Cyrus Shams really doesn’t have much going for him. He is a barely recovering alcoholic and unpublished Iranian-American poet who scratches a living in Indiana by role-playing terminal patients for trainee doctors. His mother was blown out of the sky by the US navy – and even his name sounds like a criticism. Hardly surprising, then, that he would channel his search for meaning into a much-planned but largely unwritten book on martyrdom.
His mother was one of the 290 on board Iran Air flight 655 when the USS Vincennes fired at what they believed to be a jet fighter, and Cyrus needs her death to “matter”, to be more than a number. He wants her to have been a martyr and also craves that state for himself – a chance to still the “doom organ… throbbing in his throat”.
