Martyr!

In 2017, two years into the process of recovery and sobriety, Cyrus is still studying and working at Keady. He has a job as a medical actor at the University Hospital, pretending to be either a patient or family of a patient for medical students learning proper bedside manner. Each shift, he is assigned a new identity and backstory and acts as that character for a mock medical appointment. Cyrus loves the job but had hoped that his best friend and lover, Zee, would join him. Zee worries that the job is particularly unhealthy for Cyrus as he continues his recovery.

On this particular day, Cyrus is assigned the identity of a high school teacher about to receive a skin cancer diagnosis. He dislikes the medical student conducting the mock appointment because of her preppy appearance and decides that he is going to make the appointment difficult for her. Interspersed with flashbacks to his early conversations with Gabe, his Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) sponsor, Cyrus proceeds to perform as a cancer patient that is highly combative and reflective of his struggles with addiction and mental illness. To his surprise, the medical student can offer empathetic advice. Embarrassed, he gives her a good review and rushes out of the hospital.

A 1988 government memo to the president of the United States asserts that “[t]he USS VINCENNES did not purposely shoot down an Iranian commercial airliner” (20). Back in 2017, Cyrus goes to his AA meeting following his disarming shift at the hospital. Gabe is also at the meeting. Cyrus struggles to pay attention to what others have to say during this meeting, finding the older, predominantly white group unrelatable and suspecting that they would likely be politically hostile to him outside of the meeting. Toward the end of the meeting, he shares with the group about his difficult day at work and how addiction and recovery have complicated his relationship with religion.

After the AA meeting, he and Gabe meet up at a nearby coffee shop to debrief. Gabe is cynical about much of what Cyrus has to say, particularly his new ideas about finding direction through Iranian spirituality. The two men get into an argument over Gabe’s insensitivity and Cyrus’s musings. Cyrus leaves the coffee shop angry, vowing to himself to never speak to Gabe again. 

This chapter details Cyrus’s childhood as an Iranian immigrant to the United States. He struggled with severe insomnia and night terrors. His single father, Ali, was distraught and overworked, straining to take care of Cyrus’s needs and work his job at a chicken factory. Roya, his mother, was killed shortly after Cyrus was born when a US warship bombed a civilian flight that she was on from Tehran to Dubai. Roya’s family became enraged at the United States for killing her (and for failing to take accountability for the bombing), but Ali decided that he and Cyrus would move there anyway when he saw advertisements for the job at the chicken factory.

This chapter is told from the perspective of an unnamed woman on a flight to Dubai in 1988 (inferred to be the same flight on which Roya was killed). She is initially nervous because she has never been on a plane before. She considers Tehran as she left it—widespread poverty has driven many of her community members to financial desperation, the war with Iraq claims the lives of countless young men, and the government imprisons women for sex work. She finds that despite her initial fears, she navigates the airport with relative ease and feels tranquility at the thought of leaving Tehran and her husband behind. Even as two mysterious objects approach the plane from a distance, she finds herself hopeful for a better future.

A New York Times article from July 4, 1988, reports that the US Navy claims to have mistaken the passenger plane for an enemy fighter jet and that the civilian casualties were unintentional. All 290 people on board the flight were killed. Ali and Cyrus learned how to survive in America, concealing their Iranian identity from hostile locals and learning to participate in American culture through outlets like watching basketball. Ali told Cyrus the story of his uncle Arash (Roya’s brother), whose role as a soldier in the Iran-Iraq War was to pose as an angel and who rode through battlefields with a flashlight obscuring his face to instill courage and affirm the faith of dying soldiers. Seeing so much death left Arash permanently traumatized. His mental health began to deteriorate as a result, and Roya’s death only heightened his suffering. The story left a lasting impression on Cyrus.

Ali fell victim to alcoholism, and Cyrus spent his entire childhood afraid of drinking because of it. However, when Ali died early into Cyrus’s time as an undergraduate at Keady, he began using alcohol and other substances to cope. For the first time in his life, he slept soundly at night, as if the alcohol enabled it. Before, he had to construct elaborate conversations between his heroes and friends to lull himself to sleep at night: “It became a way of visiting the titans of his psychic life, a Faustian trade-off with his insomnia” (51).

The second half of the chapter is one of Cyrus’s dialogic dreams, where Roya Shams and Lisa Simpson speak to one another. Lisa appears in her two-dimensional form and listens while Roya philosophizes about the importance of treating the present as though it is precious. Lisa, whose physical form and appearance are constantly morphing throughout the dream, warns Roya not to turn everything into symbols.

In Tehran in 1973, young Roya wakes up every morning having wet the bed. She feels immense shame over this habit, convinced that everyone else can smell urine on her, and tries to control it by restricting her water intake every day. She also feels shame over her appearance, particularly her large nose. Arash heightens her insecurity by admonishing her for smelling bad. One night, she dreams of flowers but is awoken by the sensation of Arash urinating on her.

In the narrative present, Cyrus sits at a coffee shop with his friends. He tells Zee and another friend, Sad James, that he is considering starting a book-length poetry project about martyrdom. He has covered his apartment with pictures of historical martyrs, along with his parents, to gain inspiration for the project. He explains that part of his motivation is trying to find the meaning behind his mother’s death. Sad tells him that he might want to go visit the Brooklyn Museum, where a terminally ill Iranian American artist named Orkideh has taken up residence for her final exhibition, called “DEATH SPEAK.” Cyrus is immediately enticed by this idea, and with Zee agreeing to accompany him, he decides to go to New York to talk to her.