Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

“I guess, I write these sentences where I try to lineate grief or doubt or joy or sex or whatever till it sounds as urgent as it feels. But I know the words will never feel like the thing. The language will never be the thing. So it’s damned, right? And I am too, for giving my life to it. Because I know my writing can never make any of these deaths matter the way they’re supposed to. It’ll never arrest fascism in its tracks or save the planet. It’ll never bring my mother back, you know?”

Leila was so good at wearing sunglasses. I found myself watching them, watching her more than I was actually listening to her. It is ridiculous to say that she was beautiful. A horse is beautiful, a mountain or an ocean is beautiful. Leila, in those sunglasses, was something else.

Cyrus smiled, despite himself. He remembered reading about how children who had lost a parent would often act out against the one left, an unconscious way of testing whether that parent could be trusted to remain, unconditionally. Cyrus had never really done this to his actual father; but then, he had no memory of his mother. Her loss was totally abstract. It was excruciating, now, for Cyrus to think of himself as the unwitting subject of the same predictable psychic tempests as every other human on the planet.

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.

But the handful of poems he’d ever shared with the world were in tiny fold-and-staple journals, not online as far as he knew. And even those were written after he got sober, when poetry simply became a place to put his physical body, something he could do for a few hours without worrying about accidentally killing himself. That was poetry then, a two-by-four floating in the ocean. When Cyrus wrapped himself around it, he could just barely keep his head above waves.

If he’d been drunk, if he’d relapsed at the hotel bar, this would have all made sense. The fight with Zee, the piss. But Cyrus was doing everything he was supposed to do. Sobriety, writing. What was the point if every road led back to the same shame?

It felt like the only time Cyrus ever really felt now-ness was when he was using. When now was physiologically, chemically discernible from before. Otherwise he felt completely awash in time: stuck between birth and death, an interval where he’d never quite gotten his footing. But he was also awash in the world and its checkboxes—neither Iranian nor American, neither Muslim nor not-Muslim, neither drunk nor in meaningful recovery, neither gay nor straight. Each camp thought he was too much the other thing. That there were camps at all made his head swim.

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.

We held the song’s preemptive nostalgia between us like a candle, swaying as its flame smocked the wick, our faces illuminated and flickering in it, that flame, yearning, idiot yearning, yearning so strong it bends you, buckles you, like waves or miracles.

When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, “It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David.” 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.

What distinguishes grace from everything else? Grace is unearned. If you’ve moved through the world in such a way as to feel you’ve earned cosmic compensation, then what you’ve earned is something more like justice, like propriety. Not grace. Propriety is correct. Justice is just. There’s an inescapable transactional quality: perform x good, receive y reward. Grace doesn’t work that way. It begins with the reward. Goodness never enters the equation.

Painting saved me, but I can’t say I loved painting. I painted because I needed to. What I really loved, what I love, is having-painted. That was the high. Making something that would never have existed in the entirety of humanity had I not been there at that specific moment to make it.

“I think the moral is supposed to be that you fill the hollow with God. And that everything else is a distraction.” “Hmph. Is your hollow filled with God, then?” she asked. “Oh, no,” Cyrus said quickly. “Or mostly never. Maybe a couple times in my life. I think I’ve tried to fill it with booze, with drugs. Maybe with writing. But obviously, none have really worked out very well.” “Never love? That seems like the big one.”

As Cyrus finished catching Zee up, he felt immeasurably lighter. Whatever was merciful in the universe lived in Zee, Cyrus suddenly realized. The way Zee held, understood, knew, him. Grace. How when he saw a bird or a tree or a bug, Zee really saw that bird or tree or bug, not the idea of it. How he really saw Cyrus, really heard him, beneath all his beneaths.

“All those severe poets talking big about the wages of sin all the time,” Zee added, “but nobody ever brought up the wages of virtue. The toll of trying really really hard to be good in a game that’s totally rigged against goodness.”

It was almost unbearable, how good and warm it felt to be there—together—in the pond’s golden light. The feeling of prayer—not prayer itself, but the stillness it leaves—lifted from the earth, smelling of grass and woodsmoke.

Often in my life, in the throes of despair, of my husband’s abuse, I have held the certainty of the damned, that sense of “everything is going to be just this, this misery forever, till I die.” An irrepressible inescapable horror stretching out infinitely in every direction. Tragic, that only terror feels that way. That even in Roya’s and my impossibly good moments, I instinctively knew to hold them, to store them inside myself like pockets of fat for the lean seasons ahead.

I couldn’t help laughing, but laughing didn’t need my help. It already was, holding us there, good and full, where nothing could splinter us into shards, nothing could smear us off the map. The three of us stayed there all night in my gallery working, singing along to radio songs we knew, dancing to the ones we didn’t, laughing at everything, all of it, the whole absurd production suddenly blossoming straight into our faces, on purpose.