KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR AND BEETHOVEN SHAMS

The first thing Cyrus saw was the setting, an empty parking lot raised a couple stories off the ground and surrounded by trees. This was almost never the case. Usually the people emerged first and began talking, usually these dreams started that way—not an absence of context but an absence of the need for context. The way a charming speaker blurs the room around them, and two make the room disappear entirely. But in this instance the dream parking lot came into clarity before the dream characters. The trees around the structure were full of ripe blooms, magnolia maybe. It wasn’t a forest exactly, since beyond the trees were sprawling plains of yellow grass. But there were lots of trees, and in the center of them, in a neatly cleared square: a parking lot empty of cars, forty or so feet off the ground.

Within the parking lot, eventually, two men walked into clarity, one about a foot taller than the other. They were both wearing basketball clothes, the taller with clear plastic goggles and yellow short shorts, a too-tight #33 jersey. The shorter had long curly hair the color of wet earth, red Nike sweatpants over scuffy blue-and-white Jordans.

“What do you love?” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar asked the shorter man, who Cyrus recognized as the younger brother he used to imagine himself having when he was a kid. Kareem was a regular in these scenes, but Cyrus hadn’t seen his imaginary little brother in a while; he wasn’t among his usual cast of dream characters. Cyrus was excited to see him now, excited to see how his hair had grown long, down below his shoulders.

“Excuse me?” asked Cyrus’s pretend brother, whose name was Beethoven, “Beethoven” after the titular dog in the 1992 family movie Beethoven. If Cyrus had it to do over, he’d name his imaginary brother something better, something human and aggressively Iranian, Shabahang or Rostam or Shahryar. But he knew once you named someone, even if you did it when you were a little kid, you didn’t get to rename them, so “Beethoven” stuck.

“What do you love?” Kareem repeated.

“Basketball, I guess,” Beethoven answered. The two men were circling the parking lot, walking the square brick edges and turning right at sharp angles. The trees nodded along. “Borges. Pecans. Magic tricks. Twin Peaks probably.”

Both men laughed.

“Twin Peaks?” Kareem asked, scrunching up his face. “Wow. So you’re one of those dudes. You drink IPAs too? You like to go hiking on the weekends?”

Beethoven smiled:

“I mean. Probably something insufferable like that, right? Maybe I’m really into turning people on to Infinite Jest. Or CrossFit. Or Tesla.”

They both laughed again. Kareem said: “I don’t know, man. You seem like you’d be into DJ-ing or hacking Bitcoin. Or improv classes.”

“Damn, I bet I actually am really good at improv. That’d make a lot of sense.” Beethoven ran a hand through his hair. His curls fizzed like soda bubbles.

“Tell me a joke,” said Kareem.

“I don’t think that’s really how improv works,” said Beethoven.

“I don’t care, tell me a joke. Make me laugh.”

Beethoven stopped walking for a second. His eyes got big and neon. For a second, they looked like marguerites, that yellow. Then he said, “What’s red and invisible?”

Kareem shrugged his shoulders.

Beethoven said, “No tomatoes.”

Kareem winced.

“That’s a terrible joke, Beethoven.”

They both laughed. The sky was shining blue over and over itself, like a mirror spinning on a string. Beethoven looked up at Kareem and asked, “How about you? What do you love?”

“I love basketball too,” Kareem said, without hesitation. “Still. And I love movies. And jazz. You know about the fire?”

“Yeah, how your home burned down and all your records got destroyed.”

Kareem nodded.

“Thousands of them. Years’ and years’ worth. Some really rare stuff. Irreplaceable. My dad played jazz and all his old records burned in that fire. So all the Lakers fans started sending me their records, records from their own personal collections.”

“That’s so strange,” said Beethoven.

“Strange?” asked Kareem. The trees were flowering now into little pink and purple crowns.

“I mean,” Beethoven began, “I don’t want to speak for you. But it seems like it wouldn’t be the physical records that mattered to you, but the stories behind them. Where you found them, your dad giving them to you, that sort of stuff. And you probably made more money than ninety-nine percent of the people sending you their records. Probably orders of magnitude more, right?”

“Wow,” Kareem looked down at Beethoven. “Is this you talking, or is this Cyrus?”

Beethoven winced. “How would I even know?”

The two walked in silence for a minute. Two yellow birds, goldfinches, flew in from opposite sides of the lot and crashed violently into each other mid-air. A tantrum of feathers fell to the parking lot asphalt. There, they kicked up the sort of angry dust bubble you see in cartoon fights. Claws, beaks, exclamation points.

“First of all,” Kareem began, “it was absolutely about the records themselves. It wasn’t like now where you could go on YouTube and listen to anything. If I wanted to hear ‘Nina at Newport,’ I had to put the Nina at Newport record on the turntable. Some of the guys my dad played with gave him demos, home recordings. Irreplaceable shit.”

Beethoven was starting to sweat. Kareem continued: “Can you imagine just losing access to all the art that you most loved, to all the stuff that gave your living purpose? Purpose and fluency? The stuff that made you feel like a member of the human tribe? That made you want to stay alive?”

“I can’t,” said Beethoven, honestly. “To stay alive. I can’t imagine that.”

“Imagine all that stuff disappearing,” Kareem continued. “Literally going up in smoke.”

Beethoven said nothing. The two kept walking.

“Then imagine,” Kareem said, “that a bunch of people who’d never met you, for whom you’re just a myth, began sending you the art you loved, or the art they loved, the art they thought you might love too. An old woman sending a bunch of old standards. Or an eight-year-old boy sending you his prized Monkees record. Imagine how that might contribute to your sense of amongness. To your sense of earth maybe actually being the right place for you.”

“I never thought about it like that,” Beethoven confessed.

“Obviously.”

“But,” Beethoven continued cautiously, “but these people didn’t really know you. You said so yourself, you represented a kind of myth to them. And myths are the stories we tell ourselves to make living tolerable. To make shitty lives seem worth enduring. The gods lived on Olympus, a climbable mountain whose peak was in plain sight.”

“Man…” Kareem was sweating now too. He wiped his brow with the back of his right forearm like he’d do in the fourth quarter of a close game.

“How much of the people’s kindness had to do with their own sense of responsibility, their obsession with their own goodness? Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about ‘the politics of personal exoneration…’ ”

Kareem laughed.

“Wait wait wait. I cannot continue this conversation with you if you’re going to stand there quoting Ta-Nehisi Coates at me,” Kareem said. “Look at yourself. Look at what’s happening to you.”

Beethoven looked at his hand, which was growing paler and paler by the second. It was like someone in Photoshop was slowly sliding the brightness filter up.

“Damn,” said Beethoven, his face going from basketball-leather brown to referee’s-uniform white. “Shit. Shit.”

Beethoven should have been at least a bit younger than Cyrus but now he looked much older. Older than Kareem, even. His long black hair was wild with curls; it waved along with the tree branches, growing gray. He was beginning to look less like a person and more like a part of the scenery. Almost meteorological.

“Sometimes I forget you’ve never actually been alive,” said Kareem.

“That’s super real, yeah,” said Beethoven. “I do too.”

It began to snow. Kareem and Beethoven both began saying a line by Pablo Medina, “The rich man cannot buy snow,” then stopped when they heard the other saying it. They smiled. The rest of the line, the part neither said out loud, was “and the poor man has to wear it on his eyebrows.” They both thought of themselves as the rich man.

“Tell me another joke?” Kareem said.

“I really don’t think you understand how improv works,” said Beethoven.

“Or maybe you’re just not very good at it.”

Beethoven sucked his teeth.

“Fine. Here’s one: Why did the scarecrow get a promotion?”

“Why?

“Because he was out standing in his field.”

Kareem groaned and then laughed, a big laugh that seemed to rattle the floor and the sky itself.