SUNDAY

Cyrus Shams and Zee Novak

BROOKLYN, DAY 3

Cyrus walked to meet Zee at a café called Daylight on the opposite side of Prospect Park, settling into a small outdoor two-top. It was way too cold for outdoor seating, but he knew Zee would want to smoke, and he didn’t mind the chill. His head was still spinning from his conversation with Orkideh. How did she know what she knew? Strangely, there were other people seated outside too, despite the temperature. A high-cheeked woman in a thick coat and leather gloves was smoking elegantly and cooing into a smartphone. Across the patio, two bearded white guys laughed and ignored their mimosas. Car doors slammed. A waiter with a tray of espressos was looking around, confused.

Cyrus had texted Zee asking if he was around for coffee and a quick chat. In their private idiom, asking for a “quick chat” meant there was something fairly urgent to be discussed, and Zee replied with “no problem,” and then the address of this coffee shop. Cyrus knew talking to Zee might break the cycle of circular thinking in his head, the cycle that went something like I met Orkideh, I told her my mother was dead, Orkideh referenced a plane crash, I never told her about the plane crash, I met Orkideh…

Cyrus felt his phone vibrate, a text from his sponsor, Gabe: “You STILL still sober?” Cyrus typed, “STILL still, yep. u?” Gabe replied, “Indeed I am. You still mad?” Cyrus paused. “i dont know. not really,” he typed. A beat. Then, three dots appeared to indicate his sponsor was typing: “There you go,” Gabe wrote, finally.

Cyrus smiled, despite himself. He remembered reading about how children who had lost a parent would often act out against the one left, an unconscious way of testing whether that parent could be trusted to remain, unconditionally. Cyrus had never really done this to his actual father; but then, he had no memory of his mother. Her loss was totally abstract. It was excruciating, now, for Cyrus to think of himself as the unwitting subject of the same predictable psychic tempests as every other human on the planet. Painful, too, for Cyrus to accept how naturally he’d drafted this grizzled midwestern John Wayne as de facto father. But he knew Gabe could be trusted to remain. That much was clear.

Clicking away from his texts, still waiting for Zee and idly scrolling the news app on his phone, Cyrus saw a picture of President Invective shaking hands with a group of foreign businessmen. “President Invective” was what Cyrus and Zee privately called the sitting president, both of them feeling that to say his name was a concession to power, like the man got some sick eldritch shiver of pleasure whenever his real name was uttered by anyone anywhere in the world. President Invective gave the camera a grimacing smirk. Cyrus clicked the button on the side of his phone to shut off the screen and sat there thinking about Orkideh, thinking about Zee, thinking about President Invective.

Cyrus wondered sometimes how much ideas of leadership in the West (a term he was also dubious of—west of what? The earth is a sphere where every spot is west of every other—calling America “the west” and Iran “the Middle East” placed the center squarely in Europe) had to do with notions of an infallible Christian God. How the best leaders in America professed to be moving toward “godliness,” that’s what they always said, that was the horizon leaders were always trying to approach, “godliness,” with all its intractable convictions. Cyrus thought about President Invective, a cartoon ghoul of a man for whom Dantean ideas of Hell seemed specifically conceived. The sort of man whose unwavering assertions of his own genius competence had, to the American public, apparently overwhelmed all observable evidence to the contrary.

Only in a culture that privileged infallibility above all else could a man like President Invective rise to power—a man insulated since birth from any sense of accountability, raised in a pristine cocoon of inherited wealth to emerge pristine, dewy, wholly unsullied by those irksome mortal foibles, grief and doubt.

Even Jesus doubted, his moment of “eloi eloi lama sabachthani” on the cross, incredulous with grief and doubt at his own suffering, calling up Psalm 22 to try to self-soothe, to assuage his own agony. Or Muhammad who, being told to transcribe God’s word by a literal archangel, protested to Gabriel again and again that he could not write. He doubted hard enough to say it to the face of a fucking angel. Imagine! Never mind the prophets, the saints—to lead in the new world meant all the infallibility, none of the doubt. Nothing like a light bulb flickering in an Indiana apartment that may or may not have been the voice of God.

Sitting there at the café table, trying to refresh the same sites he’d just looked at a minute ago on his phone, Cyrus thought about what an aggressively human leader on earth might look like. One who, instead of defending decades-old obviously wrong positions, said, “Well, of course I changed my mind, I was presented with new information, that’s the definition of critical thinking.” That it seemed impossible to conceive of a political leader making such a statement made Cyrus mad, then sad.

Of course, Cyrus himself wasn’t impervious to this way of thinking. That was the whole martyr book. He wanted to live perfectly enough to die without creating a ripple of pain behind him, like an Olympic diver knifing splashlessly into the pool. The marvel would be how little the water moved, how the deep seemed to gulp him whole without even opening its mouth.

Cyrus looked around the patio. A whiff of bread in the air, and coffee. Supernaturally beautiful people walking around busily, tapping into cell phones. Still no sign of Zee.

Cyrus’s father told him once about his mother’s learning, how whenever he asked her something she didn’t know the answer to, she’d write it down on a little notebook she carried everywhere and then, as soon as she could, she’d take it to the library to look up the answers. Why do fireflies glow? A chemical reaction a hundred times more efficient than light bulbs. Why does the sea have salt? Rainwater washing minerals away from rocks. She’d copy diagrams from the books she read into her notebook. Photocytes, erosion.

Even Cyrus’s father, who had been a quiet man, tended to avoid claiming knowledge not his own, though of course he didn’t have his wife’s driven curiosity. He preferred to ignore such questions, or change the subject. Cyrus prided himself in descending from people comfortable sitting in uncertainty. He himself knew little about anything and tried to remember that. He read once about a Sufi prayer that went “Lord, increase my bewilderment.” That was the prayer in its entirety.

Cyrus thought of the other people standing in line to speak with the dying artist, how desperate they now seemed in his recollection, and how Orkideh still welcomed them, grinning, probably a little stoned. The performance of certainty seemed to be at the root of so much grief. Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty. And so legislators legislated, building border walls, barring citizens of there from entering here. “The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,” said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they’d wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt.

Cyrus was on his first refill of coffee, absorbed in the frenzy of his own mind, when Zee emerged through the throng of pedestrians. He was wearing a white T-shirt with red letters that said LIGHGHT along with loose black slacks and his signature camouflage Crocs. He was carrying a brown paper bag with finds he’d acquired over the course of a morning scrounging Brooklyn’s vinyl stores—he’d hardly packed any clothes so he’d have room in his carry-on to bring records back home. Zee smiled when he saw Cyrus waving him over.

“Ah, Brooklyn town!” grinned Zee. “An agreeable sight for an old knickerbocker such as myself!”

Cyrus couldn’t help but smile.

“What’d you find?” he asked as Zee settled into his chair.

Zee eagerly opened up his haul—a hippie acoustic-era Tyrannosaurus Rex record (once in their first apartment Zee had ordered a bunch of old Tiger Beats off eBay and cut out enough gauzy pictures of Marc Bolan to paper a whole wall of their apartment), and a beat-up live Dinah Washington record (Zee had this monologue he’d give sometimes about how the sound of a jazz singer’s voice cracking on a record was the sound of an emotional event too urgent for the medium assigned to record it; Cyrus knew he’d read that in a Brian Eno book but it didn’t make it any less true).

Cyrus tried to muster what enthusiasm he could, knowing how much Zee loved this stuff, but it was obvious to both parties he was distracted. As their server, dressed in a puffy black coat, came over and took Zee’s order for hot tea, Cyrus began recounting that morning’s conversation with Orkideh, about the coffee and his mom-grief-day and then about the artist’s uncanny mentioning of the flight, the flight Cyrus had never brought up.

“You’re sure you didn’t just accidentally mention it yesterday?” Zee asked, stirring a second half-and-half into his tea.

“Yeah, like ninety-nine percent sure. I’m basically positive. I know I said she died, but I can’t imagine why or when I would’ve explained how.”

“Could she have Googled something?”

“I can’t think of what she could have possibly Googled that would have had my name on it in relation to that flight.”

He’d written about the flight, of course. He was an orphan now; he’d written a lot about both of his parents over the years. But the handful of poems he’d ever shared with the world were in tiny fold-and-staple journals, not online as far as he knew. And even those were written after he got sober, when poetry simply became a place to put his physical body, something he could do for a few hours without worrying about accidentally killing himself. That was poetry then, a two-by-four floating in the ocean. When Cyrus wrapped himself around it, he could just barely keep his head above waves.

Those poems were understandably obsessed with his recovery, which at the time was so touch-and-go, so monolithic and all-encompassing, it didn’t let much other light in. Certainly the deaths of both his parents inflected everything he wrote, but in what Cyrus had given to the world, in what he shared at the open mic, their deaths never manifested directly in any obvious or explicitly legible way.

Cyrus hesitated, working up the courage to ask something that had been on his mind since leaving the museum. Something nearly inconceivable, but nevertheless a possibility that needed to be crossed off. He looked at Zee squarely and asked, “You didn’t go to see her without me, did you?”

Zee’s eyes widened.

“Excuse me?”

“Like after I went yesterday, you didn’t go in and talk to Orkideh about me?”

Zee smiled.

“Oh yeah, she and I have actually been texting each other this whole time, waiting for you to catch on. She’s gonna swing by the hotel later to watch the new Avengers movie with us.”

Cyrus smiled too, rolling his eyes.

“Seriously, Cyrus, what the fuck? Do you know who I am? Sometimes I feel like you don’t see me at all,” Zee said. He was still smiling, but less convincingly now.

“I just don’t understand why she would have said that about the flight.”

Zee sighed, asked: “Do you think she might have known your dad somehow? Back in Iran? I can’t think of how else.”

Cyrus considered this. He thought it unlikely. From the old life in Iran his father really only talked to Arash, his mother’s brother, and even him only once a year on Nowruz. Cyrus’s grandparents were long gone. And given how unwell Arash was, how he never left his house, it didn’t seem likely Orkideh would know him.

“I don’t think so. I guess it’s not impossible,” Cyrus said. “I honestly don’t know a ton about Orkideh’s story. If she knew my dad, wouldn’t she have said something about it?”

“I mean, I would think so. Have you looked her up?” Zee asked, flagging the server for more hot water. The records were still fanned out on their table, and inside the restaurant was getting busy. The server looked flustered and a little annoyed that they weren’t ordering food.

“Just quickly with Sad James before we left Indiana. Not in depth, no. I’ll check again.”

With this, he pulled out his phone and opened the web browser, typed in “orkideh artist.” When he had looked her up prior to leaving for New York he’d just scanned Google images to get a sense of her projects. He’d seen some professionally shot photographs of her, most in dramatic black-and-white lighting and with Orkideh wearing stern expressions. And then a handful of her pieces too: many pictures seemed to be of one large entire exhibit space filled with frayed FedEx and UPS boxes, various international shipping containers, all shredded and filling the room all the way up to viewers’ knees—they walked through almost like a ball pit made of ripped-up cardboard. Another involved an empty room with some sort of mechanical device activated with a button push that dispensed ice cream into a small bowl in the center of the room, which ran over onto the floor in sloppy pools. There were some paintings, many abstract, that Cyrus had scrolled through idly in search of something more figurative to give him a sense of who the artist was. And of course, he’d found a good deal of promotional material about her final installation, Death-Speak.

Clicking back, he navigated to her Wikipedia page and was struck by how scant it was. For someone with a major show at the Brooklyn Museum next to pieces by Judy Chicago and Mark Rothko, Cyrus had expected a Wikipedia page with sections—Personal Life, Career, Awards, Controversies, Further Reading. But this was all it said for “Orkideh (Artist)”:

“Orkideh (ارکیده) is the stage name of an Iranian visual and performance artist. She is best known for her 1997 exhibit ‘SHIPPING AND HANDLING,’ which was featured at the Venice Biennial. Though she is famously reclusive and avoids interviews, she has revealed that she fled Iran sometime after the Iranian Revolution (hyperlink). Her work often deals with themes of loneliness, exile, war, and identity. In 2005, she divorced her wife and gallerist Sang N. Linh. In 2017, The Linh Gallery announced Orkideh was dying of terminal breast cancer and would be spending her final weeks living in the Brooklyn Museum for an exhibit called Death-Speak.”

The page had a handful of links and citations—a 2009 write-up in Artforum was the source of the “fled Iran” moment. And a link to the Sang Linh gallery site, which Cyrus clicked. It loaded quickly on Cyrus’s phone; there was a home page collage of several different artists represented by Linh—a Colombian husband-and-wife sculptor team who made hip bronze reimaginings of Mesoamerican deities, an Atlanta artist who crafted massive mobiles out of still frames from French New Wave films. Orkideh’s picture, younger, with a full head of long wavy black hair, was near the bottom of the page—still there, Cyrus noted—the divorce apparently hadn’t severed Orkideh and Sang’s business relationship. Cyrus tapped his thumb on her picture.

On the top of Orkideh’s page there was a flyer for the Death-Speak exhibit in Brooklyn with the same gallery copy Cyrus had seen in Indiana. Beneath were names and pictures of previous exhibits: Jigaram, Minus Forty, Comprehension Density. But as Cyrus kept scrolling, one piece caught his eye.

A large rectangular image, a painting, showing a battlefield strewn with dead soldiers, many mustached, many wounded, many lying in puddles of blood. And in the middle of the battlefield: a giant black horse with the black silhouette of a rider in long black robes. The rider was haloed in yellow light, and there was a big silver line—a zipper—running up the front of the robe. The artist had created with the halo a sort of X-ray effect that allowed the viewer to see through the rider’s black robes where, illuminated inside, the body of a scared naked little boy curled tight, holding desperately on to the horse. An expression of pure agony lurched across his face, almost like a kabuki mask but it was no mask, it was the rider’s face, the man-boy naked under the black robes riding a horse through this field of dead.

Cyrus’s breath caught in his throat like a fist. He handed his phone over to Zee and told him about his uncle Arash, how he had been the one to wear the black robe and ride among the dead in the Iran-Iraq War.

“That’s fucking wild,” Zee said when Cyrus had finished. “That really happened?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s nuts that people did that. It’s nuts your uncle did that.” Looking closer at the painting, Zee said, “ ‘Dudusch’? The title of the painting—what’s that mean?”

“Brother,” Cyrus said. “It’s Farsi for ‘brother.’ ”