Excerpt from Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Dr. Monfort said nothing. Cyrus went on,

"But when I'd finished maybe just a quarter of the bottle, I realized suddenly I didn't want to burn everyone else in the apartment complex."

This was true. That little flicker of lucidity, light, like sun glinting off a snake in the grass. It happened a few months before Cyrus had gotten sober, and it wasn't until he was already good and drunk that he even remembered the existence of other people, and the fact that fire spreads, that if he lit himself on fire in a first-floor apartment bathtub, everyone else's apartments would likely catch fire too. Booze worked that way sometimes, clarifying—briefly—what his mind couldn't. It was like sitting in the optometrist's office, booze flashing its different lenses in front of your face and sometimes, for a second, it'd be the right prescription, the one that allowed you to catch a glimpse of the world as it was, beyond your grief, beyond your doom. That was the clarity alcohol, and nothing else, gave. Seeing life as everyone else did, as a place that could accommodate you. But of course a second later it'd zoom past clarity through a flurry of increasingly opaque lenses until all you were able to see would be the dark of your own skull.

"Can you believe that?" Cyrus went on. "I needed to be drunk to even consider that a fire that consumed me in a bathtub wouldn't just go out on its own."

"Mrs. Kaufmann ... ," the medical student said. She was wringing her hands, one of the "physical distress behaviors" Cyrus was supposed to note in his evaluation.

"I remember actually sitting there in the bathtub, doing the calculus of it. Like, do I even care if I take other people with me? These strangers. I had to work out whether or not they mattered to me.

How fucked up is that?"

"Mrs. Kaufmann, if you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, we have resources ... ."

"Oh c'mon, just talk to me. You want to be a doctor? I'm sitting in front of you, talking. I ended up walking myself outside the apartment complex, wet with the alcohol, though not too wet, it evaporated quickly I think, I remember being surprised at how wet I wasn't. There was a little grassy patch between our building and the one next to us, a picnic bench with one of those built-in charcoal grills. I remember thinking that was funny, lighting myself on fire next to a grill. I brought out the Everclear and the lighter, I remember—this is bizarre—it was a Chicago Bears lighter. I have no idea where it came from. And I sat there at the bench feeling, despite the Everclear in and on me, I remember sitting there feeling, not happy exactly but simple, maybe? Like a jellyfish just floating along. Someone said alcohol reduces the 'fatal intensity' of living. Maybe it was that."

Outside the clouds had grown fat and dark with rain, the whole sky a wounded animal in some last frantic rage. The hospital room had a tiny little window high on the wall, probably placed there so people from the street couldn't look in. The medical student didn't move.

"Do you have this organ here?" Cyrus asked her, pointing at the base of his throat. "A doom organ that just pulses all the time? Pulses dread, every day, obstinately? Like it thinks there's a panther behind the curtain ready to maul you, but there's no panther and it turns out there's no curtain either? That's what I wanted to stop."

"What did you do?" the medical student asked, finally. Something in her seemed to have relaxed a little, conceded to the moment's current.

"I went back inside my apartment." Cyrus shrugged. "I wanted to stop hurting. Being burned alive felt suddenly like it'd hurt a lot."

Dr. Monfort smiled, gave a tiny nod.

Cyrus continued: "I took a shower and passed out. I remained. But so did the dread. I thought getting sober would help, that came later. Recovery. And it did, in its way. Certainly it made me less a burden to the people around me, created less dread in them. But it's still in me, that doom organ." He pointed again at his neck. "It's in my throat, throbbing all day every day. And recovery, friends, art—that shit just numbs it for a second. What's that word you used?"

Excerpted from Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. Copyright © 2024 by Kaveh Akbar. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.