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He wanted to live perfectly enough to die without creating a ripple of pain behind him, like an Olympic diver knifing splashlessly into the pool.

Only in a culture that privileged infallibility above all else could a man like President Invective rise to power - a man insulated since birth from any sense of accountability, raised in a pristine cocoon of inherited wealth to emerge pristine, dewy, wholly unsullied by those irksome mortal foibles, grief and doubt.

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.

2/2 What began in me as fear was being eclipsed by utter fascination. Her energy was infectious, a child's glee at discovering the hole in a fence big enough to sneak through.

It was dark and getting darker, and cold, and as we passed people walking in the dim light Leila would dip her head and say "salaam" in a gravelly man's voice, and the men passing by would salaam right back without missing a beat, as if greeting any other man. Leila would look back at me with a big smile, her short curls free in the air. 1/2

That she was walking around - at night! - with her hair free was terrifying to me, so terrifying I didn't even want to mention it, afraid it would invite someone else to notice as well.

"I cry all the time," she continued, as if I wasn't even there. "I hate it. It embarrasses me. I am not fragile, but sometimes my body just cries and I can't help it. It's a betrayal. Like someone tickling you, you laugh even when you don't want to, even when it hurts. That's how I cry."

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.

The Persian word for "eyebrow" literally deconstucts to "cloud-above". Cyrus's made his eyes look pained, stormy, even when he was laughing. Much older and darker than the rest of his face.

[“Then imagine that a bunch of people who’d never met you, for whom you were just a myth, began sending you the art you loved, the art they loved, the art they thought you might love] Imagine how that might contribute to your sense of amongness. To your sense of earth maybe actually being the right place for you.”

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 a truck?Did the dog remember you?What’d your sweetheart say when they saw you again?

She came from a rich family in Arizona. Not my-mum-is-a-dentist rich – that was the kind of wealth Cyrus had seen, peripherally, growing up in Fort Wayne, and the kind around which he built his lifelong distaste for the moneyed.
K. was oil-rich, charm-school-and-family-stables rich, a new kind of rich that made Cyrus’s moral compass spin all the way through contempt and back around to curiosity.

Midwestern politeness felt that way too, Cyrus learnt, like it was burning cigarette holes in your soul. You but your tongue, then bit it a little harder. You tried to keep your face still enough to tell yourself you hadn’t been complicit, that at least you weren’t encouraging what was happening around you. To you.

At the intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness was pathological politeness, an immobilising compulsivity to avoid causing distress in anyone else. Cyrus thought about it a lot. You cooed at their ugly babies, nodded along with their racist bullshit.

That summer, Cyrus was also trying to expand his horizons by dating a Republican.

I am poor, unmarried. I didn’t finish high school, just screwed around in the countryside for a few years working where I could, chasing girls. This means I’m expendable, a zero soldier. Zero education, zero special skills, zero responsibilities outside of my country.

2/2 But we hated the idea of foreign meddling more than we hated him. So we went along.

I imagine what might make a boy choose to go to war. Ideology, personal belief, sure. Iraq invaded us. They thought they’d kick down the door and the whole house would collapse, something like that. We were weak after the revolution. They wanted Khuzestan’s oil and Saddam wanted us to kiss his hand. To bow, yes. Of course we didn’t believe Ayatollah’s nonsense. 1/2

Somehow the idiot zealots ended up with all the guns, tanks. Five years after a revolution led by students and idealists, pacifists with hyacinths in their breast pockets. How did this happen? Zealots. Guns, tanks. And now, war.

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

The difference between wanting to not be alive and wanting to die.

What was there to complain about? ..
Loving 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.

(Persian checkboxes: poet, martyr)

I’ve been working this job and studying all there people who dies for what they believed in. Qu Yuan, Joan of Arc, Bobby Sands. Dying. It feels like such a throwaway to just die for no reason. To waste your one good death.

They both knew Cyrus well enough to not be flustered by his directness.

He mentioned nothing to Ali – he was still at the age when the fear of getting in trouble with his father dwarfed all others, even the fear of death

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 the 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

Alhamdulillah

“Yes yes,” Gabe replied, his voice still level. “You’re upset with me and quoting Borges in order to cudgel me with your great intellect. Very impressive.”

“I want my life - my death - to matter more than that.”
You want to be a martyr?” Habe asked, raising his eyebrows.
“I guess. Yeah, actually. Something like that.”