Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

cup. It pained him to waste the coffee and the money he’d spent on it, especially since he’d not left it for the punk, who may not even have wanted it, who was really a foil for Cyrus to feel good about his own goodness, which shamed him doubly now.

He knew that if Zee was with him he’d have left her the coffee. Zee made him want to be better like that. Cyrus’s ears flushed with shame.

“I’m an artist. I give my life to art. That’s all there is. People in my life have come and gone and come and gone. Mostly they’ve gone. I give my life to art because it stays. That’s what I am. An artist. I make art.” She paused for a moment. “It’s what time doesn’t ruin.”

“What about you though, Cyrus Shams?” Orkideh asked. “If you become a martyr, won’t you be hurting the people who love you?” Cyrus nodded. “Of course,” he said, then after a beat, “but it’s hard to figure out if that hurt would be worse than the hurt of my being here.”

“Of course,” said Orkideh. “It seems very American to expect grief to change something. Like a token you cash in. A formula. Grieve x amount, receive y amount of comfort. Work a day in the grief mines and get paid in tickets to the company store.”

“I guess, I write these sentences where I try to lineate grief or doubt or joy or sex or whatever till it sounds as urgent as it feels. But I know the words will never feel like the thing. The language will never be the thing. So it’s damned, right? And I am too, for giving my life to it. Because I know my writing can never make any of these deaths matter the way they’re supposed to.

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

The performance of certainty seemed to be at the root of so much grief. Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty. And so legislators legislated, building border walls, barring citizens of there from entering here. “The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,” said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they’d wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt.

He’d written about the flight, of course. He was an orphan now; he’d written a lot about both of his parents over the years. But the handful of poems he’d ever shared with the world were in tiny fold-and-staple journals, not online as far as he knew. And even those were written after he got sober, when poetry simply became a place to put his physical body, something he could do for a few hours without worrying about accidentally killing himself. That was poetry then, a two-by-four floating in the ocean. When Cyrus wrapped himself around it, he could just barely keep his head above waves.

Zee talked about how luxurious it felt to do nothing in New York City, a place where you could do anything. He kept saying “opportunity cost,” that the opportunity cost of doing nothing in the city was so immense that it felt opulent.

“Nah, that was All in the Family. But that was fucked up too. That kind of comedy always exists on the edge of what you’re allowed to say at the moment. And that edge keeps moving. With the moment. The Everton window or whatever.”

“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?”

“Okay, you really want to get into it? It’s true. Nothing here makes me feel compelled to stay. Not my dad, not drugs or booze, not recovery or Gabe or fucking poetry. Nothing.”

“I know! And I don’t want to be normal. Maybe you’re okay waiting tables and playing drums occasionally for the rest of your life, but I actually want to make a difference. I want my having-been-alive to matter.”

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.

How it felt like the perfect song then, even though we were together, the bud of us just starting to open. Something in the song’s plaintive yearning, that’s what it was, bone-deep yearning. We held the song’s preemptive nostalgia between us like a candle, swaying as its flame smocked the wick, our faces illuminated and flickering in it, that flame, yearning, idiot yearning, yearning so strong it bends

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?

Normal people think of recovery as a kind of abstinence: they imagine us sitting around white-knuckled, sweating as we count our hours trying desperately to distract ourselves enough to not relapse. This is because for normal people, drinking is an activity, like brushing their teeth or watching TV. They can reasonably imagine excising drinking, like any other activity, without collapsing their entire person. For a drunk, there’s nothing but drink. There was nothing in my life that wasn’t predicated on getting drunk—either getting fucked up itself or getting money to get fucked up by working or slinging this drug for that drug or that drug for cash.

Getting sober means having to figure out how to spend twenty-four hours a day. It means building an entirely new personality, learning how to move your face, your fingers. It meant learning how to eat, how to speak among people and walk and fuck and worse than any of that, learning how to just sit still. You’re moving into a house the last tenants trashed. You spend all your time ripping up the piss-carpet, filling in the holes in the wall, and you also somehow have to remember to feed yourself and make rent and not punch every person who talks to you in the face. There’s no abstinence in it. There’s no se...

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.

When I learned how to say “cigarette,” I walked around saying it to myself like a prayer, like an incantation. see-GARR-ett. It was my favorite word. If I walked up to someone and said it, one time in every five they’d hand me one. Language could make a meal like that.

have not needed to be told. More fluent, perhaps, at the semiotics of passion, though not all exchanges were passionate. 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.

spent every penny I had on canvas, brushes, paints. I killed myself. I killed my love. I forced myself to forget my husband, my brother. My country. My son. 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.

wanted to be out in front with the people. All of us were dying, I’d remind them. I was just dying faster.

They smoked quietly for another minute. The silence was a mercy for which each felt grateful as their hearts calibrated to the moment, to the day’s wild and vertiginous revelations.

“Orkideh—Roya—used to say there were only two kinds of people in any relationship, the feeder and the eater: the person who wanted to give care and the person who wanted to be taken care of. Maybe she said it more crudely, mommy and baby, something horrible like that.”

“She resented ever needing anything from anyone. The whole thing was an elaborate self-loathing, I think.”

“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.”

The universe—you can call it God if you want, it doesn’t bother me—gave me my first son. And then I was scared for us, instead of just myself. My boy gave me a reason to stick around. I stopped drinking. I started making my own paintbrushes out of clothespins and bits of old sponge, making paint from flour and food color. I made these tacky landscapes and sold them to tourists, hid the money. Fear made me work hard, get better. It’s a dirty fuel, but it works. And anger? Anger helped me to leave him. To get my boys away from him as soon as I could. To come thrive in this country that didn’t even believe we were people. To prove it wrong. You can put a saddle on anger, Cyrus.”

‘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.” Sang smiled. “Sounds like some men I’ve known for sure,” she said. Cyrus laughed too. “Right?” He went on, “I think the moral is supposed to be that you fill the hollow with God. And that everything else is a distraction.” “Hmph. Is your hollow filled with God, then?” she asked. “Oh, no,” Cyrus said quickly. “Or mostly never. Maybe a couple times in my life. I think I’ve tried to fill it with booze, with drugs. Maybe with writing. But obviously, none have really worked out very well.” “Never love? That seems like the big one.” Cyrus thought. The ground burning under his feet. He felt a pang, thought about Zee. “Not as much. Not as much as I probably should.” “Oh, I don’t know about ‘should.’ But mostly, it’s a cleaner fuel than getting high. Cleaner than art too, mostly.”

For our species, the idea of art as ornament is a relatively new one. Our ape brains got too big, too big for our heads, too big for our mothers to birth them. So we started keeping all our extra knowing in language, in art, in stories and books and songs. Art was a way of storing our brains in each other’s. It wasn’t until fairly recently in human history, when rich landowners wanted something pretty to look at in winter, that the idea of art-as-mere-ornament came around.

That purity, that simplicity, that’s it for me. I’m dying. Here I am. It’s ugly. There are all these tubes, all this gunk oozing out of me. Sometimes the bigness of the thing is too much for language, for paint, for art. You just have to say it plain: “O Muslims, I am sad tonight.” That’s what Death-Speak is. Being present. Saying it plain.

The clearness of it, of his friend’s love and distress, suddenly felt pulverizingly obvious. How negligent Cyrus had been with Zee’s loyalty. With Zee’s devotion. Cruel, even.

Sobriety meant Cyrus couldn’t help but see himself, eventually. And it hurt. He was repulsed by what he saw.

It wasn’t right, how Cyrus had treated Zee. His barb the night before, yes, but also their entire relationship. Like he was entitled to his friend’s adoration. How had he been so oblivious? Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it. Cyrus understood that now, and stepped.

As Cyrus finished catching Zee up, he felt immeasurably lighter. Whatever was merciful in the universe lived in Zee, Cyrus suddenly realized. The way Zee held, understood, knew, him. Grace. How when he saw a bird or a tree or a bug, Zee really saw that bird or tree or bug, not the idea of it. How he really saw Cyrus, really heard him, beneath all his beneaths. Cyrus loved that Zee moved through life unencumbered by the flinching anxiety that governed, corroded his own soul. Cyrus was dizzy with it, this love, its abrupt and total overwhelm.