MONDAY
Cyrus Shams
BROOKLYN, DAY 4
After Sang left—making Cyrus promise to call her, making him promise he’d let her know when he got home to Indiana safely—Cyrus wandered around the park. The cold was invigorating, an anchor. When he pulled out his phone to see if Zee’d reached out, he found he only had a single missed notification, a text from Sad James. Clicking into it, Cyrus read:
“Did you see this?”
And below that, a little link. The preview that popped up said: “NYT Obituary: Orkideh, In Her Own Words.” Cyrus clicked it and a page popped up with a giant hero photo of Orkideh, the same one the museum had used on their sign, eyes full of coal and mischief, her cheeks still glowing, bright even in the black and white. Cyrus took a moment, a realization that this was an image, a text he would likely visit again and again for however much longer he’d remain alive—he still wasn’t sure how long that’d be—and tried to slow himself down. Studying the picture, he looked for his own face in Orkideh’s, in her brow or her chin or her smile lines, but mostly she looked like herself, a one of one, like an angel who had adopted a human’s face as a concession to convention. Mythologizing this way was dangerous, Cyrus knew. And yet. He scrolled down.
“Orkideh (1963–2017)” said the header. Then: “IN HER OWN WORDS.” In italics, an editor’s note:
Since January 5th, the Iranian American visual artist Orkideh has been in residence at the Brooklyn Museum performing her final installation, “Death-Speak.” Diagnosed months ago with terminal breast cancer that had metastasized across her body, the artist elected to spend her final weeks in an Abramovic-esque performance wherein museum guests could sit with her for a few minutes at a time and discuss death frankly, openly. Orkideh, whose public work spanned three decades and a variety of mediums, was once dubbed “a painful and poignant emotional revolutionary” by Nora N. Barskova, this publication’s chief art critic. Below is Orkideh’s obituary, in her own words.
Cyrus took a deep breath, then read on to Orkideh’s—his mother’s—text:
Here’s what’s important: I was Iranian, then I was Iranian in America. I made lots of art. Some of it was quite good, I think. Plenty wasn’t. But I was alive for a long time, long enough to make a lot of art. Creativity didn’t live in my brain any more than walking lived in my legs. It lived in every painting I ever saw, every book I ever read, every conversation I ever had. The world was full enough that I didn’t need to store anything inside myself.
I wore gold jewelry that warmed in sunlight. I made my friends smile. I did not linger to see what my enemies did.
Even when I was subject to the murderous whims of patently evil nations, men, I knew the badness for how different it was from the goodness. I was not often “a person to whom things happened.” And when I was, I had the sanctuary of imagination, of art.
When I say “nations,” I mean “armed marketplaces.” Always. That understanding made the world a little bit easier to comprehend, if not tolerate. To the extent I was a fraud, I was no less than anyone else. I was grafted onto my living from a part of the universe that remains nameless, like smoke rising from a great fire.
I demand to be forgiven.
I demand the same leniencies, rationalizations, granted to mediocre men for centuries.
I died, if you’re reading this, in a museum, of a disgusting and unbeautifiable disease. I reject the reduction of my life to this most grotesque artifact. I used to walk with a sprig of lavender in my pocket—smelling it I could go to almost any other point in my life, which I believe was as close to time travel as anyone’s come. I’d like credit for that.
I am flatterable, and obnoxiously disarmed by praise.
Forugh Farrokhzad: “This isn’t about terrified whispers in the dark. This is about light and cool breeze through the open window.”
When the world was flat, people leapt off all the time. There is nothing remarkable about dying this way, but I hope I’ve made something interesting of my living. An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it, one can produce almost anything.
Orkideh, 2017
Finishing the article, Cyrus found himself praying, suddenly, without even realizing it. Sitting back down on a bench he was forming a prayer not exactly in language, not out loud at all. The most basic form of prayer, he’d heard once, was something like “help me help me help me, please please please, thank you thank you thank you”; and Cyrus’s prayer in the park was not much more advanced than that. But it was a prayer all the same, recognizable—like an Archimedian scale—by the heft of what it displaced.
What formed in Cyrus’s mind was a blunt and inarticulable plea to be done, for a reprieve from navigating what had become to him an unnavigable world, to not have to spend the next decade or decades unraveling what it all meant, had meant, would mean. The anger he felt at his mother. The vanished. The abandoner. But, also, the pride he felt for her, now. The great artist. It was too much. He prayed for an end to the tyranny of all symbols, beginning with language. He understood, with a clarity that had until that moment in his life eluded him, that he was not at all made for the world in which he lived, that art and writing had gotten him only trivially closer to compensating for that fundamental defectiveness, the way standing on a roof gets one only trivially closer to grabbing the moon than standing in the dirt.
Let me be done, he thought, this time in words, his mother’s letter still glowing on the screen in his hands. He closed his eyes, said it again out loud: “Let me be done.”
When he opened his eyes, he was still alone on the park bench. Planted there, the city’s motion around him felt like a broken video clip, like the same fifteen seconds were just playing over and over on loop, yellow taxicabs and bits of snow moving along the horizon, then hard-resetting to their original position. The wind smelled faintly of almonds. In his pocket, his phone was vibrating. He pulled it out, saw “ZEE NOVAK” was calling him. Quickly, he answered:
“Hey!”
“Cyrus,” Zee said, “I just got to the museum and saw—” He paused, realizing Cyrus might not yet know. “Have you been here yet?”
“Yeah, I was there this morning,” Cyrus said.
“I’m sorry, man.” Cyrus could hear plainly in Zee’s voice the pain that had inspired his exodus from their hotel, but also that the pain was, in that moment, eclipsed by an acute concern for Cyrus, for the possibility Cyrus might do something rash in the wake of the artist’s death. The clearness of it, of his friend’s love and distress, suddenly felt pulverizingly obvious. How negligent Cyrus had been with Zee’s loyalty. With Zee’s devotion. Cruel, even. Sobriety meant Cyrus couldn’t help but see himself, eventually. And it hurt. He was repulsed by what he saw.
“I’m so, so sorry too, Zee. Not just for last night. All of it. Truly.”
A beat—an hour, a second—passed.
“Where are you?” Zee asked. There was a faint shuffling from his end, the phone being passed from one ear to another.
“I’m actually still right across from the museum, in Prospect Park.”
“Oh—is it okay if I come over there with you?”
“Of course, please, please, yes,” Cyrus said, excited at the opportunity to apologize to Zee in person, to hold him, catch him up on all that had transpired. “I’ll drop a pin. I really am sorry, Zee.”
Cyrus waited, and in his waiting became increasingly aware of how hot the ground had gotten under his feet. He could hear the humming, the vibrating, like the earth was very thin paper wrapped around a hornet’s nest. By the time he saw Zee approaching in the distance, the ground felt like a great kiln firing something massive and delicate, sand into glass. At the sight of Zee, Cyrus’s heart caught in his chest, with—he realized almost all at once—what must have been clarity. Clarity like he’d never known: sweet and unequivocal. The smell of walnut and woodsmoke on the wind. The air felt thick. Somewhere in the distance, someone was singing.
“Zee!” Cyrus shouted, waving him over.
Zee smiled and made a show of jogging over to Cyrus, though he moved slowly to not slip on the ice in his ridiculous Crocs. Cyrus gleamed, Zee’s woven backpack flopping up and down on his back in time with the bouncing of his curls. Cyrus loved him so much.
“I love you so much,” Cyrus said, immediately falling into a deep embrace as Zee got to him. He used his thumbs to part the curls crossing over Zee’s forehead and kissed him there. “I’m so, so sorry.” He meant it. Zee’s goodness filled him like a drug.
“Hey!” Zee said, smiling, pulling his head back from Cyrus’s. “I love you too, you idiot.” They kissed on the lips, a quick and firm kiss that seemed at once tiny and unbreakable, like a pebble. It wasn’t right, how Cyrus had treated Zee. His barb the night before, yes, but also their entire relationship. Like he was entitled to his friend’s adoration. How had he been so oblivious? Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it. Cyrus understood that now, and stepped.
Around them, something like seafoam blew across the park. The tree branches had lowered themselves down to meet the new grass rising through the snow.
Cyrus and Zee sat. Zee admitted he’d spent the whole night wandering Brooklyn, alternating between feeling angry at himself and at Cyrus, finally passing out sitting up for a couple hours on a train station bench. Zee said he’d planned to talk to Orkideh that day, to go ask her—“well, I don’t know what,” he’d said. He just wanted to see her with his own eyes. He believed that would make a difference, that the words would come. But when he got to the museum, she was gone.
Cyrus winced at every detail. He kept saying he was sorry. And he was. Zee said, “I know,” again and again, but only once Cyrus truly believed him did he tell Zee the story of his day: going to see Orkideh that morning, fainting on the staircase, Prateek and his aunt, Sang’s voicemail, then meeting her, what Sang told him about his mother, his mother and the plane crash and Leila and Orkideh’s final letter in the paper, all of it, all of it whooshing out of him like steam.
“Holy shit,” Zee kept saying. “Holy shit.”
As Cyrus finished catching Zee up, he felt immeasurably lighter. Whatever was merciful in the universe lived in Zee, Cyrus suddenly realized. The way Zee held, understood, knew, him. Grace. How when he saw a bird or a tree or a bug, Zee really saw that bird or tree or bug, not the idea of it. How he really saw Cyrus, really heard him, beneath all his beneaths. Cyrus loved that Zee moved through life unencumbered by the flinching anxiety that governed, corroded his own soul. Cyrus was dizzy with it, this love, its abrupt and total overwhelm.
All around them, the city’s skyline of desiccated towers blinked absently, some of them crumbling around their edges. The trees of Prospect Park had at some point shaken off the snow and erupted into bloom. Lavender buds, blue and yellow and crimson flowers Cyrus didn’t recognize.
“Are you seeing this?” asked Zee, gesturing to the wilding world around them.
“I am.” Cyrus nodded. “I think it’s maybe because of us.” His words weren’t moving quite in sync with his lips.
“Of course you do!” Zee laughed. “You’re not wrong, though.” His hands were cupped in front of him on his lap. “You’re not wrong.”
The scent of feathers and copper filled the air. If there had been other people around before—Cyrus couldn’t remember—they were gone now. It was just Cyrus and Zee and whoever was making this music that was all around them. Trumpets, saxophone. Further away, voices. The humming had turned into a kind of flat scraping, like a tooth sliding across a wooden floor. Cyrus felt light-headed—his foot pulsed hard.
“It reminds me of this one Milosz poem,” Cyrus said. “ ‘Those expecting archangels’ trumpets and locusts and horsemen will be disappointed,’ something like that. I’m probably bungling it.” He slipped his hand into Zee’s and squeezed it tightly. Zee kissed him on the cheek.
“All those severe poets talking big about the wages of sin all the time,” Zee added, “but nobody ever brought up the wages of virtue. The toll of trying really really hard to be good in a game that’s totally rigged against goodness.”
Glassy moans barely audible over the horizon. Dark clouds against a bright sky, like blackberries in a bowl of milk.
“You’re so good, Zee. I see it.”
Snow falling faster than what should have been possible.
“That’s not what I mean,” said Zee in an unexpectedly high, strange voice. “It’s just. Where does all our effort go? It’s hard not to envy the monsters when you see how good they have it. And how unbothered they are at being monsters.”
“That’s why heaven and hell, right? Why people talk about that stuff?”
“Nah, fuck hell,” Zee said, shaking his head. “Hell is a prison. All we do is build those on earth. No need to imagine more.”
Cyrus smiled.
“And fuck heaven too!” Zee continued. “Like goodness is a place you can arrive at, a destination. Where you’re either standing in it or you’re not. It fucks you up. Royal you and also you-you, Cyrus-you. All of these symbols being so literal.”
The topography of the Brooklyn skyline—and somehow, also Manhattan’s, and several unfamiliar skylines too—was blistering all around them. Towering cracks now running up the sides of skyscrapers, molten liquids roiling, smoking, pooling against the marble and steel and glass. Lava hardened into new land.
“Somebody’s feeling frisky,” Cyrus teased. Zee pulled his head back, raised his eyebrows.
“See, that’s how you know all this is real,” Zee said, fanning his hand out to the city wilding around them.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, that’s like, the difference between real life and dreaming. Nobody’s ironic in a dream. Nobody goes around winking and smirking.”
Songbirds were darting almost imperceptibly across the sky, wailing broken half ballads back and forth to their mates. Two pigeons crashed into each other, then flew off in the same easterly direction. A hawk was flying straight upward with a tiny starling in her claws.
“Nobody smirks in your dreams?” Cyrus asked.
“Of course not,” Zee said, definitively. “Dreams are the great preserve of the earnest. People smirk in your dreams?”
Cyrus thought for a second:
“I can’t remember now. I don’t think so. Maybe you’re right.”
The ground was breathing, revealing tiny little golden fissures in the earth as it swelled. The trees dropped their flowers, then their branches, to the ground—slowly, almost delicately, like new lovers undressing in front of each other for the first time. The sky had gone from white to gray to bright orange, a great cigarette sucked back to life. There was thunder but no rain. Or maybe not thunder, but great cracking sounds all around.
“It won’t be long now,” said Zee.
Cyrus squeezed his hand again, took a deep breath.
“Why don’t I feel startled by any of this?” he asked. “Shouldn’t I be more scared?”
“Underneath being-startled is the expectation of calm,” Zee said, then paused. “I mean, a person gasps because the ease they were expecting was interrupted. I think probably your life hasn’t taught you to expect ease.”
“Jesus,” Cyrus said. “Yeah.”
“A lot of people mistake neglect for calm. Cosmic neglect, or otherwise. But nobody’s neglected you, Cyrus. You see that now, don’t you?”
“I think I am starting to, yeah,” Cyrus answered. Then, “Where is all this coming from?”
Little spirals of snow on the horizon, still, despite the heat coming up from the ground. The smell of deep forest, rotten and damp. Tarragon, pomegranate molasses, vetiver. The sound of brass again, trumpets, saxophone, horns. And now, drums too. A whistling on the air, nearly jaunty.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think about it,” Zee answered, laughing. “A long long time.”
“I see,” Cyrus said, laughing a little too, though he was still confused.
The two sat there, watching as a herd of wild horses galloped by them in the park, nostrils flared, hulking muscles steaming in the cold. Behind them, a great black stallion, twice the size of the rest, with an illuminated rider gripping the reins dressed in a long black cloak.
“Really?” said Cyrus.
Zee smiled, shrugged.
“You’ll forgive the universe its moment of high drama.”
They sat for another moment watching the sky curl, churn, like cream in coffee—they held hands, watching, thinking about blissfully little. Then Zee asked, “You feel ready?”
“I think so,” said Cyrus. His foot was burning, a heat so hot it looped through so-hot-it-feels-cold and felt hot again, scorching. Cyrus looked down at his shoe, the foot that had been throbbing, and saw a swirling void, a cosmos of deep gravity and pale bones. He saw his family, both of his parents, his book, his own face. Futureless, like a shattered crystal ball.
Together, Cyrus and Zee stood up. The golden light cracking through the ground had gathered into a vast and deep pool, warm and gurgling absently like an unattended infant. Cyrus knelt over the swirl and gasped a little. He was, somewhere in the back of his mind, aware he was crying, that Zee was there kneeling beside him, wiping the tears from his cheeks, kissing them. It was almost unbearable, how good and warm it felt to be there—together—in the pond’s golden light. The feeling of prayer—not prayer itself, but the stillness it leaves—lifted from the earth, smelling of grass and woodsmoke. Cyrus reached his hand into the pool and closed his eyes. He felt another hand—was it his own, or Zee’s?—grab it.
Around them, birds and bright blossoms dropped like fists of snow from the sky.