Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

If Ali had ever spoken to anyone about this time, he would have said it felt like a profoundly unfair arrangement—the universe that took his wife from him should have at least given him an easy child. A fair-tempered good-sleeping child. It was injury to injury, Ali felt, a finger rooting around an open wound.

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

“Quit things in the order they’re killing you,” Gabe told him once.

While I’m getting my vaccinations before training, a young woman in the waiting room seethes at another man even younger than me; he looks like he hasn’t even begun shaving. “You wanted this,” she says. “You could have told them about Beeta. You could have gotten out of this and now you have what you deserve.” The man stares at his hands, his long soft fingers. I imagine maybe he’s a brilliant pianist, a prodigy. Maybe Beeta is his teacher, his piano trainer, who he is disappointing by enlisting. There is a station on the AM radio that plays classical music every Thursday and Sunday morning and I try to listen to it when I can, often just lying in bed the whole time with my eyes closed and the songs circling around me like planets. I like the loud guys best, Rachmaninoff and Mahler and Vivaldi. But I imagine this man, this boy really, this soft boy, playing Debussy, he looks like he’d love Chopin but especially Debussy, I imagine him swimming through an underwater cathedral, stained glass and tiny fish, with just his fingers, just his soft hands making sunken cathedral sounds. That’s what he should be doing. I can’t do anything, I have no great talent or even minor ones, I belong here. But not him, this boy, not his cathedral hands.

I’ve seen the faces of the war dead in the mosque and in the markets. Our ugly-beautiful martyrs staring ahead into the place only they can see. I wonder what they imagined that place being, before they arrived there. I wonder if they were disappointed, or if there was no place to arrive to at all.

Ugly crying. Bawling, really, as he walked. Cyrus felt in that moment like he was wearing a crown. Sonic Youth, the streetlights, the smell of ozone after rain—it was all for him. His grapefruit juice had transubstantiated into ambrosia. It tasted so good it made him dizzy. Cyrus felt new. Sinless. Invincible. 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.

Cyrus was practically floating an inch off the ground, lost in gratitude and awe and a sense of overwhelming simpatico, when another part of the conversation entered into his head. “My writing will never bring my mother back,” he’d said. And Orkideh replied, “Or any of the people on that flight.” He tried to remember if he’d ever mentioned to Orkideh how his mother had died. He sat on a park bench. He’d told her about Zee, about his father, about his mother dying; but, for the life of him, he couldn’t remember ever saying anything about Flight 655.

“One day, I was maybe three months, four months sober, and my kids were nuts, the oldest kept getting into fights at school and I could barely keep my head attached to my neck. We have the meeting and I am so eager to go to the diner with Janet because I have all these grievances to list, all this stuff I wanted to talk with her about. But as soon as the meeting’s over she invites this raggedy newcomer lady to come eat with us. She was clearly straight off the street, probably just at the meeting to drink free coffee and bum smokes. And of course we get to the diner and this lady won’t shut up, talking about how her boyfriend fucked her over and how now he’s looking for her, something like that. I remember just sitting there, seething at this trespasser, hating the way she chewed, the way she guzzled her water and coffee. She was swallowing up the whole conversation, not letting me get a word in. And then at some point she gets up to use the bathroom and it’s just me and Janet left in the booth and before I can say anything, Janet leans across the table and says, very very slowly and clearly, “ ‘Sang. Listen to me. You are not the patient today.’ “And that was that. I think about it every day. You’re not the patient today, Sang. It’s lucky to get to be on the other side. It’s a good day when you’re not the patient.”

I demand to be forgiven. I demand the same leniencies, rationalizations, granted to mediocre men for centuries.