SATURDAY
Cyrus Shams and Orkideh
BROOKLYN, DAY 2
Cyrus woke up in his Brooklyn hotel with Zee’s thumb in his mouth. They’d split the cost of a single bed single room for a weekend, which made it surprisingly affordable. The hotel they’d found was even one of those hip Brooklyn-y places with loud music and a live DJ in the lobby at night. The mini bar boasted two different kinds of mezcal, and a “feminist icons” tarot deck with a picture of Gloria Steinem as the Queen of Cups on the box’s outside.
Cyrus had been a late-in-life thumbsucker. When he was thirteen, his father became determined to fix the problem once and for all. He began making Cyrus soak his thumbnails in hot pepper juice nightly after dinner. For weeks, Cyrus would rise in the middle of the dark, his thumb in his mouth, his lips and tongue on fire. Nothing could shrink the pain. It took ages for his sleeping self to finally reject his thumbs as poison. Later in his life, almost as if out of protest, Cyrus’s subconscious began enlisting any bedmate’s thumb as proxy for his own, and Zee’s was the most common surrogate.
The two had begun rooming together shortly after meeting, and sharing each other’s beds not long after that. When they’d sleep together, it mostly wasn’t sexual. In one of the very few occasions over the years when they’d spoken about it, Cyrus told Zee it was like that line from Moby-Dick.
“The bit about putting up with any half-decent man’s blanket?” Zee’d asked.
Cyrus had been thinking about a different line, about it being better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian. He thought of himself as the sober cannibal, and Americans broadly as drunk Christians. But he just laughed and said: “Yeah, that one. You do have very nice blankets.”
Cyrus had gotten to know Zee’s thumbs well. They were long on Zee’s hand, but still considerably shorter than Cyrus’s. At six-foot-three, Cyrus was nearly a foot taller than his roommate, but more often than not Zee still ended up as big spoon when they cuddled. Zee’s thumbs were like miniatures of Zee himself, compact but muscular, sturdy and strong. They could have belonged to a masseuse or a sculptor, a seamstress or a carpenter.
The two rarely kissed, and if they did it was almost never on the lips. Mostly they held each other, played against each other’s skin and backs and fingers. Mostly they slept.
Sometimes Cyrus would turn to face Zee and reach his hand down his shorts, or Zee would reach around Cyrus and softly scratch his fingers through his pubic hair into his crotch, and they’d finish the other off like that, eyes closed and breathing heavy. Or sometimes, facing each other, they would touch themselves, using their off-hands to trace the other’s nipples, Adam’s apple, lips.
Usually though, they just held each other and slept. It was simple that way. Just two half-decent men sharing a blanket.
When Cyrus or Zee was dating someone, they’d introduce their roommate as their best friend. When they were both partnered, they’d go out on double dates, play loud music in their respective bedrooms to cover the sounds of their sex. Cyrus never told his partners about sleeping with Zee, and Zee never told any of his boyfriends either.
It wasn’t out of secrecy or shame—Zee was openly and happily gay, and Cyrus just ended up with people, their gender rarely figuring significantly into his interest. They found it impossible to describe their relationship to others without over- or underselling the kind of intimacy they shared. So they didn’t try.
That morning in their too-hip Greenpoint hotel, Cyrus took Zee’s thumb out of his mouth and set it gently on the bed, slipping out of the bed and into the shower. Zee turned over in his sleep, grunted a grunt that meant something along the lines of “Goodbye be quiet have a good day shh.”
Cyrus emerged from the shower, quickly put on clean clothes, trying hard not to think too hard about his choices, settling on the same pants he’d worn the day before and a clean black T-shirt. Glancing back once, quickly, at Zee, who was still fast asleep, Cyrus stepped out the door.
Cyrus arrived at the Brooklyn Museum around one, much later than he’d intended, after taking the train in the wrong direction all the way uptown and then finding himself hopelessly lost. The maps app in his phone was no help. He’d never been to New York—embarrassing to admit as a writer approaching thirty—and he was trying desperately not to look lost. Unfortunately, this just disoriented him more. He’d heard that only tourists look upwards in the city, native New Yorkers stared straight ahead, and he kept catching himself unconsciously gazing up at the hulking steel. It was impossible to imagine that humans like him had erected such alps. This awe made him feel good, still permeable to wonder, but also shamefully provincial. Country mouse.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity of half-lost wandering and stepping onto and off of trains to confirm he was indeed headed back to Brooklyn, he managed to find the museum again. Dumb luck, that it’d been so effortless the day before. On entering, he beelined straight for the Death-Speak gallery, which he was surprised to find completely full, a long curling line of people waiting to talk to Orkideh. Cyrus spotted the same docent from the day before—thick septum ring, feather earring—sitting near the doorway of the gallery, looking at his phone.
“What’s going on today?” Cyrus asked him.
“Hm?” grunted the docent.
“Why such a long line?”
The docent shrugged:
“Weekend? It always gets like this on Saturdays,” then looked back down at his phone.
Cyrus took his place in line behind a father and his young daughter each dressed in athletic sweats. There was a not insignificant part of Cyrus’s mind that resented everyone else waiting in the gallery. Interlopers, he couldn’t help but feel. Vulgar looky-loos here to gawk at the dying woman, the “peanut-crunching crowd” shoving in to see her suffering. That Cyrus was here on a mission—and possibly, or maybe even hopefully, to plan his own death—exempted him from this gross voyeurism, he thought, though even as the idea was forming in his mind he wasn’t sure he actually believed it.
At her table, Orkideh was talking with a muscley white guy with a black-and-white U.S. flag on his shirt. The man had a stump for a right arm and was speaking passionately, gesturing wildly, while the artist smiled in what seemed like tolerant bemusement.
Cyrus checked his phone. Several messages from Zee’s day: a picture of a Daniel Johnston record with a line drawing of a woman’s bust on the cover. A discarded paperback of Dante’s Purgatorio abandoned fanned open in a sidewalk puddle. A gauzy poster in some nondescript store featuring Mick Jagger and Klaus Kinski in a summery European bell tower, which Zee had sent with the message, “do we need this?” Cyrus texted him back, “We ABSOLUTELY need it.” Zee responded with three thumbs-up emojis.
The line moved a little. Cyrus checked his other messages. A text from a woman with whom Cyrus used to work asking if he was around to cat-sit. A link from Sad James to a YouTube video of an old The Locust show. And a text from his sponsor Gabe, the first since their fight. “Still sober?” Gabe had written. “Yep.” Cyrus typed flatly, reflexively. Looking at it, Cyrus decided the terminal period made his text look overly harsh. After a few seconds, he added a “You?”
Another notification popped up from his bank app telling him he’d already spent 411 percent more this month than the previous. Cyrus closed it quickly and put his phone away. He focused on taking in the gallery and its attendees. One by one people sat in front of the artist—a bald man with a bushy sailor’s beard, a teenager in a skullcap. To Cyrus, Orkideh looked half engaged, or perhaps just exhausted. She was letting her interlocutors do most of the talking. There was a flash of a second when she looked up from the sailor-beard man and caught a glimpse of Cyrus standing in line. He smiled at her, and she smiled across her whole face—she had little dimples above her eyebrows when she smiled this way—nodding happily to Cyrus just slightly before returning her attention to the man in front of her, who checked behind his shoulder, confused.
Finally, after three more people sat in the chair and got up, it was Cyrus’s turn. As he was sliding into the chair, before he could even say hello, Orkideh said, “Cyrus Shams! You came back!”
“Of course I did,” he said. “I’m here in the city to talk to you!” He said this, then considered it might perhaps feel like a burden to the artist, like he was pressuring her to be sufficiently brilliant as to make his trip worthwhile. He added, “I mean, I’m doing other things too. Walking around, watching, eating and writing. But I just find what you’re doing here so incredible.”
Orkideh rolled her eyes a bit, waved Cyrus’s words away with her left hand. Her fingers were long, skeletal, her fingernails chewed to nibs.
“When I first came to New York City, that’s all I did too,” Orkideh said, shifting the subject. “Wander, watch, wander, watch. It’s so much like Tehran, really. Here and there. Poor people putting out blankets on the street, selling picture frames and movies and wristwatches. Right by them, in Central Park, on Park-e Shahanshahi, rich people have their servants, their nannies, spread blankets over grass so they can eat fruit with their babies, so they can sleep in the sun.”
“I’ve never been to Iran,” said Cyrus, embarrassed. He longed to be able to nod knowingly along with the artist’s references.
“No?”
“I mean, not since I was a baby.”
“You’re not missing much.” Orkideh smiled. “People are people, everywhere. Grass is grass, blankets are blankets. Countries are countries.”
“You don’t miss it?” Cyrus asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. I miss places, foods. Fresh noon barbari, real mangoes. That kind of thing.”
“You’ve made so much of your being here.”
Orkideh rolled her eyes again.
“Really,” Cyrus continued, “I’ve never heard of anyone doing anything like this. I mean…with their final days or whatever. It’s so exactly what I’ve been wanting to write about, how to make a death useful. Who knows how many of these people”—he gestured to the line behind him—“needed to talk to you. How many lives will be changed—it’s heroic, literally it’s—”
“Okay, Cyrus,” Orkideh said firmly. “Now you’ve said this part, now it can be behind us. Can we just be friends now? And talk like regular people?”
Cyrus paused for a second. He felt a flash of familiar shame—his whole life had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much. He realized he was perhaps doing what Sad James had once called The Thing, the overliking thing, obsessing over something in a way that others felt to be smothering.
As if sensing Cyrus’s fluster, Orkideh added, “Cyrus, it is lovely to hear this feels meaningful to you. But I know myself too well to allow anyone to sit across from me and call me heroic. What, because I have cancer and a couple metal chairs in some museum?” She laughed, and Cyrus smiled a little. “Besides,” she whispered conspiratorially, “I’m too fucking high on these pain meds. When you’re dying they give you the really good stuff.”
She laughed and so did Cyrus.
“That’s hilarious,” he said, suppressing the part of his brain that immediately wanted to ask what pain meds she was on specifically, opiates almost certainly, maybe even fentanyl. How many milligrams, though? A patch? This was such an evergreen wildness, to Cyrus, how strong his addict reflexes remained, in spite of his sobriety. In the back of your brain, your addiction is doing push-ups, getting stronger, just waiting for you to slip up, an old-timer once told him. Cyrus shifted the conversation, saying, “I’ve been thinking about our conversation, a lot. I don’t know how much you remember…”
“Hah, Cyrus, I remember it perfectly. Most of these people are not Iranian boys bent on martyrdom.” She chuckled. “You’re a very strange one. I’m afraid you’ve added us both to all the CIA lists!”
Cyrus smiled. “I honestly actually do worry about that, no joke. Being a young Iranian man making a book about martyrdom, going around talking to people about becoming a martyr. It’s not inert, you know?”
The line behind Cyrus nearly filled the entire room. Already, their conversation had lasted longer than some that had preceded it. Cyrus went on: “W. E. B. Du Bois, the American sociologist, do you know his work?”
“I don’t,” said Orkideh. “Tell me about it.”
“I’m not an expert. I just read a bunch of his stuff in school. He wrote about civil rights, racism. And I remember he had this idea of double-consciousness, how Black people in America always have to be mindful of how racist white people see them. And how that applies to a lot of marginalized people, always having to see themselves through the eyes of the folks who hate them. And being an Iranian vaguely Muslim man in a country that hates those things, each of those things, and then also writing about martyrdom, obsessing honestly over what that word might mean for me in my own life or in my own death…It’s just hard not to think about, like, ‘what would a person who hates me think about this.’ ”
“Why are you worried about what people who hate you think about your art?”
“Well, because the people who hate me also own all the guns and all the prisons.” Cyrus laughed.
“Hah. Ah, yes, there is that,” Orkideh said.
“Sometimes I just imagine the Fox News headlines, ‘Iranian Muslim’s Death Cult Manifesto Seized in Indiana’ or whatever.”
“It is probably not a good practice to start imagining headlines about your art before you even make it, Cyrus jaan.”
“But see,” Cyrus smiled, “that’s a whole part of it too. How much of this whole thing is my ego? How much is it me wanting to matter more than other people? In life or in death?”
“I was thinking last night, your project reminds me of all the great Persian mirror art,” Orkideh said. “Do you know much about that?”
“Nothing at all. Can you tell me about it?” Cyrus said. He felt he might explode with all the things he wanted to say to her, but he was also desperate for Orkideh to teach him, to sit at her feet and learn. Selfishly, he wanted to stay in the chair all day, all week, not let the line move. He wanted Orkideh all to himself.
“Some centuries ago all these Safavid explorers from Isfahan go to Europe—France, Italy, Belgium—and they see all these gargantuan mirrors all over. Ornate, massive mirrors everywhere in the palaces, in the great halls. Building-sized mirrors. They come back and they tell the shah about them and of course he wants a bunch for himself. So he tells his explorers, his diplomats, to go back to Europe and bring him mirrors, giant mirrors, buy them for any price. And so they do, but of course as they bring these massive mirrors back across the world, they shatter, they fracture into a billion little mirror pieces. Instead of great panes of mirror, the shah’s architects in Isfahan had all this massively expensive broken mirror glass to work with. And so they begin making these incredible mosaics, shrines, prayer niches.”
“Whoa.”
“I think about this a lot, Cyrus. These centuries of Persians trying to copy the European vanity, really their self-reflection. How it arrived to us in shards. How we had to look at ourselves in these broken fragments, and how those mirror tiles found themselves in all these mosques, the tilework, these ornate mosaics. How those spaces made the fractured glimpses of ourselves near sacred.” She paused, took a little sip from her white mug of water, then continued:
“It means, in my humble opinion, we got to cubism hundreds of years before Braque or Picasso or any European. That maybe we’ve been training for a long time in sitting in the complicated multiplicities of ourselves, of our natures. At least for a time. No monolithically good Siegfried hero versus monolithically bad dragon.”
Cyrus knew she was talking about the hero and villain of a Wagner opera, but only because of a joke in an old episode of The Simpsons. He nodded, and Orkideh went on:
“And look at what belief in that kind of total good versus total evil did. Hitler listening to Wagner in Nuremberg. That’s what I’m getting at, you see? The flatness of me being this hero artist, or you being this martyr NSA threat. None of that is real. You know this. I’m not Siegfried any more than you’re a dragon.”
Cyrus and Orkideh were leaning over the table to speak to each other now, voices familiar, hushed. Behind them, people in line were starting to shift around passive-aggressively. An older woman in the middle of the line sighed loudly.
“I get that,” said Cyrus. “I do. Maybe part of it is just wanting my tiny little life to have something of scale. For the stakes to matter.” He paused, then added, “For my having-lived to matter.”
Orkideh smiled, placed her hand on Cyrus’s. It felt cold, dry, like canvas.
“We won’t grow old together, Cyrus. But can’t you feel this mattering? Right now?”
When he hesitated, she said, “It matters to me. Know that. It matters deeply.” Then, looking up at the line, she sighed, leaned back in her chair. “You’ll come see me again tomorrow, won’t you?”
“Yeah, yes. Yes, of course, I’ll be here. Yes, thank you.” Before he knew it he was standing, walking away from the artist and her table and folding chairs, away from her dry hands and drier lips and the winding line of impatient patrons. Walking, suddenly, back outside the museum into the startling February air, Cyrus felt the artist’s conversation, her voice and mind and presence, surging like a wildfire through his mind. Safavid glass, stakes. The dimples above her eyebrows. We won’t grow old together, Cyrus. But can’t you feel this mattering? He could feel it, he realized. He wished he’d said that.