CYRUS SHAMS
KEADY UNIVERSITY, JUNE 2012
It had been storming one of those uniquely Indiana summer storms. Merciless, without beginning or end. To Cyrus, then, the storm and all other meteorological phenomena happened directly to him. Against him. Storms existed expressly to piss Cyrus off, snow to make him late to his job answering phones at the all-night Chinese takeout place on campus. The sun came out to burn Cyrus specifically, to make him wince at its white.
That summer, Cyrus was also trying to expand his horizons by dating a Republican.
He was raised Iranian in the American Midwest, amidst 9/11 and the subsequent jingoism and lawn flags and yellow ribbons and the “aren’t you glad to be here” set. Cyrus could see it in their chests when they looked at him. It was like Americans had another organ for it, that hate-fear. It pulsed out of their chests like a second heart.
Once, shortly after 9/11, Cyrus’s middle school math teacher, bald save a bright orange ring of unkempt hair around his ears, hung a poster of George Bush by his blackboard. Later that term, he told Cyrus after class, conspiratorially, that he’d heard a new term for people like him. He whispered it though they were alone in the room. Two words, the first was “sand.” Cyrus’s teacher laughed, as if Cyrus was in on the joke. Cyrus didn’t know what to do so he laughed along with him. He hated himself for that.
Another time, Cyrus’s social studies teacher, a woman just out of college, referred to him mid-class, pointing out how “our troops” were helping Cyrus’s “people over there” to “figure out democracy.” Most of the other students in the room nodded approvingly at the idea, if they registered it at all. So Cyrus did too. He didn’t mention what our troops had done to his mother over there. He hated himself for that, too.
At the intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness was pathological politeness, an immobilizing compulsivity to avoid causing distress in anyone else. Cyrus thought about this a lot. You cooed at their ugly babies, nodded along with their racist bullshit. In Iran it was called taarof, the elaborate and almost entirely unspoken choreography of etiquette that directs every social interaction. The old joke, that two Iranian men could never get on an elevator because they’ll just keep saying “you go,” “no you,” “no no please,” “I insist,” as the doors opened and closed.
Midwestern politeness felt that way too, Cyrus learned, like it was burning cigarette holes in your soul. You bit your tongue, then bit it a little harder. You tried to keep your face still enough to tell yourself you hadn’t been complicit, that at least you weren’t encouraging what was happening around you. To you.
Kathleen was the first Republican he ever dated, the first wealthy person too. She was a business grad student at Keady’s famous Morris School of Management. She came from a rich family in Arizona. Not my-mom-is-a-dentist rich—that was the kind of wealth Cyrus had seen, peripherally, growing up in Fort Wayne, and the kind around which he’d built his lifelong distaste for the moneyed.
Kathleen was oil-rich, charm-school-and-family-stables rich, a new kind of rich that made Cyrus’s moral compass spin all the way through contempt and back around to curiosity. Once, she told him John McCain had come to her college graduation party.
“An old friend of my dad’s,” she’d shrugged.
For a couple months, Cyrus successfully suppressed his distaste for her politics in favor of this new novelty: Kathleen would buy books and leave them sitting in the coffee shop, only quarter-read. She’d tip 100 percent on one bar tab, then nothing on the next. Money meant nothing to her. She’d borrow Cyrus’s jacket, his hoodie, and never return them, not realizing he had no replacements. She knew the name of the guy who flew her father’s helicopter, of her nanny’s kid, which she’d bring up frequently as evidence of her magnanimity. She was Christian but American Christian, the kind that believed Jesus had just needed a bigger gun.
Cyrus loved that she was more ambitious, more driven, more beautiful than he was. When they slept together, she would just kind of lie back and smile a little, like, you’re welcome. That sort of beautiful.
Cyrus also loved, if he was being very rigorously honest, that she picked up every food and bar tab. That she could order delivery twice a day without thinking anything of it. That her groceries came from Whole Foods, not Aldi. The fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice alone was almost worth the cognitive dissonance.
One night, the two drove Kathleen’s BMW from her apartment through a summer storm to the Green Nile, the campus hookah bar. That was where Cyrus met Zee for the first time; he was their server. He introduced himself with his full name, Zbigniew, to which Kathleen immediately asked, “Zbigniew? What is that?”
Zee didn’t hesitate a moment before grinning, saying, “Sounds like a sneeze, doesn’t it? I’m Polish Egyptian, it’s from the Polish part. My friends just call me Zee.”
Cyrus had chewed some Klonopin before leaving the apartment, the little yellow-orange ones that tasted like citrus when you bit into them—Cyrus believed the pharmaceutical companies did it on purpose as a gift to recreational users—and then snorted a bit of Focalin to level out the high. At the Green Nile, he just nodded lazily along as Kathleen ordered the first of many pitchers of “house sangria,” which Zee told Cyrus many months later was just Franzia Chillable Red with chunks of frozen apple in it.
After Kathleen and Cyrus finished their first hookah, Zee offered to make their next one “special.” Cyrus found the whole experience of American hookah bars vaguely off-putting and orientalist, the children of soybean farmers and insurance salesmen sitting around eating stale falafel dipped in Costco hummus, smoking “Electric Raspberry” shisha from hookahs made in Taiwan. But he’d never been one to let his beliefs get in the way of a buzz, and the prospect of free-to-him booze and weed made Cyrus squirm with glee.
“Apologies to Edward Said,” Cyrus said under his breath, thinking himself very clever.
“Huh?” Kathleen asked. Cyrus just shook his head. In Cyrus’s addict calculus, getting to feel morally and intellectually superior to Kathleen, despite her great wealth and beauty, somehow put them on level ground. Each of them fascinated the other.
When Zee brought out the second hookah, he said, “This is pretty intense stuff, so take it slow.”
They did not take it slow. At first Cyrus felt paranoid the smell of weed was overpowering the smell of the shisha—Zee’d recommended “White Gummi Bear” flavor as the one best at masking the scent. Cyrus often got that way on weed, anxious, unable to escape the idea everyone was hyper and negatively focused on the granular details of his person. It was for this reason weed wouldn’t have made his list of top ten favorite highs, which didn’t stop Cyrus from smoking it practically every day, ubiquitous as it was. He drank more, faster, to mellow out his paranoia. The alcohol calmed him a little, and he came to realize none of the other patrons seemed to notice the weed smell, or at least none of them seemed to care. As the rain outside relaxed to a drizzle, the night accelerated toward its natural conclusion.
Kathleen talked about small grievances with her friends, her classmates. She complained about a professor who never answered his emails, a friend who was cheating on her boyfriend and expected her to support it. Cyrus tried hard to focus on her eyes, which were the kind of blue many blond people’s eyes are. So common you forget how pretty they are. Like pigeons. At one point, she exclaimed, “I feel so outnumbered in this place!” She laughed, taking a strong sip of her sangria, their third or fourth pitcher.
Cyrus studied her face. Those blue blue eyes. Straight blond hair down past her shoulders. Her houndstooth blazer was spinning a little, but so was the wallpaper. She was gorgeous in that aggressively American way, the kind of woman you might see in an ad for cold medicine. She’d taken an acting class in LA with James Franco once, Cyrus remembered her saying. She said he’d tried to sleep with her.
“Outnumbered?” Cyrus asked, trying to get his eyes to focus on hers.
Green Nile’s décor was vaguely pan–Middle Eastern: framed Arabic calligraphy, a photograph of a camel, a pyramid, a river, a rug. The checkout counter had a Chinese lucky cat, its arm waving up and down through the fog of hookah smoke.
“C’mon. Look at this place. You and the server and the music and walls. It’s like Baghdad, Indiana!”
Cyrus hadn’t noticed the music till she pointed it out. That’s how nondescript it was—strangely quiet, some sort of poppy sitar affair, maybe Ravi Shankar. Cyrus wondered what about him made Kathleen feel like he’d think “Baghdad, Indiana” was funny. His unaccented English? The sex they had? His perpetually bitten tongue, the way he rarely challenged her regressive political takes? All these things sat outside Kathleen’s experience of them-ness, so to her Cyrus was an us.
Cyrus wondered about how much of his living he owed to other people’s assumptions of his us-ness. The middle school teacher who surreptitiously offered him a racial slur, like a juicy orange they might peel together and share. Even his name could pass as white. Cyrus Shams. Weird, probably ethnic, but kind of inscrutably so. Cyrus felt like Blade, the Wesley Snipes hero, half human, half vampire, with all the superpowers of each species, super strong but also capable of walking around in sunlight. Like Blade, Cyrus was a day-walker, American when it suited him and Iranian when it didn’t. Bullets bounced off his chest! His teeth could cut through metal! He was really, really stoned.
“Let’s get you out of Baghdad,” Cyrus said, trying for a moment to figure out a shock-and-awe joke, failing, then feeling grateful to have failed. He was too high to feel disappointed in himself. Kathleen smiled and flagged Zee. She handed him her credit card, dull black metal.
“How are you guys feeling?” Zee asked when he brought it back.
“Pretty. Fucking. Good!” She said each word like a teenager overreading a poem. “I think we might’ve made the rain stop.” Outside it was still a bit wet, but Kathleen was right, the full fury of the storm had abated.
Zee smiled and said something Cyrus couldn’t make out, but it made Kathleen laugh so Cyrus laughed too. Zee shot him a look, a fraction of a fraction of a glance that Cyrus took to mean “You sure about her?” but might have meant “You aren’t driving, are you?” Cyrus shrugged in the direction of nobody and carefully stood up out of his seat, trying not to wobble.
The rain had completely stopped when they got to Kathleen’s car, leaves around them dropping onto sidewalks and puddles rippling in the wind. Kathleen drove the two of them up Old 233, streetlights breathing heavy the whole way. At her apartment Cyrus tucked Kathleen in and told her he was going for a walk. She was too sleepy to protest.
“Be careful” was all she said, rolling over.
Cyrus poured himself a plastic cup of fancy grapefruit juice and took it with him out into the night.
Walking back in the general direction of campus, he was listening to Sonic Youth’s “Sister,” on his iPod from its first track. Coming down from wine drunk and weed high, in that gummy interstitial state of psychic congestion and heightened emotional arousal, Cyrus began suddenly crying at Kim and Thurston’s harmony singing:
“It feels like a wish coming true, it feels like an angel dreaming of you…”
Ugly crying. Bawling, really, as he walked. Cyrus felt in that moment like he was wearing a crown. Sonic Youth, the streetlights, the smell of ozone after rain—it was all for him. His grapefruit juice had transubstantiated into ambrosia. It tasted so good it made him dizzy. Cyrus felt new. Sinless. Invincible.
He would think about this a lot in the years to come. Before addiction felt bad, it felt really, really good. Of course it did. Magic. Like you were close enough to God to bop him with an eyelash.
“You’ve got a magic wheel in your memory. I’m wasted in time…”
If he’d had a block of marble he could’ve carved the David. If he’d had a sword he could have sliced through a car. If he’d had a mother she’d be delirious with pride, holding him against her chest, wiping away his tears.
After some time—fifteen minutes, an hour—Cyrus found himself across the river, walking toward the Green Nile. Lucky’s, his go-to bar, was a block away. He saw a couple of regulars in front of its neon Old Style sign smoking cigarettes. Usually he’d have joined them, bumming a cigarette then going inside to order a $5 pitcher of PBR for himself. But something was calling Cyrus back to the Green Nile. When he walked in, the Indian guys were still at their table, working on a new hookah.
“Whoa, hey,” Zee said, on seeing him. “You lost your girlfriend.”
Cyrus considered lying, saying he’d forgotten his umbrella. On the one hand, it would sound nobler than “I put my girlfriend to bed so I could come back here and keep drinking.” On the other hand, Cyrus knew his desire to return to drink would be laid bare no matter what he said, the phantom umbrella obvious as any other smoking gun.
“She’s back home,” Cyrus responded. “Finished her tour of duty.” He was proud of this joke, even if Zee wasn’t in on it. It made him feel like he’d regained a shred of the dignity he’d lost earlier. “Did I miss last call?”
Zee walked back behind the bar. “You just made it. What do you want?”
“What’s the cheapest way to drink here?” Cyrus had long grown past feeling shame at asking this question.
Zee pulled two bottles of High Life from a mini fridge:
“You let me buy you one of these.”
Zee was compact, had light stubble that blended into his hairline, which he shaved close to the skin every couple of days. His skin was coppery and his stubble black; his mother’s Egyptian genes dominated his Polish father’s. His physical compression felt anything but slight—not intrinsically small like a mouse, but coiled, gathered into himself, like a cat preparing to leap.
Before long, the Indian guys were closing their tabs and heading out into the night. Zee said goodnight to each of them by name. He went to the iPod plugged into the restaurant speakers and switched it from the sitar raga that had been playing almost inaudibly to a custom playlist of his own that opened with EPMD’s “Strictly Business.” Turning the volume way up, Zee began wiping down tables as Cyrus sat at the bar.
“Can I help with anything?” he asked. Cyrus liked having something to do with his body.
Zee just laughed and said, “Nah, I’m almost done.”
Zee made banter about this or that. He pointed out the samples used in the song—Eric Clapton, Kool and the Gang. He continued closing and talked about flying planes, an aeronautics course he was taking at Keady for fun—“you lose eight ounces of water for every hour you’re in the air, but you can’t really drink either because there’s nowhere to pee”—his father’s half-hearted conversion to Islam—“we were as Muslim as a Catholic family that only goes to church on Christmas and Easter”—and the drums on Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun—“it’s this boom tik boom boom thing, instead of boom boom tik boom.” Cyrus didn’t follow most of it, but was content to nurse his High Life, vaguely enthused by Zee’s scattershot enthusiasms. After telling a somewhat confusing narrative about busting his kick drum at a jazz ensemble gig, Zee started counting tables left:
“Just have one, two, three, four, five more, and then I’m done,” he said. When he counted them, he used his fingers—one on his pointer, two on his middle finger, three on his ring, four on his pinky, and then he looped back around to count off five on his pointer again. Cyrus thought it enchanting and said so—
“You don’t count on your thumb?”
Zee looked at him, then back at his hand, as if suddenly remembering it was there.
“Oh,” he said, not self-consciously but as if remembering suddenly the two were strangers. “When I was a kid, I was a really late talker. So my mom taught me to count on my fingers like: one, two, three, four, and then my thumb was for ‘many.’ She’d ask me how many French fries or crayons I wanted, and I’d just hold out my thumb to say ‘lots!’ It wasn’t for counting like the other fingers. I’ve never really thought about it much.”
“Whoa,” Cyrus said, then suddenly felt dumb for saying it. He tried to rally by adding something quasi-profound: “Infinity on the thumb of your hand, eternity in an hour…” then felt even more ridiculous.
But Zee just laughed, said, “Hah, I guess! I don’t really know. What do you do, Cyrus?”
Cyrus felt glad for the opportunity to jet past his nonsense.
“I’m still a student,” he said. “A super-senior going on…I don’t know. I’ve been here awhile. English major. Most nights I answer phones and take delivery orders at Jade Café.”
“I don’t mean what do you do for school or money,” Zee said. “I’m asking what do you do. What do you love?”
Zee had just finished wiping down a table, and now was sitting down marking up receipts. Over the speakers, Emmylou Harris sang about popping the heads off dandelions.
“I mean, I write. I write poems, but I haven’t published anything.”
Zee looked up from his receipts, eyes wide: “You’re a poet!”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Cyrus answered, tipping his High Life bottle into his mouth before realizing it was already empty. Zee smiled.
“Well, do you write poems?”
“Yeah.”
“Then you get to call yourself a poet.” Zee said the final word, “poet,” smugly, like a lawyer closing an argument. “I’ve never cut a record,” he said, “but I have no trouble calling myself a drummer.”
Cyrus wanted to object, point out something vague and political about the responsibility of calling oneself a poet, but Zee’s confidence was catching, and besides, Cyrus was feeling a little drunk again. He did write a lot. And certainly he read as much poetry as anyone he knew, indiscriminately pulling handfuls of books off the 811.5 section of his library to pore over at home. In fact, that very afternoon he’d skipped a quiz over “Hero and Leander” in his Elizabethan drama class because he’d been so immersed in reading Jean Valentine: “I came to you, Lord, because of the fucking reticence of the world.”
Zee walked behind the bar, put the receipts inside the register. Looking at Cyrus, he said: “I’ve got some rum back at my place just up Chauncey. You wanna listen to Mama’s Gun? My partner is at his parents’ in Chicago, so we can turn it way up.”
It was still only a little after two in the morning and Cyrus was ideologically opposed to, and constitutionally incapable of, turning down free alcohol.
“Cool, yeah,” he said.
They gathered themselves and walked the few blocks to Zee’s apartment, a fourth-floor studio overlooking River Road, with two old mountain bikes in front of the kitchen sink. Zee pulled a half-full fifth of Captain Morgan from his freezer and plugged his iPod into a set of cheap computer speakers. They sat on a ratty old couch that looked like it had been upholstered with burlap.
Passing the bottle back and forth, talking a little, Zee would occasionally illuminate an important musical or biographical detail—this is a Stevie Wonder sample, this line is about her breakup with Andre 3000. Halfway into “My Life,” Cyrus asked to pause the album so they could go outside and smoke. It was windy, and Zee bent over holding his unlit cigarette between his lips to light it within the shield of his coat. Cyrus thought that was very cool. Mostly though, the two drank and listened in silence. Some point before “Green Eyes,” Cyrus passed out; when he woke up again it was morning. The bottle was nearly empty on the couch between him and Zee, and their shoulders were just barely touching.