Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

And recovery, friends, art—that shit just numbs it for a second. What’s that word you used?” “Palliative?” “Right, palliative, yeah. All that stuff is palliative. It stills the suffering, but it doesn’t send it away.”

“Recovery is made of words, and words have all these rules. How can anything so limited touch something as big as whatever the fuck a ‘Higher Power’ is? How can it get rid of the big ball of rot inside me? It feels like this giant sponge sucking away anything in the world that’s supposed to feel good. What words can touch that?”

It was hard for Cyrus not to see waking as the enemy. The way it corroded your power to exist—to live and think with acuity—until you finally submitted. Being awake was a kind of poison, and dream was the only antidote.

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.

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

But I thought it lucky, the clarity of tears. Instead of the loose riot of confusion and dread webbed up in my chest, in my head, probably wearing lesions into my gut and brain.

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.

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.

“We won’t grow old together, Cyrus. But can’t you feel this mattering? Right now?”

Something beyond language. I get frustrated this way so often. A photograph can say “This is what it was.” Language can only say “This is what it was like.”

He himself knew little about anything and tried to remember that. He read once about a Sufi prayer that went “Lord, increase my bewilderment.” That was the prayer in its entirety.

There was a part of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous Cyrus had read over and over when he first got sober where it talked about self-pity and resentments being the “dubious luxuries” of normal people, but for alcoholics, they were poison.

What was the point if every road led back to the same shame?

The imprecision of American justice was a given, even to Americans.

But these lovers didn’t lack the ability to perceive my desires. They lacked faith in my conviction.

Separation from what you love best, that is hell. To be twice separated, first by a nation and then by its language: that is pain deeper than pain. Deeper than hell. That is abyss.

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.

“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.”

You can put a saddle on anger, Cyrus.”

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

She studied my face and I studied hers. She had really been in love with me once, and I had really loved watching her love me. Which sounds terrible, but it’s not. It’s easy to resent those who love you. Those who are over eager with their affection. Too performative. But I loved how Sang loved me, easily, like it was its own soul in her chest, pumping that love through her, animating her as naturally as blood. Even if I didn’t have that for her.

He understood, with a clarity that had until that moment in his life eluded him, that he was not at all made for the world in which he lived, that art and writing had gotten him only trivially closer to compensating for that fundamental defectiveness, the way standing on a roof gets one only trivially closer to grabbing the moon than standing in the dirt.

“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.”