MONDAY

Cyrus Shams and Sang Linh

Brooklyn, Day 4

Cyrus thought about what Sang would see: a shaggy young man, underdressed in a hoodie and jeans, sitting alone on a park bench. Not looking at his phone or reading a book, just hunched over picking at his fingernails. Maybe the pits of his eyes would remind Sang of Orkideh’s. Maybe, for a moment, it would catch her breath.

“Cyrus?” a woman asked.

He looked up. His eyes were red and dry.

“Are you Sang?” he asked, though he recognized immediately that she was. She looked older than she had online, but there was no mistaking her. She was a stout woman, short, thin-lipped, hair the color of Pepsi, which she kept pulled away from her face in a loose ponytail. She wore an open thin black coat down to her knees and beneath it, a dark gray button-up dress shirt. Her large eyes and deep nose-to-mouth lines gave her face an expression of perpetual concern, halfway to a wince. There was nothing ostentatious about her appearance, nothing to suggest she was a major player in the city’s art scene.

Sang nodded—

“Can I sit?” she asked.

“Of course,” he replied, scooting over.

They sat there for a few seconds, then a full minute, each quietly measuring the texture of the silence, the history between them. A dog-walker passed by, being pulled along by a blue heeler and two border collies. A nanny pushed a double stroller. Sang pulled out a colorful pack of cigarettes, bright Nat Shermans, and offered one to Cyrus. At first he shook his head, then he reconsidered and reached for one. Sang lit it for him and they sat there. The cigarette smoke felt to Cyrus like a beloved ghost returning after a long absence, filling him with warmth, making his fingertips tingle. Even the ground felt hot beneath his feet, though the day was uncommonly cold. Was it vibrating slightly, or humming?

“Do you hear that?” Cyrus asked about it, finally.

“The city?” Sang asked.

Cyrus listened again for the humming, the vibration, but he couldn’t find it.

“Ah, never mind,” he said. His neck was throbbing with cold.

“It’s different here, the cold,” Cyrus said. “It smells different than it does in the Midwest. The sky looks different too. It’s wetter? Heavier?”

“Where do you live?” Sang said, exhaling a thick plume into the air.

“Indiana. Kinda by Chicago. Not really.”

Sang nodded. They smoked quietly for another minute. The silence was a mercy for which each felt grateful as their hearts calibrated to the moment, to the day’s wild and vertiginous revelations.

“You know,” Sang said, eventually, “when Orkideh started losing the weight, the cancer weight, we became obsessed with trying to feed her. My wife would cut her these fruit bowls filled with kiwi, pear, starfruit, peach slices so soft your breath could bruise them. My middle son, Truong, he’s a chef. Has his own little spot in Jackson Heights. And he’d make her these incredible spreads—bone broths, dumplings, steamed spring rolls. He used to do these coconut rice cakes that she loved. Everyone just wanted to feed her and feed her. And here you are all skinny and hunched over in the cold and immediately all I want to do is take you to Truong and feed you too, just stuff your mouth full of French fries and noodles.”

Cyrus smiled a little. Sang continued:

“Orkideh—Roya—used to say there were only two kinds of people in any relationship, the feeder and the eater: the person who wanted to give care and the person who wanted to be taken care of. Maybe she said it more crudely, mommy and baby, something horrible like that.” Sang smiled and shook her head. “She resented ever needing anything from anyone. The whole thing was an elaborate self-loathing, I think.”

“That sounds exhausting,” Cyrus said.

“She was a complicated woman,” Sang added simply, the sort of nothing meant to vent—something—but it just kind of hung there.

I wouldn’t know, Cyrus thought, bitterly, but did not say. So much of what he was feeling was rage, it occurred to him. Swallowing it as best as he could, he feebly offered, “I appreciate you coming to see me. I just don’t know what to say.”

Sang nodded, then looked at her phone, which was vibrating.

“Shit, I do have to answer this one,” she said, standing up from the bench. “Two minutes,” she mouthed to Cyrus, holding up two fingers, before walking a little distance away.

Cyrus watched her pace off, conducting what seemed to be a stern business call. He looked up at the sky, which had begun to clot into blotchy purple clouds. Why hadn’t Orkideh told him who she was? His own mother? Why hadn’t she tried to find him? Or her husband? And what about the flight? None of it made sense. Cyrus pulled another cigarette from the colorful pack Sang left sitting on the bench, but realizing he had no lighter and Sang hadn’t left hers, he gave an exasperated sigh and put it back in the pack. A tide of self-pity swallowed him. He was alone and cold in a strange city he had no business being in. Friendless, sponsorless, possibly smelling faintly of piss, he was now also somehow even more motherless than he had been when he woke up that day. If this is a sign, it’s a fucking dumb one, he thought to—at?—god. His foot pulsed with its familiar dull ache. The wind plucked at the park air like an unattended harp.

Finishing her phone call, Sang paced swiftly back over to Cyrus, sitting back down beside him. She smelled good, sturdy, like tarragon and tobacco.

“Sorry, dear. I’m still her manager,” Sang said.

“It’s no problem,” Cyrus said. “I’m surprised you have time to talk to me at all,” he added, aware it sounded a little pathetic.

Sang rolled her eyes, then said, “Orkideh told me you’re in recovery?”

Cyrus looked up at her, nodded.

“I’ve been sober for nearly thirty years,” said Sang. “In the rooms.”

“Wow,” he said. “That’s an eternity.”

Sang smiled, said, “I mention it because, when I first started going to my Tribeca meetings, I was a mess. Noon meetings, just these big clouds of smoke. And afterwards my sponsor—or, she would eventually become my sponsor, Janet—she would take me to the Possum Diner next door for coffee and egg sandwiches. She was this old biker lady, leather jacket, the whole deal. We did that daily for months and months. My kids at school, and me sneaking off at noon to hang out with all these drunks and eat drippy egg sandwiches with this crazy old white lady.

“One day, I was maybe three months, four months sober, and my kids were nuts, the oldest kept getting into fights at school and I could barely keep my head attached to my neck. We have the meeting and I am so eager to go to the diner with Janet because I have all these grievances to list, all this stuff I wanted to talk with her about. But as soon as the meeting’s over she invites this raggedy newcomer lady to come eat with us. She was clearly straight off the street, probably just at the meeting to drink free coffee and bum smokes. And of course we get to the diner and this lady won’t shut up, talking about how her boyfriend fucked her over and how now he’s looking for her, something like that. I remember just sitting there, seething at this trespasser, hating the way she chewed, the way she guzzled her water and coffee. She was swallowing up the whole conversation, not letting me get a word in. And then at some point she gets up to use the bathroom and it’s just me and Janet left in the booth and before I can say anything, Janet leans across the table and says, very very slowly and clearly,

“ ‘Sang. Listen to me. You are not the patient today.’

“And that was that. I think about it every day. You’re not the patient today, Sang. It’s lucky to get to be on the other side. It’s a good day when you’re not the patient.”

Cyrus smiled up at Sang. There was a softness to her speech that felt incongruous with the crags in her face, her severe posture. He could see why important people trusted her.

“That’s a great story,” Cyrus said, earnestly. “Do you and Janet still work together?”

“No, she died a few years after I got sober. Went back out and it only took her a couple months to OD.”

“Jesus Christ. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine!” Sang said. “She was sober for a decade, lived ten years longer than she was supposed to. She helped many women get sober, and who knows how many people we’ve all helped ourselves, who everyone we’ve helped has helped. You know? She did good. God loves Janet.”

Cyrus smiled weakly. He felt dizzy, still. He said, “I say that about myself all the time, ‘Lived years longer than I was supposed to.’ My liver was pre-cirrhotic when I quit. I was only in my twenties. A baby. And I’m still here when all these other people just like me aren’t. So who decides ‘supposed to’? Who chooses?”

Around them, it had started to snow. Or maybe it had been for some time. The flakes hung in the air, big globs, neither rising nor falling, just suspended there, like sounds.

“You don’t have to do this gracefully,” Sang said, after a pause.

Cyrus nodded slowly.

“I always…I always thought my mom was on that flight, you know? What that meant to me, how that related to this big idea of martyrdom.”

“Not wanting her to have died for nothing,” Sang offered.

“Right. Exactly. And then my friend told me about Orkideh and her installation and I thought I could write a book about it. Martyrdom. The gulf between my mother making nothing from her death and this artist in Brooklyn making something. These two opposite Iranian women…except it was the same person.” Cyrus turned and looked at Sang, hard. “How was it the same person? How was my mother not on that flight?”

Sang sighed:

“She gave her ticket to her lover. Leila. They switched passports. They were going to run away separately, meet up, and start life over again. Together. Somewhere else.”

Sang’s words—not even the words, their sounds—crushed whatever feeble sense of bearing Cyrus had built up. He reflexively shook his head, baffled, trying to apprehend what Sang just said. Leila. Lover. Start over. Without him? Had Sang said “without you”? He couldn’t remember, though she’d just spoken. “Without you” was everywhere apparent, even if Sang hadn’t said it out loud. His mother had not been shot out of the sky at all. Some random other woman—Leila, was it?—had been. Cyrus’s mother was another one of those just-stepping-out-for-a-pack-of-cigs family abandoners. He’d been a tiny baby. It felt so pulverizingly mundane. Roya Shams, the deadbeat mom. Or at least, she’d planned to be a deadbeat, before her lover—her lover!—Leila!!—was shot out of the sky. Cyrus felt annihilated. Furious. He felt angry for his sweet sick dead father. He felt angry for himself. Then at himself, for feeling angry instead of something more enlightened: acceptance, or perhaps compassion. That’s where he quickly settled, the vector of his rage, his hurt, pointed directly back at himself. Every cell of his body wanted to drink, to jettison out of the moment, out of consciousness entirely.

After what felt like an eternity, Cyrus heard himself ask, “Did my father know?”

Sang looked at Cyrus, then took a final drag from her cigarette.

“Not much, I don’t think. Maybe about Leila. Leila’s husband found out, so probably he did tell your father something, at some point. But Leila’s husband finding out, that was why—” She paused, looking at Cyrus.

“Why they had to leave?” he finished for her.

Sang nodded. A sinewy woman walked by, struggling to pull a complicated caravan of roller bags. Snow caught in her hair and didn’t melt, like cotton in the wind.

“I hate this,” said Cyrus.

Sang looked at him. The chain of her modest gold necklace had popped from under her shirt, was sitting on the collar of one side of her blouse. Given how put together Sang was, it looked doubly strange.

“Gay people dying for love,” Cyrus stammered. His mind was racing too far ahead of his language. “It’s bullshit” was what he said, was all he could manage.

“It happened. And it still happens,” Sang said. “You Americans act like this stuff is over. Like George Bush standing on that ship in front of the Mission Accomplished banner. It’s not over at all. It’s not in the past. You and I are sitting here right now because of it.”

Cyrus winced at “you Americans,” though Sang wasn’t wrong.

“I can’t stand that I’m so mad,” he said, desperately.

“You think there’s some nobility in being above anger?” Sang asked. “Anger is a kind of fear. And fear saved you. When the world was all kneecaps and corners of coffee tables, fear kept you safe.”

Cyrus said nothing.

“When we were still in Vietnam, my husband was a drunk,” Sang continued. “He’d drink all our money, gamble anything left over. I drank too, but not like him. There was no money for anything. I was scared all the time of going hungry, of losing our home. The universe—you can call it God if you want, it doesn’t bother me—gave me my first son. And then I was scared for us, instead of just myself. My boy gave me a reason to stick around. I stopped drinking. I started making my own paintbrushes out of clothespins and bits of old sponge, making paint from flour and food color. I made these tacky landscapes and sold them to tourists, hid the money. Fear made me work hard, get better. It’s a dirty fuel, but it works. And anger? Anger helped me to leave him. To get my boys away from him as soon as I could. To come thrive in this country that didn’t even believe we were people. To prove it wrong. You can put a saddle on anger, Cyrus.”

Cyrus looked at her. He was suddenly embarrassed, hopelessly embarrassed to have made this grieving widow-of-sorts have to come console him, today of all days. He wanted to say sorry, to say, somehow convincingly, that he was fine, that she didn’t need to speak to him this way. But before he could put any of that into language, Sang continued:

“I’m mad at her too, you know. For a lot of things. But especially for making me be the one to have to have this conversation with you.”

“Yeah,” Cyrus said. “I can imagine.” Though he couldn’t.

The wind stirred up a flurry of snowflakes, lifting them off the dead grass like sparks rising off a beach fire. Cyrus felt light-years away from the world.

“ ‘Whoever climbs over our fence, we shall climb over his roof,’ ” Cyrus mumbled.

“What?”

“Saddam said that, at the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War. That kind of anger, retributive. That half-your-face-for-an-eye shit. There’s nothing uglier.”

“Ahh.”

“I just think about that a lot. The ugliness of anger. I don’t disagree that it can be harnessed. But it’s so irredeemably ugly.”

“You’re a human being, Cyrus,” Sang said, gently. “So was your mother. So am I. Not cartoon characters. There’s no pressure for us to be ethically pure, noble. Or, God forbid, aspirational. We’re people. We get mad, we get cowardly. Ugly. We self-obsess.”

Cyrus blinked. Sang was right—whatever storm of confusion, anger, betrayal he was feeling in that moment began and ended with himself. Globs of snow were falling from the clouds that had begun, almost imperceptibly, growing lighter, like someone was emptying out them out with a teaspoon.

“I’m so sorry, Sang,” Cyrus said.

“For what?”

“All this. Taking up your day. I can’t imagine all you have to be doing right now. And Jesus, I haven’t even asked: How are you? How are you handling all this?”

“I’m okay, Cyrus,” she said. “Mad, like I said. But not surprised. Not really. It wasn’t a surprise. And”—she took a deep breath—“and honestly, it’s thrilling to meet you. I never imagined I’d be able to. Plus,” she added, “every minute you keep me from my inbox, from the art-world death vultures, is a kindness.”

Cyrus smiled.

“It’s exciting to meet you too, Sang.”

They sat quietly like that for a time, snow dusting them like sugar. Then Cyrus said:

“There’s this story I read one time, some old-school Muslim fairy tale, maybe it was a discarded hadith I guess, but it was all about the first time Satan sees Adam. Satan circles around him, inspecting him like a used car or something, this new creation—God’s favorite, apparently. Satan’s unimpressed, doesn’t get it. And then Satan steps into Adam’s mouth, disappears completely inside him and passes through all his guts and intestines and finally emerges out his anus. And when he gets out, Satan’s laughing and laughing. Rolling around. He passes all the way through the first man and he’s rolling around laughing, in tears, and he says to God, ‘This is what you’ve made? He’s all empty! All hollow!’ He can’t believe his luck. How easy his job is going to be. Humans are just a long emptiness waiting to be filled.”

Sang smiled.

“Sounds like some men I’ve known for sure,” she said.

Cyrus laughed too. “Right?” He went on, “I think the moral is supposed to be that you fill the hollow with God. And that everything else is a distraction.”

“Hmph. Is your hollow filled with God, then?” she asked.

“Oh, no,” Cyrus said quickly. “Or mostly never. Maybe a couple times in my life. I think I’ve tried to fill it with booze, with drugs. Maybe with writing. But obviously, none have really worked out very well.”

“Never love? That seems like the big one.”

Cyrus thought. The ground burning under his feet. He felt a pang, thought about Zee.

“Not as much. Not as much as I probably should.”

“Oh, I don’t know about ‘should.’ But mostly, it’s a cleaner fuel than getting high. Cleaner than art too, mostly.”

“Is that yours then?” Cyrus asked. “How you filled your hollow?”

“What, love?” Sang thought for a moment. “Probably these days, yeah. I mean, I could also say your mother. Her self, her history, her art. Holding all of that. But then, also, my boys. And their families. Their wives, my grandkids. I hope you’ll meet them one day, Cyrus. But I don’t know what fills me!” She laughed. “I don’t have one piece of my brain for romantic love and one for narcotic love and one for family and one for art. It all washes together. Tintoretto makes me think of my youngest boy. O’Keeffe makes me think of my oldest. Right now Roya makes me think of lavender. Of Sarah Vaughan’s ‘Solitude.’ And also this song from my childhood, ‘Hạ Trắng.’ Which also makes me think of my wife! Which is fucked up,” she laughed. Cyrus laughed too.

“I think I get that,” he said, “the mess of it.”

“I think you do too,” Sang replied.

They sat there quietly for a time, watching. Cyrus’s foot pounded. He felt angry, confused, sick—but also a little excited. Which confused him. A pretty couple walked by eating kimchi sandwiches, a gray old man was studying a chessboard he had balanced on his knees. Cyrus once read an anthropologist who wrote about how the first artifact of civilization wasn’t a hammer or arrowhead, but a human femur—discovered in Madagascar—that showed signs of having healed from a bad fracture. In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another. It was an attractive idea.

The sun, Cyrus noticed, was cracking back through the sky in waves.