LITMIR.BIZ

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aristocrat Royalist Iranians, who left everything behind and raised two lower-middle-class children in a tiny apartment in South Pasadena, California. Even during our greatest financial struggles, my parents were too prideful to accept government assistance. My whole family shared a single bathroom and my brother and I shared a bedroom until I was seventeen. While my parents mourned their lack of wealth, all we cared about was the brand of normal that sitcoms, films, and songs of the eighties promised: a sort of oblivious California happy that could cancel out the news and its consistent airing of grievances against our homeland. Iran was never far from the media’s lips, it seemed, and that poured into my home and playground life with equal heaviness.

      I love that sad, simple apartment, but it wasn’t until I was much older that I recalled the mold in the bathrooms. The cracks in the ceiling. The peeling paint everywhere. The suitcases in the closet always packed for an emergency, always packed for fleeing, presumably back to Iran. The way we’d have to negotiate lunch money. The times of true poverty that my parents lived in that they thought we couldn’t see.

      Decades later Los Angeles would be the only place I would contemplate suicide—not once but twice—the least healthy place in the world for me. In a way, I always felt it. My entire childhood I was sick with one thing or another, always feeling broken in my body. Depression was a constant. It would be many years until I realized that not only did Los Angeles have particularly horrible pollution but that Pasadena was one of the worst—a big bowl of dirty air thanks to car culture plus the mountains, a sponge absorbing all the smog. Good schools, yes, but we had ended up in the worst place for health imaginable—though for my parents, both relatively able-bodied, health never seemed to be much of a factor. No one paused and thought my preferred dinner of two Wienerschnitzel hot dogs or McDonald’s chicken nuggets or KFC buckets was bad. No one stopped me from soda. Nobody asked what I was spending lunch money on, when it became clear I’d be bullied if I put Persian stews or cold kebabs and rice anywhere except in the trash. No one bothered to knock on my door those weekends when I stayed indoors every second, reading and reading and more reading, and writing furiously, still deep in the dream of stories, fully invested in being a “girl author” one day. I had notebooks devoted to plotlines, to vocabulary, to illustrations of my stories. No one bothered to say, That’s nice, kid, but you also need to go outside. While I attempted community center classes in ballet, jazz, tap, gymnastics even, no one told me to stick with it and not to quit, when as usual I realized I did not fit in. The only place I fit in was not quite home but what was within our home: it was the desk, the chair, the pen and paper. It was the only place I felt well.

      As a child I had severe ear infections and one that led to near deafness, though I never let on that I knew my hearing was dropping out, and I’d merely guess at what people would say to me. Occasionally I was right. Eventually I had surgery to put a tube in my ear. It was then that I had what I consider my first drug experience—what I used to joke about, but today I do indeed think of as part of early wiring that led me to drugs later in life, or a fascination at least with altered states.

      The doctors apparently could not give me enough general anesthesia to put me out during the routine surgery, which resulted in my very lucid hallucinations. I have two memories of the whole ordeal: one is waking up, with surgeons in their green uniforms hovering over me, their movements and sounds ultraslow while behind them in the hospital everything moved in hyperspeed. This was only one of the couple times I woke up midsurgery, when they could not put me out—but the time I remember. The other memory is of afterward, waking up clutching a stuffed animal I didn’t recognize in the waiting room, on my mother’s lap, being told by the doctor that he had never met such a brave child.

      “We couldn’t put you to sleep—you didn’t want to go to sleep, brave girl?” he said. “I’ve never seen such a brave girl.”

      I remember not understanding, feeling suspicious of the doctor. “What happened to me? What went on in there?”

      “We fixed your ear, brave girl,” the doctor said. He clearly could not say my name, something I was already used to by that point.

      “I woke up,” I said. “I woke up and saw.”

      Nods and chuckles, doctor and mother.

      Later in the car I tried to convey to my mother that time had been altered in there, that it had sped up in parts, slowed down in others, and I saw it happen.

      “It was the gas,” my mother said. “They gave you a gas to sleep.”

      “I was awake,” I said. “I woke up.”

      “Yes,” my mother said wearily, “it was a drug. The drug made you see that way.”

      In just a few years, when Nancy Reagan and the Just Say No to Drugs slogan was as ubiquitous as Merry Christmas, my mind darted back to this memory—my mother telling me they had put me on drugs, that I had drugs and that they had made me see that way.

      The end result of that: I became suspicious of doctors. And I became fascinated by drugs.

      I had my own ideas. I tried to steer clear of our family pediatrician who always seemed a bit off to me. I decided the life of the body would be a secret life and that I was in it for the brain anyway. So many books to write, so many to read, so many words to learn. I was determined not to get tested for ESL again, determined to be one of the honors kids, determined to do justice to Mrs. O’Connell, my second-grade teacher who saw my handmade books that we made from the refugee days and onward and said, I’ll bet you will be an author one day. And it was because of her that I agonized over submissions to Highlights for Kids— always rejected—and that I made my father buy all sorts of guidebooks on how to publish kids, all fruitlessly. But I had a work life and there was nothing that was going to get in the way of that, not even the flus and colds I would always get. And not even the tremors.

      I never told anyone about the tremors, but that was what I called them, named after that word I had learned that referred to the earthquakes of my new habitat. I was still a few years from experiencing earthquake tremors but always greatly feared them. The first earthquakes I experienced were the ones in the body instead. They always came late at night, when my parents were supposed to be sleeping in the room across a tiny hall from my brother and me, bridged only by the restroom. The tremors always came after I’d listened to my parents for a while, their whispered conversation turning into a whispered sort of yelling and sometimes bangs, what I recognized as the sound of a rattling headboard.

      My brother somehow always slept through this. I was always deeply worried and deeply afraid to do anything about it—I could not make it out of my bed and risk being seen as witness to their fights. And my body, as if in cooperation with that notion, didn’t let me. Generally a half hour into it, my entire body would go into a shaking, starting with my legs, a sort of violent involuntary rattling that would stop on its own after a while. Sometimes it felt like hours would go by. Suddenly it would be time to go to school and I had no explanation for why I felt like death. My mother never suspected I was not sleeping, never suspected I was listening to them, never suspected the tremors. Only once, one summer evening, I remember her taking my hands in hers and staring at them in deep concentration.

      “What are you doing?” I asked, alarmed.

      “Your hands are shaking,” she said. “Why are your hands shaking?”

      I shrugged. I had not noticed.

      “It’s all the writing,” she said. “You need to stop writing so much. It’s cramping your hands. Take a break.” Later she said that about tennis, piano, pottery, anything I tried to expand myself in, but her jab at writing hurt most because it was the first thing close to a purpose I had found in this new world of ours. I remember feeling furious with that suggestion but knowing better than to fight with her. I would keep writing. At that age I already knew they could only control me so much.

      The tremors seemed to fade as I entered my preteens, though that was when I cared less about listening to my parents’ late-night altercations. Walkmans existed and I had convinced my parents to get me a Sony Walkman for Christmas one year, which felt like the greatest invention on earth, especially for someone like me who was

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