FRIDAY

Cyrus Shams and Orkideh

BROOKLYN MUSEUM, DAY 1

“I’ve been thinking about dying,” Cyrus Shams said to the artist as he settled into the black chair across from her. The words came out fast, surprising him a little. “Dying soon. Or I guess, killing myself soon, but that sounds so mechanical.” He worked a pinch of his beard between his thumb and forefinger. “I’ve been practicing at it. I have this job…dying.” It had sounded much neater in his head.

The artist made a quick scratch in a little black notebook sitting on the table between them, set it back down. Then she took a slow, deliberate sip from a white mug of water before placing it back at her feet.

“What are you waiting for?” she asked slowly. Her voice was tissue-thin.

Cyrus paused.

“That’s the thing, I don’t really know. For it to mean something? I’ve been working this job and studying all these people who died 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.”

The artist lifted her eyes to Cyrus, curling the edges of her lips into a smile. She watched him remember in one beat, two, that she was the one literally dying, terminal cancer, in that moment.

“Er, I don’t mean ‘to waste,’ ” he corrected quickly. “Or ‘good.’ I mean, death is death. It’s all a waste and none of it’s good. Immortal soul sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal, whatever. But you’re not wasting your dying, you know? You’re here doing this thing, and so your dying actually means something.”

When he said “this,” Cyrus lifted an arm to gesture around the dark gallery, waving his hand in the air like a dice player shaking before a big roll. He was speaking too quickly, betraying his anxiety, his anticipation of this moment across the country, across days of logistics. His right knee was bouncing manically.

The artist snorted a little laugh, then coughed, gently.

“Let’s slow down,” she said, patting the air with her open palms. “I’m Orkideh. What’s your name?”

Sitting on a simple black metal folding chair, just a thin black pillow between her and the seat, Orkideh looked a little like a sculpture she herself might have made earlier in her career. The single standing lamp in the corner of the gallery room cast a hard shadow against the wall behind her, where the soft round shape of her hairless skull arced over the narrowing angles of her jaw and neck like a divining crystal dangling from an invisible string.

Behind her, the eggshell wall of the Brooklyn Museum gallery had the words DEATH-SPEAK in massive black Helvetica. There was a description of the exhibition beneath it announcing the artist, known simply as Orkideh, was dying of a terminal cancer, and had two months ago stopped all treatment. She would spend her final days here in the museum, talking to whoever came in about whatever they wanted to talk about. Guests were encouraged to ask about what dying felt like, or simply sit quietly with the artist, who today was dressed in a loose black sweater, accenting a crisp pair of men’s slacks, navy with white pinstripes. Orkideh had cuffed the legs up above her ankles, highlighting her blue and skeletal bare feet.

Orkideh had talked about this in the past—some interview long ago—how she saw a private nobility about feet, the way, like the body’s most intimate parts, they mostly stayed hidden from the world. But unlike those tucked away bits, she’d said, feet were constantly performing thankless and often demeaning work while mostly the other parts drowsed, swaddled in nylon or cotton or lace. Even wearing something open like sandals or heels, the soles of one’s feet were concealed, secretly pressing themselves into and pushing back against the world, as if to halt its ever-encroaching advance.

“Cyrus,” he said.

“Cyrus!” said Orkideh, smiling. “Such a princely name!” She said “princely” with a thick Persian accent and an extra syllable, “PREEN-seh-LEE. “What’s your last name?” she asked.

He told her. She paused, studying Cyrus’s face. He imagined what she must be seeing when she looked at him: his facial hair like makeup poorly applied, dark beard short but not trimmed, and thicker in certain areas—his mustache, his chin—than others. He didn’t look old, exactly, but his face seemed to be older than the rest of his body, its gaunt eye sockets and the buggy purses beneath them amplifying the roundness of his eyeballs, giving him an uncanny urgency. He had deep laugh lines that swallowed his face when he smiled, and when he sat quietly, they drew the eye down from his Persian nose—“noble,” he often called it, the only part of his face he liked—and into his mess of patchy beard.

“Cyrus Shams,” Orkideh said slowly, as if laying the sound like a sheet over his face. She cocked her head to the side. “That’s a beautiful name. And how old are you, Koroosh?”

“Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine in a month,” he replied, feeling suddenly self-conscious. “And you?”

Orkideh sucked her teeth. She squinted a little, opened her mouth to say something, then closed it. Finally, she answered:

“I’m fifty-four.” She studied his face. “And you are Iranian, yes?”

“Yeah. Born in Tehran but came to America when I was a baby.”

If Orkideh had been drawing Cyrus, the first thing she’d have noted would have been his large wet eyes. Eyebrows resting in a semi-perpetual furrow, like he was always a little worried. Wrinkly tan T-shirt with a pocket over the left breast. Dark black curls. Thin gray denim pants, well worn. Dirty blue canvas sneakers. He was skinny in a scrawny way, not like a runner but like a mathematician who forgets to eat. She scratched the back of her bald head. Somewhere in the next room a woman sneezed.

“Do you worry,” Orkideh began, after another long pause, “about becoming a cliché?”

“How do you mean?”

“Another death-obsessed Iranian man?”

Cyrus deflated, slumping in his chair and letting out a soft sigh.

“See, that’s the thing. I didn’t even know about all that cult-of-the-martyr stuff until relatively recently. Families picnicking at cemeteries of the war dead, the state hiring poets to read at their graves. That wasn’t me.”

“But you want to die. And you want for that death to be glorious. Like all Iranian men.”

“I mean, yeah, but doesn’t everyone want that in the end? For their deaths to matter? Or shouldn’t they?”

Orkideh lifted an eyebrow, leaned in.

“So you grew up insulated from death?”

“Well, that’s not exactly true either. But it wasn’t a Persian thing. I grew up eating Hot Pockets and watching Michael Jordan, not thinking about Hussain or Ashura or the fucking Iran-Iraq War. My dad wouldn’t even let me speak Farsi in the house.”

“No?”

“He thought it’d slow down my English learning, or confuse me as a kid. He wanted me to be American. He’d actually check out these massive SAT preparation books from the library. He’d teach himself all the vocabulary words in the back, these ridiculous words nobody actually uses. He’d learn them and then start peppering them into his vocabulary when he spoke to me. The apartment wasn’t messy, it was squalid. I didn’t count, I enumerated. I was the kid in first grade who still couldn’t tie my own shoes but would say things like ‘I’m ambiguous’ about whether I wanted peanut butter or cheese crackers.”

Orkideh smiled. Behind Cyrus, a chic German tourist couple had come in, weak-jawed men, one wearing dark round sunglasses even in the dark exhibit room. They stood back, whispering and smiling at each other.

“My point,” Cyrus continued, “is that I come to it honestly. The martyr stuff.”

“Martyrs!” Orkideh said. “My god, now you want to be a martyr?”

Cyrus ignored this.

“It’s not an Islam thing. It wasn’t martyrs in textbooks or dead soldiers on mosque walls or a brass key to heaven around my neck or anything like that. But there’s no escaping it. The Iranian cult of the martyr stuff. If I died trying to kill a genocidal dictator tomorrow, the news wouldn’t say a leftist American made a measured and principled sacrifice for the good of his species. The news would say an Iranian terrorist attempted a state assassination.”

Orkideh chuckled.

“Are you trying to kill a genocidal dictator?”

The German tourists shifted uncomfortably. Cyrus sighed again.

“Of course not. I wish I were that brave. But no. I just want to write an epic. A book. Something about secular, pacifist martyrs. People who gave their lives to something larger than themselves. No swords in their hands.”

“Oh my God, so you’re a poet too! All the Persian checkboxes.”

Both of Cyrus’s knees were bouncing now, syncopating each other’s fever dance. A thin layer of sweat formed on his brow.

“I didn’t say it would be poetry! I don’t know what it’s going to turn into. So far, I’m just typing. Really, I’m serious. I think it’s the book I was born to write.”

“And you want to end this book about martyrs with yourself.”

Cyrus winced. He had thought of this, reading about Malcolm X, the Tiananmen Tank Man, and Hypatia of Alexandria. He’d stared at picture after picture of Bhagat Singh, the Souliot Women, and Emily Wilding Davison. Cyrus felt ready to join them, to enter the ranks of the honorable dead. He even felt ready to carry himself to that end. Most of the time. He was ready, then he wasn’t. Like one of those perpetual motion swinging ball cradles, his desire to die kept striking back equal and opposite against his desire to make his dying dramatic, to make it count. Was it ego? Was it fear of being forgotten?

“I don’t know yet. I think elegizing myself in advance would probably void my right to be considered a martyr. Secular or otherwise. Right? But I haven’t written the book yet, so I don’t really know all the rules.”

“The rules! You’re talking about people who die for other people. Not dying for glory or an impressable God. Not the promise of a sunny afterlife for themselves. You’re talking about earth martyrs.”

Cyrus’s eyes widened.

“Earth martyrs—that’s good.”

Somewhere in the next room over a camera flashed. A docent’s voice loudly scolded the photographer. The two German men stood motionless.

“Why are you here, Cyrus Shams?”

He was sweating all over now, in his armpits and the circle around his belly button. He hadn’t expected to find himself so nervous.

“Well, I’d like to write about you. For the book. You…” He hesitated. “You dying here, like this.”

Orkideh pulled a handkerchief from her pants pocket and coughed into it. Cyrus looked at her eyes, which had begun to glaze dully, white clouds over brown moons. He had expected either amused tolerance or stormy rebuke, but sensed neither. The artist just sat there staring at him for ten seconds, fifteen, thirty, her expression seemingly larger than what was visible, like it continued somewhere else beyond her face. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity but was likely only a minute, she reached her hand across the table.

“It has been my incredible luck to meet you, Cyrus.”

He met her hand, almost weightless, with his own.

“Erm. Thank you. But—”

“Come see me again tomorrow, if we’re both still here.”

“I’m actually just in town for a couple days and I was hoping—”

Orkideh smiled toward the German couple, tilted her head to gesture for them to come sit. Cyrus stood up, gathering himself. The Germans avoided eye contact with him, the one without sunglasses sliding slowly into the seat. Cyrus began to walk out of the room confused, replaying in his head what had just happened. The Germans were talking about a taxi driver they’d had once in New York, who told them about a time he’d driven Robert De Niro to the airport. They said the punch line together in unison: Taxi Driver taxi driver!

Cyrus quickly made his way through the museum and out its front doors. An old man sat shirtless on the great steps. Yellow and white carts sold hot dogs, halal meats, soft-serve ice cream. Seeing them, Cyrus suddenly felt desperately thirsty and bought a Coke from the woman at the halal meat cart. He stood nearby gulping down the chemical sweet, trying to calm himself. Earth martyr, he thought.

This idea for the book, for his own dying—going into the museum he’d had a grasp of its shape, why it mattered. It was a tidy, gallant idea about leaving life for something larger than mere living. Becoming an earth martyr. It made sense, and then suddenly it didn’t. It held a shape and then suddenly it didn’t. Like boiling water poured into a cup then poured over his head. He felt scorched, confused, suddenly alive.