Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

How was it fair to celebrate those guys for faith that wasn’t faith at all, that was just obedience to what they plainly observed to be true? And what sense did it make to punish the rest of humanity who had never been privy to such explicit revelation? To make everyone else lurch from crisis to crisis, desperately alone?

“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.

I turn my headphones up till it hurts, act like a dick to a random woman just doing her job. Because it feels different than nothing. Which is all sobriety is. Nothing. Nothing in every direction.

“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?”

“Can you imagine having that kind of faith?” Cyrus asked. “To be that certain of something you’ve never seen? I’m not that certain of anything. I’m not that certain of gravity.” “That certainty is what put worms in their brains, Cyrus. The only people who speak in certainties are zealots and tyrants.”

What was left of his life had no intrinsic meaning, he knew, since such meaning could only be shaped in relation to other people.

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.”

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.”

“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.

A chicken was a machine that converted grain into protein.

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’s holey shoes were flaunting something too: his authenticity, his class antipathy, his allegiance to the proletariat—it

He wanted to be on “the right side of history,” whatever that was. But more than that (he admitted this to himself when he was practicing being rigorously honest), he wanted other people to perceive him as someone who cared about being on the right side of history. It’s hard to imagine an earth martyr who was also a fervent eugenicist, or one who had supported Mussolini. Being on the right side of history seemed a bedrock feature of the sort of people in whom he was interested.

Somehow the idiot zealots ended up with all the guns, tanks.

“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.

It is a funny story, I think, funny the way crows are funny birds, more knowing than they let on. The story pretends to be about names but it’s actually a story about time, how time flattens everything. Family, duty, whatever. Into dirt. There’s something comforting about that, something vast and, yes, inescapable. Like bright ink spilling over everyone at once.

We invented it, this language where one man is called Iraqi and one man is called Iranian and so they kill each other.

Midwestern politeness felt that way too, Cyrus learned, like it was burning cigarette holes in your soul. You bit your tongue, then bit it a little harder. You tried to keep your face still enough to tell yourself you hadn’t been complicit, that at least you weren’t encouraging what was happening around you. To you.

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

These centuries of Persians trying to copy the European vanity, really their self-reflection. How it arrived to us in shards. How we had to look at ourselves in these broken fragments, and how those mirror tiles found themselves in all these mosques, the tilework, these ornate mosaics. How those spaces made the fractured glimpses of ourselves near sacred.”

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.

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.

“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 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.”

“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.”

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

He read once about a Sufi prayer that went “Lord, increase my bewilderment.” That was the prayer in its entirety.

Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win.

That kind of comedy always exists on the edge of what you’re allowed to say at the moment. And that edge keeps moving.

Victims die, that’s their main verb.

If 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.

Everything green just farms us, Cyrus thought. Feeding us oxygen and eating our corpses.

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.

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. A painting of a blooming rose to hang on the mantel when the flowers outside the window had gone to ice. And still in the twenty-first century, it’s hard for folks to move past that. This idea that beauty is the horizon toward which all great art must march. I’ve never been interested in that. “As heaven spins, I fall into bedlam.”

I am flatterable, and obnoxiously disarmed by praise.

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.

“I mean, that’s like, the difference between real life and dreaming. Nobody’s ironic in a dream. Nobody goes around winking and smirking.”

“Dreams are the great preserve of the earnest.