That evening, Cyrus drove himself to an AA meeting at the Camp5 Center, Keady’s local recovery clubhouse. It was a converted Craftsman home, gabled roof, rickety wooden frame painted dingy lavender. A fixture of crusty old-timers chain-smoked perpetually in the parking lot while embarrassed kids with court cards avoided eye contact as they shuffled in and out on the hours.
Cyrus walked through the fog of cigarette and vape smoke into the front entrance and up the stairs to the little window where Angus B., a no-nonsense old-timer, worked during daytime hours, selling cups of coffee and cookies for fifty cents, egg salad sandwiches for two dollars, all money going toward Camp5’s monthly rent. Cyrus got a cup of coffee and went downstairs to the dim basement. Six long plastic folding tables were spread out across a dark open room, each table surrounded by uncomfortable wooden campus-surplus chairs.
His sponsor was there. Gabe B., Gabriel Bardo. He was in his late fifties, thirty-three years sober. He’d grown up in Orange County, wove in and out of the television world, and now taught playwriting at the local community college. Gabe looked like an oak tree in a denim jacket, his face all jaw, big white mustache, big hands perpetually cracked from working on this or that project. He was already sitting at the far table in the room when Cyrus walked in, so he wordlessly settled into the empty chair beside him.
Cyrus had trouble paying attention in the meeting. The topic was “life on life’s terms,” which was so broad as to be functionally meaningless. A middle-aged white man celebrated thirty days for the fourth time in a year. Everyone clapped. An old-timer rhapsodized about his own magnanimity in a recent business dispute, saying, “If you’re coasting, it means you’re going downhill.” Everyone nodded. His shirt read “I don’t run, I RELOAD” in big white letters. An aquiline young woman talked about doing coke in the bathroom of her daughter’s preschool open house. Everyone laughed. Gabe shared about his son—Shane, after the western—struggling in school, skipping classes, generally being a teenager. Talking about his recently blowing up at Shane over leaving the kitchen in chaos, Gabe said, “For me, the difference between heaven and hell is not giving a shit about the mess.”
The room mooed in approval. A few more people shared. Cyrus hadn’t planned on saying anything, was mostly there out of habit or inertia, but toward the end of the meeting something restless in him stirred and he spoke:
“Hi, I’m Cyrus, addict-alcoholic.” A couple heads turned over to him, but mostly the folks knew who he was, what he looked like.
“I snapped at this woman at work today. I didn’t know her at all and I was shitty for no reason. And you know? It felt good. It felt so good, putting her on her heels like that. Being in control. We’re always talking in here about surrendering, surrendering. ‘Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do thy will.’ Giving up control. But it’s those moments of rushing the cockpit where I actually feel anything anymore, where I remember who I am. Rushing the cockpit? Bad metaphor.” Cyrus smiled, took a deep breath. “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.”
A weaselly younger guy, Joe A., made a big show of turning around to look at the wall clock. Cyrus went on:
“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. That’s the thing. The woman at work today, she was saying these words to me, all these words. And they were so empty; I hated her for it. This program too. Just words. I mean, I used to piss the bed all the time and try to kill myself. And I don’t piss the bed anymore, at least. So there’s something here, right? Objectively. But I resist it. I feel sad all the time. Angry. If I’m being rigorously honest, I still think most of you are fucking idiots. If we met outside these rooms, you’d probably try to deport me—”
“Outside issue!” barked Big Susan, a tiny but gruff old-timer who, despite her nickname, actually stood under five feet. “Non-AA-related!” Her voice made everyone in the room sit up a little straighter.
“See, that’s what I mean,” Cyrus said, holding up his hands at Big Susan. “Recovery is made of words, and words have all these rules. How can anything so limited touch something as big as whatever the fuck a ‘Higher Power’ is? How can it get rid of the big ball of rot inside me? It feels like this giant sponge sucking away anything in the world that’s supposed to feel good. What words can touch that?” Exasperated, Cyrus snorted at himself. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
He slumped down in his chair, exhaled. The room was quiet for a second, two seconds—an eternity for this group—and then Mike P., a former crack addict turned coffee-shop owner, started sharing about what a good day it was to be sober, the sun and clouds and trees. Gabe looked down at Cyrus for a fraction of a second with a kind of nod and pursing of his lips that meant something like “Well, that was interesting.”
After the meeting Gabe asked Cyrus if he wanted to go to Secret Stash, Mike P.’s coffee shop downtown, and Cyrus knew it wasn’t actually a question. They drove separately, Gabe in his blue Volvo, Cyrus in his old Chevy Cavalier. Gabe got to the café first, and when Cyrus walked in Gabe had just finishing ordering—a double espresso for himself, black Americano for Cyrus. The two men waited wordlessly for their drinks, then found a little circular two-top in the back. The walls were lined with some high school artist showcase, their section featuring charcoal sketches of teenagers making grotesque faces inside hand-drawn Instagram frames.
“So,” Gabe said, finally, “a God made of words, huh?” He ripped open a brown cane sugar packet and poured it into his espresso, swirling it around. The coffee shop was playing that loud Arcade Fire song that played at hockey games.
“I don’t know, man,” Cyrus said. “I’m just sad. Aren’t I supposed to talk about that?”
“Sure,” said Gabe, “sure.” He leaned over the table, staring at Cyrus. “You’ve got a little red in your eye.”
“What?”
“A blood vessel or something?” Gabe pointed to the corner of his own right eye to indicate where to look. Cyrus pulled out his phone camera, used it to see himself. A little red Pangea in the white of his eye bleeding into his iris.
“Oh, shit.”
“You okay?” Gabe asked.
“Yeah, I don’t know. I probably slept funny or something.”
“Or something, sure. Okay: God made of words, you’re sad. Keep going.” He took a sip of his espresso, which left a little moon of foam at the edge of his white mustache.
“That’s it, really. The big pathological sad. Whether I’m actually thinking about it or not. It’s like a giant bowling ball on the bed, everything kind of rolls into it.”
“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?”
“What does that even mean? ‘God, your mother, poetry, whatever.’ I have no idea what you or Big Susan or Mike or any of those people mean when they talk about ‘higher power.’ Most of those guys probably mean an old bearded dude in the clouds who gets mad when I suck a dick, who sends all Muslims to hell. What use is that higher power to me?” Cyrus paused. “I’ve been reading all these ancient mystics. I think if I could find some Persian higher power, something in Islam…”
“Oh that’s fucking bullshit.” Gabe rolled his eyes theatrically. The open mouths of the charcoal teenagers snarled horrifically down. “You’re the most American kid I know. You taught Shane how to play Madden, how to torrent Marvel movies. You buy fucking vinyl records. We’re having this conversation in Indiana, not Tehran.”
Gabe was the only person in Cyrus’s life, white or not, who spoke to him this way. There was something in it, a kind of old man punk “fuck-it”-ness Cyrus had long admired, even if it meant Gabe sometimes danced well past the third rail of political correctness. Still, however abstractly he envied Gabe’s ability to speak unencumbered by the rhetorical hygienics du jour, in this specific instance, still harried from the episode with Dr. Monfort, Cyrus quickly grew flush with righteous fury.
Two years ago when Cyrus was doing his fifth step—cataloguing to Gabe all his deepest most tucked-away secrets—and casually mentioned having slept with men, Cyrus expected shock, at least one of Gabe’s “well, that’s something” looks. Instead, Gabe informed Cyrus that he’d slept with hundreds of men himself.
“Southern California in the seventies,” he’d shrugged, like it was a given.
“I expected you to be more surprised,” Cyrus admitted. “My being straight passing or whatever.”
“Oh sweetheart,” Gabe chuckled, “you think you’re straight passing?”
Gabe looked like, and revered, John Wayne. His face all chin and jaw, cavernous dark eyes like weeping poppies. He built sets from scratch with his playwriting students, scavenging old pallets from around Keady’s campus sprawl and loading them into his Volvo. He was a single parent to Shane after his wife, whom he’d met in AA, relapsed and disappeared from Indiana without a trace. Cyrus had come to expect certain constitutional surprises from his sponsor, sizing him up to be one kind of man—starchy, conservative—only for him to illuminate again and again the wide gulf between the image on his dust jacket and the story inside.
Cyrus elected to say nothing to Gabe’s Indiana-not-Tehran crack, just crossed his arms and jutted out his lower lip in a vaguely combative stance. Gabe continued:
“I’ve read your poems, Cyrus. I get that you’re Persian. Born there, raised here. I know that’s a part of you. But you’ve probably spent more time looking at your phone today, just today, than you’ve spent cutting open pomegranates in your entire life. Cumulatively. Right? But how many fucking pomegranates are in your poems? Versus how many iPhones? Do you see what I mean?”
Cyrus wanted to kick him in the face. For being racist. For being a little right.
“I’m not trying to be an asshole,” Gabe said, his voice softening. “But it’s a schtick. It’s a schtick and it’s holding back your recovery. And your art. Nobody else is going to say it to you as plain as I am. Nobody can. I’m fine with you being pissed at me. That shitty face you’re making. I can deal with that. What I can’t deal with is you going back out and drinking over this. Hurting yourself.”
A skinny guy next to them was wearing giant headphones, typing furiously into his laptop, like a movie hacker trying to crack into the Pentagon. Out of the coffee-shop speakers, some breathy ballad Cyrus didn’t recognize.
“Is there an action item in this monologue?” Cyrus snarled, finally.
Gabe leaned in.
“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.”
Cyrus frowned. “I know what I want,” he said.
“Do you?” Gabe was hunched over, his big palms flat on the round table making it look like a wooden dinner plate.
“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.
“Cyrus, everyone and their mailman believes they’re an unacknowledged genius artist. What do you, specifically, want from your unprecedented, never-to-be-repeated existence? What makes you actually different from everyone else?” Gabe picked his teeth with his pinky nail. He was missing an incisor, which made him look a little boyish.
Cyrus paused, then said, finally:
“I want to die. I think I always have.”
“Hm.” Gabe squinted. “We’ll revisit that. Keep going.”
“Jesus, I don’t know. My mom died for nothing. A rounding error. She had to share her death with three hundred other people. My dad died anonymous after spending decades cleaning chicken shit on some corporate farm. I want my life—my death—to matter more than that.”
“You want to be a martyr?” Gabe asked, raising his eyebrows.
“I guess. Yeah, actually. Something like that.”
“Cyrus,” Gabe said, smiling, “you can’t even wash your own dirty clothes.” He nodded down at Cyrus’s T-shirt, wrinkled and specked with coffee stains near the collar. “You think you’re going to be able to strap a bomb to your chest and walk into a café?” His voice didn’t change at all when he said “bomb,” but it made Cyrus wince.
“Do you even realize how racist that is?” Cyrus whispered, anger rising in his throat like a snake crawling out of its hole—bilious, licking the air.
“Am I wrong?” Gabe asked, earnestly.
“I don’t mean that kind of martyr,” Cyrus declared. “Though—”
“Yes?” Gabe asked. The bit of espresso foam on his mustache looked ridiculous.
“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.”
“Sure, sure. But there’s no tiny secret part of you that envies that clarity? That conviction?”
“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. Have you read the third step lately?”
Cyrus rolled his eyes. The third step was the one where you turn it all over, your entire life, to God or poetry or your grandma or whateverthefuck.
“Have you been listening to me at all?” Cyrus asked. “I don’t even know what my higher power is.”
“That didn’t stop you from getting on your knees with me a year ago and asking it to remove your suffering.”
“Asking what?” Cyrus asked. “What were we even talking to?”
“Who cares?” Gabe answered. “To not-your-own-massive-fucking-ego. That’s the only part that matters.”
“Do you ever listen to yourself?” Cyrus asked. The snake was reared up now, rattling its tail. “How sanctimonious you get trying to control other people’s lives? Maybe because your own life is so fucked up. Maybe because your kid’s a screw-up and your wife picked booze over you. Maybe that’s why you’re trying to commandeer my life to make yourself feel better about yours. Calling me fake Persian? Calling me a dilettante?”
“I don’t think I called you a dilettante,” Gabe said calmly.
“You know what Borges said about fathers and mirrors? They’re abominations. They both double the number of men.”
“I’m certain, actually,” said Gabe, “that I never used the word ‘dilettante.’ ”
“You’re not even listening to me!” Cyrus was getting loud. The hacker guy looked over at their table.
“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.”
“Fuck you,” Cyrus said, standing up. “I don’t need this. I don’t need you lecturing me and I don’t need this bullshit cult of bullshit.”
Cyrus grabbed his untouched coffee, stepping away from the table. Gabe didn’t move. Nick Cave’s voice was coming out of the speakers: “hernia, Guernica, furniture.” Cyrus stormed to his car and drove away from Secret Stash—from Gabe—flooded with a narcotic blend of righteous indignation and self-pity. His foot throbbed. In the rearview mirror he caught a glimpse of himself; the red spot had swallowed up the whole right side of his right eye, colors melting into each other like a painting by Rothko.
Cyrus was furious at himself for not having said something more cutting when he stood up than “bullshit cult of bullshit.” He drove home thinking of better alternatives: limp-dicked Republican church, coven of racist crones. It was soothing, to stop time and rework memory, imagining through the thesaurus multiverse. Vapid temple of words. Scumbag Caesars vivisecting God. He thought about all the poets he’d read whose rapturous ecstasy overwhelmed even language’s ability to transcribe it. Cyrus realized he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt even a glimmer of incandescent, effortless good. That would be his last AA meeting, he decided. And his last time talking to Gabe.