LITMIR.BIZ

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could transport me into all sorts of possibilities, and I was allowed cassette tapes here and there, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, and Cyndi Lauper. While my father argued they were all obscene, he did not go so far as to stop me.

      By my preteen years I was obsessed with late-night radio, where I could learn about what cassettes to buy, and where I could listen to the show Loveline on one of my two favorite stations, KROQ. It was a show on which they’d have a music guest, which is what I pretended I was in it for, but the main point of the show, love and sex advice, was the real allure for me. KROQ must have been where I learned about sex, as it certainly did not come from my parents. So from 11:30 to 1:30 a.m., I could put on my headphones and not disturb my brother across the room, pretending, when my mother tucked my brother in, that I was also deep in sleep, while I was actually learning about STDs, 69ing, spitting and swallowing, orgies and ménage à trois. She never bothered to check the headphones that I wore upside down under the covers. Listening and laughing along with Poorman and Dr. Drew seemed infinitely preferable to listening to the terrifying bickering of my parents. Maybe by that point I had learned nothing too terrible would come of it, nothing worse than the other bad things that seemed to happen in our house anyway.

      The next time I remember being very ill also involved entering in and out of consciousness, though not so artificially as when I was drugged for my ear surgery. I was thirteen and it was a Sunday, as the concept of school was looming large, and I had just taken a shower. The shower was a hot one—I’ve always been partial to very hot long showers, especially when given the mammoth ordeal of dealing with my always-tangled, always-frizzy, impossibly thick black hair. But this time, in the fog of the bathroom, as I dried off, I felt strange. I felt both lighter and heavier, like I was being pulled up and down at the same time. My eyesight seemed altered—visuals seemed both brighter and darker, strange shadows jumping in and out, all electric in their tone, nearly metallic in shade. I felt like the life force was being vacuumed out of me, from every opening in my body. I wrapped the towel around me and wandered into the living room and called out to my mother.

      “What’s wrong?” she asked absently, engrossed in the television, on her usual love seat perch.

      I remember saying simply, “I think I’m fading.”

      The sentence did not seem to mean much to her, and so I struggled alone to their bedroom, not mine for some reason. Moments—minutes?—later I was lying on their bed, and my mother was shaking me and speaking rapidly in a panicked high pitch I’d never heard. “What happened?” I asked, as the colors of the room rearranged themselves into normalcy, the sounds falling into their more proper places.

      But she was still red in the face and frenzied. “You fainted!” she cried over and over. My father was now at our side and he seemed very upset too. But I was beyond the realm of upset or anxiety. I felt more peaceful than I had in ages. In the days to come, I felt special as a fainter, as if I was a character from another world. It felt like an event to have a condition, especially since I was still months away from getting my period, the affliction that it seemed everyone I knew got to complain about.

      This called for me being dragged to our family pediatrician who said it was normal for my age, which disappointed me. But then he brought up the possibility of me carrying smelling salts—which I’d only known from old Victorian epics and period cinema that I had at that point become obsessed with—and I was overjoyed. I eventually got them, but I never got the opportunity to use them. I never again let myself fully pass out—instead, when it came to that intense fading, the light-headedness, after a hot shower and often at malls, I would sit and place my head between my legs as instructed, and I’d always somehow evade it.

      I liked that there was danger involved with me, that I was someone people could lose, that I could flirt with some other realm, that I was intensely fragile yet ultimately indestructible. I felt like a crystal ballerina, a porcelain swan, but most of all like a ghost. The haunting metaphor felt actualized in some part of me: a part-ghost at least. I had access to some other world, but I could be in this one too—I told myself that narrative. The narrative I ignored was the one where I should have also realized that it was the first time I got to feel like a woman—and that perhaps ailment was a feature central to that experience, the lack of wholeness one definition of femaleness, or so they would have you think.

      When in 2009, almost twenty years after that first fainting incident, Dr. E, an infectious disease specialist who treated my Lyme in Pennsylvania, tried to get my entire history of illness, I recalled all these instances. It interested him, the ear surgery, the tremors, the fainting. He asked me if there was any chance I could have been exposed to ticks, and after much struggling I could only come up with one memory: when I was around six or seven, just a couple of years into our new life in America, my father took my mother and me hiking.

      I remembered it being the Angeles Crest Mountains, because I loved the name—back then I digested American words like they were frosted desserts, and anything with “angel” was delicious to me. We were hiking through a forest that seemed unlike much of Los Angeles, and my father said they reminded him of the mountains in Iran. (My father tended to say that about most mountains.) We got to an area with a sign, a wood sign that I still vividly remember as painted brown with a very friendly-seeming yellow font that announced LYME DISEASE • BEWARE OF TICKS and some other fine print under it that I did not read. I remembered it because of the word Lyme. I was new to English and I had become obsessed with spelling, and I turned to my father and said, “They spelled lime wrong, didn’t they?” And he had stared at the sign long and hard and my mother and him muttered back and forth and then shrugged off their worry, as they usually did, like people who had seen it all long ago. Ticks were the least of their concerns.

      I remembered the Farsi word they used: kaneh. Which referred to a pest of some sort and is a sort of insult you could use for someone, someone more than possessed by a bite, someone who has lost it. My father explained it was a disease one could get from bug bites and I remembered thinking bugs liked to bite me—every summer my legs showcased constellations of mosquito nibbles. And then, as children do, I forgot all about it and we hiked. It’s one of my few memories of hiking with my family—the Khakpours were seldom the outdoorsy sort. And it was eighties Los Angeles, when hiking at some altitude was the only way to get away from the thick brown veil of smog that covered the city more often than not.

      It was only years later when a man who loved me took me hiking in that same area that I again saw the sign—this time I was with diagnosis, sick and shaking—and I thought back to telling Dr. E the story, who saw it as a highly probable origin story. And I thought back to the event itself and the calm of my parents and my own calm, probably thinking how on earth could a bite from an insect do damage.

      Of all the things that could do damage—revolution, war, poverty in this new land—why would anyone think of a kaneh?

       2

      NEW YORK

      Ever since I can remember, I dreamed of escaping. Escaping what was always the question, but my life had been one of escape since I was born—revolution and war sent us through Asia and Europe and eventually to America. We were in exile, my parents always reminded me, we had escaped. It was temporary. But escape was also something I longed for in eighties Southern California, which constantly felt foreign to me, a place of temporary settling but no home. Everything was tan in a way my brown skin could not compete with. Everything was blond in a way my bottle-blond mother could not re-create, gilt upon gold upon gilt. Everything was carefree and smiles, gloss and glitter, and money to no end. We, meanwhile, were poor and anxious and alone. When my brother was born in our neighboring city Arcadia, California, in 1983, I watched his pink squirming body stowed into a giant felt red heart—it was Valentine’s Day—and even stuffed in all that makeshift American affection I thought he didn’t have a chance. None of us did.

      As the tremors continued, as my body somehow

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