Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

My God, I just remembered that we die. —Clarice Lispector

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.

“And I’m sure eventually it’ll be good for my writing too,” Cyrus added. “What’s that thing about living the poems I’m not writing yet?”

Sometimes, life was just what happened. What accumulated.

“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.”

“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.”

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.

I am setting out to write a book of elegies for people I’ve never met. Yes, there is an unforgivable hubris in my imagining any part of their living, and presuming to write about it. There is also hubris in writing about anything else.

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

It feels so American to discount dreams because they’re not built of objects, of things you can hold and catalogue and then put in a safe. Dreams give us voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire.

People in my life have come and gone and come and gone. Mostly they’ve gone.

If a great winged angel had come up from the earth and burst apart, I would have gathered its feathers.

He wanted, acutely in that moment, to be not-alive. Not to be dead, not to kill himself, but to have the burden of living lifted from his shoulders.

“Paradise is mine today, as cash in hand,” Hafez had written. “Why should I count upon the puritan’s pledge of tomorrow?”

If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself—which, because it is inevitable, means nothing.

Everything green just farms us, Cyrus thought. Feeding us oxygen and eating our corpses.

My name is Roya Shams. I died in a plane crash on July 23rd, 1988, when the USS Vincennes shot down my plane over the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. Naval warship mistook my plane for a fighter jet and fired two RIM-66 Standard MR missiles at my plane. One of them hit the left wing, tore the plane apart. The plane and all of us on board were eviscerated almost immediately. Two hundred ninety of us, there, then not-there.

All of us were dying, I’d remind them. I was just dying faster.

Cyrus once read an anthropologist who wrote about how the first artifact of civilization wasn’t a hammer or arrowhead, but a human femur—discovered in Madagascar—that showed signs of having healed from a bad fracture. In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another. It was an attractive idea.

I won’t see spring, these lines are all that will remain. As heaven spins, I fall into bedlam. I am gone, my heart is filled with sorrow— O Muslims, I am sad tonight.

An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it, one can produce almost anything.

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