MONDAY

Cyrus Shams

BROOKLYN, DAY 4

Cyrus woke up the next morning cold, heavy. Wet too, he soon realized, though it took a moment, with cold and heavy being so much of wet. He looked around the dark hotel room, remembered he was alone. Zee hadn’t returned in the night. Cyrus got out of bed, spent too many seconds trying to figure out how to turn on a light, and then discovered the genesis of the cold and heavy and wet: he’d pissed the bed.

During the deepest stages of his drinking this had been a regular occurrence; in the night he’d sleepwalk to get more beer, more booze, but his lizard brain cared more about the alcohol’s acquisition than its orderly discharge. That was just life then, waking into the familiar braid of self-loathing and duty that governed his living—matting up what he could of the wet, spraying it with Febreze, peeling off his clothes and getting into the shower. If Cyrus woke somewhere besides his own bed, he had to navigate the cost-benefit of explaining himself or just wordlessly slipping away. These rituals had, blissfully, ended when he got sober.

But even though Cyrus hadn’t pissed himself like this in ages, not since he was still drinking, all the old feelings immediately swarmed back in, like lakewater flooding into a sinking car. First, the still-reflexive swell of exoneration, the how-do-I-avoid-getting-in-trouble-for-this. Then the thought of the hotel, the poor maid who’d have to discover his mess and clean it up. This brought in the self-loathing, the exasperation with living. Cyrus knew his pragmatic brain would click into fix-it mode soon, but he first allowed himself a few sumptuous instants of self-pity. He wanted, acutely in that moment, to be not-alive. Not to be dead, not to kill himself, but to have the burden of living lifted from his shoulders.

When they were still in the warm dawn of their friendship, Cyrus and Zee used to spend so much time happily blacking out together—whole years that had become cavities in their memory but for flashes of late-night sidewalks and unfamiliar faces deliriously shouting lyrics over living room record players, nights of key bumps and swigs from plastic liquor bottles and pouring crushed pills into cigarettes unsure if smoking them would even do anything besides taste bad. Nights of weeping in the moonlight because it was so beautiful to love and feel the world as deeply as they did, so unexpected and rare.

They’d have laughed at Cyrus’s pissing the bed. If there were other people around, Zee would have flashed his smile that folded his whole face into his lips, the one that made everyone else in the room unconsciously smile along, and it’d be a joke for a minute before everyone moved on to something else. One night at Keady, Cyrus drunkenly drew two big crowns at the top of Zee’s bathroom mirror in permanent marker. Below them he wrote, We can wear these crowns forever. When Zee asked about it the next morning, Cyrus had no recollection of it, but the crowns, and the maxim, stayed on the mirror till the two moved out.

There was a part of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous Cyrus had read over and over when he first got sober where it talked about self-pity and resentments being the “dubious luxuries” of normal people, but for alcoholics, they were poison. Instead of “self-pity” and “resentment,” Cyrus remembered it called them “the grouch and the brainstorm,” which he’d always thought was quaintly of its time. But that phrase, “dubious luxury,” that was tremendous. “For us, these things are poison.” His best friend was gone. He was in a cold war with his sponsor, with recovery in general. His book—if it could even be called that—was going nowhere. His life was too fucked at present for his death to even count toward anything. A meaningless life meant a meaningless death. He wasn’t even sure if he believed that, but his current state had increased his tolerance for despondent generalizing. In that moment, it felt like the only true thing.

When Cyrus got sad like this, most people treated him lightly, hastily, like he wasn’t worth the trouble. Only Zee took it seriously, never shaming Cyrus for canceling plans, sometimes actually sitting with him in silence for whole afternoons or evenings saying nothing, occasionally putting on a record only to let it go still for twenty minutes or an hour before flipping it again.

Cyrus balled up the sheets and the comforter, which had absorbed most of the piss. He took his sweatpants off and threw them in the garbage, then stepped into the shower. If he’d been drunk, if he’d relapsed at the hotel bar, this would have all made sense. The fight with Zee, the piss. But Cyrus was doing everything he was supposed to do. Sobriety, writing. What was the point if every road led back to the same shame?

Sometimes when he closed his eyes in the shower in the morning, he could catch sparks of whatever dream he’d forgotten about from the night before: a girl kneeling in the middle of a country road with a black coin in her palm, a pink lamb pulling a rusted plow. But today, when he closed his eyes in the shower, which took him a full minute to figure out how to turn on (Zee had joked that a hotel’s fanciness was directly proportional to how long it took you to figure out how to turn on the showerhead)—when Cyrus closed his eyes, all he saw was the backs of his eyes. He felt desiccated. He tried to put it into language, tried to salvage some kernel of the feeling to write down later. But all he could think was “inside my heart is a little man with a broken heart.”

When he got out of the shower, he put on clothes and ran down to the lobby ATM, got forty dollars cash to leave for the maid (the ATM only dispensed in multiples of twenty, and Cyrus spent more than a few seconds deliberating between forty and sixty) along with a note that said “Sorry!” He winced at the gesture but didn’t know what else to do. He made coffee with the room’s Keurig and drank it scalding. Gathering his phone cord and socks and toothpaste, he proceeded to check out. The man at the lobby desk was wearing a nametag that said “Hua”—instead of saying “How was your stay” Hua asked, “Did you make anything cool while you were here?” which caught Cyrus off guard. It was the sort of stock query this genre of corporately hip Brooklyn businesses traded in. Not a bad question, even, but damned by its context. Cyrus looked down at his hands, which were still shaking. Where was Zee? Why had they come to New York? Why was Cyrus doing any of this? Writing, talking, living? He wanted to run into traffic, into the sea. He wanted to disappear. Cyrus just shook his head at the lobby attendant and, without looking back, set off for the museum.

It was a beautiful day, though cold, the kind that might look in a picture like it was the middle of summer, if not for all the people in boots and heavy coats. Cyrus checked his phone, but still there was nothing from Zee. He typed a quick text: “Hey, I’m sorry. Really. Where are you?”

He checked his phone twice more in the next minute to see if Zee’d respond right away like he usually did, but he didn’t. Cyrus put on his headphones and played the Miserere, a 1980 recording off YouTube, and found it to be a hauntingly good score to the city. Everything around him was syncopating, or illustrating, or complicating, the song’s rhythms, deepening its haunted voices. Pigeons tucked themselves into the soft-edged letters of a Duane Reade sign, the cradles in the D’s and E’s and R full of sticks and leaves and hair. Two boys walked side by side with plastic bags over their feet, protecting their sneakers from the city’s omnipresent slime.

Cyrus decided he’d ask Orkideh about the Miserere. He made sure his headphones were clean so she could listen through them if she wanted. He hoped she’d want to. He hoped she hadn’t heard it before either. He’d tell her about his uncle, how he was a soldier, the kind in her painting with the flashlight and the horse. He’d ask her how she knew what she knew about the plane crash, delicately, not trying to imply anything.

It wasn’t a big deal if she’d Googled him, followed some trail of digital breadcrumbs that led her from him to the plane crash. After all, Cyrus had Googled the artist too. He wasn’t sure exactly what cyber pathway existed between him and his mother, but it wasn’t impossible that one was out there. Of course, there was the other explanation too, the one Cyrus couldn’t even articulate. The impossible one.

When Cyrus had still been drinking, whenever people asked him how his poems were going, he’d answer that he was just “living the poems he wasn’t writing.” He’d say that with a straight face. It made him wince to even think about. But now, this journey into the city felt like what he’d meant then—looking at all the shattered fundament of his living and thinking “this will be useful, I’ll use all this later”—as a writer there was always that. It always gave him a faint shudder of guilt to think this way, but it wasn’t something he could turn off.

So many of Cyrus’s heroes rebuked abstinence, with its abstract promises of spiritual reward in exchange for corporeal restraint, preferring instead the booming immediacy of physical pleasure. “Paradise is mine today, as cash in hand,” Hafez had written. “Why should I count upon the puritan’s pledge of tomorrow?” Cyrus wasn’t sure how many tomorrows he had left and considered briefly that Zee might have been right, that he might not be fully inhabiting his todays.

It felt like the only time Cyrus ever really felt now-ness was when he was using. When now was physiologically, chemically discernible from before. Otherwise he felt completely awash in time: stuck between birth and death, an interval where he’d never quite gotten his footing. But he was also awash in the world and its checkboxes—neither Iranian nor American, neither Muslim nor not-Muslim, neither drunk nor in meaningful recovery, neither gay nor straight. Each camp thought he was too much the other thing. That there were camps at all made his head swim.

He wanted to talk with Orkideh about it. Surely her vantage point in thinking about place, time, belonging, would be illuminating, alit as she was within a mortal immediacy Cyrus could not fathom. He sniffed at himself, worried he still smelled vaguely of piss.

When Cyrus got to the museum, he recognized the two black-clad employees taking admissions. He paid five dollars and climbed the stairs to the third floor, passing the docent with the thick septum ring who gave him a slight downward nod. At the third floor, Cyrus turned past Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, where a man was walking hand in hand with his daughter, both listening to headphones, and a nerdy-looking teenager was dutifully reading placards. Walking toward Orkideh and Death-Speak, Cyrus found the lights to the gallery totally dimmed, a velvet rope spread across the doorway. On it, a laminated note with a black-and-white picture of a young Orkideh wearing some sort of mesh veil, dark eyes cast upward in equal parts mischief and provocation. The note read:

The Death-Speak exhibit is now closed. The Brooklyn Museum thanks Orkideh for trusting us with her final installation. Donations in her memory may be made in the lobby gift shop.

“Art is where what we survive survives.”

—Orkideh, 1963–2017

All the blood left Cyrus’s head. He felt like puking, then he felt like shitting. He leaned against the wall. To live eternally or die. Those were the options, and there wasn’t much evidence to point to the viability of the former. Cyrus knew the artist was dying, of course. But this little sheet of paper, Orkideh’s face glowering up from it, testified to the way what was inevitable could still be, what? Immobilizing. Eviscerating. And yes, surprising.

She had been fine the day before. They’d laughed. Hugged. Cyrus stumbled back to the stairs, nearly tripping over his feet. When he saw the docent with the feather earring and septum ring, he stammered, “Did…Death-Speak is closed.”

He meant to ask it as a question but instead delivered it flat, a statement of fact. The docent nodded.

“Yeah. The artist passed away last night. You know she was living in the museum?”

Cyrus didn’t move.

“I guess they found her this morning in her room.” He looked around, then said, in a low voice, “I heard maybe she took a handful of her pain pills, something like that. She was totally fine yesterday. You were here, weren’t you?”

Cyrus couldn’t say anything. The docent raised his eyebrows, then offered:

“I’m not sure when the next exhibit will open, I think it’s a French photographer. I forget her name. But it won’t be for a bit still.”

Cyrus was trying desperately to keep himself upright. He scoured his mind to find the vital information around how to stand like a person, how to inhabit a body, but there was only shadow, shadows of half-remembered shadows. He felt like a windmill stilled in a field. He shook his head. A whole field of stilled windmills. The docent asked him something. Asked him something else. All Cyrus could hear was ringing in his brain, some ear cell’s final song, a frequency never to be heard again. He collapsed.