Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

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?

“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.

“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.”

What was left of his life had no intrinsic meaning, he knew, since such meaning could only be shaped in relation to other people.

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.”

actually wasn’t too bad,” Lisa said. “I think I was so excited to be flying I didn’t feel any fear.”

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

“Now we definitely get to lick more squares when we get home,” Cyrus said, grinning.

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.

time flattens everything.

Smart, I thought, for God to demand prayer from his servants while their minds were still gummy with dream, while the partition between our world and his was thinnest.

“It is probably not a good practice to start imagining headlines about your art before you even make it,

“We won’t grow old together, Cyrus. But can’t you feel this mattering? Right now?” When he hesitated, she said, “It matters to me. Know that. It matters deeply.”

(Zee had this monologue he’d give sometimes about how the sound of a jazz singer’s voice cracking on a record was the sound of an emotional event too urgent for the medium assigned to record it; Cyrus knew he’d read that in a Brian Eno book but it didn’t make it any less true).

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.

“Of course! How do you think I got here?” “Ahhh,” said Ali. “I’m still figuring out how all this works.” “It took me a bit too.”

like noon barbari.

You can put a saddle on anger, Cyrus.”

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.

Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it. Cyrus understood that now, and stepped.