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Sick. Porochista Khakpour
Читать онлайн.Название Sick
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781786896056
Автор произведения Porochista Khakpour
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
In the next few weeks of my life, I saw everything turn upside down and my life became more bizarre than ever. I could not tell where I was at times—at a stoplight down the street from my house, a neighbor said I asked him if I was in New York City and he walked me back home. I began hearing things—on the phone with my friend Laura, I heard a brisk swirling sound that I knew as the ocean in high tide: Do you hear that, Laura? Why are we hearing the ocean now? What is this? Another time, walking with my editor down the street, I suddenly was overwhelmed with a metallic flapping in my ear. What the hell is that? I screamed. All I could describe it as was the feeling that the illustration on the paperback cover of my second novel, a winged man, had lodged himself in my inner ear cavity and this was the sound of his giant metalwork wings that were scraping against my eardrum.
With a friend at my first NYU neurology appointment, I fell into violent convulsive crying when shown a chart like the ones you get during eye exams—not only could I not make out the letters, but they were flying at me in all sorts of directions, the entire room wobbling along with it. And my one solace, the computer that was for writing and communicating with friends and learning about the world, suddenly made me nauseated at best and put me in panic attacks at worst, as if its thinly vibrating frequency was suddenly amplified so that I could see its inner workings, its multitudinous networks busily announcing their duties, as if I could suddenly see the blood vessels underneath my skin. I was only allowed brief spurts of computer use—five minutes at a time for severe concussions like mine, followed by hours of rest, eyes closed, in the darkness. If I tried to do more, my body would punish me. All my senses had gone hostile.
What I didn’t know for sure—though my doctor certainly did—was that I was having a major Lyme relapse now, with the accident and concussion nearly finishing me off.
By the time New Year’s Eve came I was still in a haze and could not really register that this could be seen as a fresh start, that the holidays were over at least, and life in 2016 could now take hold. I wasn’t mentally together enough to invite a new beginning.
Instead, I was focused on the logistics of my limitations.
I knew, for instance, that I could not go outside for Cosmo’s last walk at midnight, when I usually did it, as there would be too much going on. I had never been in my neighborhood for New Year’s—always leaving town in previous years—so I didn’t know for sure, but I could imagine it.
But as usual, as the hours went by, I grew more and more lazy about that final little stroll. Cosmo’s walks had been cut down by many times at this point, and he himself—I was still a week or so away from realizing he had suffered pulmonary contusions from the accident—had adjusted to his limited time outside. It was a miracle to me that I was even maintaining a basic walking schedule with him.
I finally got up, got him leashed, and got us out. I paused at our doorway.
I didn’t know what time it was, but it was possible it was that wrong time.
Just as we walked out the lobby I heard my answer in the form of a husky laugh: Five minutes to midnight! went a tenant, a short shiny dress of a woman slung over a suited man.
How had I picked that time to go out, of all times?
But it was too late.
There we were in my Mount Morris neighborhood of Harlem, at the gates of Marcus Garvey Park, taking a longer walk than I had tried of late. It felt good outside to me somehow, far quieter than I’d imagined, the perfect temperature, the outdoor air somehow emitting special occasion.
I had lost my watch at the ER, so I couldn’t tell on my own when it was coming, but moment by moment, out of sync, I began to hear countdowns. In the grand windows of my neighborhood’s countless brownstones, I could see all the signs of celebration: disco lights flashing, groups of friends gathered around a table, champagne flutes raised.
3–2–1
Happy New Year!
Then all the sounds of joy. And pops. Gunshots maybe.
And there we were, woman and dog, alone, survivors I hoped.
The full weight of my aloneness hit me in that moment.
If I was going to survive it at all, this time, it was all by myself. And here, in this place that I had to reconcile with as home. If you face yourself properly, you also have to at some point face where you take up space.
I hadn’t thought that way before. Far from it.
1
IRAN AND LOS ANGELES
The one thing I do know: I have been sick my whole life. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t in some sort of physical pain or mental pain, but usually both.
I was born in Tehran in 1978, infant of the Islamic Revolution and toddler of the Iran-Iraq War. Like many Iranians of their educated, progressive, Western-friendly upper class, my parents did not last there. My first memories are of pure anxiety, buses and trains and planes with my two parents, who I was cognizant were just two clueless beings—a twenty-six-year-old, a thirty-three-year-old, both often in a panic, occasionally in tears. Furiously I told stories to distract them, books the only toys we could fit into our two suitcases. Whenever I could, I took pen to paper and drew images and had my father dictate my narrative. It was not much, but it was something; storytelling from my early childhood was a way to survive things. Meanwhile I tried to ignore everything in the air—hot air balloons, helicopters, later fireworks and light displays—that resembled air raids and bomb sirens. I knew to hide my trauma, at least until we found a home.
This isn’t your home, my father would say when we got to the US. We’ll be going home again one day soon.
He said that for three decades. Now in the fourth, he likely still says it.
Years later several doctors, and also my own parents after they’d read some study, told me that if a child is exposed to significant trauma in the first three years of their life, they could have significant psychological repercussions later in life. PTSD. The brain of a child develops at high speeds, those first few years a time of rapid development. And as their brain develops, so do their emotions.
No one who knows this study has ever let me forget this fact.
Like most Iranians we ended up in Tehrangeles—almost. The portmanteau referred to the enclave in the West Side of Los Angeles that had become home to an Iranian diaspora, mostly refugees on political asylum like us, but also many other wealthy Iranians who simply felt at home in the Southern California of luxury and hedonism, far before a siege on their homeland would force them out. But while we’d spend weekends there at various kebab houses, driving around Rodeo Drive and gaping at rich Iranians flaunting their nose jobs and carrying designer shopping bags, and going on long rides to see their McMansions, we never lived there. We were forty-five minutes southeast, inland in the East Side suburbs, from Alhambra and Monty Park to eventually South Pasadena. My parents were no longer crying at least.
And so my father began looking for work, a process that has never quite ended. His accent canceled out his MIT PhD—and this could only mean adjunct professorships with little hope of much more (my father, well into his seventies now, is still adjuncting). At first we were a quick drive from Cal State LA, his first place of employment. It was in the library of that very college that he learned from a librarian of a city called South Pasadena, a place that was expensive if you wanted to buy but affordable if you wanted to rent, and it had an excellent public school system. That was all that mattered to my parents, my future still a thing not ruined in their eyes.
We