Summary
Chapter 27
Cyrus considers the perspective that cutting out the bad will lead to a good life. Avoiding sin (cheating, lying, coveting, etc.) and quitting harmful things (leaving a toxic partner, cutting out bread from one's diet, or deleting addictive social media apps) are meant to guide one toward living well. But Cyrus feels that simply avoiding the bad is not the same as actually doing good in life. For a sober person in recovery from addiction, the basic details of living require a tremendous amount of effort.
Cyrus wonders how Orkideh's gallerist (and ex-wife) Sang Linh has the capacity to call him. When they speak, she confirms that Orkideh was Cyrus's mother. Years earlier, Roya and Leila traded passports so that Leila could escape her husband, who had found out about their affair. Roya had intended to meet her later in Dubai.
Chapter 28
Two quotes placed side by side show that the US and Iran each blamed each other for the murder of the innocent passengers. American politicians believed that Iran provoked and incited the tragedy, while Iranian politicians argued that the US was responsible for the barbaric act.
The rest of the chapter is told from Roya's perspective as she recalls her arrival in the U.S. Using Leila's papers, Roya manages to make her way to New York without getting caught, raped, or punished. She survives by stealing and studying a dictionary. Missing Leila and Cyrus, Roya wanders around the city. She works at a diner and eventually becomes an artist. When she meets Sang, Sang requests that she bring in a piece of work. Under the name Orkideh, Roya shows the painting of her brother as an angel of death, among others. That first show was a hit. Years later, Orkideh uses the Death-Speak exhibit to remind people that everyone is dying. She, Orkideh herself, just happens to be dying faster at the given moment.
Chapter 29
Orkideh was content with her life. Though she used up her lifetime's allotment of happiness quickly, in the short time she got with Leila, she does not consider her life to have been tragic. This is more than most people can expect.
Chapter 30
Sang Linh meets Cyrus at Prospect Park. They sit in silence and smoke together. Sang talks about how her family tried to feed Orkideh when she first started losing weight due to cancer. Cyrus feels a bitter sense of rage and abandonment. Sang tells Cyrus that she is 30 years sober, and she urges him not to push away his anger and fear, because these are valuable emotions. She shares various personal stories that show the way she harnessed her fear and anger to care for herself and her family. She left an alcoholic husband and made a living in America to support herself and her three sons. In the present, Sang thinks that her love for her family and art fill her.
Chapter 31
The second time her death comes around (via cancer), Orkideh resolves to be present for it. A few lines from one of Forugh Farrokhzad's poems speak deeply to Orkideh, particularly the line, "O Muslims, I am sad tonight." Orkideh tells her gallerist and ex-wife, Sang, about her cancer diagnosis by pitching Death-Speak to her. Sang takes it badly, hurt that Orkideh didn't reveal the diagnosis earlier. Their entire relationship had been impacted by Orkideh's avoidance, so it was to be expected. Sang suggests the title, Death-Speak, and tells Orkideh she does not have to go through with it.
Chapter 32
Cyrus wonders how he can adequately express his intense feelings without the world judging him and other Iranian men as dangerous. Sad James sends Cyrus a link to an obituary that Orkideh wrote for herself. In it, she shares details that humanize her and grant her agency, and she demands to be forgiven. She states her hope that she has done something interesting with her life, and her belief that life itself is craftable even as it is finite. After reading the article, Cyrus prays for his life to be over.
Zee calls him and delivers the news of Orkideh's death, just in case Cyrus had not yet seen. Cyrus hears the love and concern that Zee has for him, and he feels self-disgust for not having appreciated Zee more over the years. Zee agrees to meet Cyrus at the park. Cyrus confesses his love for Zee, which Zee returns. The trees shake off snow and flowers bloom. They hear playing trumpets and a saxophone nearby. Other strange dreamlike things begin to happen. The skyline around them begins to crack and turn into molten liquid. Birds fly around, singing and hunting each other. The very ground seems to breathe. Cyrus cries and Zee comforts him. When they are ready, they stand up and hold hands as birds and blossoms drop around them.
The concluding section takes place in 1997 from Sang's point of view. Sang's eldest son helps her pack up one of Orkideh's shows at the gallery. He asks his mother about a large painting of a crucified hand. Orkideh tells Sang that with her new money from the show, she will buy a Cadillac car door. That way, when the world is on fire, they can open the window. Sang laughs along with Orkideh without understanding. She thinks of how she once took the phrase "I can't help laughing" literally, since laughing doesn't need help. Sang, her son Duy, and Orkideh laugh and work all night.
The novel ends on this ambiguous note.
Analysis
The truth surfaces that Orkideh is, in fact, Roya—Cyrus's mother. Just as Cyrus obsesses over the differences between virtuous acts and the absence of immorality (which is to say, neutrality), so too did Roya contemplate ethics, morality, and the nature of grace. According to Roya, there is no distinguishable code of ethics that will cleanly guarantee a good life. She notes that "Many have done worse than [her] and been punished less. But most have done less and been punished more" (Chapter 28). Various fortunate circumstances contributed to Roya's escape, whereas Leila perished in a senseless tragedy. In this way, both Cyrus and his mother suffered the consequences of her supposed death.
Akbar makes it clear that, despite Cyrus's understanding of his mother's death as "senseless" (when he was still under the impression that Roya died on an airplane shot down by a U.S. Navy warship), her death is in fact deeply symbolic—politically, historically, and nationally. This can be seen in the way the author gathers quotes from politicians and presents them at the beginning of chapters to highlight the ethos of American ignorance and self-righteousness. For instance, he quotes Admiral William J. Crowe (a military strategist who served as the 11th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr.), blaming Iran for provoking the U.S. attack on the passenger plane (Chapter 28). Iranian politicians, on the other hand, blamed the U.S. for its "barbaric massacre of innocent passengers" and subsequently used the attack "to stoke anti-American sentiment" (Chapter 20). Akbar examines the way that citizens and regular people get caught in the crossfire of larger political conflicts. However, the author also insinuates that larger concepts such as "politics" and "countries" are created by people themselves, and the difficulty, for characters such as Cyrus, lies in figuring out how to lead a virtuous life.
Art is an outlet for Roya's survival. She calls it "a place to put [herself]" (Chapter 28). This is just as necessary as her waitressing job in terms of keeping her afloat. After Leila's death, Roya's life was completely thrown into disarray. The future she dreamed of was ripped from her due to circumstances beyond her control. What is more, she feels survivor's guilt—that she herself killed her lover because Leila was flying under her identity using her documents. In addition, despite the fact that Roya felt yoked to being Ali's wife and Cyrus's mother, these roles were familiar (if not suffocating). Leaving the country, Roya had to carve out an entirely new existence and learn a different language. Her own identity became unrecognizable, seen in the way that others called her by her dead lover's name. For all these reasons, making art served as a vital mechanism for Roya's sustenance.
The revelation that Orkideh was Cyrus's mother destabilizes the central assumptions of his life for various reasons. Firstly, he always assumed that Roya died on Flight 655, not that she actively chose not to be in his life as his mother. This inevitably triggers feelings of anger and abandonment. Cyrus feels crushed by the normalcy of the situation: his mother abandoned her family to start over with a lover. Secondly, the nature of Roya's supposed death was the foundation of Cyrus's obsession with martyrdom. Similar to the way that art helped Orkideh to endure, Cyrus's whole writing process was a means of survival. Researching and writing about martyrdom gave him a reason to strive. Unsure how to proceed with his fear and anger, Cyrus settles for reaching out to Zee.
Cyrus tells Sang that he is tired of queer people dying for love. This could insinuate a desire for queerness to flourish in a world without political restrictions and state or religious control. However, Cyrus's personal experience with regard to queer love suggests otherwise. His own struggles in figuring out his feelings for Zee have less to do with politics than with what he describes as the tyranny of symbolism. When Cyrus sees Zee again after their disagreement, he is struck by how when Zee "saw a bird or a tree or a bug, Zee really saw that bird or tree or bug, not the idea of it" (Chapter 32). Cyrus, on the other hand, looks for layers of meaning in everything, and often feels alienated from others as a result. The ambiguous ending of the novel plays on this note of Cyrus's personality by opening various possibilities, including a surreal version of the afterlife. Whether this scene is another dream sequence, an imagined conversation induced by the shock of Orkideh's death, or an actual iteration of the afterlife, it portrays Cyrus and Zee in a beautiful and strangely rendered version of the world.
