The chapter opens with Cyrus's reflections on sleep as a strange, performative act—a faith-based surrender that the body demands nightly under threat of madness or death. Cyrus has always seen waking as the only true state, and sleep as a poisoning enemy he resents.

Cyrus has been a terrible sleeper since infancy. As a baby in Iran, he barely slept, prompting his father Ali to fear a disability. As Cyrus grew, his sleeplessness worsened into violent night terrors, leaving Ali to rock, beg, change wet sheets, and shoulder extra laundry costs. Ali silently felt the universe owed him an easier child, given that his wife Roya had been taken from him only months after Cyrus's birth.

The narrative recounts Roya's death: in July 1988, she boarded Iran Air Flight 655 to visit her ailing brother Arash in Dubai, leaving infant Cyrus behind because she felt he was too young to fly. The U.S. Navy warship USS Vincennes shot the plane down with surface-to-air missiles, killing all 290 passengers, including 66 children. Cyrus was spared only by Roya's decision to leave him home.

Flashing further back, the chapter explains that Ali had wanted a child more than Roya did; Roya doubted she could match her own mother's natural warmth. Cyrus was born on March 13, 1988, just before Nowruz, in a quick, quiet birth. Ali wept and praised God; they named the solemn baby Cyrus.

After Roya's death, Ali was overwhelmed by grief, rage, and the suffocating pity of family and friends. He resented covered dishes, stock condolences, and political anger that felt foreign to his own bottomless fury. Arash, already damaged by the Iran-Iraq War, fell into incoherent grief. Ali began drinking, smoking, hardening. Seeing a flyer for a chicken farm job in Indiana requiring no English, he sold nearly everything, packed a single trunk, and emigrated with infant Cyrus to Fort Wayne, Indiana, beginning their American life sleepless and exposed.