Cyrus wondered sometimes how much ideas of leadership in the West (a term he was also dubious of—west of what? The earth is a sphere where every spot is west of every other—calling America “the west” and Iran “the Middle East” placed the center squarely in Europe) had to do with notions of an infallible Christian God.

Art? What is beautiful is not always beautiful in company: Prussian blue, men like me—

“The version of my uncle he might have been was killed in the war, and for no reason at all. Him personally losing his mind didn’t lose or win the war. It’s meaningless. That’s what fucks me up. My dad drops me off at college and then dies like, barely a year later. I’m not saying all this to say ‘poor me’ or even ‘poor us.’ But none of those death

Everything didn’t have to be as complex as Zee constantly made it, Cyrus thought. Sometimes, life was just what happened. What accumulated.

Other times he’d bargain with God, promising to finally read the Quran or not touch himself in the shower in exchange for a single night of deep sleep. He made these pleas desperately, urgently, but they seldom worked, and neither made any serious attempt to honor their agreement.

“Stop that,” Lisa said. “Stop what?” asked Roya. “Stop trying to make everything mean something,” Lisa said. “Trying to flatten everything to a symbol or a point. The coral is dying because of microbeads in body wash and because of Monsanto and because there’s no reason for anyone powerful enough to do anything about it to do anything about it.”

The way sleep happened not as a fact like swallowing or using the bathroom, but as a faith. People pretended to be asleep, trusting eventually their pretending would morph into the real thing.

The middle school teacher who surreptitiously offered him a racial slur, like a juicy orange they might peel together and share.

You couldn’t do that with soul-learning. We all started from zero. From less than zero, actually. We started whiny, without grace. Obsessed only with our own needing. And the dead couldn’t teach us anything about that. No facts or tables or proofs. You just had to live and suffer and then teach your kids to do the same. From a distance, habit passi