Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

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?

Cyrus was a good poet when he wrote, but he rarely actually wrote. Before getting sober, Cyrus didn’t write so much as he drank about writing, describing booze as essential to his process, “nearly sacramental”—he really said it like that—in the way it “opened his mind to the hidden voice” beneath the mundane “argle-bargle of the every-day.” Of course, when he drank, he rarely did anything else but drink. “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you!” Cyrus would announce proudly to a room, to a bar, forgetting from whom he’d lifted the line.

“But you’re not a bad person trying to get good. You’re a sick person trying to get well,” Gabe responded. Cyrus sat with the thought. Gabe went on, “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.

“Do you have this organ here?” Cyrus asked her, pointing at the base of his throat. “A doom organ that just pulses all the time? Pulses dread, every day, obstinately? Like it thinks there’s a panther behind the curtain ready to maul you, but there’s no panther and it turns out there’s no curtain either? That’s what I wanted to stop.”

“I snapped at this woman at work today. I didn’t know her at all and I was shitty for no reason. And you know? It felt good. It felt so good, putting her on her heels like that. Being in control. We’re always talking in here about surrendering, surrendering. ‘Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do thy will.’ Giving up control. But it’s those moments of rushing the cockpit where I actually feel anything anymore, where I remember who I am. Rushing the cockpit? Bad metaphor.” Cyrus smiled, took a deep breath. “There are no big decisions in my life. Mostly I just sit around listening to my brain saying the same shit over and over: ‘Wouldn’t you rather be masturbating?’ ‘Wouldn’t you rather be overwhelmed?’ And the answer is always, always yes, yes. 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. It used to be I’d only feel something if it was the most extreme ecstasy or the most incapacitating white-light pain. Drugs and booze sandpapered away everything else. But now everything is in this textureless middle.”

Two years ago when Cyrus was doing his fifth step—cataloguing to Gabe all his deepest most tucked-away secrets—and casually mentioned having slept with men, Cyrus expected shock, at least one of Gabe’s “well, that’s something” looks. Instead, Gabe informed Cyrus that he’d slept with hundreds of men himself. “Southern California in the seventies,” he’d shrugged, like it was a given. “I expected you to be more surprised,” Cyrus admitted. “My being straight passing or whatever.” “Oh sweetheart,” Gabe chuckled, “you think you’re straight passing?”

“Do you know what the first rule of playwriting is?” Cyrus shook his head, barely. Even allowing Gabe’s questions felt like a concession. “You never send a character onstage without knowing what they want.” 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.” “I want to make great art. Art people think matters.” “Good. Keep going.” “Isn’t that enough?” Cyrus was exasperated. “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.” “Sure, sure. But there’s no tiny secret part of you that envies that clarity? That conviction?” “I’m not uncomfortable sitting in uncertainty.

“You know what Borges said about fathers and mirrors? They’re abominations. They both double the number of men.”

That Ali’s family, his friends, could put words around their anger meant it was a different thing entirely from what he was feeling. Ali’s anger felt ravenous, almost supernatural, like a dead dog hungry for its own bones.

Around Iran, statues of the shahs had been torn down and replaced with statues of the ayatollahs. Scowling men. In Qom, future mullahs studied those faces, practiced their own glowers in bathroom mirrors. “More Holy Men Than Any Other Culture,” the local posters bragged. In Isfahan, the old capital, soldiers showed up unannounced at the doors of old women, saying, “Congratulations, your sons have been martyred.” The mothers would have to hold back their tears, wringing their lips into the eerie not-quite-smiles they’d spend the rest of their lives perfecting. They were the lucky ones. Inside Tehran’s Revolution Square, the sons of other mothers hung from cranes.

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.

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.”

Roya said, “Well, 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.” “Adélia Prado,” said Lisa.

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

“So what are you thinking then? A novel? Or like…a poetic martyr field guide?” asked Zee. “I’m really not sure yet. But my whole life I’ve thought about my mom on that flight, how meaningless her death was. Truly literally like, meaningless. Without meaning. The difference between 290 dead and 289. It’s actuarial. Not even tragic, you know? So was she a martyr? There has to be a definition of the word that can accommodate her. That’s what I’m after.”

“All I know is I’m fascinated. Like in Iran, there are these schools for the children of men killed in the war, who they call ‘martyrs.’ Those martyr schools are the good schools, the fancy schools, you try to get your kids into them. Kids with healthy parents grow up jealous of orphans, because the children of martyrs get automatic college admission, all this special treatment. I’ve heard of children of martyrs trying to hide it, like they’re ashamed of all the privilege. Like trust fund kids, except instead of trust funds they have dead parents. It’s nuts.”

Cyrus called our Saturday visits to Jude “grocery shopping.” “Like volunteering in a co-op,” he’d said once on our way to Jude’s house. “Except sexier,” I added. “Oh my god,” said Cyrus. “Yeah. Are we doing sex work? Is this sex work? Are we selling our bodies?” “Angela Davis would say we’re all selling our bodies,” I said, smiling. “That the only difference between a coal miner and a prostitute is our retrograde puritan values about sex. And misogyny.”

Cyrus looked at the wood, then at me, and asked, “Have you ever, uh, chopped wood?” We both laughed. “What do you think?” I said. Cyrus shrugged. “People way dumber than us do it all the time,” he said, picking up the axe. “I don’t know that intelligence is the success variable here,” I said.

Sitting on a simple black metal folding chair, just a thin black pillow between her and the seat, Orkideh looked a little like a sculpture she herself might have made earlier in her career. The single standing lamp in the corner of the gallery room cast a hard shadow against the wall behind her, where the soft round shape of her hairless skull arced over the narrowing angles of her jaw and neck like a divining crystal dangling from an invisible string. Behind her, the eggshell wall of the Brooklyn Museum gallery had the words DEATH-SPEAK in massive black Helvetica. There was a description of the exhibition beneath it announcing the artist, known simply as Orkideh, was dying of a terminal cancer, and had two months ago stopped all treatment. She would spend her final days here in the museum, talking to whoever came in about whatever they wanted to talk about. Guests were encouraged to ask about what dying felt like, or simply sit quietly with the artist, who today was dressed in a loose black sweater, accenting a crisp pair of men’s slacks, navy with white pinstripes. Orkideh had cuffed the legs up above her ankles, highlighting her blue and skeletal bare feet.

Once, when I was a boy, our teacher told us the hadith of the starving man. The man was dying in the desert, got on his knees and begged to God, “Please help me, I’m starving, nearly dead, too tired to continue looking for water. I don’t want to hurt anymore. Please, almighty Lord, take pity, end my suffering.” God, in his infinite wisdom, sent the man a baby. An infant to take care of. And so the man had purpose, a reason to stay alive. I remember thinking the story didn’t make sense. Why not just send him food, water, a bed? God stories always seemed to work that way. Sideways, convoluted. Like one of those elaborate chain-reaction machines built in the most deliberately nonsensical way, using a track and a spring and a candle and a balloon to ring a bell.

Maybe it’s because we could pass along science. You wrote a fact in a book and there it sat until someone born five hundred years later improved it. Refined it, implemented it more usefully. Easy. You couldn’t do that with soul-learning. We all started from zero. From less than zero, actually. We started whiny, without grace. Obsessed only with our own needing. And the dead couldn’t teach us anything about that. No facts or tables or proofs. You just had to live and suffer and then teach your kids to do the same. From a distance, habit passing for happiness.

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 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 believed a hyper-focus on occasions for gratitude would make his eventual death more poignant, more valuable. When a sad-sack who hated life killed themselves, what were they really giving up? The life they hated? Far more meaningful, thought Cyrus, to lift yourself out of a life you enjoyed—the tea still warm, the honey still sweet. That was real sacrifice. That meant something.

It’s possible, he thought, that the experience of gratitude was itself a luxury, a topless convertible driven through a rainless life.

So much of his psychic bandwidth was taken up with conflicting thoughts about political prepositions. The morality of almond milk. The ethics of yoga. The politics of sonnets. There was nothing in his life that wasn’t contaminated by what he mostly mindlessly called “late capitalism.” He hated it, like everyone was supposed to. But it was a hate that made nothing happen.

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.

I remember in school Agha Pahla holding up a stone suspended in the air by a string, telling us how the stone was full of potential energy—potential energy, the names we give things!—and how when the stone is dropped all that potential energy gets converted into motion, into kinetic energy, action, something like that. And that transformation, potential energy into motion, is what makes stones powerful, terrible, how they can crush people. Sometimes I feel like that, like I’m walking around all stuffed up with potential energy, a stone hanging in the air with no knife sharp enough to cut the rope. I do wonder sometimes what it would feel like to cry, to beat my chest and wail like an old woman at a funeral, no potential anything being stored for later, all motion, all energy. I think about that and feel stuffed up even in my imagining, like a nose you can’t breathe out of, my brain can’t even move me into that place, can’t even pretend it to be true. One thing happens, then the next. For a long, long time.

To Cyrus, then, the storm and all other meteorological phenomena happened directly to him. Against him. Storms existed expressly to piss Cyrus off, snow to make him late to his job answering phones at the all-night Chinese takeout place on campus. The sun came out to burn Cyrus specifically, to make him wince at its white.

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

Cyrus found the whole experience of American hookah bars vaguely off-putting and orientalist, the children of soybean farmers and insurance salesmen sitting around eating stale falafel dipped in Costco hummus, smoking “Electric Raspberry” shisha from hookahs made in Taiwan. But he’d never been one to let his beliefs get in the way of a buzz, and the prospect of free-to-him booze and weed made Cyrus squirm with glee. “Apologies to Edward Said,” Cyrus said under his breath, thinking himself very clever.

The iron law of sobriety, with apologies to Leo Tolstoy: the stories of addicts are all alike; but each person gets sober their own way. Addiction is an old country song: you lose the dog, lose the truck, lose the high school sweetheart. In recovery you play the song backward, and that’s where things get interesting. Where’d you find the truck? Did the dog remember you? What’d your sweetheart say when they saw you again?

It’s just hard not to think about, like, ‘what would a person who hates me think about this.’ ” “Why are you worried about what people who hate you think about your art?” “Well, because the people who hate me also own all the guns and all the prisons.” Cyrus laughed. “Hah. Ah, yes, there is that,” Orkideh said. “Sometimes I just imagine the Fox News headlines, ‘Iranian Muslim’s Death Cult Manifesto Seized in Indiana’ or whatever.” “It is probably not a good practice to start imagining headlines about your art before you even make it, Cyrus jaan.”

Cyrus knew she was talking about the hero and villain of a Wagner opera, but only because of a joke in an old episode of The Simpsons.

“What do you love?” Kareem repeated. “Basketball, I guess,” Beethoven answered. The two men were circling the parking lot, walking the square brick edges and turning right at sharp angles. The trees nodded along. “Borges. Pecans. Magic tricks. Twin Peaks probably.” Both men laughed. “Twin Peaks?” Kareem asked, scrunching up his face. “Wow. So you’re one of those dudes. You drink IPAs too? You like to go hiking on the weekends?” Beethoven smiled: “I mean. Probably something insufferable like that, right? Maybe I’m really into turning people on to Infinite Jest. Or CrossFit. Or Tesla.” They both laughed again. Kareem said: “I don’t know, man. You seem like you’d be into DJ-ing or hacking Bitcoin. Or improv classes.”

It began to snow. Kareem and Beethoven both began saying a line by Pablo Medina, “The rich man cannot buy snow,” then stopped when they heard the other saying it. They smiled. The rest of the line, the part neither said out loud, was “and the poor man has to wear it on his eyebrows.” They both thought of themselves as the rich man.

“When my mother died I was a baby,” Cyrus finally said. “And so I didn’t really know what I’d lost until I was much older. I mean, maybe I still don’t. But there was this one day when I was fifteen or sixteen when I decided I was really going to feel it. Like, I didn’t get to have a day to grieve my mother properly when it happened. So I made one up. I skipped school and just wandered around downtown Fort Wayne listening to my Walkman, weeping wherever I went, trying to picture her in my head. I kept ducking into these alleys and side streets bawling my eyes out, imagining all the days she’d never seen me. All the days I’d never see her. I got dehydrated from all the crying, I remember feeling super thirsty. I remember stopping into a gas station to buy a Gatorade, and the clerk there asking if I was okay, if I needed any help. That’s such a funny detail, I’d forgotten about that till just now. It tasted like trash, so sweet it burned. But I chugged it! I was so thirsty from crying. I felt it I think maybe for the first time then. All that grief consolidated, concentrated into a single hard point. Like a diamond. That one day.”

“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.”

Many of these fresh constructions, I knew, were converted cemeteries full of the regime’s executed political prisoners. Paving over those unmarked mass graves with turf, with water features, to show the world how happy and pristine Tehran had become. Clean. I’d heard this whispered: If you were taken prisoner, they would ask you, “When you were growing up, did your father pray, fast, and read the Holy Quran?” You were supposed to answer no, though most reflexively said yes. “No” meant your delinquency was not your fault. If you said yes, you’d be tortured or hanged.

Clicking away from his texts, still waiting for Zee and idly scrolling the news app on his phone, Cyrus saw a picture of President Invective shaking hands with a group of foreign businessmen. “President Invective” was what Cyrus and Zee privately called the sitting president, both of them feeling that to say his name was a concession to power, like the man got some sick eldritch shiver of pleasure whenever his real name was uttered by anyone anywhere in the world. President Invective gave the camera a grimacing smirk.

Cyrus prided himself in descending from people comfortable sitting in uncertainty. 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.

Zee talked about how luxurious it felt to do nothing in New York City, a place where you could do anything. He kept saying “opportunity cost,” that the opportunity cost of doing nothing in the city was so immense that it felt opulent.

“That’s what I’m saying! This stuff is in pretty much everything. It’s not even old white dudes either. Adrienne Rich was a TERF. Sontag announced she was ‘turning her back on’ Gwendolyn Brooks.” “See, this is why everyone should just do what I do,” Zee said. “Be right about everything, and shut up about it.”

“I’m gonna take a shower,” Cyrus said. “Do you need anything?” “Do I need anything…from the shower?” “Hah. Do you need anything broadly?” “Can you arrest the world’s encroaching entropy? Fix irreversible ecological collapse?” “I cannot,” said Cyrus, smiling. “The rising specter of global fascism?” “Nope.” “New Vistalite drum kit?” “Sorry.” “Okay, then I’m good,” Zee said, grinning.

It’s simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what’s actually killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fuck or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness.

My God, I just remembered that we die. But—but me too?! Don’t forget that for now, it’s strawberry season. —Clarice Lispector