Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

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?

He wondered if maybe that was how God worked now in the new world. Tired of interventionist pyrotechnics like burning bushes and locust plagues, maybe God now worked through the tired eyes of drunk Iranians in the American Midwest, through CVS handles of bourbon and little pink pills with G 31 written on their side.

Cyrus was a good poet when he wrote, but he rarely actually wrote. 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. “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you!” Cyrus would announce proudly to a room, to a bar, forgetting from whom he’d lifted the line.

“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.” “Good-person drag,” Cyrus thought out loud. That’s what they called it after that.

The coffee shop was playing that loud Arcade Fire song that played at hockey games.

“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.”

Cyrus had thought it unimaginably strange, the body’s need to recharge nightly. The way sleep happened not as a fact like swallowing or using the bathroom, but as a faith. People pretended to be asleep, trusting eventually their pretending would morph into the real thing. It was a lie you practiced nightly—or, if not a lie, at least a performance.

Other times he’d bargain with God, promising to finally read the Quran or not touch himself in the shower in exchange for a single night of deep sleep. He made these pleas desperately, urgently, but they seldom worked, and neither made any serious attempt to honor their agreement.

Death had long overtaken Ali’s mind; now, it had simply overtaken his body.

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. In school Roya could smell the dank must even though she’d soaped it away and changed into fresh clothes. The scent wasn’t so much on her as it was of her, compositional. It clung inside her nose like a kind of rot. She was certain everyone else could smell it.

Sad James and Zee nodded supportively along. They both knew Cyrus well enough to not be flustered by his directness. But Cyrus was, for his part, more than a little surprised by the words as they came out his mouth, how they gave shape to something that had long been formless within him. It was like the language in the air that night was a mold he was pouring around his curiosity. Flour thrown on a ghost.

Using blood money, even for good, felt bad.

Like boiling water poured into a cup then poured over his head. He felt scorched, confused, suddenly alive.

I used to think slow, slower than language moved. By the time I settled into an idea about anything, the moment for me to say something had passed. Roya used to say I was a good listener. Mostly, though, I was just a bad talker.

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.

Nothing could stop us from our descending, our legs were running the sort of running that wasn’t even running anymore just desperately trying to keep up with the rushing world, the speed of the ground moving under us and only our clumsy skinny legs, idiot technologies, to keep us from crumbling in a heap, and my sister laughing, I was terrified and shouted like it but Roya was laughing while the pond kept getting bigger and bigger, I was trying to figure out how to get the world to slow down, slow down enough to let my legs catch up to its racing, but my sister the starfish less than a meter tall was laughing, gobbling like a turkey, holding my hand and still running straight ahead, her legs not even a blur anymore but a straight single shape, like the rims of cars in car commercials that stay still even as the car curves down the road, and finally the pond was everything in front of us and somehow I slid, I can’t remember exactly how it started but I think I jammed my sneaker into the frozen dirt, locking my legs, kicking up ice, and I slid that way and the earth stopped moving maybe too suddenly, I felt my brain slosh against my skull, that fast, maybe the earth even moved backwards a bit as if to correct itself, and in my sliding I let go of Roya’s hand, the world stilling around me I could finally see how fast she was moving, all rush and wild, I remember I shouted Roya no! as she lifted her hand, the hand that had held mine, into the air like a boxer, like a boxer’s t...

Compared to even the dullest dog humans can smell nothing. But compare us with—what?—a monkey who can say “apple” with her hands?—and we are the gods of language, everything else just chirping and burping.

Beautiful terrible, how sobriety disabuses you of the sense of your having been a gloriously misunderstood scumbag prince shuffling between this or that narcotic crown.

“It seems very American to expect grief to change something. Like a token you cash in. A formula. Grieve x amount, receive y amount of comfort. Work a day in the grief mines and get paid in tickets to the company store.”

The performance of certainty seemed to be at the root of so much grief. Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty. And so legislators legislated, building border walls, barring citizens of there from entering here. “The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,” said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they’d wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt.

Zee talked about how luxurious it felt to do nothing in New York City, a place where you could do anything. He kept saying “opportunity cost,” that the opportunity cost of doing nothing in the city was so immense that it felt opulent.

The pizza was half pineapple, and Cyrus said something reflexive about fruit on pizza being bad, the sort of uncharacteristic inherited nothing people said just to say something, and to which Zee replied by stating “fruit” was a botanical term, “vegetable” a culinary term, and that such distinctions were meaningless.

The kiss lasted three seconds, maybe four, but it set everything else in motion. My life was a painting I’d been staring at upside-down up until that moment, that moment when Leila wandered in and flipped it right-side up for me. Just like that. Everything clicked into place, the picture came into clarity. Even Leila, in all her poise, looked surprised and, after those few infinite seconds, pulled away.

If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself—which, because it is inevitable, means nothing.

That’s when everything became supersaturated. One of those memories you can squeeze like a rag and watch details drip and pool.

His whole life was a conspiracy of other people helping him, other people teaching him this or that.

It’s simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what’s actually killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fuck or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he’s buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns.

Getting sober means having to figure out how to spend twenty-four hours a day. It means building an entirely new personality, learning how to move your face, your fingers. It meant learning how to eat, how to speak among people and walk and fuck and worse than any of that, learning how to just sit still. You’re moving into a house the last tenants trashed. You spend all your time ripping up the piss-carpet, filling in the holes in the wall, and you also somehow have to remember to feed yourself and make rent and not punch every person who talks to you in the face. There’s no abstinence in it. There’s no self-will. It’s a chisel. It’s surrender to the chisel. Of course you don’t hope to come out a David. It’s miracle enough to emerge still standing on two feet.

Even the letters themselves carry this junk. If I write “wri☨ing” or “wr↿t↿ng” any fluent English reader will still understand what I’ve written. I could even replace all my i’s with l’s, “wrltlng,” and it’s still basically legible. Clearly some of the compositional parts of the language itself are junk while others are essential. There is no dictionary to tell you which is which.

I knew well enough what the masters had made of things. I wanted to understand the visual vocabulary of the current moment, learn how to use all of it: textile art, neon sculpture, photography.

I painted because I needed to. What I really loved, what I love, is having-painted. That was the high. Making something that would never have existed in the entirety of humanity had I not been there at that specific moment to make it.

Fear made me work hard, get better. It’s a dirty fuel, but it works.