Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order, or the right drugs in the wrong order, but when God finally spoke back to him after twenty-seven years of silence, what Cyrus wanted more than anything else was a do-over. Clarification.

Why should the Prophet Muhammad get a whole visit from an archangel? Why should Saul get to see the literal light of heaven on the road to Damascus? Of course it would be easy to establish bedrock faith after such clear-cut revelation. 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?

He wondered if it had maybe been the sheer weight of his wanting, or his watching, that strained his eyes till they saw what they’d wanted to see. He wondered if maybe that was how God worked now in the new world. Tired of interventionist pyrotechnics like burning bushes and locust plagues, maybe God now worked through the tired eyes of drunk Iranians in the American Midwest, through CVS handles of bourbon and little pink pills with G 31 written on their side.

“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.

“When I was little and my dad was the right kind of drunk, he’d insist I pray before bed. ‘Just talk to God, talk to your mother. Tell them how you feel.’ They were the same thing, talking to God and talking to my dead mom. And so I did, I’d tell God I was fucking miserable, I’d beg my mom to make me feel less sad. Even at seven, ten years old. I’d offer these trades, I’d say, ‘You can take twenty years off the end of my life if you stop making the ones I have so miserable.’ I don’t even know what I was so sad about. I had friends. I wasn’t hungry. But the rot just sat in my gut. God? My mom? They were just words. That’s the thing. The woman at work today, she was saying these words to me, all these words. And they were so empty; I hated her for it. This program too. Just words.

“Maybe you don’t believe God wants you to be happy? God, your mother, poetry, whatever. What makes you so special that everyone else deserves that except you?”

Cyrus frowned. “I know what I want,” he said. “Do you?” Gabe was hunched over, his big palms flat on the round table making it look like a wooden dinner plate. “I want to matter,” Cyrus whispered. “You and everyone else. Deeper.”

“Have you been listening to me at all?” Cyrus asked. “I don’t even know what my higher power is.” “That didn’t stop you from getting on your knees with me a year ago and asking it to remove your suffering.” “Asking what?” Cyrus asked. “What were we even talking to?” “Who cares?” Gabe answered. “To not-your-own-massive-fucking-ego. That’s the only part that matters.”

Cyrus was furious at himself for not having said something more cutting when he stood up than “bullshit cult of bullshit.” He drove home thinking of better alternatives: limp-dicked Republican church, coven of racist crones. It was soothing, to stop time and rework memory, imagining through the thesaurus multiverse. Vapid temple of words.

People pretended to be asleep, trusting eventually their pretending would morph into the real thing. It was a lie you practiced nightly—or, if not a lie, at least a performance.

As if to incentivize the whole ordeal, the body offered you dreams. In exchange for a third of your living, you were offered sprawling feasts, exotic adventures, beautiful lovers, wings. Or

I used to think slow, slower than language moved. By the time I settled into an idea about anything, the moment for me to say something had passed. Roya used to say I was a good listener. Mostly, though, I was just a bad talker.

For all our advances in science—chickens that can go from egg to harvest in a month, planes to cross the world, missiles to shoot them down—we’ve always held the same obnoxious, rotten souls. Souls that have festered for millennia while science grew. How unfair, this copper delivery. How unfair, this life. My wounds are so much deeper than yours. The arrogance of victimhood. Self-pity. Suffocating.

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 was all right there at his feet, waving like two ratty flags. Yes, they were ratty flags made by a billion-dollar shoe company, but there was no ethical consumption under late capitalism and sometimes, Cyrus figured, one had to pick one’s battles. He tried not to think too much about these contradictions.

Cyrus also worried that the whole idea of gratitude was possibly classist, or worse.

The unforgivable vanity of fantasizing about one’s own death. As if continuing to live was a given, inertia that needed to be disrupted inorganically.