Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

The Shams men began their lives in America awake, unnaturally alert, like two windows with the blinds torn off.

Mostly what Cyrus felt was empty. A crushing hollowness, which governed him. He should have died on the plane with his mother, but he’d been left home. With his father now dead, Cyrus had no parents left to worry over him. What was left of his life had no intrinsic meaning, he knew, since such meaning could only be shaped in relation to other people.

they’d recommend the school’s counseling services, which Cyrus would pretend he’d never heard of, though he had already manipulated those services into a robust loadout of narcotic prescriptions—Xanax, Adderall, Ambien, Neurontin, Flexeril—each name like an alien flower.

Cyrus created a miniature economy out of these drugs, trading them for street drugs like weed or cocaine or MDMA or heroin. Often, he’d then trade those for booze. The drugs were exciting new lovers, each with fresh ways to touch him, new ways to turn him on. They

Cyrus wanted what everyone wanted, he figured—to feel good all the time. It seemed rational: Why would anyone choose feeling shitty when feeling good was an option?

Other times the narcotics feeding on Cyrus’s sleep took over their vessel entirely, like an office fire feeding itself on oxygen by bursting through a window. He’d walk to the fridge—eyes open and empty like pills you could crush and snort—and chug another beer. People would talk to him and he’d grunt as he made his way back to sleep, always dreamless and teetering on the verge of something darker, endless. His drunkenness sometimes moved like this, unaccompanied. Eager to keep itself alive.

“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.”

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

“Stop trying to make everything mean something,” Lisa said. “Trying to flatten everything to a symbol or a point. The coral is dying because of microbeads in body wash and because of Monsanto and because there’s no reason for anyone powerful enough to do anything about it to do anything about it.”

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

“Quit things in the order they’re killing you,” Gabe told him once. After a year clean he turned his attention to cigarettes, which he finally managed to kick completely by tapering:

But Cyrus was, for his part, more than a little surprised by the words as they came out his mouth, how they gave shape to something that had long been formless within him. It was like the language in the air that night was a mold he was pouring around his curiosity.

That’s what fucks me up. My dad drops me off at college and then dies like, barely a year later. I’m not saying all this to say ‘poor me’ or even ‘poor us.’ But none of those deaths meant anything. I don’t think it’s crazy to want mine to. Or to study people whose deaths mattered, you know? People who at least tried to make their deaths mean something.”

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.”

“Seriously, Cyrus, why not? You’re starting on this whole big project around ‘alternative martyrdom’ or whatever, and then there just happens to be a dying Iranian woman saying ‘come talk to me about death’? I’m not a clouds-parting-burning-bush sort of guy. But if anything has ever seemed like a sign, this seems like a sign.”

You graduated years ago, you don’t have a partner. You just mope around not writing, feeling sorry for yourself. You’re the definition of available.” “Jesus,” Cyrus said.

“Flexible.” Sad James corrected, trying to soften Zee’s language. “You’re currently open to the vicissitudes of fate.”

“You want to be a writer,” Zee went on. “This is what writers do. They follow the story. It’s an inflection point. You can keep being the sad sober guy in Indiana who tal...

In Cyrus’s active addiction it had taken dread and doom bringing him to his knees, or euphoric physical ecstasy elevating him half-literally out of his body—to break through his dense numb fugue. In sobriety, he still sometimes erroneously expected this of the universe—a stark shock of embodied rapture, the angel dropping from the sky to smack him with clarity’s two-by-four. 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.

“Cyrus Shams,” Orkideh said slowly, as if laying the sound like a sheet over his face. She

“But you want to die. And you want for that death to be glorious. Like all Iranian men.” “I mean, yeah, but doesn’t everyone want that in the end? For their deaths to matter? Or shouldn’t they?”

not. I wish I were that brave. But no. I just want to write an epic. A book. Something about secular, pacifist martyrs. People who gave their lives to something larger than themselves.

I used to think slow, slower than language moved. By the time I settled into an idea about anything, the moment for me to say something had passed. Roya used to say I was a good listener. Mostly, though, I was just a bad talker.

We all started from zero. From less than zero, actually. We started whiny, without grace. Obsessed only with our own needing. And the dead couldn’t teach us anything about that. No facts or tables or proofs. You just had to live and suffer and then teach your kids to do the same. From a distance, habit passing for happiness.

What was there to complain about? A murdered wife? A sore back? The wrong grade copper? 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.

Cyrus believed a hyper-focus on occasions for gratitude would make his eventual death more poignant, more valuable. When a sad-sack who hated life killed themselves, what were they really giving up? The life they hated? Far more meaningful, thought Cyrus, to lift yourself out of a life you enjoyed—the tea still warm, the honey still sweet. That was real sacrifice. That meant something.

Some nights he’d lie awake till morning, frightening sleep away with the desperation of his wanting it.

It’s possible, he thought, that the experience of gratitude was itself a luxury, a topless convertible driven through a rainless life.

“Expendable” may seem a bad word to use to describe your own life, except I actually find it liberating. The way it vents away all pressure to become. How it asks only that you be.

He would think about this a lot in the years to come. Before addiction felt bad, it felt really, really good. Of course it did. Magic. Like you were close enough to God to bop him with an eyelash.

A drug works till it doesn’t. Dependence grows until it eclipses everything else in the addict’s life.

Active addiction is an algorithm, a crushing sameness. The story is what comes after.

My marriage with Ali was never one of those, but just being perceived, all the time being perceived, was itself exhausting. Ali’s vacations were vacations for me too.

“Of course I did,” he said. “I’m here in the city to talk to you!” He said this, then considered it might perhaps feel like a burden to the artist, like he was pressuring her to be sufficiently brilliant as to make his trip worthwhile. He added, “I mean, I’m doing other things too. Walking around, watching, eating and writing. But I just find what you’re doing here so incredible.”

Cyrus paused for a second. He felt a flash of familiar shame—his whole life had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much. He realized he was perhaps doing what Sad James had once called The Thing, the overliking thing, obsessing over something in a way that others felt to be smothering.

“That’s hilarious,” he said, suppressing the part of his brain that immediately wanted to ask what pain meds she was on specifically, opiates almost certainly, maybe even fentanyl. How many milligrams, though? A patch? This was such an evergreen wildness, to Cyrus, how strong his addict reflexes remained, in spite of his sobriety. In the back of your brain, your addiction is doing push-ups, getting stronger, just waiting for you to slip up, an old-timer once told him.

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.

“I get that,” said Cyrus. “I do. Maybe part of it is just wanting my tiny little life to have something of scale. For the stakes to matter.” He paused, then added, “For my having-lived to matter.” Orkideh smiled, placed her hand on Cyrus’s. It felt cold, dry, like canvas. “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.”

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.

And myths are the stories we tell ourselves to make living tolerable. To make shitty lives seem worth enduring.

man like me in every platoon sets out after battle and rides in my robe, rides with my flashlight, gallop around the war dead and the war dying, give them a glimpse of an angel protecting them, being among them. That’s the secret, don’t you think, the amongness, to be among with an angel means you were right all along, all your wincing and kneeling, your fasting, your scowling, that amongness might send you to Jannah, an angel to send you to Jannah and Riswan with conviction in your heart and not fear of pain, suffering, nothingness, conviction, yes, of seeing an angel in black riding the wind, riding the night, conviction to remain as long as suffering demanded, to not end it, not kill yourself.

think Arman suspects I’m a little more confused, I think he knows because he always reminds me I ride for the men, for the dying men, not for myself, not for my country even but for the men and their desperate and spoilable souls. Action will be judged according to intention, that’s what he always tells me, action will be judged according to intention, that’s from the Quran somewhere.

He’d picked up two coffees along the way, the second as a little offering for Orkideh, a small gift to communicate that he’d been thinking of her before he saw her. This gesture, this possibility, had always struck Cyrus as particularly moving—an evergreen wonder that anyone remembered him when he wasn’t in the room.

That people found the surplus psychic bandwidth to consider—or even worry over—anyone else’s interior seemed a bit of an unheralded miracle.

Cyrus read on a website once that there was a word for this: sonder. “The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” Incredible, how naming something took nothing away from...

Cyrus was also aware of the possibility that his marvel at this seemingly mundane phenomenon might be an indict...

He hadn’t cured a plague, he’d purchased a two-dollar cup of coffee. This overblown moment of self-satisfaction at what was e...