Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

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.