TUESDAY

Cyrus Shams, Zee Novak, and Sad James

KEADY UNIVERSITY, 7 FEB 2017

Sitting on the Naples Café patio during the open mic’s intermission, Cyrus had been telling Zee and their friend Sad James about his fight with Gabe, about his sponsor’s obnoxious white gall and how it’d all cemented this new idea for a writing project—maybe even a book—about martyrdom.

“So like a whole collection of poems just about people who died?” Sad James asked as he pulled from his back pocket a little red plastic pouch of Bugler tobacco.

“Like that Jim Carroll song,” added Zee.

“I’m not sure exactly yet,” said Cyrus. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. I’m writing, it’s taking shape as I go. I don’t even know that it’ll be just poems.”

There were two campus coffee shops at Keady. One, Bluebarn, featured single-sourced beans, baristas with self-serious framed certificates advertising their training at “Espresso Academy,” and beautiful mid-century modern furniture. Every time Cyrus had been there, the baristas were almost off-puttingly friendly, Stepfordian. He’d felt tempted to ask for his coffee with just a splash of misanthropy, please. Or at least sullen ambivalence. Their eagerness felt offensive, too much to bear.

The other cafe—called Naples though it was owned by a Palestinian-Turkish couple—featured Costco coffee beans, a single rusty and unreliable espresso machine, and uncomfortable campus-surplus tables and chairs. The two coffee shops were on the same block, and Naples wasn’t even particularly cheaper than Bluebarn, but out of some oblique sense of cultural loyalty or class antipathy, this had become the spot favored by the local young counterculturalists. It’s where one might find fold-and-staple punk zines with names like Rat! and SPUNK GXRLS left on chairs, where undergraduate DSA chapter meetings continued late into the night while teenage Marxists laughed loudly through sugary lattes and shabby beards.

The Naples Tuesday night open mic had become a mainstay of Cyrus and Zee’s friendship. It was a small affair, not much to distinguish it from the myriad other open mics happening elsewhere in the country—except this was their open mic, their organic community of beautiful weirdos—old hippies singing Pete Seeger, trans kids rapping about liberation, passionate spoken-word performances by nurses and teenagers and teachers and cooks. As with any campus open mic, there was the occasional frat dude coming to play sets of smirky acoustic rap covers and overearnest breakup narratives. But even they were welcome, and mostly it felt like a safe little oasis of amongness in the relative desert of their Indiana college town, a healthy way to spend the time they were no longer using to get drunk or high.

Naturally, Naples didn’t have its own sound equipment, so Zee would usually show up fifteen minutes early with his beat-up Yamaha PA to set up for Sad James, who hosted every week. Sad James was called this to distinguish him from DJ James, a guy who cycled nightly through the campus bars. DJ James was not a particularly interesting artist, but he was well-known enough in the campus community to warrant Sad James’s nominative prefix, which began as a joke but somehow stuck, and to which Sad James had grown accustomed with good humor, even occasionally doing small shows under the name. Sad James was a quiet white guy, long blond hair framing his lightly stubbled face, who played intensely solemn electronic songs, punctuated by sparse circuit-bent blips and bloops, and over time at Keady, he had become one of Zee and Cyrus’s most resilient and trusted friends.

On this night, Cyrus had read a poem early, an older experimental piece from a series where he’d been assigning words to each digit 0–9, then using an Excel document to generate a lyric out of those words as the digits appeared in the Fibonacci sequence: “lips sweat teeth lips spread teeth lips drip deep deep sweat skin,” etc. It was bad, but he loved reading them out loud, the rhythms and repetitions and weird little riffs that emerged. Sad James did an older piece where the lyrics “burning with the human stain / she dries up, dust in the rain” were repeated and modulated over molten beeps from an old circuit-bent Game Boy. Zee—a drummer in his free time who idolized J Dilla and John Bonham and Max Roach and Zach Hill in equal measure—hadn’t brought anything of his own to perform that evening, but did have a little bongo to help accompany any acoustic acts who wanted it.

On the patio listening to Cyrus talk about his new project, Zee said, “I could see it being a bunch of different poems in the voices of all your different historical martyr obsessions?” Then to Sad James, Zee added, “Cyrus has been plastering our apartment with these big black-and-white printouts of all their terrifying faces. Bobby Sands in our kitchen, Joan of Arc in our hallway.”

Sad James made his eyes get big.

“I just like having them present,” Cyrus said, slumping into his chair. He didn’t add that he’d been reading about them in the library, his mystic martyrs, that he’d taped a great grid of their grayscale printed faces above his bed, half believing it would work like those tapes that promised to teach you Spanish while you slept, that somehow their lived wisdoms would pass into him as he dreamt. Among the Tank Man, Bobby Sands, Falconetti as Joan of Arc, Cyrus had a picture of his parents’ wedding day. His mother, seated in a sleeved white dress, smiling tightly at the camera while his father, in a tacky gray tux, sat grinning next to her holding her hand. Above their heads, a group of attendees held an ornate white sheet. It was the only picture of his mother he had. Next to his mother, his father beamed, bright in a way that made it seem he was radiating the light himself.

Zee went on: “So you could write a poem where Joan of Arc is like, ‘Wow, this fire is so hot’ or whatever. And then a poem where Hussain is like, ‘Wow, sucks that I wouldn’t kneel.’ You know what I mean?”

Cyrus laughed.

“I tried some of that! But see, that’s where it gets corny. What could I possibly say about the martyrdom of Hussain or Joan of Arc or whoever that hasn’t already been said? Or that’s worth saying?”

Sad James asked who Hussain was and Zee quickly explained the trial in the desert, Hussain’s refusing to kneel and being killed for it.

“You know, Hussain’s head is supposedly still buried in Cairo?” Zee said, smiling. “Cairo, which is in which country again?”

Cyrus rolled his eyes at his friend, who was, as Cyrus liked to remind him when he got too greatest-ancient-civilization-on-earth about things, only half Egyptian.

“Damn,” Sad James said. “I would’ve just kneeled and crossed my fingers behind my back. Who am I trying to impress? Later I could call take-backsies. I’d just say I tripped and landed on my knees or something.”

The three friends laughed. Justine, an open mic regular whose Blonde on Blonde–era pea-coat-and-harmonica-rack Bob Dylan act was a mainstay of the open mic, came outside to ask Zee for a cigarette. He obliged her with an American Spirit Yellow, which she lit around the corner as she began speaking into her cell phone.

In moments like these Cyrus still sometimes felt like asking to bum one too—he’d been a pack-and-a-half-a-day smoker before he got sober, and continued his habit even after he’d kicked everything else. “Quit things in the order they’re killing you,” Gabe told him once. After a year clean he turned his attention to cigarettes, which he finally managed to kick completely by tapering: from one and a half packs a day to a pack to half a pack to five cigarettes and so on until he was just smoking a single cigarette every few days and then, none at all. He could probably get away with bumming the occasional cigarette now and again, but in his mind he was saving that for something momentous: his final moments lying in the grass dying from a gunshot wound, or walking in slow motion away from a burning building.

“So what are you thinking then? A novel? Or like…a poetic martyr field guide?” asked Zee.

“I’m really not sure yet. But my whole life I’ve thought about my mom on that flight, how meaningless her death was. Truly literally like, meaningless. Without meaning. The difference between 290 dead and 289. It’s actuarial. Not even tragic, you know? So was she a martyr? There has to be a definition of the word that can accommodate her. That’s what I’m after.”

Sad James and Zee nodded supportively along. They both knew Cyrus well enough to not be flustered by his directness. But Cyrus was, for his part, more than a little surprised by the words as they came out his mouth, how they gave shape to something that had long been formless within him. It was like the language in the air that night was a mold he was pouring around his curiosity. Flour thrown on a ghost.

“Her death is tragic on the human level,” Sad James countered. “That difference was tragic to you, to your dad, to your families.”

“Sure, sure, but that level of tragedy wasn’t legible to the U.S. or to Iran. It’s not legible to empire. Meaningless at the level of empire is what I mean by meaningless. Like my uncle. He’s not even dead, but the Iran-Iraq War fucked him up so bad he doesn’t even leave his house anymore. He thinks he still sees ghosts and soldiers and shit. And he didn’t enlist in the Iranian army because he wanted free college or health insurance or whatever people do here. In Iran there’s no choice. If you’re a man, you’re drafted. If I went back today, I wouldn’t be allowed to leave until I did my military service.”

On the air, the smell of tobacco mixed with Chinese takeout from the spot across the street, spilled beer from the bar next door. In the void between the city’s two miniature skylines—each made up of apartment complexes and university buildings and banks and student housing—a few stars floated around like the last Cheerios in a bowl of black milk. Cyrus was working himself up:

“The version of my uncle he might have been was killed in the war, and for no reason at all. Him personally losing his mind didn’t lose or win the war. It’s meaningless. That’s what fucks me up. My dad drops me off at college and then dies like, barely a year later. I’m not saying all this to say ‘poor me’ or even ‘poor us.’ But none of those deaths meant anything. I don’t think it’s crazy to want mine to. Or to study people whose deaths mattered, you know? People who at least tried to make their deaths mean something.”

“It’s not crazy,” Zee said. “I get it. Or I mean, I don’t get it, I don’t have your experience. But I understand why you want to write this.” He paused.

Sad James asked, “Do you think you’ll put this stuff in the book? Your mom, dad, uncle? Or treat it more like reporting? Like research?”

“Great question,” said Cyrus, shrugging his shoulders. “All I know is I’m fascinated. Like in Iran, there are these schools for the children of men killed in the war, who they call ‘martyrs.’ Those martyr schools are the good schools, the fancy schools, you try to get your kids into them. Kids with healthy parents grow up jealous of orphans, because the children of martyrs get automatic college admission, all this special treatment. I’ve heard of children of martyrs trying to hide it, like they’re ashamed of all the privilege. Like trust fund kids, except instead of trust funds they have dead parents. It’s nuts.”

Sad James shook his head in disbelief, taking it in. Zee was now lighting a cigarette of his own. He started smoking early, with great affect, the sort of teenage smoker who ashes the cigarette when it doesn’t need to be ashed and takes long extravagant inhales. Though he’d figured it out a bit over the years, there was still something thespian about the way he smoked, like watching Elizabeth Taylor smoke onscreen. His slow-burning American Spirit papers heightened this effect.

Sad James offered, “It reminds me of that art exhibit in New York, I think at MoMA, with that artist who’s dying in the museum? Something like that? Did you guys see this?”

“Dying in the museum?” Zee asked.

“Yeah, there was a thing going around Twitter. You probably saw it.”

Cyrus and Zee looked at each other and shrugged. Cyrus had missed the social media train completely, a small point of pride for him now, though his friends still filled him in on all the daily outrages, goofy memes, famous people volleying passive-aggressive bon mots at each other. Sad James pulled out his phone, clicked around for a moment. His cigarette was burning unevenly between his right pointer and middle fingers.

“Ah, here it is. It’s at the Brooklyn Museum, not MoMA.”

He handed the phone over to Cyrus, and Zee bent over Cyrus’s chair to look. Open was a tweet of a flyer with 2.2k likes and 465 retweets. On the left side of the flyer was a woman’s face, a face dusted with the cosmic jaggedness so often found on the dying. She didn’t seem too terribly old in the picture, maybe fifty, though it was hard to tell with the very sick, and her bald head emphasized how tightly her sallow skin was pulled over her skull. Even in the tiny cell phone pic, her eyes looked like deep dry wells—you could almost hear the dryness echoing. On the right side of the flyer, in giant letters: DEATH-SPEAK, a curious construction that could be read either as a command or a modified noun. Beneath it:

“Internationally renowned visual artist Orkideh presents her final installation, DEATH-SPEAK. Visitors will be invited to speak with the artist during the final weeks and days of her life, which she will spend onsite at the museum. No appointments necessary. Opening Jan 2nd.”

“Whoa,” said Cyrus, handing the phone to Zee.

“It seems kind of exactly like what you’re talking about, right, Cyrus?” said Sad James.

“I think so, yeah. Wow. I mean, I don’t know. I think she’s even Iranian.”

“What?” said Zee, reading the phone. Then, catching up with the conversation, “Wait, how do you know that?”

When Cyrus was a boy, his father Ali would drive him on once-yearly trips to Chicago to visit a Persian restaurant called Ali’s Sofreh (“You didn’t know I had a restaurant?” Ali Shams would joke with his son). It was, as far as they knew, the only Persian anything within a reasonable driving radius of Fort Wayne. These trips were a tremendous indulgence for Ali Shams, who viewed even cheap fast food as an extravagance. For Cyrus, they were the source of incredible anticipation—he would fantasize for days in advance about what he’d read on the drive, about what he’d order at the restaurant. Even years after his father died, in some Pavlovian trace, thinking about anything Chicago—the Sears Tower, Navy Pier, Scottie Pippen—still made Cyrus hungry.

Once, during a trip to Ali’s Sofreh when Cyrus was eight, Ali had begun quietly pointing to each server, each restaurant worker.

“Persian,” he whispered to Cyrus about a woman pouring water. “Arab,” he said about a moppy-haired kid bussing a dirty table. “Persian,” he said about the balding man sitting alone at a table with papers and a calculator. “White,” he said about a curly-haired woman talking on the phone behind the bar. Cyrus couldn’t understand how his father could know these things. To him, each of the people Ali’d pointed to looked vaguely like himself—dark-skinned, dark-haired.

“I thought everyone here was like us,” Cyrus said to his father.

“Of course! That’s what they want,” Ali explained. “They want you to think everyone here is Iranian. It makes the restaurant seem authentic.”

Their waitress came to check on the table and Ali asked her for the bill. When she left to retrieve it, he looked at his son.

“What do you think?” he asked.

Cyrus paused for a moment.

“Arab?”

Cyrus’s father shook his head and laughed. The waitress returned with the bill and Ali studied the bill for a moment, then handed her a plastic card.

“Persian,” he whispered to his son.

Cyrus was mystified. Incredulous, he asked, “How do you know?!”

Smiling, Ali said, “It’s easy. We’re just uglier.”

In anyone else’s mouth this might have seemed self-deprecating, cruel even. For a second Cyrus had wondered whether Ali got the English confused, meant it the other way around, that everyone else was uglier than Iranians. But something in his father’s smirk suggested to Cyrus that he knew exactly what he was saying. There was a kind of pride in Ali’s face when he said it, that Iranians were uglier. There was a satisfaction that took Cyrus years to unpack.

That day on the patio of the coffee shop looking at the picture of the dying artist on his friend’s telephone, Cyrus had seen exactly what his father was able to see. What Ali had called “ugliness.” Not scornfully. This artist—Orkideh—had undoubtedly been beautiful, was still beautiful even—her high cheekbones and great wide eyes were undeniably striking. But ugliness, the Iranian ugliness Ali had meant, was earned. Cyrus’s father, who listened almost exclusively to the Rolling Stones even before coming to America, who called the Beatles “a band for girls.” Who owned exactly three pairs of pants: two for work, one for the house. Cyrus’s father, whose arms were perpetually crisscrossed with old and new farm scars, torn raw by the idiot terror of frightened birds. Cyrus’s handsome ugly dead father.

It had taken Cyrus a decade, more, to really be able to identify what Ali had meant by “ugly.” The hardness of a smile line, softness in the folds under an eye. But here on the face of this dying artist, that ugliness was everywhere apparent.

Instead of trying to explain all this to his friends, though, Cyrus said simply, “I’m pretty sure ‘orkideh’ is Farsi for ‘orchid.’ ”

“Wow,” said Zee.

“Whoa, yeah, wow,” added Sad James. “You should write to her about your project. I wonder if there’s a way to email her.” He tapped at his phone for a minute. Justine opened and closed the Naples door behind them, pouring a random prerecorded acoustic ballad out into the patio air.

“You were right!” Sad James reported, poking at his phone. “It says she grew up in Iran and left ‘sometime after the revolution.’ Says she’s got a terminal cancer diagnosis and is refusing radiation. She’s living and sleeping and eating fully in the museum, accepting no treatment or drugs except pain management. Says she will talk to museum guests for four hours a day until she can’t.”

“Honestly, you should go to the exhibit and meet her,” said Zee.

Cyrus snorted. The idea of simply jetting across the country as if driving to the store seemed to him a luxury reserved for Richard Branson, Bill Gates. “Sure, I’ll just fly to New York to catch an art exhibit. Then I’ll fly to Madrid to catch a bullfight. I’ll fly to the Orient to trade spice.”

Sad James laughed, but Zee persisted.

“Seriously, Cyrus, why not? You’re starting on this whole big project around ‘alternative martyrdom’ or whatever, and then there just happens to be a dying Iranian woman saying ‘come talk to me about death’? I’m not a clouds-parting-burning-bush sort of guy. But if anything has ever seemed like a sign, this seems like a sign.”

Cyrus shook his head:

“What world are you living in where you think I’m available to just up and fly to New York on a whim?” he said.

“I mean…,” said Sad James, cocking his head.

Zee leaned over the table, said, “Dude, you’re just treading water here. You have been for years. You work that bizarre job pretending to die or whatever, not even full-time. You graduated years ago, you don’t have a partner. You just mope around not writing, feeling sorry for yourself. You’re the definition of available.”

“Jesus,” Cyrus said.

“Flexible.” Sad James corrected, trying to soften Zee’s language. “You’re currently open to the vicissitudes of fate.”

“You want to be a writer,” Zee went on. “This is what writers do. They follow the story. It’s an inflection point. You can keep being the sad sober guy in Indiana who talks about being a writer, or you can go be one.”

Cyrus studied Zee’s face, which had grown suddenly flinty, dry. His roommate’s tawny skin seemed pulled extra tight, almost quivering against the hard flesh underneath. Cyrus couldn’t deny that he’d been treading water, that he was approaching his thirties with no meaningful achievements to his name save his sobriety, save a useless English degree he’d cheated and manipulated his way to get.

“I guess I do still have my mom’s bounty,” Cyrus offered, finally.

He called the money the U.S. had paid his father for his mother’s death her “bounty.” Even though the U.S. never fully claimed responsibility for shooting her plane out of the sky, in 1996 they eventually gave the families of each victim a check: $300,000 for wage-earning men, $150,000 for women and children (the majority of the dead). Cyrus’s father had never touched this money, instead leaving it in an account to give to Cyrus on his college graduation. Cyrus had used some of it to pay off his college debt, a bit more to pay off various credit cards he’d run up. After that, he’d felt gross using what money was left for anything so banal as simply living. Using blood money, even for good, felt bad. Inescapably. Still, the idea of visiting the artist was growing on him. Sad James and Zee winced a little when he said “bounty.”

“Okay, I guess I could go out for a weekend. It is within the realm of possibility. But I have no idea what I’d say to her.”

“Just ask her why she’s doing what she’s doing,” Zee said. “It sounds like it’s what you’re talking about, like she wants her dying to mean something.”

“Honestly, she might just be in a ton of medical debt,” added Sad James. “One last gig so her family doesn’t inherit a billion dollars of doctor bills.”

“Christ. It’s so fucked up that that could actually be the reason,” said Cyrus.

Sad James nodded, then shook his head. Zee ashed his cigarette dramatically, then said, “Listen, if you end up going to New York, I’ll go with you. We can split the cost of a shitty hotel. I’ll get someone to cover my shifts for a weekend. We could go this weekend. Why wait? It’d actually be rad to get to bop around the city for a minute while you work on your book stuff.”

“Shit, man. I’ll be with you two in spirit,” said Sad James. He worked a merciless corporate billing gig that only grudgingly gave him even the weekends off. “I really think you two should do it, though.”

Inside, the open mic attendees were beginning to stir, staring out through the Naples windows at the friends’ table, wondering when they’d finish smoking and come back inside to resume the evening. Cyrus was not in the habit of spending lavishly, or spending much at all. Between what he made working at the hospital and answering phones a few nights a week at Jade Café, he made enough to eat and pay rent. But this artist, what she was doing, seemed pretty extraordinary. An opportunity. Eerie, even.

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.

“This weekend?” Cyrus asked hesitantly.

“She’s dying, Cyrus,” said Zee. “I don’t think you can wait.”

Cyrus chewed on his bottom lip.

“Fuck. I think I’m gonna do it,” he said, feeling suddenly thrilled.