Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

Cyrus also worried that the whole idea of gratitude was possibly classist, or worse. Did a poor Syrian child, whose living and dying had been indelibly shaped by the murderous whims of evil men, qualify for grace only if she possessed a superhuman ability to look beyond her hardship and notice the beauty of a single flower growing through a pile of rubble? And would the gratitude for that flower be contaminated by the awareness, or ignorance, of the bodies turning to soil beneath it?

Kathleen would buy books and leave them sitting in the coffee shop, only quarter-read. She’d tip 100 percent on one bar tab, then nothing on the next. Money meant nothing to her. She’d borrow Cyrus’s jacket, his hoodie, and never return them, not realizing he had no replacements. She knew the name of the guy who flew her father’s helicopter, of her nanny’s kid, which she’d bring up frequently as evidence of her magnanimity. She was Christian but American Christian, the kind that believed Jesus had just needed a bigger gun.

The superficial details may change—it wasn’t a truck, it was a business; it wasn’t a sweetheart, it was a family—but the algorithm is inexorable. A drug works till it doesn’t. Dependence grows until it eclipses everything else in the addict’s life.

Cyrus thought about what an aggressively human leader on earth might look like. One who, instead of defending decades-old obviously wrong positions, said, “Well, of course I changed my mind, I was presented with new information, that’s the definition of critical thinking.” That it seemed impossible to conceive of a political leader making such a statement made Cyrus mad, then sad.

The most basic form of prayer, he’d heard once, was something like “help me help me help me, please please please, thank you thank you thank you”; and Cyrus’s prayer in the park was not much more advanced than that.

He understood, with a clarity that had until that moment in his life eluded him, that he was not at all made for the world in which he lived, that art and writing had gotten him only trivially closer to compensating for that fundamental defectiveness, the way standing on a roof gets one only trivially closer to grabbing the moon than standing in the dirt.