MONDAY

Cyrus Shams

BROOKLYN, DAY 4

When Cyrus came to, he was on the landing in the stairs. A group of museum employees, all clad in black, were huddled over him. The familiar docent with the thick septum piercing was standing behind them.

“Hey, are you okay? Can you hear me?”

Cyrus blinked. Three heads bent over his, more hovering behind them. Cyrus struggled to nod but the synapses weren’t connecting. He thought about Orkideh’s body, frail and weightless, someone having to find it. To “discover the body.” Unbearable. One of the hovering heads procured a bottle of water, and Cyrus’s hands somehow found it, drew it to his lips. Someone somewhere would bury Orkideh’s tiny body and then the green world would swallow her up. Everything green just farms us, Cyrus thought. Feeding us oxygen and eating our corpses.

“Prateek said you fainted,” one of the heads said. Cyrus focused on it. A balding older white man with a bushy gray goatee. “Do you want us to call an ambulance?” Prateek, that was the septum docent’s name.

“I’m fine,” Cyrus managed to stammer, sitting himself up slowly, then leaning back on his fists.

“Do you have a history of fainting? Medical conditions?”

“I’m fine,” Cyrus said again. “I just—” He tried hard to think of something to defuse the situation. “I didn’t eat breakfast today.” That was the sort of thing these kinds of people seemed like they’d believe. Slowly he lifted himself up. Prateek reached over to help him up—

“Hey, take it easy,” he said, a hand placed behind Cyrus’s upper back.

Cyrus smiled weakly. Another person manifested with a banana and a Snickers bar, handed them to Cyrus.

“I’m fine. Thank you, guys. I’m sorry, I’m really embarrassed.”

“You sure you don’t want us to call somebody?” the bushy goatee man asked.

“Really, it’s not a big deal.”

The docents looked at each other, furrowed their brows. They helped Cyrus down the stairs, guided him to a bench.

“Why don’t you just rest here, and we’ll see how you’re doing in ten minutes?”

“Sure, that’s fine,” Cyrus said, thanking them. The banana-and-Snickers docent left the banana and Snickers. The water-bottle docent left the water bottle. They wandered off, looking back over their shoulders to ensure Cyrus was still conscious and upright. Only Prateek stayed.

“Did you know Orkideh?” he asked Cyrus, like a secret. “Is that what’s going on?”

“Oh, no, not really,” Cyrus said, honestly. “Just a fan, I guess.” Cyrus realized only after saying it that it was the truth.

Prateek nodded.

“Yeah, I’d never heard of her before the Death-Speak thing. But she was kind of incredible, wasn’t she?”

He sat down on the bench next to Cyrus. He had short cropped black hair, gelled to a point. His soft cheeks and deceptively smooth face made him look younger than he probably was. If not for the gauged septum ring, he might have looked outright wholesome.

“I didn’t know much about her either until Death-Speak,” Cyrus said. He ripped open the Snickers bar, offered a bit to Prateek, who smiled and waved it away. Taking a bite himself, Cyrus managed—

“I’m okay, really. You can go.”

“I know,” said Prateek. “I think my boss wants to make sure you don’t die—er, you know. Everyone’s already pretty on edge around here today.”

“Sure,” Cyrus said.

“I had an aunt who died of breast cancer,” Prateek continued. “Stage Four, just like Orkideh. She was always in rooms filled with all these tubes and metal frames, handrails and tubing, that’s what I remember most about visiting her, all these different kinds of tubes, rubber ones but also like, vacuum cleaner tubes, those and handrails on everything. Like, handrails on the handrails. And all these tubes woven through them!”

Cyrus looked up at him. Quickly, he tried to remember the sorts of things the doctors-in-training at his job said to console grieving family members, but all he could summon were the office posters: anatomy of the inner ear, stroke warning signs, understanding cholesterol.

“I—I’m sorry,” Cyrus mustered.

“Oh, it was forever ago,” Prateek said. “I’m good. Just to say, it was a mess. She forgot who we all were at the end, stuff just leaking out of every orifice. It was so dark, cruel even. Like, fucked up that that is even an option, that that is a thing that can happen to a person. But Orkideh was Orkideh right up until the end. Still herself. That’s luckier than people realize.”

Cyrus nodded a little. His eyes felt hot, like he was going to cry, but no tears came out. His vision was still coming in and out of focus; the scar on his foot throbbed.

“I talked with her about it,” Prateek went on. “With Orkideh. I told her about my aunt, how she was an artist too, how she’d draw these little cartoons for my cousins and me. Even when we were way too old, she’d still draw these goofy cartoons, dinosaurs on skateboards, that kind of thing, and she’d mail them to me and my sisters. And do you know what Orkideh told me?”

“What?” asked Cyrus. His heart was in his throat, his throat was in his hands.

“She said, ‘Isn’t it good to be able to speak to each other this way?’ She just said that and reached out and held my hand for a second and smiled really big at me. She said, ‘Thank you for sharing her with me. It is so good to be able to speak this way.’ And that was that. The next person in line came and sat.”

“Wow,” Cyrus said. He shook his head; his vision seemed to have mostly cleared up. He said, “Thank you, Prateek. Really.”

Prateek smiled, patted him on the shoulder.

“Okay. I’m trusting you’re gonna be okay.” He looked like he might be getting ready to add something else, but elected against it, standing up and walking toward the stairs. Cyrus felt his body still vibrating. His whole life was a conspiracy of other people helping him, other people teaching him this or that. He felt like Hamlet, just moping around waiting for the world to assuage his grief, petulantly soliloquizing and fainting while everyone else fed him bananas and candy bars. Hamlet died at the end, of course. “The rest is silence,” Hamlet declared, though he also demanded his best friend tell everyone else his story. Cyrus felt that full of shit.

He wanted to apologize to Prateek. To Gabe. He wanted to take a long shower, to hug Zee, to spend hours curling into him, kissing the same spot on the back of his neck over and over and over. Cyrus wafted to the front doors of the museum and then found himself back out in the cold, shivering. Vendors all selling the same hot dogs, waters, biryanis. A street performer was dancing acrobatically around an old-fashioned boombox as a crowd of tourists was assembled around her.

Nobody was observing the perimeter of austerity he felt wrapped like a velvet rope around the museum. Wrapped, vibrating around his chest. “If we meet each other in Hell, it’s not Hell.” Who had said that? Faintly, Cyrus became aware the vibrating was real, external, was coming from his coat pocket. He pulled out his phone, saw he had missed two calls from a number he didn’t recognize. There was a voicemail. Cyrus pressed the phone to his ear, and a woman’s voice said, in a thick accent:

“Hello, uhm, this is, uh, this message is for Cyrus Shams. My name is Sang Linh, I represent the artist Orkideh. I got your number from, ah, online—I, she asked me to, ehm, there are some things I’d like to discuss with you. If you could please call me back at this number I’d—yes, call please as soon as you’re able, this is my cell phone number, please call me back as soon as possible.”