FRIDAY

Cyrus Shams

BROOKLYN, DAY 1

Orkideh’s words were still orbiting Cyrus’s skull like an invisible halo as he walked away from the Brooklyn Museum into Prospect Park. Earth martyrs, Persian checkboxes. The difference between wanting to not be alive and wanting to die. Cyrus finished his Coke and bent over to tie his shoes. He wore dark blue canvas Vans that required replacing every six months, like clockwork, when the soles wore through. Every six months, he’d order an identical pair from the Vans website, dark blue with gum soles and black laces. He’d walk around in the new ones on wet days to wear them in, phasing out the old holey ones by using them like rich white men used topless convertibles, driving them only on perfectly clear days, only to flaunt their capital.

Cyrus’s holey shoes were flaunting something too: his authenticity, his class antipathy, his allegiance to the proletariat—it was all right there at his feet, waving like two ratty flags. Yes, they were ratty flags made by a billion-dollar shoe company, but there was no ethical consumption under late capitalism and sometimes, Cyrus figured, one had to pick one’s battles. He tried not to think too much about these contradictions.

For two full years, his roommate Zee had been wearing the same pair of forest-green camouflage Crocs every day, everywhere.

“Fashion is a capitalist weapon,” Zee smirked when asked about them, and before long it became impossible to imagine him wearing anything else on his feet. Cyrus’s sneakers seemed to him a quieter political cousin to Zee’s Crocs, and he liked not having to think about what to put on his feet. A martyr wears simple footwear, he thought to himself.

Nearby, a woman was lifting a long blunt to the lips of the copper bust of John F. Kennedy while a friend snapped a picture. Cyrus was trying to be better about noticing these moments, about feeling grateful for the texture and specificity they lent his life.

And you want to end this book about martyrs with yourself, Orkideh had said. Did he? Cyrus wanted to sit on a park bench. He wanted to get something to eat.

Cyrus believed a hyper-focus on occasions for gratitude would make his eventual death more poignant, more valuable. When a sad-sack who hated life killed themselves, what were they really giving up? The life they hated? Far more meaningful, thought Cyrus, to lift yourself out of a life you enjoyed—the tea still warm, the honey still sweet. That was real sacrifice. That meant something.

He considered making this an essential quality in his book, leaving behind a life you cared about. It was one of the things he would have to work hardest on. He had a decent life, didn’t need to work too hard to stay where he was. His rent was cheap, he had friends, there were books he was excited to read. But some days, that all felt so abstract as to become totally meaningless. Cyrus often wept for no reason, bit his thumbs till they bled. Some nights he’d lie awake till morning, frightening sleep away with the desperation of his wanting it.

Cyrus also worried that the whole idea of gratitude was possibly classist, or worse. Did a poor Syrian child, whose living and dying had been indelibly shaped by the murderous whims of evil men, qualify for grace only if she possessed a superhuman ability to look beyond her hardship and notice the beauty of a single flower growing through a pile of rubble? And would the gratitude for that flower be contaminated by the awareness, or ignorance, of the bodies turning to soil beneath it?

And then, if the girl herself was rubbled by an errant mortar shell, her eyes full of tears and aimed in their final living moment at that flower, which would weigh more on the cosmic scales: a tear of gratitude at the great beauty of a flower lifting through ash, or a tear of delirious rage?

It’s possible, he thought, that the experience of gratitude was itself a luxury, a topless convertible driven through a rainless life. Even the platitudes offered after a tragedy—a divorce, a dead pet—seemed built around the expectation that gratitude was a base level to which you returned after passing through some requisite interval of grief: “In time, you’ll remember only the joy.” People really said that, people who, like Cyrus, could reasonably expect that sufficient training of the spirit would reveal a near-infinite supply of gratitudes hidden in every leaf and sound and mortarless sky.

Orkideh’s words: Another death-obsessed Iranian man. The unforgivable vanity of fantasizing about one’s own death. As if continuing to live was a given, inertia that needed to be disrupted inorganically.

Cyrus considered for a moment whether it was fucked up to imagine a dead Syrian child as the foil to his relative fortune, as a prop in his psychic play about the ethics of gratitude. He wanted to ask Orkideh what she thought about this, what she thought about gratitude broadly. So much of his psychic bandwidth was taken up with conflicting thoughts about political prepositions. The morality of almond milk. The ethics of yoga. The politics of sonnets. There was nothing in his life that wasn’t contaminated by what he mostly mindlessly called “late capitalism.” He hated it, like everyone was supposed to. But it was a hate that made nothing happen.

He wanted to be on “the right side of history,” whatever that was. But more than that (he admitted this to himself when he was practicing being rigorously honest), he wanted other people to perceive him as someone who cared about being on the right side of history. It’s hard to imagine an earth martyr who was also a fervent eugenicist, or one who had supported Mussolini. Being on the right side of history seemed a bedrock feature of the sort of people in whom he was interested.

Cyrus remembered Orkideh had been barefoot when he saw her in the museum. That suddenly seemed significant. He leaned over and untied his sneakers before walking three blocks back to the subway station.