ALI SHAMS

The chicken farm where I worked in Fort Wayne wasn’t a normal farm. We didn’t raise chickens for you to eat. We raised the grandparents of the chickens you eat. A breeder farm. And really, it was more laboratory than farm. The goal: to create, through selective breeding, a chicken that would go from egg to harvest in as little time as possible, on as little feed as possible. A chicken was a machine that converted grain into protein. That was the line. Easy enough.

As soon as Cyrus was in first grade, he was getting himself dressed and on the bus to school. I’d leave our apartment in the outskirts of Fort Wayne at five with him still sleeping in our shared bedroom. When I got to work, I’d have to take a shower and change into scrubs. Like a nurse. With our chickens, the first thing to be bred out was their immune systems. A waste of calories in chickens that never left their biosecure barns. Any germ someone brought in could wipe out a whole flock.

Probably you’re imagining chickens pecking around in the dirt, splashing themselves in muddy puddles. Our chickens would never survive real dirt. Bacteria, viruses. Industrial chickens, that’s what we called our birds. They were like magic. Grew like weeds and you barely had to feed them. Our chickens, you slaughtered at thirty-five days when they were nearly seven pounds. A backyard chicken might not get to that weight in a year.

At home I’d cook big pots of stew and rice on Saturdays, and we’d eat that through the week. Potatoes, cheap organ meat. A few tomatoes. On Friday nights, Cyrus and I would bake a frozen pizza and watch movies together. He looked forward to that all week, going to the library and picking out a VHS, a DVD to borrow. We’d each choose one. He liked everything I liked. Mostly I liked Westerns. John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. They did good and things turned out all right for them. Cyrus liked comedies, silly dumb stuff. Adam Sandler, Eddie Murphy. I liked watching Cyrus laugh. When it was basketball season we’d watch Pacers games. Our favorite player was Reggie Miller. We loved how mean he was, how he’d score and then taunt the player who had tried to guard him. We liked the Muslim players too, on principle—Kareem especially, but also Hakeem Olajuwon, Shareef Abdur-Rahim. Sports was a language everyone at the farm, and in Cyrus’s school, spoke. So we learned to speak it too.

I bought gin in bulk, giant half-gallon plastic bottles with British names: Barton’s, Bennett’s, Gordon’s. There were people back in Iran who believed the mullahs were installed by the British to keep Iran backwards. Maybe the British were doing the same to me with their gin. Filthy medicine. But what was the alternative?

At work, I ate like a king. Small joy. Our first break came at ten, then lunch at twelve-thirty. The farm managers filled the work fridge and freezer with snacks for us—biosecurity meant we couldn’t bring our own food in. What they gave us was all vegetarian; meat had too many germs. But it was unlimited. I’d eat bean burritos, frozen rice dishes. The other men would talk about sports, talk about women, or just not talk. Most were immigrants like me, so we tried to stay in English so we could all practice. “The plates are dirty.” “We have no more coffee.” From the guys, I learned a bit of Spanish, French.

My job, first thing, was to walk from barn to barn collecting eggs. Each barn had 1,000–2,000 eggs buried in the shavings. Some hens would make little nests in the shavings, and we learned where each of those were. But there were also hiding places, clusters of eggs in random clumps of debris. The birds would really bury them; we had to dig deep. And of course they’d shit right there. The eggs were always covered with all kinds of bodily fluids.

Our job was to pick the eggs daily while destroying as few as possible, set them onto these monorail trays hanging at eye level. The eggs were slimy, fertilized, sturdier than people imagine. You could drop one from your hands and it’d usually be fine landing on the shavings. Still, I was careful about where and how I stepped. Wherever I moved, the birds would flee.

The other guys rarely talked about home, their old ones or their new ones. A mercy. We did talk about food. A Congolese guy, Jean-Joseph, would talk all the time about cooking. Cassava, fufu, fish. And also French stuff. People were interested in Iranian food and I shared what I could about it, but I was never much of a cook. Pomegranate molasses, walnuts. Eggplants. Rice. Koobideh. We couldn’t bring anything in to share, so what we described just had to live in our heads. One time Jean-Joseph came in, excited to tell the Spanish guys he’d tried tamales, how it reminded him of kwanga back home. But of course, none of them, none of us knew what kwanga was. That kind of thing.

Cyrus grew, I worked. What more to say?

For his part, Cyrus was basically an adult from the beginning. I’d tell him about his mother, his uncle, our families when he’d ask. But mostly he didn’t ask. He was a good boy.

Once, when I was a boy, our teacher told us the hadith of the starving man. The man was dying in the desert, got on his knees and begged to God, “Please help me, I’m starving, nearly dead, too tired to continue looking for water. I don’t want to hurt anymore. Please, almighty Lord, take pity, end my suffering.” God, in his infinite wisdom, sent the man a baby. An infant to take care of. And so the man had purpose, a reason to stay alive.

I remember thinking the story didn’t make sense. Why not just send him food, water, a bed? God stories always seemed to work that way. Sideways, convoluted. Like one of those elaborate chain-reaction machines built in the most deliberately nonsensical way, using a track and a spring and a candle and a balloon to ring a bell.

But Cyrus was a good boy. Never had problems in his studies. He liked to read, same as his mother. Sometimes it felt like I barely knew him. We’d call his uncle Arash international long distance once a year for Nowruz, around Cyrus’s birthday, and I’d be shocked at what I’d learn. He’d tell his uncle he’d taught himself to play chess from a book, had been practicing against himself using a little board he’d drawn and pieces he’d cut from paper. After the call, he showed me the board, tried to teach me. He told his uncle he was working for the school newspaper, writing about movies and music. I didn’t even know his school had a newspaper. He spoke English like a professor.

After lunch, on the farm, me and the Guatemalan guy Edgar, it was our job to wash the eggs, one by one. It was a big job. Edgar would complain about football, his kids. He’d tell dirty jokes. Mostly I’d listen, laughing a little, rinsing mucus and shit from the gray eggs. Every day, six days a week, for years, washing thousands of eggs.

Cyrus loved to show me stuff he was learning in his books. I used to call him Doctor Shams. He’d come home from school, or excitedly emerge from our shared bedroom holding a book, eager to tell me that male seahorses were the ones that carried the babies, that the sun was a gigantic nuclear furnace, how to count to ten in Russian. He wanted to write songs for Tina Turner, for Bruce Springsteen. He wanted to learn Mandarin so he could move to China and teach. I never knew what to say. Usually something like “Well, you’d better clean the kitchen first.”

Once, he showed me a picture of an ancient clay tablet, Babylonian or Sumerian, something like that, 4,000 years old. I expected it to be something holy, a poem to a fertility goddess, some ancient fable. But it was, Cyrus told me, just a lengthy complaint from a business transaction about receiving the wrong kind of copper. “The copper is substandard. I have been treated rudely. I have not accepted the copper, but I paid money for it.” I never forgot that. Cyrus was laughing of course, he thought it was hilarious. “Ancient one-star review!” he said. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even say anything.

I used to think slow, slower than language moved. By the time I settled into an idea about anything, the moment for me to say something had passed. Roya used to say I was a good listener. Mostly, though, I was just a bad talker.

For weeks, I kept thinking about that tablet. Walking around the shavings, hens running from my boots, the image of that ancient stone hung in my mind. For all our advances in science—chickens that can go from egg to harvest in a month, planes to cross the world, missiles to shoot them down—we’ve always held the same obnoxious, rotten souls. Souls that have festered for millennia while science grew. How unfair, this copper delivery. How unfair, this life. My wounds are so much deeper than yours. The arrogance of victimhood. Self-pity. Suffocating.

Maybe it’s because we could pass along science. You wrote a fact in a book and there it sat until someone born five hundred years later improved it. Refined it, implemented it more usefully. Easy. You couldn’t do that with soul-learning. We all started from zero. From less than zero, actually. We started whiny, without grace. Obsessed only with our own needing. And the dead couldn’t teach us anything about that. No facts or tables or proofs. You just had to live and suffer and then teach your kids to do the same. From a distance, habit passing for happiness.

Go to work. Dig through shavings, find the eggs. Eat. Clean the eggs. Put down new shavings. Clear the driplines. Go home. Eat with Cyrus. Put on basketball, put on a movie. Drink. Dreamless sleep. Medicine-deep. Go to work. Find the eggs.

What was there to complain about? A murdered wife? A sore back? The wrong grade copper? Living happened till it didn’t. There was no choice in it. To say no to a new day would be unthinkable. So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.