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.”

“Good-person drag,”

“Cyrus, everyone and their mailman believes they’re an unacknowledged genius artist. What do you, specifically, want from your unprecedented, never-to-be-repeated existence? What makes you actually different from everyone else?”

“How do we move through all this beauty without destroying it?”

Orkideh had talked about this in the past—some interview long ago—how she saw a private nobility about feet, the way, like the body’s most intimate parts, they mostly stayed hidden from the world. But unlike those tucked away bits, she’d said, feet were constantly performing thankless and often demeaning work while mostly the other parts drowsed, swaddled in nylon or cotton or lace. Even wearing something open like sandals or heels, the soles of one’s feet were concealed, secretly pressing themselves into and pushing back against the world, as if to halt its ever-encroaching advance.

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.

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.

When Roya was lying there heaving on her mud, that pond mud, I wanted to strangle her. Not to hurt her exactly, but to make her feel afraid, afraid the way I felt afraid, or afraid the way I felt I should have felt afraid, the way I felt blocked from feeling. Maybe I just wanted to take away the feeling of invincibility. A girl cannot go through life acting like nobody can hurt her. This world? No. But even that frames my rage—the rage that felt like a hot white pin shot through my eye—as something purposeful or noble, but it wasn’t that. There was just something in her okayness that disgusted me, that made me dizzy with anger.

men really do be hatin women, including their mother, sister, their wives and even their daughters

That was the whole martyr book. He wanted to live perfectly enough to die without creating a ripple of pain behind him, like an Olympic diver knifing splashlessly into the pool.

“It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David.”

Gay people dying for love,” Cyrus stammered. His mind was racing too far ahead of his language. “It’s bullshit” was what he said, was all he could manage.

“There’s this story I read one time, some old-school Muslim fairy tale, maybe it was a discarded hadith I guess, but it was all about the first time Satan sees Adam. Satan circles around him, inspecting him like a used car or something, this new creation—God’s favorite, apparently. Satan’s unimpressed, doesn’t get it. And then Satan steps into Adam’s mouth, disappears completely inside him and passes through all his guts and intestines and finally emerges out his anus. And when he gets out, Satan’s laughing and laughing. Rolling around. He passes all the way through the first man and he’s rolling around laughing, in tears, and he says to God, ‘This is what you’ve made? He’s all empty! All hollow!’ He can’t believe his luck. How easy his job is going to be. Humans are just a long emptiness waiting to be filled.”