Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

Some solace in history, perhaps, knowing other civilizations had also destroyed themselves. In fact, the record seemed to suggest such destruction was inevitable, the endpoint of every people.

Roya, only ten, already knew she wouldn’t have a future like her mother’s. She didn’t know what kind of future she wanted for herself, but when she tried to imagine it, there were no dining tables, no kitchens either. Mostly there was open space, freedom and passion, heat obscuring everything like a candle flame smocking its wick.

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.

“I had a friend too, a novelist,” she said. “And one time I asked her about whether she plots out her books in advance and just fills in the details, or if she moves through the story as she writes it. She looked at me and without skipping a second, she answered like an oracle: ‘Behind me is silence, and ahead of me is silence.’ And that was it. That was her whole answer. Isn’t that perfect?”

I think maybe you’ll find your real ending once you stop looking for it,” Orkideh said. “I think real endings tend to work their way in from the outside.”

A photograph can say “This is what it was.” Language can only say “This is what it was like.”

Cyrus wondered sometimes how much ideas of leadership in the West (a term he was also dubious of—west of what? The earth is a sphere where every spot is west of every other—calling America “the west” and Iran “the Middle East” placed the center squarely in Europe) had to do with notions of an infallible Christian God.

Cyrus thought about President Invective, a cartoon ghoul of a man for whom Dantean ideas of Hell seemed specifically conceived. The sort of man whose unwavering assertions of his own genius competence had, to the American public, apparently overwhelmed all observable evidence to the contrary.

Only in a culture that privileged infallibility above all else could a man like President Invective

“Can you arrest the world’s encroaching entropy? Fix irreversible ecological collapse?” “I cannot,” said Cyrus, smiling. “The rising specter of global fascism?”

This music the church thought was too beautiful for common people, pearls before swine, isn’t that what they say? Though pigs are smarter than dogs, and pearls are just rocks.

“Do you feel this?” she said, moving her open eye up, down, up, down. Beneath the eyelid beneath my finger, her other eye was matching the movements of its sibling. “You feel how even the closed eye is still searching for your face?” I nodded. Her hand tapped, pum PO-POP pum, pum POP-POP pum. “That,” Leila said, “is how I have been searching for you.”

After that first kiss, I wouldn’t have questioned anything. Possibility, freedom. If a great winged angel had come up from the earth and burst apart, I would have gathered its feathers.

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.

“You think there’s some nobility in being above anger?” Sang asked. “Anger is a kind of fear. And fear saved you. When the world was all kneecaps and corners of coffee tables, fear kept you safe.”

You can put a saddle on anger, Cyrus.”

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

Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it. Cyrus understood that now, and stepped.