THE SMOKE | Farah Contractor
I feel the smoke before I see it. The viscous air expands into my bedroom, unsettling my sleep.
My dreams are of the thick, lush Pacific Northwest rainforest. Congealed memories of hikes to driftwood-laden beaches manifesting in my subconscious. But a foreboding heavy mist blurs the vibrant green. I never make it through the emerald canopy to the beach. Endless forest sprawled before me, tree cover dimming the scarce light.
It had been years since I had walked those beaches. When my mom accepted that her arranged marriage would never alight into a slow-burning love, she left. Headed south, she took me with her. It wasn’t just the distance that stopped me from exploring the trails, though. I had my first asthma attack at six, after months of a dry cough that my parents, too consumed in their cold war, failed to notice.
Moving to the outskirts of Los Angeles helped me evade my allergen triggers. But it made going back to my dad’s almost unbearable. Totally desensitized, I can barely leave artificially controlled environments, let alone traipse around the unforgiving Oregon foliage.
Today the air in my mom’s two-bedroom condo is obviously different. I sit up in bed, pulling the blankets with me. My psyche absorbs the dreams, pushing memories forward.
Leaving Oregon also saved me from isolation, an inevitable fate with a name like Ramisha Nawaz and black hair scoring my arms and legs. My dad’s town is so homogenous that, growing up, I questioned why I needed to say the Pledge of Allegiance each morning as I was not white. That’s what I thought being American meant—being white. Here, my brown skin, though not quite the same hue as my friend Jess who was born in Mexico, gave me a chameleon edge among the hundreds of other Brown and Black students.
My parents, who communicated solely with passive aggression, never spoke their mother tongue to each other or to me. There were no other Pakistani kids. My classmates often defaulted to calling me Indian. I could never tell if they referred to the country or the reservation nearby.
More awake, I pay attention to the heavy air weighing down my lungs.
Now, at sixteen, I barely need to touch my inhaler. I recall the last time was three months ago in gym class on an unusually humid day. Since then, the school has excused me from the archaic institution that is physical education when the weather is bad. Instead, I get to devour yellowing, musty books in the school library. Today would be such a day.
The remnants of primal fear from past asthma attacks are why I still always know where my inhaler is, why I don’t ever move it from its home in my backpack's middle pocket. My hand encircles it now to make sure it hasn’t disappeared.
I had three really bad ones before we came to California. Even though I was only nine during the last attack, I can clearly conjure the teal scrubs swarming around me in the emergency room. I tried to communicate, unable to speak, to tell them I think my inhaler is broken, just get me a new one please. The dizziness became stronger, and my eyes felt like they were going to lurch out from my head. Later I learned these were side effects from magnesium. A last resort medication for the too-far gone, one wheeze away from a breathing tube.
After that, I knew I had to be my own keeper. My parents would not remember to hand me my medications in the morning or pack my inhaler or replace the expired nebulizers mummifying in the school nurse’s office. They were more concerned with who was to blame, tossing accountability like a hot potato between each other.
I never followed up with a lung doctor more than once. As a kid, I didn’t realize the importance of seeing a doctor for my breathing. When I asked my mom about the missed appointments, she said they weren’t necessary.
One time a pulmonologist asked me if anyone smoked at home. My mom immediately answered no, sending me threats with her eyes. Why did she try to conceal my dad’s pack-a-day tradition—half at work and half at home, in our covered sunroom?
Later, I heard her high-pitched yelling met with my dad’s silence. Find a job with proper health insurance. Smoking is pathetic, you’re pathetic, just quit. Her words boomeranged through the house never quite reaching the intended target. I realized then that lying is the easiest way to hide shame.
I finally pull the curtain away from my bedroom window, dreading what I will find. The perpetually blue sky had evolved into burnt orange at some point during the night. I checked my phone then. No emergency alerts.
When my mom divorced my dad, we qualified for government assistance. She got a job as a scheduler at a hospital, but the salary was half of my dad’s engineering paychecks. I’ve been seeing a pulmonologist twice a year since then. Funny how it works like that. We had to get a perfect score on the poverty test before anyone wanted to help. Want is also a strong word. We’ve spent hours fighting with the county, trying to convince them we deserve their help. My mom found out the hard way that if she accepted a raise, our health insurance would stop covering copays.
So the only way I am able to see Dr. Fitzgerald is if my mom sticks to her job and refuses promotions. Dr. Fitzgerald started me on a fancy drug that needs to be injected. I’d never been good around needles, but my mom is worse. She refused to do the injections, so the nurses taught me to do them myself.
Today is a Thursday, two weeks from my last injection. I hop up from bed, shove on my wire-framed glasses my mom labeled The Gandhi Spectacles, and pad to the fridge. I took out the syringe to let it warm up. Then I call Jess.
“Misha? What?” she croaked, sleep coating her throat.
“Look outside,” I instruct as I contort the toothpaste tube to squeeze out a dollop.
I hear shuffling and grumbling over the sound of my toothbrush scraping my molars.
“Ah shit, dude. That does not look good. You think school will be cancelled?”
I open the email app and refresh my inbox. No new messages.
“Doesn’t seem like it.”
Jess says she has to go help her siblings, affectionately called the gremlins, get ready for school. I’d always been jealous of my friends who had siblings. But where I was lonely, Jess was never alone. Despite having two parents in a seemingly healthy marriage, they both work over twelve hours a day doing labor that is tough on their bodies. As the oldest child, Jess became a parent by proxy for her younger twin sisters. It was enough to take care of myself.
Before heading out to wait for the bus, I pull up the leg of my jean shorts, create a small circle with an alcohol pad, and poke the subcutaneous needle into my thigh, pushing the medicine into my flesh. My immune system, hellbent on attacking my lungs, should be a bit quieter soon.
The burnt, polluted air slams into my face as soon as I open the door. I swing it shut and grab a KN95 mask from the stash my mom keeps in the coat closet, swallowing the cough in my chest. The wildfire smoke had never been this bad, at least since we moved to our neighborhood. Peering out the window, I see the tall palm trees whipping around in the high winds. Then I catch sight of the yellow bus barreling around a corner and pulling up to my street.
I string the mask’s loops around my ears and take off in a run to the cracked sidewalk where the bus idles, emitting its own smokey fumes into the air. The doors stay open for me as I gracelessly stumble into the aisle. This is when I start coughing. At first, I think I overexerted myself from sprinting. I want to completely refuse any possibility of an attack coming on. Denial is easy since it’s been so many years.
But I glance at the reddened sky and around at my peers, realizing I’m not the only one wearing a mask today. Just a precautionary couple puffs would make me feel better. My lips wrap around the inhaler, tasting the familiar sweetness of the medicine. Breathing slowly, I try to defuse my electric nerves.
My coughing slows but doesn’t stop on the way to school. Then it picks up where it left off.
I meet up with Jess, she asks if I’m okay. I know it’s hours too soon to use my inhaler again unless I want to admit I’m not okay. And I’m still not ready to do that.
Anything after second period exists only as a stop motion montage. Jess’s dyed ruby hair shielding my head as she bends over me while I cough uncontrollably. Squealing ambulance illuminating the pavement in blue. Useless inhaler clutched in my sweaty palm. My chest bound in an ever-tightening Victorian-era corset. And I can only breathe through a juice box straw and the more I try to exhale deeply, the smaller the straw gets. My intestines will spill out of my mouth if I keep coughing like this.
***
As soon as I am conscious in the hospital, I become obsessed with the wildfires. Forgetting the stack of fantasy novels Jess brought me, I spend stuporous hours on my phone’s browser reading article after article. I learn about particulate matter and El Niño. Cultural burns lure me into a rabbit hole. Indigenous people stewarded our forests with small, contained fires for thousands of years. But when the colonizers moved West, they put an end to those burns. They let foliage build upon itself creating the perfect fuel for fires that ravage entire communities.
My dad’s voice overlaps with the words I read. After bad days at work, he would come home and unscrew the top off a cheap bottle of whiskey he hid in the garage. Those evenings were the most I’d ever heard him speak. It would start with stories—monologues of how he saved his sister from drowning in the river running through their village in Pakistan, how he hung onto the handlebars of his uncle’s motorcycle that miraculously held his six other siblings. As he drank more, his proselytizing and my eye-rolling would begin. The British Raj tyrannized, built and deforested at my dad’s expense. Cholera, malaria, famines, floods, psychic subjugation that still affected him even though he was an ocean away. Somehow, he was never the victim nor was he able to rise above it all in his stories.
When I’ve gotten my wildfire fix, I scroll through social media. A video of a young white influencer pops up, her face too close to the camera. “All of my friends’ homes have burned down,” she says. “This doesn’t happen here,” she says. “L.A. looks like a war-torn country. This doesn’t happen here,” she says again. Then she pleads, requesting donations to help cover the reconstruction costs. A hyperlink to a donation site pops up with before-and-after pictures of a giant Spanish-style villa in the hills. I swipe left, the after pictures show a pile of dirt where the mansion once was. Already at $60,000 in donations. I scroll to the previous video on her account. A trip to Cancun sponsored by a fast fashion brand.
Between the spurts of lucidity, I dream. But now my dreams are red and charcoal light leaks. They say flames dance. But I no longer see it that way. Flames laugh. The fire of my dreams is a maniacal, contagious cackle. It sneers at us all with equal contempt, impartial. After its euphoria fizzles out, we, the disenfranchised, are left writing our stories with ashes—words of soot and embers only to be carried away, concealed by the smoke.
Farah Contractor (she/her), originally from Philadelphia, is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Medicine. At UVA, she is also a Hook Scholar in the Center for Health Humanities and Ethics, where she uses creative writing to bring awareness to disability rights, planetary health and the patient perspective as a pediatric cancer survivor herself. Contractor is applying to psychiatry residency with the plan to specialize in child and adolescent psychiatry.