalogue and then put in a safe. Dreams give us voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire.

Imagine how that might contribute to your sense of amongness. To your sense of earth maybe actually being the right place for you.”

Everything needs its angel, even war.

How saying it calls on language to represent it, this sound is that thing, how some things rebuke sound, rebuke representation,

the prophets in whom I can only muster for myself scattered belief, like a light flicking on and off in a room I can see their shapes sometimes but never with any depth, never with anything like depth, or maybe it’s the other way around where I can see their depth but can’t quite make out the shape of them, the prophets, the why or how or even the what of the whole thing.

I write these sentences where I try to lineate grief or doubt or joy or sex or whatever till it sounds as urgent as it feels. But I know the words will never feel like the thing. The language will never be the thing. So it’s damned, right? And I am too, for giving my life to it.

“I cry all the time,” she continued, as if I wasn’t even there. “I hate it. It embarrasses me. I am not fragile, but sometimes my body just cries and I can’t help it. It’s a betrayal. Like someone tickling you, you laugh even when you don’t want to, even when it hurts. That’s how I cry.”