by Adib Khorram
Sometimes I thought Dad liked Nowruz more than the rest of us combined.
Maybe it let him feel a little bit Persian.
Maybe it did.
So our Haft-Seen was loaded with everything tradition allowed, plus a framed photo of Dad in the corner. Laleh insisted we had to add it, because Stephen begins with the sound of S.
It was hard to argue with my sister’s logic.
“Darius?”
“Yeah?”
“This goldfish only has one eyeball!”
I knelt next to Laleh as she pointed at the fish in question.
“Look!”
It was true. The largest fish, a leviathan nearly the size of Laleh’s hand, only had its right eye. The left side of its head—face—(do fish have faces?)—was all smooth, unbroken orange scales.
“You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t notice that.”
“I’m going to name him Ahab.”
Since Laleh was in charge of feeding the fish, she had also taken upon herself the solemn duty of naming them.
“Captain Ahab had one leg, not one eye,” I pointed out. “But it’s a good literary reference.”
Laleh looked up at me, her eyes big and round. I was kind of jealous of Laleh’s eyes. They were huge and blue, just like Dad’s. Everyone always said how beautiful Laleh’s eyes were.
No one ever told me I had beautiful brown eyes, except Mom, which didn’t count because (a) I had inherited them from her, and (b) she was my mom, so she had to say that kind of thing. Just like she had to call me handsome when that wasn’t true at all.
“Are you making fun of me?”
“No,” I said. “I promise. Ahab is a good name. And I’m proud of you for knowing it. It’s from a very famous book.”
“Moby the Whale!”
“Right.”
I could not bring myself to say Moby-Dick in front of my little sister.
“What about the others?”
“He’s Simon.” She pointed to the smallest fish. “And he’s Garfunkel. And that’s Bob.”
I wondered how Laleh was certain they were male fish.
I wondered how people identified male fish from female fish.
I decided I didn’t want to know.
“Those are all good names. I like them.” I leaned down to kiss Laleh on the head. She squirmed but didn’t try that hard to get away. Just like I had to pretend I didn’t like having tea parties with my little sister, Laleh had to pretend she didn’t like kisses from her big brother, but she wasn’t very good at pretending yet.
* * *
I took my empty cup of genmaicha to the kitchen and washed and dried it by hand. Then I filled a regular glass with water from the fridge and went to the cabinet where we kept everyone’s medicine. I sorted through the orange capsules until I found my own.
“Mind grabbing mine?” Dad asked from the door.
“Sure.”
Dad stepped into the kitchen and slid the door closed. It was this heavy wooden door, on a track so that it slid into a slot right behind the oven. I didn’t know anyone else who had a door like that.
When I was little, and Dad had just introduced me to Star Trek, I liked to call it the Turbolift Door. I played with it all the time, and Dad played too, calling out deck numbers for the computer to take us to like we were really on board the Enterprise.
Then I accidentally slid the door shut on my fingers, really hard, and ended up sobbing for ten minutes in pain and shock that the door had betrayed me.
I had a very sharp memory of Dad yelling at me to stop crying so he could examine my hand, and how I wouldn’t let him hold it because I was afraid he was going to make it worse.
Dad and I didn’t play with the door anymore after that.
I pulled down Dad’s bottle and set it on the counter, then popped the lid off my own and shook out my pills.
Dad and I both took medication for depression.
Aside from Star Trek—and not speaking Farsi—depression was pretty much the only thing we had in common. We took different medications, but we did see the same doctor, which I thought was kind of weird. I guess I was paranoid Dr. Howell would talk about me to my dad, even though I knew he wasn’t supposed to do that kind of thing. And Dr. Howell was always honest with me, so I tried not to worry so much.
I took my pills and gulped down the whole glass of water. Dad stood next to me, watching, like he was worried I was going to choke. He had this look on his face, the same disappointed look he had when I told him about how Fatty Bolger had replaced my bicycle’s seat with blue truck nuts.
He was ashamed of me.
He was ashamed of us.
Übermensches aren’t supposed to need medication.
Dad swallowed his pills dry; his prominent Teutonic Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he did it. And then he turned to me and said, “So, you heard that Babou went to the doctor today?”
He looked down. A Level Three Awkward Silence began to coalesce around us, like interstellar hydrogen pulled together by gravity to form a new nebula.
“Yeah. Um.” I swallowed. “For his tumor?”
I still felt weird saying the word out loud.
Tumor.
Babou had a brain tumor.
Dad glanced at the turbolift door, which was still closed, and then back to me. “His latest tests didn’t look good.”
“Oh.” I had never met Babou in person, only over a computer screen. And he never really talked to me. He spoke English well enough, and what few words I could extract from him were accented but articulate.
He just didn’t have much to say to me.
I guess I didn’t have much to say to him either.
“He’s not going to get better, Darius. I’m sorry.”
I twisted my glass between my hands.
I was sorry too. But not as sorry as I should have been. And I felt kind of terrible for it.
The thing is, my grandfather’s presence in my life had been purely photonic up to that point. I didn’t know how to be sad about him dying.
Like I said, the well inside me was blocked.
“What happens now?”
“Your mom and I talked it over,” Dad said. “We’re going to Iran.”
SLINGSHOT MANEUVERS
It wasn’t like we could drop everything and leave the next day.
Mom and Dad knew it might happen. But we still had to get plane tickets and visas and everything.
So it was a couple weeks later when I sat down at the lunch table and announced, “We’re leaving tomorrow.”
I immediately executed Evasive Pattern Beta, a swift dodge to the left. My lunch companion, Javaneh Esfahani, tended to spray Dr Pepper out her nostrils if I surprised her at the lunch table.
Javaneh sneezed twice—she always sneezed twice after spraying Dr Pepper out of her nose—and wiped her face with one of the cafeteria-issue brown paper towels. She tucked a lock of hair blown loose by her violent sinus eruptions back into her headscarf.
Javaneh always wore her headscarf at Chapel Hill High School, which I thought was very brave. The sociopolitical landscape of Chapel Hill High School was treacherous enough without giving people an excuse to pick on you.
Javaneh Esfahani was a lioness.
She blinked at me. “Tomorrow? That’s fast. You’re serious?”
“Yeah. We got our visas and everything.”
“Wow.”
I mopped up the carbonated explosion on the table while Javaneh sipped her Dr Pepper through a straw.
Javaneh Esfahani claimed she was physiologically incapable of burping, so she always used a straw to drink her Dr Pepper from the can. To be honest, I wasn’t sure that was really a thing—being physiologically incapable of burping—but Javaneh was the closest thing I had to a friend at Chapel Hill High Scho
ol, so I didn’t want to risk alienating her by prying too deeply.
Javaneh had the smooth, olive-toned look of a True Persian, arched eyebrows and all. I was kind of jealous of her—Mom had inherited Mamou’s pale coloring, which meant I didn’t even get a half dose of Persian melanin—but then again, Javaneh was constantly getting asked where she was from, something I mostly avoided until people learned my first name.
She grabbed a tater tot. “I’ve always wanted to see Iran. But my parents don’t want to risk it.”
“Yeah. My mom didn’t either, but . . .”
“I can’t believe you’re really going. You’re going to be there for Nowruz!” Javaneh shook her head. “But won’t you miss Chaharshanbeh Suri?”
“They were the cheapest tickets,” I said. “Besides. We might fly over a fire. That counts, right?”
* * *
Chaharshanbeh Suri is the Tuesday night before Nowruz. Which is weird since Chaharshanbeh technically means Wednesday. But I guess it sort of means the night before Wednesday. Either way, the traditional way to celebrate Chaharshanbeh Suri is with fire jumping.
(And a mountain of Persian food. There are no Persian celebrations that do not involve enough Persian food to feed the entire Willamette Valley.)
Mom and Dad always took us to the Chaharshanbeh Suri celebration at Oaks Park, where all the True Persians and Fractional Persians and Persians-by-Marriage—regardless of faith—gathered every year for a huge nighttime picnic and bonfire approved by the Fire Marshall of the City of Portland.
Stephen Kellner, with his long legs and Teutonic jumping strength, was an excellent fire jumper.
I was not a fan.
According to family legend, when I was two years old, Dad tried to hold me in his arms as he jumped over the fire, but I wailed and cried so much, he and Mom had to abandon the celebration of Chaharshanbeh Suri and take me home.
Dad didn’t try it again. Not until Laleh came along. When Dad held her in his arms and jumped over the fire, she squealed and laughed and clapped and demanded to go again.
My sister was a lot braver than me.
Truth be told, I was not that sad to miss Chaharshanbeh Suri. I was much more comfortable flying over a bonfire at 32,000 feet than I was jumping over one, even if it did deprive Stephen Kellner of another excellent opportunity to be disappointed in me.
* * *
After lunch, I headed to the nurse’s office. Because of Chapel Hill High School’s strict Zero Tolerance Policy toward drugs, the school nurse had to dispense all medications for Chapel Hill High School students.
Mrs. Killinger handed me the little crinkly paper cup with my pill in it. It was the kind used in every mental institution in every movie and television show ever.
Except Star Trek, of course, because they used hyposprays to deliver medication directly through the skin in compressed air streams.
There were slightly larger crinkly paper cups for water, which I poured from the drinking fountain in the corner of Mrs. Killinger’s office. I couldn’t bend over a drinking fountain and take medication that way; I either choked or accidentally spit my pills all over the basin. And I couldn’t dry-swallow my pills like Stephen Kellner either; the one time I tried, I got a Prozac lodged in the back of my throat and spent five minutes trying to hack it back up, while it slowly dissolved into skunky powder in my esophagus.
That was before Dr. Howell switched me off Prozac, which gave me mood swings so extreme, they were more like Mood Slingshot Maneuvers, powerful enough to fling me around the sun and accelerate me into a time warp.
I was only on Prozac for three months before Dr. Howell switched me, but it was pretty much the worst three months in the Search for the Right Medication.
* * *
Dad never really talked about his own diagnosis for depression. It was lost to the histories of a prior age of this world. All he ever said was that it happened when he was in college, and that his medication had kept him healthy for years, and that I shouldn’t worry about it. It wasn’t a big deal.
By the time I was diagnosed, and Dr. Howell was trying to find some combination of medications to treat me properly, Stephen Kellner had been managing his depression so long that he couldn’t remember what it was like. Or maybe he’d never had Mood Slingshot Maneuvers in the first place. Maybe his medication had recalibrated his brain right away, and he was back to being a high-functioning Übermensch in no time.
My own brain was much harder to recalibrate. Prozac was the third medication Dr. Howell tried me on, back when I was in eighth grade. And I was on it for six weeks before I experienced my first Slingshot Maneuver, when I freaked out at a kid in my Boy Scouts troop named Vance Henderson, who had made a joke about Mom’s accent.
I’d been dealing with jokes like that my entire life—well, ever since I started school, anyway—so it was nothing new. But that time it set me off like a high-yield quantum torpedo.
It was the only time in my life I have ever hit anyone.
I felt very sorry for myself afterward.
And then I felt angry. I really hated Boy Scouts. I hated camping and I hated the other boys, who were all on their way to becoming Soulless Minions of Orthodoxy.
And then I felt ashamed.
I made a lot of Mood Slingshot Maneuvers that afternoon.
But I wasn’t ashamed of standing up for Mom, even if it did mean hitting Vance Henderson. Even if it did mean leaving a perfect red palm-print on his face.
Dad was so disappointed.
A NON-PASSIVE FAILURE
Chapel Hill High School had two gymnasiums, supposedly called the Main Gym and the Little Gym, but most of us called them the Boys’ Gym and the Girls’ Gym, because the boys were always in the larger Main Gym.
This, despite Chapel Hill High School’s Zero Tolerance Policy toward sexism.
I was halfway down the stairs to gym when I heard him: Chip Cusumano.
I kept my head down and took the stairs faster, swinging myself around the rail as I reached the landing.
“Hey,” he called from behind. “Hey! Darius!”
I ignored him and went faster.
“Wait!” Chip shouted again, his voice echoing off the concrete walls of the stairwell. I had just hit the last landing when he tugged on my backpack.
“Let go.”
“Just—”
“Leave me alone, Chip.” I jerked forward to loosen his grip.
Instead, my backpack experienced a non-passive failure, splitting across the seam holding the main pocket together. My books and papers spilled down the stairs, but at least my tablet stayed Velcroed in.
“Oh.”
“Really, Chip?” I knelt and grabbed for my papers before someone could kick them away. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
“Sorry.” Chip handed me a book from a few steps down. He had this goofy grin on his face as he shook the hair out of his eyes. “I was just gonna tell you your backpack was open.”
“Wasn’t my bike enough?”
“Hey. That was just a joke.”
“Me not having a bike anymore is a joke to you?”
“What are you talking about? Your tires were right in the bushes.”
I glared at him.
How was I supposed to know that?
“You never found them?”
“Leave me alone, Chip.”
The warning bell rang: One minute to make it to class.
“Come on, man. Let me help.”
“Go away.” There was no way I was going to trust Cyprian Cusumano to help me.
He shrugged and stood. “Okay. I’ll tell Coach Fortes you’ll be late.”
I got all my papers into a mostly straight pile and sandwiched them between my econ and geometry books.
My backpack was totally unsalvageable: With the seam blown out, the straps had failed as well.
The only usable part was the pouch in front holding my pencils.
The tardy bell rang. I knotted the two loose straps together so I could sling the derelict hulk of my backpack over my shoulder like a satchel, gathered my stuff up, and hurried to gym.
* * *
Coach Fortes shook his head when he saw my pile of books and the remains of my backpack. “Cusumano told me,” he said.
Why do gym teachers always call guys by their last names?
“Sorry, Coach.”
Why do guys always call their gym teachers Coach and leave off their name?
“It’s fine. Go get dressed.”
We were doing our Net Sports Unit, which meant two weeks of Badminton, two weeks of Ping-Pong/Table Tennis, and the grande finale: two weeks of Volleyball.
I was terrible at Net Sports. I wasn’t that good at any form of sportsball, really, although I used to play soccer when I was a kid. I did better at the ones where I could at least run around, because I was not bad at running. I had a lot of stamina and I was pretty fast, which surprised people since I was kind of overweight.
Well. Not kind of. I was overweight, period, which is why Stephen Kellner was always handing me the salad bowl.
As if salad would counteract the weight gain from my meds.
As if lack of discipline was the root of all my problems.
As if all the worry about my weight didn’t make me feel worse than I already did.
I pulled on my gym clothes—black swishy shorts and a red Chapel Hill Chargers T-shirt—and ran out to join warm-ups. I caught the tail end of sit-ups, and then we had to run laps for five minutes.
Chip Cusumano caught up with me on our third lap. “Hey, D,” he said.