CYRUS AND ALI SHAMS
Indiana, USA
Mercifully for Ali if not for Cyrus, as the boy grew through childhood and into adolescence, his sleep terror became less frequent, eventually disappearing entirely only to be replaced entirely by potent insomnia.
To Cyrus, even as a boy, this felt worse since he was conscious for its effects. Every night he would lie awake, endlessly reprocessing the day’s events, discovering in these rehashings slights and conversational missteps that hadn’t in the moment occurred to him to worry about. He’d work to try to convince himself these affronts were imagined, then his brain would offer its rebuttal: they were real, and each person he’d maligned would remember it forever—the friend whose new sneakers Cyrus hadn’t noticed, the teacher whose hello he’d accidentally ignored. The cycle repeated endlessly.
Sometimes, Cyrus worried about getting deported, being sent back to an Iran he couldn’t recall. Or worse. He didn’t understand his father’s visa status but knew it was precarious. There was always paperwork. Ali had cautioned Cyrus to answer people’s “where are you from” queries with “I don’t remember,” insisting upon his own ignorance, however nonsensical, until they gave up. According to Ali, the alternative—announcing his Iranianness—was to invite violence, harm. Cyrus’s father was always vague about this part, and that vagueness kept Cyrus awake too.
Cyrus’s brainstorms often continued all the way until his father woke at 4:30 to go to the nearby industrial chicken farm, arriving at 5:30 six days a week to feed the birds and take necessary measurements—how much feed and water consumed, how much waste produced—before the rest of the laborers showed up to collect eggs. For his willingness to come in an hour earlier than his coworkers, Ali made an extra $1.25 an hour, which added up, he’d tell Cyrus frequently.
One month Ali bought a Big Mouth Billy Bass with the “extra money.” It was a cheap mounted rubber fish that would move its lips to a digitized version of Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” It was a ridiculous extravagance, one the two Shams men loved with a chilling lack of irony. Ali would play it and Cyrus would drop whatever he was doing to join his father in the apartment’s single bedroom, laughing at the ur-robot flopping and rasping along. When years later Ali died and Cyrus came home from college to organize his father’s things, a few boxes of clothes and dishes to Goodwill—not much, really—the singing fish was one of the few of his father’s relics he’d kept.
It was just the two Shams men in America. It was just the two Shams men anywhere. Once a year on Nowruz, Ali would call his dead wife’s brother, Arash, and they would talk to him a bit, only about superficial things—Cyrus’s successes in school (never his stumbles), what they’d been eating, Iranian football.
On occasion, Ali would try to explain to Cyrus what happened to Arash during the war.
“The fighting with Iraq made your uncle sick,” Ali told his son.
Ali explained that Uncle Arash had been tasked with the strangest job in the Persian army. At night, after the human wave attacks and the mustard gas left countless dozens or hundreds of Iranians dying on the battlefield, it was Arash’s job to quietly and secretly put on a long black cloak, get atop a horse, and ride around the battlefield of fallen men with a flashlight under his face. He was meant to look like an angel. He was meant to inspire the dying men to die with dignity, conviction. To keep them from suicide. The delirious dying men would see Arash on his mount, in his illuminated hood, and believe they were being visited by Gabriel himself, or the twelfth imam returning for them.
“Your uncle was an angel,” Ali told his son. “Literally. He helped a lot of people.”
For hundreds of dying Iranian men, Arash on horseback was the last thing they saw. Which meant Arash watched hundreds of men die. Cyrus had a hard time wrapping his head around it, and if he was being honest, so did Ali.
Seeing so much death left Arash permanently sick. PTSD, it might be called elsewhere. As it was, Arash lived alone on government assistance in the foothills of the Alborz mountains. He could care for himself, cook and clean, but he couldn’t hold a job, would often go days without sleeping. After his sister’s death Arash flew back to Iran and withdrew even further into his own neuroses. He began seeing ghouls out the windows, demons, angels, Iraqi soldiers. He’d flinch at gunfire nobody else could hear. Ali told Cyrus that Arash still sometimes wore his black robes from the war, spoke to the Angel Gabriel as if they were sitting together at a table.
The Shams men called Arash once a year just after Cyrus’s birthday to wish him happy Nowruz, and Cyrus’s uncle was always glad to hear from him. But of course there was the inescapable, unmistakable timbre of grief in his voice, even in Farsi, even over the phone across the world—Arash’s parents, then his sister, and now his brother-in-law and nephew had all left him to be feasted on by his ghosts.
In America, Ali drank gin at night to help him fall asleep.
“A man’s body isn’t meant to sleep while the sun is still out,” he’d tell Cyrus, pulling a plastic gin bottle from the freezer. He’d sit and watch basketball during winter, or whatever was on the free movie channels otherwise—gauzy thrillers and police dramas—and drink gin mixed with orange juice until the final score or movie credits rolled. Then he’d go to his room and sleep like a mountain.
While his father slept easily, Cyrus struggled. Some nights he’d just give up, rising to read or draw or eat a snack. This was risky, since their apartment was so small. It was difficult to move without disturbing Ali’s sleep—once, Cyrus knocked a bowl of grapes onto the floor and his father woke in a confused rage, emerging from his bedroom to half-consciously slap Cyrus’s face and rip his library paperback of Simpsons comics in half down the spine. This kind of violence was rare in the Shams household, but the spectre of it dominated Cyrus’s consciousness.
When he returned the destroyed book, Cyrus told the librarian that his little brother had accidentally ripped it and that he was really sorry. She laughed and didn’t charge him anything, but for years after that every time he saw her she would ask how his little brother was doing, recommend this or that kid’s book to take home for him.
“This one has plastic pages, it should be safe from him!” she’d laugh. Sometimes out of embarrassment he’d check out whatever book she recommended.
Since that night with the grape bowl, Cyrus mostly just stayed in his bed, often worrying about the previous day or the next, sometimes trying to sleep, mostly just trying to not think.
He’d seen a movie once on TNT where Sandra Bullock’s character talked about meditation as a process of simply focusing on the feeling of air passing over her top lip as she breathed. Sometimes he’d try that. It made the air feel colder, like water going up his nose.
Other times he’d bargain with God, promising to finally read the Quran or not touch himself in the shower in exchange for a single night of deep sleep. He made these pleas desperately, urgently, but they seldom worked, and neither made any serious attempt to honor their agreement.
At some point, in order to break the endless circles of corrosive thinking, Cyrus began writing little dialogues in his head. It was like a philosophical exercise, except instead of great thinkers from antiquity, Cyrus would script conversations between his personal heroes and beloveds: he would imagine his father speaking to Michael Jordan, his crush at school would speak to Madonna, Batman might speak with Emily Dickinson.
Usually this was just a fun game, a way to play at writing in his head and keep his mind occupied enough to stave off anxiety for five minutes at a time. Sometimes though, maybe one night in three, his brain would begin playing along.
Cyrus would start consciously imagining a conversation, scripting it and conjuring what Cindy Crawford might be saying to Inspector Gadget, fashioning banter and incisive quips, and then slowly he’d begin to fade into light sleep. His unconscious would start writing more and more of the conversation until finally, under the best conditions, he’d be fully dreaming the interaction—his characters would talk to each other for his benefit, a movie he’d cast and staged himself.
It became a way of visiting the titans of his psychic life, a Faustian trade-off with his insomnia. It was the only way he could spend time with Marie Curie, Allen Iverson, Kurt Cobain. It was the only time he got to hear his mother’s voice.
When he left for college to study literature at Keady University, a state school in Indiana that gave him good financial aid, Cyrus began drinking immediately. He arrived a week early for freshman orientation and people on his floor were talking about going to a party at a guy’s older brother’s apartment. Cyrus said he would go with them to hang out but he wouldn’t drink. He wanted to be among these new people but had no interest in making himself sleepy and mean like his father got with gin. Cyrus got drunk for the first time that evening. By the end of the night he was laughing, stealing beer cans out of strangers’ hands. He accidentally tore down a shower curtain, which made everyone laugh, including Cyrus.
Growing up, Cyrus didn’t know anything about drinking other than it was something only low people did. That’s what his father called them, “low people.” Usually, Ali told Cyrus, they died from it.
“If they don’t end up in jail first.”
What his own father did every night with the gin was different. Ali explained this again and again. His drinking was controlled, pharmaceutical. How else could he fall asleep early enough to wake up at 4:30 and go to a chicken farm? Ali needed it. Low people drank because they wanted to, because they lacked imagination or drive. And they suffered for it.
Once, when he was in first grade, Cyrus went on a school field trip to Chuck E. Cheese. His whole class got to go for reading a certain number of books during the year. It was a big deal, there was an area on the blackboard where his teacher counted down to the day: “24 days till Chuck E. Cheese!” “21 days till Chuck E. Cheese!”
When the day finally arrived, they took a bus and everyone got to eat pizza and drink soda. The waitress passed around Cokes and root beers in paper cups. Cyrus had no idea what root beer was and couldn’t believe they were giving it to little kids. He asked for a cup of Coke, but when he took a sip, it didn’t taste like Coke. It tasted like medicine. Like what he imagined alcohol tasted like. It was beer, root beer. The school gave everyone five dollars’ worth of game tokens, but Cyrus just hid in the bathroom and cried in a stall until it was time to go back to the school.
When the bus dropped him off at home that night his father was watching an episode of The Waltons in which a character was dying of alcoholism. There was a scene where the character, painted in yellow stage makeup, was drunk and jaundiced and curled up in a closet like a question mark. Cyrus asked his father, “Does everyone who drinks beer die? Even if they only drink a little bit?”
Ali looked up from the TV.
“Yes,” he replied, matter-of-factly.
Cyrus spent the rest of the week preparing to die. 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. He watched Ali brush his teeth, clip his toenails, thinking: “This is the last time I’ll ever see him brush his teeth. This is the last time I’ll ever see him clip his nails.”
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.
Cyrus’s father, Ali, died from a sudden stroke at the start of Cyrus’s sophomore year in college. It was quick, and while Cyrus was, on hearing the news, pulverized, it quickly became clear to him that his father had been living only to ensure his son’s safe passage into adulthood. Ali had rarely expressed deep joy about anything—occasionally he’d shout at the end of close basketball games and then, almost as if ashamed of himself, he’d shut up completely, more grave even than he’d been before. Mostly, Ali’s granite features seemed to operate only out of resignation to necessity, obligation. Once Ali had delivered Cyrus into college, into his own autonomy, perhaps it seemed to him, consciously or unconsciously, that his long and difficult journey on earth could be finished. Death had long overtaken Ali’s mind; now, it had simply overtaken his body.
The men at the chicken farm where Ali worked for nineteen years put together a little memorial, gave Cyrus a posterboard with “ALI SHAMS” spelled out in big dollar-store party letters. They (or, more likely, their wives) had decorated it with farm photographs taken of Cyrus’s father over the years, mounted on squares of colorful cardboard: Ali in farm scrubs holding a chicken under the wings, Ali frowning in the break room over a cup of coffee. Cyrus took the posterboard with him back to his dorm room, but it depressed him in a way he couldn’t name. One afternoon he threw it in the residence hall’s giant dumpster.
With Ali dead, Cyrus was alone in the world. He’d never known his grandparents, and save his uncle Arash, he had no family left. Maybe this should have made him feel lonely or scared but really it didn’t make him feel much of anything. It had already been just Cyrus and his father for so long, and Cyrus rarely called home at the end, so the subtle shift to complete parentlessness didn’t actually make him appreciably lonelier than he already had been. This was hard to admit, and made Cyrus feel like a bad person.
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 managed what grief he did have, or milked it really, leaned into it, by drinking more, using more. Cyrus wrote plaintive emails to his professors alerting them his father had died, and they in turn excused him from classes and passed him charitably. Sometimes they’d recommend the school’s counseling services, which Cyrus would pretend he’d never heard of, though he had already manipulated those services into a robust loadout of narcotic prescriptions—Xanax, Adderall, Ambien, Neurontin, Flexeril—each name like an alien flower.
Cyrus created a miniature economy out of these drugs, trading them for street drugs like weed or cocaine or MDMA or heroin. Often, he’d then trade those for booze. The drugs were exciting new lovers, each with fresh ways to touch him, new ways to turn him on. They came and went and came and came. But Cyrus’s true love, his bedrock, his soulmate, was alcohol. Alcohol was faithful, omnipresent, predictable. Alcohol didn’t demand monogamy like opiates or meth. Alcohol demanded only that you came back home to it at the end of the night.
Cyrus and alcohol settled into a kind of easy domestic bliss. The university offered him a grief leave, so he took it—two whole semesters deferred, then a term with only one course, tapering slowly back up to full-time. It would take a few extra years to graduate this way, but Cyrus didn’t care. Keady seemed as good a place as any to live. Whatever pretensions and high purpose he’d once held for his future gave way to the delicious primacy of the present. 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. It was infuriating that nobody had told him about this, he thought. Life’s invincibility cheat code.
Cyrus slept easily these years after his father’s death. He would passively drink or dose himself into it without trying. Sometimes this brought back the night terrors from his childhood. He’d rise in bed and start speaking gibberish: “Wobbler warbler wraith” or “okay the roots clapping,” or “nurse here is where I am burning!”
In the mornings Cyrus would have no recollection of anything—neither his oracular soliloquies nor the bizarre unremembered dreams that provoked them.
Other times the narcotics feeding on Cyrus’s sleep took over their vessel entirely, like an office fire feeding itself on oxygen by bursting through a window. He’d walk to the fridge—eyes open and empty like pills you could crush and snort—and chug another beer. People would talk to him and he’d grunt as he made his way back to sleep, always dreamless and teetering on the verge of something darker, endless.
His drunkenness sometimes moved like this, unaccompanied. Eager to keep itself alive.
Often Cyrus would piss himself as a result of these unconscious drinks. He’d wake up, feel the coldness—always the coldness first, coldness being so much of wet—and clean his mess with the exasperated resolve of someone digging their car out of ice. It was the unpleasant but necessary cost of being able to move through the world.
When Cyrus got sober after years of living this way, years after his father passed away, he found his ability to fall asleep naturally had completely atrophied from disuse; his sober insomnia even worse than it had been in his adolescence. Melatonin, meditation, chamomile, Benadryl—nothing could touch his sleeplessness. It was as if his body was obstinately trying to reclaim the waking it had lost while Cyrus was drinking.
The only thing that helped at all, sometimes, was returning to the dream dialogue game from his childhood. He hadn’t had cause to play it for the years of heavy narcotic sleep, and at first when he tried, it felt hokey, contrived. But it was, at least, something to do with his restless mind.
Sometimes, he’d strike upon a turn of phrase or an idea that he’d jot down to explore further in his writing. And sometimes, miracle of miracles, the script started to write itself. Sleep would take over and Cyrus would once more find himself listening in on a conversation between heroes, beloveds.
This was how he started speaking with Scheherazade, Spider-Man, Rimbaud. How he reunited with his father. It’s how he started talking with his mother again, after years of dreamless silence.