Martyr!

Annotations from "Martyr!" by Kaveh Akbar

they weren’t rich, they were surviving better than many. She’d seen it: old matriarchs rolling up the rugs on top of which they’d raised their children, their own and often their brothers’ and cousins’ as well. They’d drag the carpets, one heavy roll under each armpit, into the market, selling them for next to nothing.

Kathleen was oil-rich, charm-school-and-family-stables rich, a new kind of rich that made Cyrus’s moral compass spin all the way through contempt and back around to curiosity

She was Christian but American Christian, the kind that believed Jesus had just needed a bigger gun.

Beautiful terrible, how sobriety disabuses you of the sense of your having been a gloriously misunderstood scumbag prince shuffling between this or that narcotic crown.

Cyrus paused for a second. He felt a flash of familiar shame—his whole life had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much. He realized he was perhaps doing what Sad James had once called The Thing, the overliking thing, obsessing over something in a way that others felt to be smothering

In the back of your brain, your addiction is doing push-ups, getting stronger, just waiting for you to slip up, an old-timer once told him.

It’s just hard not to think about, like, ‘what would a person who hates me think about this.’ ” “Why are you worried about what people who hate you think about your art?” “Well, because the people who hate me also own all the guns and all the prisons.”

Maybe part of it is just wanting my tiny little life to have something of scale. For the stakes to matter.” He paused, then added, “For my having-lived."

It feels so American to discount dreams because they’re not built of objects, of things you can hold and catalogue and then put in a safe. Dreams give us voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire

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

Chattering away in that cab—about astrology, British punk music, jungle cats, Greek gods—this is what she was like: a pinwheel of stars. Lightning under a fingernail. I was watching her, nodding, watching, watching, starting to feel light-headed.

She was talking fast, fizzing like cold soda.

Each giraffe had the long eyelashes of horses, and those same sad eyes, like they knew they weren’t made for this world. Or worse, like they knew they were

He read once about a Sufi prayer that went “Lord, increase my bewilderment.” That was the prayer in its entirety.

That night Cyrus and Zee ordered pizza and stayed in to watch the hotel’s basic cable, HGTV and Office reruns. Zee talked about how luxurious it felt to do nothing in New York City, a place where you could do anything. He kept saying “opportunity cost,” that the opportunity cost of doing nothing in the city was so immense that it felt opulent

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

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

Paradise is mine today, as cash in hand,” Hafez had written. “Why should I count upon the puritan’s pledge of tomorrow?”

It’s easy for people who have sacrificed nothing to rationalize their own ordinariness by calling me lucky. But I sacrificed my entire life; I sold it to the abyss. And the abyss gave me art

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 bath

room 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.”

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 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

Our ape brains got too big, too big for our heads, too big for our mothers to birth them. So we started keeping all our extra knowing in language, in art, in stories and books and songs. Art was a way of storing our brains in each other’s. It wasn’t until fairly recently in human history, when rich landowners wanted something pretty to look at in winter, that the idea of art-as-mere-ornament came around. A painting of a blooming rose to hang on the mantel when the flowers outside the window had gone to ice. And still in the twenty-first century, it’s hard for folks to move past that\

What was left of his life had no intrinsic meaning, he knew, since such meaning could only be shaped in relation to other people

He cycled mindlessly between lovers, friends, bosses, counselors, professors, each with their own loadout of minor and major crises. Cyrus felt safe amidst them all, knowing that if anyone got too heavy, too warm-blooded, he could simply drink to jettison up above them until they disappeared. It was infuriating that nobody had told him about this, he thought. Life’s invincibility cheat code.

Sometimes, he’d strike upon a turn of phrase or an idea that he’d jot down to explore further in his writing. And sometimes, miracle of miracles, the script started to write itself. Sleep would take over and Cyrus would once more find himself listening in on a conversation between heroes, beloveds.

This was how he started speaking with Scheherazade, Spider-Man, Rimbaud. How he reunited with his father. It’s how he started talking with his mother again, after years of dreamless silence.

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.

Thank you, Tommy Orange: bandmate, maestro. This novel would not exist without your example on and off the page.

Reader, your attention—a measure of time, your most non-replenishable resource—is a profound gift, one I have done my best to honor. Thank you, thank you.

Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections, Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine. He lives in Iowa City.