Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

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.

“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.

Most of those guys probably mean an old bearded dude in the clouds who gets mad when I suck a dick, who sends all Muslims to hell.

Two years ago when Cyrus was doing his fifth step—cataloguing to Gabe all his deepest most tucked-away secrets—and casually mentioned having slept with men, Cyrus expected shock, at least one of Gabe’s “well, that’s something” looks. Instead, Gabe informed Cyrus that he’d slept with hundreds of men himself. “Southern California in the seventies,” he’d shrugged, like it was a given. “I expected you to be more surprised,” Cyrus admitted. “My being straight passing or whatever.” “Oh sweetheart,” Gabe chuckled, “you think you’re straight passing?”

I get that you’re Persian. Born there, raised here. I know that’s a part of you. But you’ve probably spent more time looking at your phone today, just today, than you’ve spent cutting open pomegranates in your entire life. Cumulatively. Right? But how many fucking pomegranates are in your poems? Versus how many iPhones?

You didn’t sit in front of a plate of rice, pantomiming swallowing in order to take the tiny grains into your stomach. Sleep alone demanded that embarrassing recital.

Roya’s mother had spoiled her children the way grandparents spoiled their grandchildren. Roya thought she’d spoil a child the way rain spoiled a drive.

It wasn’t fair, him having to buy this alien formula made of who knew what. It was probably the formula keeping Cyrus awake at night. The formula company probably did that on purpose, put caffeine in the powder so the baby would wake up and you’d have to feed them more and more formula. That was how the world worked.

“21 days till Chuck E. Cheese!” When the day finally arrived, they took a bus and everyone got to eat pizza and drink soda. The waitress passed around Cokes and root beers in paper cups. Cyrus had no idea what root beer was and couldn’t believe they were giving it to little kids. He asked for a cup of Coke, but when he took a sip, it didn’t taste like Coke. It tasted like medicine. Like what he imagined alcohol tasted like. It was beer, root beer. The school gave everyone five dollars’ worth of game tokens, but Cyrus just hid in the bathroom and cried in a stall until it was time to go back to the school.

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.”

Like in Iran, there are these schools for the children of men killed in the war, who they call ‘martyrs.’ Those martyr schools are the good schools, the fancy schools, you try to get your kids into them. Kids with healthy parents grow up jealous of orphans, because the children of martyrs get automatic college admission, all this special treatment. I’ve heard of children of martyrs trying to hide it, like they’re ashamed of all the privilege. Like trust fund kids, except instead of trust funds they have dead parents. It’s nuts.”

Cyrus was beginning to realize that the world didn’t actually work this way, that sometimes epiphany was as subtle as a friend showing you something they saw on Twitter.

“Oh my god,” said Cyrus. “Yeah. Are we doing sex work? Is this sex work? Are we selling our bodies?” “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.”

“Here, hold this,” he said, balancing a triangular log on the stump, holding a finger on its tip like a football. “Excuse me?” I said. “Hold this here with my finger, my finger on my lovely hand, which is still attached to my lovely arm? Like Lucy from Peanuts? While you swing at it with an axe?”

If I died trying to kill a genocidal dictator tomorrow, the news wouldn’t say a leftist American made a measured and principled sacrifice for the good of his species. The news would say an Iranian terrorist attempted a state assassination.” Orkideh chuckled. “Are you trying to kill a genocidal dictator?” The German tourists shifted uncomfortably. Cyrus sighed again.

The man was dying in the desert, got on his knees and begged to God, “Please help me, I’m starving, nearly dead, too tired to continue looking for water. I don’t want to hurt anymore. Please, almighty Lord, take pity, end my suffering.” God, in his infinite wisdom, sent the man a baby. An infant to take care of. And so the man had purpose, a reason to stay alive. I remember thinking the story didn’t make sense. Why not just send him food, water, a bed? God stories always seemed to work that way. Sideways, convoluted. Like one of those elaborate chain-reaction machines built in the most deliberately nonsensical way, using a track and a spring and a candle and a balloon to ring a bell.

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.

We invented it, this language where one man is called Iraqi and one man is called Iranian and so they kill each other. Where one man is called an officer so he sends other men, with heads and hearts the size of his own, to split their stomachs open over barbed wire. Because of language, this sound stands for this thing, that sound stands for that thing, all these invented sounds strutting around, certain as roosters. It is no wonder we got it so wrong.

Fajr was always my favorite of those prayers because it was so short, only two rakats. The whole experience of the prayer fit tidily into the span of a single dream, a fifteen-minute sleepwalk into surrender, obedience, God, whatever. 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.

She was Christian but American Christian, the kind that believed Jesus had just needed a bigger gun.

Cyrus found the whole experience of American hookah bars vaguely off-putting and orientalist, the children of soybean farmers and insurance salesmen sitting around eating stale falafel dipped in Costco hummus, smoking “Electric Raspberry” shisha from hookahs made in Taiwan.

And I remember he had this idea of double-consciousness, how Black people in America always have to be mindful of how racist white people see them. And how that applies to a lot of marginalized people, always having to see themselves through the eyes of the folks who hate them.

“Why are you worried about what people who hate you think about your art?” “Well, because the people who hate me also own all the guns and all the prisons.”

A photograph can say “This is what it was.” Language can only say “This is what it was like.”

“I’m gonna take a shower,” Cyrus said. “Do you need anything?” “Do I need anything…from the shower?” “Hah. Do you need anything broadly?”

“You know I have your cum on my chest, right? Like, right now this second? While you opine about how nobody will care if you kill yourself?”

pearls before swine, isn’t that what they say? Though pigs are smarter than dogs, and pearls are just rocks.

“Paradise is mine today, as cash in hand,” Hafez had written. “Why should I count upon the puritan’s pledge of tomorrow?”

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.

It’s what Ali and I had called Cyrus when we thought he was going to be a girl, after the first ultrasound got it wrong. “It said you were going to be a girl,” Ali cooed down to Cyrus the day we brought him home, “but you were just a shy boy. Mashallah! Modest!”

Art was a way of storing our brains in each other’s.

Any volcano that has erupted since the Holocene, ancient history, is considered active. I haven’t. Does that make me inert? Or overdue?

An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it, one can produce almost anything.

“Why don’t I feel startled by any of this?” he asked. “Shouldn’t I be more scared?” “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.”