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.

If every relationship was a series of advances and retreats, Cyrus was almost never the retreat-er, sharing everything important about himself at a word, a smile, with a shrug as if to say, “Those’re just facts. Why should I be ashamed?”

He liked how the Quran put it that way, not “until you die” but “until you are of those who perish.” Like an arrival into a new community, one that had been eagerly waiting for you.

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.

Sometimes, life was just what happened. What accumulated. That was one of the vague axioms from his drinking days to which Cyrus still clung, even in sobriety. It wasn’t fair that just because he was sober, everyone expected him to exhaustively interrogate his every decision. This job or that job, this life or that. Not drinking was Herculean enough on its own. He should’ve been afforded more grace, not less. The long scar on his left foot—from an accident years before—pounded with pain.

A year and a half ago in early recovery, Cyrus told his AA sponsor Gabe that he believed himself to be a fundamentally bad person. Selfish, self-seeking. Cruel, even. A drunk horse thief who stops drinking is just a sober horse thief, Cyrus’d said, feeling proud to have thought it. He’d use versions of that line later in two different poems.

I remember being surprised at how wet I wasn’t. There was a little grassy patch between our building and the one next to us, a picnic bench with one of those built-in charcoal grills. I remember thinking that was funny, lighting myself on fire next to a grill. I brought out the Everclear and the lighter, I remember—this is bizarre—it was a Chicago Bears lighter. I have no idea where it came from. And I sat there at the bench feeling, despite the Everclear in and on me, I remember sitting there feeling, not happy exactly but simple, maybe? Like a jellyfish just floating along. Someone said alcohol reduces the ‘fatal intensity’ of living. Maybe it was that.”

But it’s still in me, that doom organ.” He pointed again at his neck. “It’s in my throat, throbbing all day every day. And recovery, friends, art—that shit just numbs it for a second. What’s that word you used?” “Palliative?” “Right, palliative, yeah. All that stuff is palliative. It stills the suffering, but it doesn’t send it away.”

“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.”

“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.

“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?”

“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.”

“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.

“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.”

“I’m not uncomfortable sitting in uncertainty. I’m not groping desperately to resolve it. I got four DUIs in a month because I was certain I was in control. That’s what certainty did to me. It put me in jail for eighteen months.

It was soothing, to stop time and rework memory, imagining through the thesaurus multiverse. Vapid temple of words.

For as long as he could remember, Cyrus had thought it unimaginably strange, the body’s need to recharge nightly. The way sleep happened not as a fact like swallowing or using the bathroom, but as a faith. 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.

She tried not to think about the people she was leaving. She’d earned that. More than earned it. She refused the hot knot of guilt rising up in her throat. You will not be needed, she said to it in her mind, swallowing. So much could still go wrong, of course, but for the first time in as long as she could remember, she could inhale fully, feel the air filling the bottom of her lungs. Even this, breathing, felt freighted, suddenly more meaningful, the way money means more to the poor than the rich.

Within a month of leaving for his dorm at Keady University, Cyrus was drinking nightly, experimenting with weed and benzodiazepines and, once that month, very drunk, heroin. He started having sex, smoking cigarettes. It was like being born—there were so many feelings he’d never felt. He’d wasted years with meditation and chamomile. There were all these seasons nobody even mentioned. New wets, new warm soft heats. He wanted to live in them all.

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.

Cyrus wanted what everyone wanted, he figured—to feel good all the time. It seemed rational: Why would anyone choose feeling shitty when feeling good was an option? He cycled mindlessly between lovers, friends, bosses, counselors, professors, each with their own loadout of minor and major crises. Cyrus felt safe amidst them all, knowing that if anyone got too heavy, too warm-blooded, he could simply drink to jettison up above them until they disappeared.

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.”

“Stop that,” Lisa said. “Stop what?” asked Roya. “Stop trying to make everything mean something,” Lisa said. “Trying to flatten everything to a symbol or a point. The coral is dying because of microbeads in body wash and because of Monsanto and because there’s no reason for anyone powerful enough to do anything about it to do anything about it.”

When you are ten, shame stitches itself into you like a monogram, broadcasting to the world what holds you, what rules your soul.

In Cyrus’s active addiction it had taken dread and doom bringing him to his knees, or euphoric physical ecstasy elevating him half-literally out of his body—to break through his dense numb fugue. In sobriety, he still sometimes erroneously expected this of the universe—a stark shock of embodied rapture, the angel dropping from the sky to smack him with clarity’s two-by-four. Cyrus was beginning to realize that the world didn’t actually work this way, that sometimes epiphany was as subtle as a friend showing you something they saw on Twitter.

Most of the time. He was ready, then he wasn’t. Like one of those perpetual motion swinging ball cradles, his desire to die kept striking back equal and opposite against his desire to make his dying dramatic, to make it count. Was it ego? Was it fear of being forgotten?

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. Go to work. Dig through shavings, find the eggs. Eat. Clean the eggs. Put down new shavings. Clear the driplines. Go home.

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.

It’s possible, he thought, that the experience of gratitude was itself a luxury, a topless convertible driven through a rainless life. Even the platitudes offered after a tragedy—a divorce, a dead pet—seemed built around the expectation that gratitude was a base level to which you returned after passing through some requisite interval of grief: “In time, you’ll remember only the joy.”

He wanted to ask Orkideh what she thought about this, what she thought about gratitude broadly. 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.

He wanted to be on “the right side of history,” whatever that was. But more than that (he admitted this to himself when he was practicing being rigorously honest), he wanted other people to perceive him as someone who cared about being on the right side of history. It’s hard to imagine an earth martyr who was also a fervent eugenicist, or one who had supported Mussolini. Being on the right side of history seemed a bedrock feature of the sort of people in whom he was interested.

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.

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.

Cyrus wondered about how much of his living he owed to other people’s assumptions of his us-ness. The middle school teacher who surreptitiously offered him a racial slur, like a juicy orange they might peel together and share. Even his name could pass as white. Cyrus Shams. Weird, probably ethnic, but kind of inscrutably so. Cyrus felt like Blade, the Wesley Snipes hero, half human, half vampire, with all the superpowers of each species, super strong but also capable of walking around in sunlight. Like Blade, Cyrus was a day-walker, American when it suited him and Iranian when it didn’t.

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.

Active addiction is an algorithm, a crushing sameness. The story is what comes after.

“Okay, Cyrus,” Orkideh said firmly. “Now you’ve said this part, now it can be behind us. Can we just be friends now? And talk like regular people?” Cyrus paused for a second. He felt a flash of familiar shame—his whole life had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much. He realized he was perhaps doing what Sad James had once called The Thing, the overliking thing, obsessing over something in a way that others felt to be smothering.

“It is probably not a good practice to start imagining headlines about your art before you even make it, Cyrus jaan.” “But see,” Cyrus smiled, “that’s a whole part of it too. How much of this whole thing is my ego? How much is it me wanting to matter more than other people? In life or in death?” “I was thinking last night, your project reminds me of all the great Persian mirror art,” Orkideh said. “Do you know much about that?”

“It means, in my humble opinion, we got to cubism hundreds of years before Braque or Picasso or any European. That maybe we’ve been training for a long time in sitting in the complicated multiplicities of ourselves, of our natures. At least for a time. No monolithically good Siegfried hero versus monolithically bad dragon.”

We won’t grow old together, Cyrus. But can’t you feel this mattering? He could feel it, he realized. He wished he’d said that.

That’s the secret, don’t you think, the amongness, to be among with an angel means you were right all along, all your wincing and kneeling, your fasting, your scowling, that amongness might send you to Jannah, an angel to send you to Jannah and Riswan with conviction in your heart and not fear of pain, suffering, nothingness, conviction, yes, of seeing an angel in black riding the wind, riding the night, conviction to remain as long as suffering demanded, to not end it, not kill yourself.

How saying it calls on language to represent it, this sound is that thing, how some things rebuke sound, rebuke representation, we call the sun the sun as if that means anything, call such-and-such person a hero, such-and-such person a coward. The Prophet sent him away because he put his own knife into his own neck instead of suffering like a man, that’s the lesson, that’s the thing Arman wants me to remember.

That’s how Arman says it, “preserve their hereafter,” let them be reunited with their babas and mamabazorgs and yes, their prophets, the prophets in whom I can only muster for myself scattered belief, like a light flicking on and off in a room I can see their shapes sometimes but never with any depth, never with anything like depth, or maybe it’s the other way around where I can see their depth but can’t quite make out the shape of them, the prophets, the why or how or even the what of the whole thing.

When he sees me, one man cries ob, ob, water, water—this happens a lot, Arman told me this would happen, the dying take their thirst with them, maybe the only thing they take, their thirst and their dying, thirst tearing open their chests worse than any sword, like a lion might, and I’m not allowed to give them water, absolutely not is what Arman said when I asked, why would an angel be carrying water he said, which makes sense, but so I just have to hear them cry and beg and die and I sit there on my big horse in my little costume holding my fake sword.

I swear now I can hear him smiling through the gurgling, through the dying, and it really does make sense for that second, gurgling, the horse and the cloak and the hot flashlight, I know he’s smiling and maybe I am too, for He is the Most High, it’s almost funny how hot it is, funny how wet the man’s gurgling, the silly sword in my hand with moonlight curling off its fangs.

an evergreen wonder that anyone remembered him when he wasn’t in the room. That people found the surplus psychic bandwidth to consider—or even worry over—anyone else’s interior seemed a bit of an unheralded miracle. Cyrus read on a website once that there was a word for this: sonder. “The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” Incredible, how naming something took nothing away from its stagger. Language could be totally impotent like that.

“Why aren’t you spending these last days with your family? With the people who love you?” Orkideh didn’t smile at this but didn’t look wounded either. She let her mouth hang open for a moment before saying, “Cyrus,” snapping the r the Iranian way, drawing out the ooo. “I’m an artist. I give my life to art. That’s all there is. People in my life have come and gone and come and gone. Mostly they’ve gone. I give my life to art because it stays. That’s what I am. An artist. I make art.” She paused for a moment. “It’s what time doesn’t ruin.”

Orkideh inhaled deeply. “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?”

“Of course,” said Orkideh. “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.”