Martyr!: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Indiana, USA. As Cyrus grows up living with Ali in Indiana, Cyrus’s fear of sleeping gets replaced by insomnia, which stops him from sleeping for a different reason. Instead, Cyrus now fears getting deported and sent back to Iran. His father has a visa, but Cyrus thinks it feels like an unstable situation with complicated paperwork.

Despite Ali and Cyrus’s poverty, one day, Ali buys a Big Mouth Billy Bass that sings “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” It seemed like a wildly foolish purchase at the time, but it will become one of the few things Cyrus keeps after Ali dies. Once a year, Ali calls Arash, Roya’s brother, who still lives in Iran. During the Iran-Iraq war, it was Arash’s job to go out at night on the battlefield, riding a horse and holding a flashlight, in an attempt to inspire the men by looking like an angel. But seeing so much suffering gave Arash PTSD. He always sounds haunted on his phone calls with Ali and Cyrus.

One night, while Cyrus is up wandering because he can’t sleep, he spills a bowl of grapes. A half-conscious Ali gets up, slaps Cyrus’s face, and rips Cyrus’s Simpsons comic from the library. Ali is rarely violent, but this incident sticks with Cyrus for a long time. He later tells the librarian that his younger brother destroyed the book, and he doesn’t get charged. Cyrus stays still at night after the incident, often trying to bargain with God to just let him sleep. He begins writing dialogues in his head between people like Marie Curie, Allen Iverson, Kurt Cobain, and Roya.

Soon after Cyrus goes to Keady University, a state school that gives him good financial aid, he begins to drink heavily. Ali thinks drinkers are “low people,” although Ali himself has gin at night to make sure he can go to be early and wake up in time for his job on the chicken farm. Once, when Cyrus was younger, he feared that drinking his first sip of root beer would make him die.

Ali dies of a sudden stroke during Cyrus’s sophomore year in college. The news devastates Cyrus, but he had also gotten the sense lately that Ali took little pleasure in life and was only staying alive long enough to help Cyrus become an adult. Cyrus never knew his grandparents, so now the only family he knows of is Arash.

Cyrus’s grief causes him to drink more, and he begins increasingly experimenting with other drugs. He often feels so good that it seems like cheating, and he doesn’t understand why anyone would choose to feel otherwise. He sleeps well. Sometimes during sleep, the substances seem to pilot Cyrus’s body on their own, making him get up and go to the fridge to drink another beer. When, two years later, Cyrus does finally get sober, he struggles to fall asleep the normal way because he’s so out of practice at it. He goes back to his game of imagining dialogues between real and fictional people.

Lisa Simpson and Roya Shams. In an imaginary dialogue, Lisa Simpson tells Roya that she’s Cyrus’s friend. She is amazed that the dead Roya can’t see Cyrus or anything else on earth. Roya explains that death isn’t quite like that. Roya tries to explain the butterfly effect to Lisa, how actions have consequences that can be difficult to predict. Roya tells Lisa that when she was Lisa’s age, she wanted to be an “oceanographer florist” who cuts coral into bouquets. Lisa says coral is alive, but Roya points out that flowers are too. Lisa says it’s different because coral is dying out. Roya sees metaphors in the death of coral, but Lisa just thinks it’s because no one in power has any incentive to protect coral.