SUNDAY

Cyrus Shams and Orkideh

BROOKLYN, DAY 3

His third day in the city, Cyrus got to the museum ten minutes before it opened. He’d wanted to get there with enough time to have a substantive conversation with Orkideh before lines formed and snuffed it out. He’d picked up two coffees along the way, the second as a little offering for Orkideh, a small gift to communicate that he’d been thinking of her before he saw her. This gesture, this possibility, had always struck Cyrus as particularly moving—an evergreen wonder that anyone remembered him when he wasn’t in the room. That people found the surplus psychic bandwidth to consider—or even worry over—anyone else’s interior seemed a bit of an unheralded miracle. Cyrus read on a website once that there was a word for this: sonder. “The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” Incredible, how naming something took nothing away from its stagger. Language could be totally impotent like that.

Cyrus was also aware of the possibility that his marvel at this seemingly mundane phenomenon might be an indictment of his own self-absorption. He hadn’t cured a plague, he’d purchased a two-dollar cup of coffee. This overblown moment of self-satisfaction at what was essentially a very, very minor favor.

Upon arriving at the museum—quicker this day and with only a brief period of confused wandering—and staring through the glass at staff shuffling around, Cyrus suddenly realized he was going to have to throw away the extra cup. There was no way the attendants—hip, self-serious to a person, statement glasses and austere all-black dress—would allow him to take in coffee among all the art. He felt stupid. He looked around for a homeless person to whom to give the coffee, a way to assuage his pathological guilt around wasting food or drink. When Cyrus was still a child, his father would force him to sit at the dinner table to finish whatever he’d put on his plate, even if it meant going to the bathroom to throw up and come back. In the Shams apartment, no sin was worse than waste.

In Cyrus’s adult life, this training meant he’d eat around the mold on strawberries, ask to box his friends’ food at restaurants, finish half-empty cans of flat soda the next day. At busy nights at Lucky’s when he was still drinking, the bartenders would consolidate other patrons’ abandoned drinks into a single pitcher and bring the murky liquid over to Cyrus. He was grateful for the free booze and for the feeling of conservation this gave him, and the servers were grateful for the tips he left on disgusting drinks they’d otherwise just dump.

He wandered around the museum’s outdoor entrance for a few minutes, sipping his own coffee. He saw a young professional woman in heels juggling two carrying trays of iced lattes. A tattooed man dressed in black, perhaps a server on his way to a brunch shift, scowling up at the pigeons flying overhead, willing them to hold their droppings till he passed. Finally, Cyrus spotted a young crust punk sleeping on her dog’s ribs, a dirty comforter spread over them both. He walked over to set the coffee down near them, close enough that the dog raised its head to study him, then set it sleepily back down.

But Cyrus considered, at the last moment, that he might be able to smuggle the coffee under his shirt. Maybe he could get it in there to Orkideh after all. Maybe this whole episode would be a conversation starter. He picked the coffee back up from in front of the crust punk. She hadn’t stirred from her sleep. The sleeping dog’s breath made little gray clouds in the cold.

Cyrus tossed his cup in the bin after chugging the dregs as he walked through the museum doors. He paid three dollars (the suggested donation was ten) and proceeded through to the stair area, where a stern-looking middle-aged woman in a nondescript suit, with long dreads down to her rear, stopped him.

“You can’t bring that in here,” she said, face pinched forward toward the coffee cup Cyrus was still half hiding behind his back.

“Ah, whoops, I didn’t even notice,” Cyrus lied, turning around and tossing Orkideh’s cup. It pained him to waste the coffee and the money he’d spent on it, especially since he’d not left it for the punk, who may not even have wanted it, who was really a foil for Cyrus to feel good about his own goodness, which shamed him doubly now. He knew that if Zee was with him he’d have left her the coffee. Zee made him want to be better like that. Cyrus’s ears flushed with shame.

When he finally got to the third-floor gallery where Orkideh was sitting alone resting her skeletal bald head on her hand, he was already feeling anxious, anxious about his place in the world, his relative goodness or inescapable selfishness. Outside the gallery entrance the same docent, no older than twenty or twenty-one with a long feather earring dangling from his left earlobe and a thick gauged septum piercing, was still scrolling through his phone. He looked up as he saw Cyrus coming in.

“Less crowded today,” the docent said, smiling.

Cyrus smiled back, nodded, grateful for the acknowledgment, for the tiny moment of being treated like an insider.

As he stepped into the gallery, Cyrus tried to take in the room as a whole. If art’s single job was to be interesting, then the room with Orkideh sitting in it was art of the highest order. The artist’s tiny living body swallowed by an inorganic frenzy of clothing, shadow. The eroded surfaces of Orkideh’s face were like Martian crags and craters that, like a perfect photograph, caught in astonishing clarity the entire spectrum of visible light from pure light to pure dark. The shadows against the wall played up the gulf between the size of the physical objects—two folding chairs, a mug of water on a small table, a lamp, a notebook and pen—and the scale of their purpose. And today, something new—an oxygen tank, ominous oval looming like a deactivated missile, with its gleaming control knob and thin translucent tube coiling down around the floor and then back up to Orkideh’s two nostrils.

One could paint the scene and hang it next to a Vermeer or a Caravaggio for parallel master studies in isolation, in the drama of light and dark playing against basic shapes. There was an almost operatic quality to the simple contours competing with each other for the eye’s attention—Orkideh’s round skull, her billowing black dress—and bare feet again, Cyrus noticed. The air felt like marble hardening all around him.

At the sound of his footsteps, Orkideh’s face rose to meet Cyrus with recognition and a joyful smile, and some third thing he couldn’t quite decipher.

“Salaam, Orkideh,” said Cyrus, smiling as he settled into the chair. “Chetori?”

Orkideh inhaled deeply, smiling a crooked smile. Every time she breathed out, the tube in her nose fogged.

“Cyrus Shams,” she said, “you’re back!”

“How are you feeling today?” he asked.

He regretted asking this almost instantly. What an obvious question, what a ridiculous way to greet someone dying of cancer. It was like asking someone just struck by lightning about the weather.

For her part, Orkideh just shrugged and smiled in the direction of the oxygen tank.

“Right. Sorry,” said Cyrus.

“It’s fine, Cyrus. I’m not scared of it. Please, tell me something! Tell me something good this morning.”

Cyrus thought for a moment, but just one.

“I’ve been working on that book I was telling you about,” he said. “I thought I was going to call it The Book of Martyrs but now maybe I’m going to call it Earth Martyrs.” He looked at her and quickly added, “I mean, if that’s okay with you. It’s your phrase.”

Orkideh laughed.

“My gift to you, Cyrus jaan.” Her thick accent warmed the room. It felt like a sunrise.

“Thank you,” he said sheepishly. “I really am grateful for it.” He paused for a second, staring at the artist’s face, finding it warm, as if suddenly saturated by his presence.

“Can I ask you something? Something…uncomfortable?”

Someone in another gallery sneezed loudly and the docent stuck his head out the doorway, but otherwise, Cyrus and Orkideh were alone.

“That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?” she said.

“Is it?”

“I don’t actually know.” She laughed. “I think so, though, probably. To talk about things people are normally afraid to talk about.”

“Sure,” said Cyrus. All of a sudden, he felt nervous. “That makes sense.” The back of his neck was sweating and he noticed he suddenly had to pee. “Why aren’t you spending these last days with your family? With the people who love you?”

Orkideh didn’t smile at this but didn’t look wounded either. She let her mouth hang open for a moment before saying, “Cyrus,” snapping the r the Iranian way, drawing out the ooo. “I’m an artist. I give my life to art. That’s all there is. People in my life have come and gone and come and gone. Mostly they’ve gone. I give my life to art because it stays. That’s what I am. An artist. I make art.” She paused for a moment. “It’s what time doesn’t ruin.”

Cyrus wanted to object. It was the kind of pronouncement that inspired in him immediate skepticism—the grandness of it, the certainty. Sensing his reticence, Orkideh smiled.

“I’m not bereft, azizam. I’ve had a rich life. I’ve eaten oysters fresh out of the Caspian! I’ve been to the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City! I’ve made love and been in love and fallen out of love. I’ve made art. I’ve been so lucky.”

Her oxygen machine wheezed. Cyrus’s knee was bouncing.

“What’s the trick, then?” he asked. “The trick to being at peace at the end?”

Orkideh laughed. “If I knew, do you think I’d tell you?”

“I mean, I kind of guess, yeah, I do. Why wouldn’t you?”

They both laughed. Cyrus was beginning to feel more comfortable. “I brought a coffee for you, but I had to get rid of it before I came in,” he said.

“Aw, that’s very sweet, Koroosh,” said Orkideh. She reached over to him and pretended to grab an invisible coffee cup from his side, then took a pretend sip.

“Beh beh beh,” she said. “Delicious!”

An older man with long gray hair and a tweed coat walked into the gallery. Both Cyrus and Orkideh looked up at him, and the man, confused, turned around and walked back out.

“He must have been surprised to see two Iranians whispering conspiratorially in a dark room,” Cyrus said, and he and Orkideh laughed again.

“What about you though, Cyrus Shams?” Orkideh asked. “If you become a martyr, won’t you be hurting the people who love you?”

Cyrus nodded. “Of course,” he said, then after a beat, “but it’s hard to figure out if that hurt would be worse than the hurt of my being here.”

Orkideh shook her head.

“It will be worse,” she said. “I promise. If you let yourself get a little older, you’ll understand that.”

“Maybe,” said Cyrus. “My mother died when I was very young. My father never really got over it. I feel like in a lot of ways he blamed himself. Maybe he even blamed me. I think my being around made it hard for him.”

Orkideh winced, studying Cyrus. He was a handsome man, strong jaw. High, thick eyebrows. The Persian word for “eyebrow” literally deconstructs to “cloud-above.” Cyrus’s made his eyes look pained, stormy, even when he was laughing. Much older and darker than the rest of his face. So many Iranian men she had known had eyes like that. Her breathing tubes were fogging up a little more than before.

“And I have friends, some of them really close. My best friend Zee, he came with me on this trip. He would probably be mad at me forever if I killed myself. But it’s not like he’d spontaneously combust or anything. He’d understand, eventually. Probably he already does.”

Orkideh inhaled deeply.

“I had a friend too, a novelist,” she said. “And one time I asked her about whether she plots out her books in advance and just fills in the details, or if she moves through the story as she writes it. She looked at me and without skipping a second, she answered like an oracle: ‘Behind me is silence, and ahead of me is silence.’ And that was it. That was her whole answer. Isn’t that perfect?”

“Yeah, that’s beautiful,” said Cyrus, though it confused him.

“What I mean is, I think maybe you’ll find your real ending once you stop looking for it,” Orkideh said. “I think real endings tend to work their way in from the outside.”

Cyrus was struggling to keep up. He had so much to say, so much to clarify and challenge, but he could only find himself nodding, grunting in vague affirmations. He felt self-conscious talking to the artist, like she was going to think him a voyeur, or a morbid child. In the gallery a new guest had walked in, a younger woman, maybe in high school, listening to headphones shaped like cat ears, shuffling awkwardly from foot to foot.

“When my mother died I was a baby,” Cyrus finally said. “And so I didn’t really know what I’d lost until I was much older. I mean, maybe I still don’t. But there was this one day when I was fifteen or sixteen when I decided I was really going to feel it. Like, I didn’t get to have a day to grieve my mother properly when it happened. So I made one up. I skipped school and just wandered around downtown Fort Wayne listening to my Walkman, weeping wherever I went, trying to picture her in my head. I kept ducking into these alleys and side streets bawling my eyes out, imagining all the days she’d never seen me. All the days I’d never see her. I got dehydrated from all the crying, I remember feeling super thirsty. I remember stopping into a gas station to buy a Gatorade, and the clerk there asking if I was okay, if I needed any help. That’s such a funny detail, I’d forgotten about that till just now. It tasted like trash, so sweet it burned. But I chugged it! I was so thirsty from crying. I felt it I think maybe for the first time then. All that grief consolidated, concentrated into a single hard point. Like a diamond. That one day.”

“Wow,” said Orkideh. “Wow.” Her own eyes had begun to water as Cyrus spoke. She paused, took a sip from her mug. Her oxygen machine rattled. Clearing her throat Orkideh said, “So then what? How did you feel after?”

“That’s the thing,” Cyrus said. “I got home and ate dinner and watched TV and went to bed. The next day I went to school and nothing had changed. My mother hadn’t come back. My father wasn’t any less sad and neither was I. I was still the same person.”

“Of course,” said Orkideh. “It seems very American to expect grief to change something. Like a token you cash in. A formula. Grieve x amount, receive y amount of comfort. Work a day in the grief mines and get paid in tickets to the company store.”

They both laughed.

“Yeah,” said Cyrus. “This was I think the beginning of my understanding that. And when my father died a few years later, after I went to college, I felt like I was more ready for it. Like he had done his job, delivering me to college. And so he could finally clock out, as if he’d been waiting for that moment of being allowed to rest. I was able to really feel it, and mostly I felt gratitude. Sad too of course, but I remember it mostly being just so grateful that he kept himself around as long as he did, for me.”

Cyrus noticed Orkideh’s eyes were totally clouded with wet—now flushed, red, gauzy.

“Jesus. I’m so sorry, we don’t even know each other. I don’t mean to put this all on you,” Cyrus said.

“No, no, it’s beautiful. It’s exactly what I’m here for.” Orkideh smiled, dabbing each eye with her black sleeves, then gesturing with the back of her hand toward the gallery title painted on the wall behind her, DEATH-SPEAK.

“Sure, but you’re holding so much already, with your own…”

“Cyrus, yesterday a woman came in here. Showed me a picture of a gorgeous little girl, said it was her daughter, said now she was in a coma, brain dead from a heroin overdose. Asked me what to do. Whether she should—” Orkideh winced, saying the next words as if trying to force a large rock up her throat, “—pull the plug.” She put her hands up on the table between them. “What am I supposed to say to that?”

“What did you say?”

“Ah, I don’t know. What can you say? Only stupid things. Something about it being a horrible disease, a horrible choice. I think she left disappointed.” Orkideh coughed into the crook of her arm. “But my point is, I’m happy to talk with you. It’s easy. Lovely. I enjoy it.”

Cyrus nodded, then blurted, “I’ve been sober for a couple years too.” He felt suddenly self-conscious. “Or, not ‘too.’ I mean, I like talking to you too. But yeah, it is a horrible disease, you’re right.”

Orkideh’s eyes widened.

“Wow. Good for you. You’ve really had a whole life already, Cyrus Shams.”

When he looked at the artist, he noticed suddenly how veiny her skull was. How the blood vessels bulged, blue arteries almost phosphorescent in the dim light. On TV when he’d seen people bald from cancer their skulls always seemed so flat, ghostly and powdered. In real life it was so much more vascular, animal. There were tiny wispy strands of hair growing back over it too, he saw now, so thin you could only see them when they caught the light.

“I’m supposed to be talking to you about your life, though. For the book.”

“Ah yes, the book, the book. Your book of martyrs,” she said, drawing out the word “martyrs” like it was a punchline to a bad joke. “And you still think I might feature in this book?” Orkideh said, smiling.

“I do, yeah. I mean, I don’t know for sure yet. But I think so. What you’re doing here. It’s incredible. I flew here to talk to you about it. I don’t even really know what to say about what you’re doing, but it’s remarkable.”

“Ahh yes, remarkable.” She laughed, gesturing toward her oxygen machine, which wheezed a gassy wheeze as if to punctuate her point.

“It is,” Cyrus went on. “And I feel so inadequate. Like, just the writing of it, trying to put it into language. It feels so damned.”

“How do you mean?”

Cyrus fidgeted, putting his hands on the table then taking them back off. The table, matte metallic black, held the imprint of his hand for a flicker of a second, a little ghost of Cyrus’s heat. There, then gone.

“I guess, I write these sentences where I try to lineate grief or doubt or joy or sex or whatever till it sounds as urgent as it feels. But I know the words will never feel like the thing. The language will never be the thing. So it’s damned, right? And I am too, for giving my life to it. Because I know my writing can never make any of these deaths matter the way they’re supposed to. It’ll never arrest fascism in its tracks or save the planet. It’ll never bring my mother back, you know?”

“Or any of the people on that flight,” said Orkideh.

“Exactly!” said Cyrus. “Exactly.”

The girl in line was still awkwardly shifting from foot to foot listening to her cat ear headphones, and behind her a couple more people had joined the line, another younger person with wireless headphones and the older man with long hair from before, perhaps now emboldened by the presence of a line.

“It has been so very lucky to have these talks with you, Cyrus Shams,” said Orkideh. “I really truly enjoy it. Will you come back and see me again tomorrow, if you’re still in town?”

“Of course, of course, I’ll be back tomorrow,” said Cyrus. He had so much more he wanted to say, but he wanted to respect the line, wanted to respect Orkideh’s project. He took a sip from his imaginary coffee, and then Orkideh took a sip from hers, smiling across her whole face. Cyrus stood up.

He said, “May I give you a hug?”

Orkideh responded, “Please.”

They hugged and Cyrus breathed in her scent, some combination of rosewater and antiseptic lotion, the former perhaps meant to mask the latter.

As he walked out of the museum, his head was spinning. He replayed the conversation over and over. He’d never told anyone about his grief day, not even his father. Not even Zee. He’d almost forgotten about it, forgotten about the Walkman and the Gatorade. He tried to remember who he had been listening to—Elliott Smith maybe, or Billie Holiday. Orkideh had held that conversation so carefully. He’d seen her eyes water.

He wished he’d spoken with her more about martyrdom specifically. Did she consider herself a martyr? An earth martyr? If not, was it okay if he did? What about the mother who’d had to “pull the plug” on her daughter? He’d remember to be more focused tomorrow. He’d half forgotten that he was ostensibly there writing his book. Their conversation had been so good, so true. It wouldn’t have felt right to press too inorganically.

Cyrus was practically floating an inch off the ground, lost in gratitude and awe and a sense of overwhelming simpatico, when another part of the conversation entered into his head. “My writing will never bring my mother back,” he’d said. And Orkideh replied, “Or any of the people on that flight.”

He tried to remember if he’d ever mentioned to Orkideh how his mother had died. He sat on a park bench. He’d told her about Zee, about his father, about his mother dying; but, for the life of him, he couldn’t remember ever saying anything about Flight 655.