Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

“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.”

“It’s the same way with the future,” said Roya. “We plant a tree imagining our kids will play under it one day, or we go to some shitty business meeting because it might be the one where our boss singles us out for a promotion. Every tiny decision becomes mired with importance, and we’re immobilized.”

Roya said, “Well, we fly through our days. We move from one decision to the next, only we’re not even aware they’re decisions. We treat our minds like crowns, these magnificent crowns on our magnificent autonomies. But our minds aren’t crowns. They’re clocks. It’s why we invest everything in our stories. Stories are the excrement of time. Someone said that.”

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.

“What I mean is, I think maybe you’ll find your real ending once you stop looking for it,” Orkideh said. “I think real endings tend to work their way in from the outside.”

When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, “It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David.” 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.

I want to be the chisel, not the David. What can I make of being here? And what can I make of not?

What distinguishes grace from everything else? Grace is unearned. If you’ve moved through the world in such a way as to feel you’ve earned cosmic compensation, then what you’ve earned is something more like justice, like propriety. Not grace. Propriety is correct. Justice is just. There’s an inescapable transactional quality: perform x good, receive y reward. Grace doesn’t work that way. It begins with the reward. Goodness never enters the equation.

Leila was, though. Passionate. She discerned everything from a wince, a sigh. When Leila’s fingers first crept down and met an unconscious stiffening of my stomach, she read as robust an autobiography as I’ll ever write. And then she added her own movement, her own chapters to it. She changed the text of my living.

It’s easy for people who have sacrificed nothing to rationalize their own ordinariness by calling me lucky. But I sacrificed my entire life; I sold it to the abyss. And the abyss gave me art.

“I say that about myself all the time, ‘Lived years longer than I was supposed to.’ My liver was pre-cirrhotic when I quit. I was only in my twenties. A baby. And I’m still here when all these other people just like me aren’t. So who decides ‘supposed to’? Who chooses?”

“You think there’s some nobility in being above anger?” Sang asked. “Anger is a kind of fear. And fear saved you. When the world was all kneecaps and corners of coffee tables, fear kept you safe.”

When I say “nations,” I mean “armed marketplaces.” Always. That understanding made the world a little bit easier to comprehend, if not tolerate.

“All those severe poets talking big about the wages of sin all the time,” Zee added, “but nobody ever brought up the wages of virtue. The toll of trying really really hard to be good in a game that’s totally rigged against goodness.” Glassy moans barely audible over the horizon. Dark clouds against a bright sky, like blackberries in a bowl of milk. “You’re so good, Zee. I see it.” Snow falling faster than what should have been possible. “That’s not what I mean,” said Zee in an unexpectedly high, strange voice. “It’s just. Where does all our effort go? It’s hard not to envy the monsters when you see how good they have it. And how unbothered they are at being monsters.” “That’s why heaven and hell, right? Why people talk about that stuff?” “Nah, fuck hell,” Zee said, shaking his head. “Hell is a prison. All we do is build those on earth. No need to imagine more.”

“Underneath being-startled is the expectation of calm,” Zee said, then paused. “I mean, a person gasps because the ease they were expecting was interrupted. I think probably your life hasn’t taught you to expect ease.”