SUNDAY

Cyrus Shams

BROOKLYN, DAY 3

Cyrus tried calling Zee. He wasn’t sure what he’d say if Zee picked up—sorry, probably, though he still wasn’t exactly sure for what—speaking cruelly, yes, but there was more. And anyway, Zee didn’t answer, and Cyrus didn’t leave a voicemail. It was 8:30, too early to sleep. Cyrus didn’t feel like going back outside. His hands, he noticed, were quivering involuntarily, erratically, as if they were trying to shake themselves out of a dream.

When his father was buried, a couple people from his farm showed up. Ali’s boss and his boss’s wife, who were closer to Cyrus’s age than Ali’s. Cyrus’s favorite high school English teacher, Mr. Orenn, came. Shireen, Cyrus’s then girlfriend, came. His roommates at the time, Zeke and Chang. Bilal, Cyrus’s then friend, future lover, future ex. Cyrus hadn’t asked anyone to say anything so everyone mostly stood around somberly. Mr. Orenn said something secular and sweet, Cyrus couldn’t really remember much about it other than how he felt grateful that someone was doing something. Mostly he remembered the smell of wet soil, sickly sweet, that earthy sweet he could still sometimes smell in the air after rain.

His uncle Arash wouldn’t have been able to fly over from Iran even if Cyrus had remembered to call to invite him, but Cyrus hadn’t, and when he eventually called to deliver the news, his uncle was furious. He’d screamed and cursed at Cyrus over the phone for the first and only time ever.

Cyrus got up from the bed and cracked open the hotel window, which looked out at some sort of brick structural organ of the hotel’s anatomy. The cold came in and for a moment, two, Cyrus was able to just think of that, the feeling-cold. It stilled his higher brain a bit, one of the few minor highs still left in Cyrus’s ever-dwindling arsenal. After a minute, he pulled his phone back out and dialed his uncle Arash’s number in WhatsApp.

Even though it was the middle of the night in Alborz, Arash picked up on the second ring, remaining silent, waiting for the caller to introduce themself first. Cyrus had grown accustomed to this in their infrequent phone calls over the years, and said, in his heavily accented Farsi, “Dahyi Arash, this is Cyrus. Did I wake you?”

Arash’s voice filled the line brightly: “Cyrus jaan! My heart!”

Cyrus was always a little surprised at the high pitch of his uncle’s voice; a tonsillectomy decades ago had gone slightly awry, leaving Arash with a permanent falsetto one might think was mocking, if one knew no better.

“How are you, my boy?” Arash asked eagerly.

Cyrus realized it had been years since the last time they’d spoken. He generally avoided it, preferring the guilt of not calling to the guilt of calling, hearing his uncle’s endless conspiracies, digressions into his medical histories, of having to apprehend fully the weight of his only living relative’s unwellness. Still, to his credit, Arash never shamed him for this.

“I’m good, uncle. I’m content. How are you?”

“Ah, the same story. I am alive, which pisses everyone off.” Arash laughed. “There’s not much more to say about it than that. My new helper here is nice, a little Lebanese girl. She’s teaching me some French. Je m’appelle Arash. Do you know French?”

Cyrus had cheated his way through a couple undergrad classes, expecting to both be able to skip all his classes and also emerge fluent enough to offer the definitive English translations of Dumas and Rimbaud. Mostly he remembered foods, pain au fromage, that sort of thing.

“No, not really.”

“What I just said was ‘My name is Arash.’ ”

“Ahh,” said Cyrus, smiling.

“It’s a lot like Farsi, actually. A lot of the same words. Conquerors, colonial vampires.”

“Iran was colonized by the French?” Cyrus asked.

“ ‘Merci amperyalist! Merci burokrasi!’ Where do you think these come from? A coincidence?”

“I guess I never really thought about it.”

“You know what she taught me the other day?” Arash asked. In the background of his end was a loud whirring sound.

“Are you grinding coffee, dahyi?”

“Impressive ear!”

“What time is it there?”

“A little after four,” Arash told him. “But I was already up, don’t worry. Why should I lie? Between death and I, it’s like this.” Cyrus knew his uncle was holding up four fingers close together to indicate the width between himself and death, a strange gesture his father sometimes made too. As an idiom it always seemed out of character for his father. When Cyrus asked him about it once, he just laughed.

“From an old TV show. I’d actually forgotten where it came from.”

Now, Cyrus could hear the gas stovetop clicking on, likely under his uncle’s Moka coffee pot.

“Now, can you guess what Ghashmira taught me the other day?” Arash asked.

“Ghashmira?”

“My Lebanese assistant! Do you listen at all, nephew?”

“Ah, sorry.”

Cyrus knew part of his uncle’s soldier’s state pension was the government providing him with assistants to do his shopping, to make sure his bills were paid.

“Tenez fermement à la corde de dieu,” Arash said in an exaggerated French accent. “Do you know what that means?”

“Something about God? And firmament?”

Arash laughed. “Exactly, some mullah nonsense. You know I hate that shit.”

Cyrus said nothing. His uncle talking that way over the phone made him anxious. Even for a “war hero,” such talking in Iran was needlessly reckless.

“So why are you calling, Koroosh baba? Are you safe?”

“Yes, uncle, I’m safe. Everything is fine.” Cyrus hesitated. “I saw a painting and it made me think of you.”

Silence from his uncle’s end. Then—

“A painting?”

“Yeah, it’s by an Iranian artist, and I think it was one of the soldiers, the kind you were, in the war.”

“The kind I was?”

“Like, with a robe and a horse and a flashlight.”

Arash laughed:

“You saw a painting of a soldier with a flashlight and it made you think of me! Made you call your dear sick uncle! Praise the propaganda empire! Some good comes from it at last!”

Cyrus chuckled weakly.

“It’s just—it seemed exactly like your stories, or the stories my dad told me about what you did. Like…” Cyrus paused. “Riding around all those bodies, a guy on a horse with a sword and a flashlight, riding around the—.” He paused.

“Riding around the dead?” his uncle said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m not a child, Cyrus. I’m crazy, they say, but you can talk to me like a real person.”

“I know, dahyi. I am.”

“A couple years before your dad died, I sold my little white four-door Paykan sedan. I had it since around when you guys left. I used to take it on these long drives, trips through the countryside. And that Paykan had this broken tape player. I couldn’t get it to spit the cassette back out, it was just permanently stuck in there. Do you know what the tape was?”

“What was it?”

“Allegri’s Miserere.” Arash waited a beat for Cyrus’s recognition. When it didn’t happen, he asked, “Are you familiar?”

“I don’t think so, no. Maybe if I heard a bit of it—”

“If you’d ever heard it before, you wouldn’t forget about it. Anyway, it’s a very famous piece of music. Very particular.” He took a sip of coffee. “The story goes it was only ever taught orally, in the Vatican, only to be sung for popes on holy days. Total psycho Catholic bullshit. But then three hundred years ago, little fourteen-year-old Mozart comes in and gets to hear it, he’s the pope’s special guest. And then that little teenager goes home and transcribes it from memory. The whole composition, start to finish. There are five distinct choral parts, and Mozart transcribes the whole thing off that one listen. He goes back the next year to check his work and fine-tunes his transcription and then he took the song, this perfect protected angelic thing, and gave it to the people.”

“Wow,” Cyrus said, in English.

“Right? This music the church thought was too beautiful for common people, pearls before swine, isn’t that what they say? Though pigs are smarter than dogs, and pearls are just rocks. But Mozart got it so right, so perfect off hearing it just twice, that the church didn’t even punish him. They said Mozart brought thousands of new converts into the church.”

“Wow,” Cyrus said again, in English, immediately regretting it.

“Anyway, I had this Miserere tape stuck in my car for years, and I couldn’t get it out. So I just listened to it again and again and again, the whole tape was only twenty minutes long, less than that even, and then the tape player would automatically rewind itself and start over, which was a very advanced feature for a tape player back then, by the way. I must have listened to it one thousand times, maybe more. Why should I lie? Between death and me, it’s like…Certainly the mullahs would say the tape was an apostasy. But I just kept listening to it over and over. And do you know what happened? What changed?”

“What?”

“Nothing. It felt like a miracle every time. It didn’t matter if I came in just for the last minute, the last ninety seconds of the tape. There were five voices and I heard something new every time. The idea that someone, a child, could hear it once or twice and remember everything, and I could hear it a thousand times like I’d never heard it once before? What does that tell you?”

Cyrus was confused. He’d felt confused all night.

“I have no idea. I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

Arash laughed.

“Of course you don’t. You’ve never heard the song.”

“I’ll listen tonight. I can even play it for you right now on my laptop if you—”

“No!” said Arash, sharply. “No.” Cyrus was on his heels.

“You wouldn’t understand even if you heard it, nephew. Get it? I listen to it and see God in it because I’ve been God. I’ve spoken to those same angels, right? But you see a picture of an angel and a sword and think only of your crazy uncle. The most human thing in the world. Because that’s as close as you’ve ever been. Or you believe it’s as close as you’ve ever been.”

Cyrus sighed, then blurted:

“It was called ‘Dudusch.’ ”

“Excuse me?”

“The painting. It was called ‘Brother.’ ”

A pause.

“A lot of people have brothers, Cyrus. There were many men who did what I did. One in every company.”

“Right.”

“What are you trying to say, Cyrus?”

“I don’t know, uncle. It just made me think of you, and my mom.”

Another pause, longer.

“Are you doing okay?” Arash asked. “Do you have enough money? How are your poems?”

“I’m fine. Really, aziz. I have money. I’m working on a new writing project and it’s good to feel busy.”

“Good to be busy indeed.” Cyrus heard his uncle take a gulp of coffee. “The next time you call, I’ll be fluent in French, if this woman has her way.” His tone had shifted.

Cyrus smiled, then laughed a little so his uncle could hear it.

“I’ll call again soon. I promise.”

“You’re a young man, Cyrus. Full of life. I understand.”

Cyrus winced.

“You know what happened to that Paykan?” Arash asked. “When I was in the hospital they said I saw things that weren’t there, that I couldn’t drive anymore. Even though a blindfolded man would still be the safest driver in Tehran! But they took my driving license and so I had to sell my Paykan. I loved that car. But I couldn’t sell it with contraband in it. So I took a screwdriver and shoved it in the tape slot. And I shoved it in again and again until I heard the cassette crack. And I swear to you, when it cracked, I heard giggling. Giggling! It wasn’t mine.”

“Giggling?”

“The devil, Cyrus. It’s not supernatural. It’s not make-believe. They play chess with us. That’s what we are. I destroyed that tape and it was like the devil killing a queen on a chess board. Checkmate.”

Cyrus had so many questions. Who was “they”? Why “killing” instead of “captured”? Cyrus felt like he was two beats behind his uncle this whole conversation.

“You’ll call again soon Cyrus, right?”

“I will, dahyi. I promise.”

They hung up. Cyrus imagined his uncle across the world setting down his telephone receiver and walking back to the window, pulling the curtain back just an inch to stare out into the vast black outside. Stars, even on a morning like that. It would be all dark in his house, and the darkness outside the window would reflect his own face back from the glass. His uncle would shut the curtain quickly, wait a couple seconds, and then flash it open again, just to be sure. To be sure of what? Arash wouldn’t know. But he’d pull a chair over to the window, sip his coffee, and concentrate.

Cyrus went to grab his headphones, turned off all the lights in the room and lay down on the bed. He queued up a recording of the Miserere on his phone and, as the voices began, Cyrus closed his eyes.