“No one knows I’m here. I’ve been staying in a flophouse in the Gomrok District. I got homesick. And I was running out of money. I saw a flyer for that event tonight so I went to Book City. I . . .” He hesitated. “I came back to Tehran because I don’t know how to become a martyr in Iraq.”

“Do you need help toward that purpose?”

He was silent for a while.

“Yes. I need help toward that purpose.”

“So do I,” Miss Homa murmured. “Please, gentlemen, drink the tea before it gets cold.”

The three of us drank in silence. The person who desires obliteration will get it. Some are quick about it, some take longer than others, some hesitate, and some even lie about it because they are embarrassed to admit they don’t want to die. It was often the talk of the trenches—exactly when a man should become a martyr. A volunteer to defend the holy places had a duty to do just that: defend. But you couldn’t exactly defend if you were dead. So how did you negotiate the two and come to a concord between life and death? These are ultimate questions that don’t get asked in peace, because peace means having to worry about the pair of new shoes you need to buy, or your kid’s braces, or the milk going sour. Trench talk in Mesopotamia was different than other wars because the bluster of martyrdom was actually real. Even those men who didn’t want to die had to talk the talk. And because they were there, sometimes, despite all their precautions, they became martyrs. They reached sainthood through a lie despite their every effort not to be saints. My concern was not these men, but the ones who walked into the butcher house willingly, knowing that there was a fifty-fifty chance there would be a video of their cut-off head posted online by the enemy the day after tomorrow because the op they’d volunteered for was outright suicide.

I tried to speak but Miss Homa hushed me. She had, she insisted, all the money she needed in the world. Her fame had reached its limit. And she was tired of this world. Her collectors had designs on her store of unsold paintings. After which she could die for all they cared, and in fact it was preferable from the collectors’ point of view that she did. But she refused to do her dying on their terms; she would manage it on her own. Everything that was hers she’d already bequeathed to a number of charities. A lot of the unspoken-for works, her house, everything. There would be plenty of stealing by the lawyers that she’d put in charge, because there was always stealing. But her last act would be a bilakh, a finger, to the world. She was going to get her way into or near Karbala with or without my help.