It hit him when he walked by the one restaurant he usually speed-walked past or avoided altogether by taking a long-cut. It was beyond sinister — and yet. Was he bird or was he man? Hadn’t all of what he’d been through in 2000 made a man of him? Wasn’t that the real root of his problem with all the jobs? That there was still a tiny side of him that wasn’t? Wasn’t that un-man drop in him what kept him attached to a woman who could drive any man to madness, too?
He imagined walking in. Better yet: he imagined jumping out of the twin turboprop plane; he went further: he imagined throwing himself off the Brooklyn Bridge; and further: he imagined falling off the face of the whole fucking planet.
(Fucking, he thought. Yes, he thought, fucking.)
It was the darkest winter of his life.
So on a particularly snowy January day, he entered the restaurant that he had avoided so effectively for years at this point, so effectively that he had almost forgotten about it. First step: he took deep breath after deep breath and almost relished the torture. It was worse than he thought. He was slashing his wrists and finding a certain joy in it.
Worse than its smell was the fact that they were not hiring.
Zal told the Chinese lady how much he’d work for, his new line when he really wanted the job. It was so much less than minimum wage — the offer nobody could refuse. Nobody, after all, knew he wasn’t doing this for money.
The Chinese man who owned the place came out from the back and, in broken English, welcomed him and said he’d have to be there at dawn the next morning.
That was when the chickens came in. He’d be in charge of washing them and cutting them.
“That’s it?” gulped Zal, trying to sound eager.
“Maybe you can ___ them, too,” the man said, nodding along.
Zal didn’t catch the word. “I can what?”
“You can ____ them,” the man said again.
Zal frowned. To his sheer terror, it was a word that sounded like “fly.”
“I don’t understand,” Zal said, helplessly.
Finally the man, frustrated, lifted a takeout menu and hit the word over and over and over again, the third word in the very name of the place: Ken Lee Fried Chicken.
And he did fry them, many of them, over and over, day in and day out. There he was: at the workplace of his worst nightmares, doing the job he was most afraid of in the world, at the takeout joint whose very existence had the effect of a pop-up Auschwitz for him. Washing, cutting, and indeed frying chicken, there he was.
Experience, Zal reminded himself. How many men even get to experience what it feels like to be a serial killer? Experience!
The first day, he periodically had to go to the bathroom and throw up. He did it four times, until eventually he had nothing but saliva to expel. Ken told Zal he could eat a free meal on them, depending on his shift, and he politely declined. The very notion of eating in that place seemed unfathomable to Zal, even if he avoided chicken altogether and just had plain rice. Eating at all, even outside of that place, began to feel impossible. With no weight to lose, really, Zal started to lose weight.
Asiya took a break from her own worries and focused on him in this period. Something was wrong with him, she knew. Why else would he work there, a place no one with his story could possibly endure? Over and over she asked him if he was depressed. She told him she had been with lots of depressed people at the home and she knew what depression looked like: it was hating yourself to the point that you take joy in nothing, hating yourself to the point where you want to do only the opposite of the best.
“Who says I’m taking joy in nothing?” Zal snapped. “I’m getting another experience.”
“You don’t need this experience,” she argued. “Nobody does! You think everyone at some point just has to work at a fried chicken place? It’s crazy!”
He bit his lip to keep from commenting on her use of the word crazy. “Look, Asiya,” he said instead, “the very fact that you think it’s a problem for me to work at a fried chicken place — when every day people work at them all over the world — is the reason I have to do it! It’s not out of your head, your idea of me!”
“But, Zal, if I go by that logic, then the very reason you took that job was because you had to prove something to yourself, meaning you’re not over it, either!”
Crazy or not, she had a point. “Asiya, it’s nothing I need to explain. It’s hell, but I have to do it. What’s the saying. . ‘That’s life!’”
“What about another type of food place?”
Zal rolled his eyes. “And the purpose of that would be? C’mon, you got the point of this. Anyway, don’t worry, I’ll get fired soon enough, that is for sure!”
So Asiya waited. And in fact Zal waited. He held on to this job longer than any other. It seemed to be the one thing he excelled at. He was apparently made to be a chicken fryer.
During this time, he started having his grisliest nightmares — the grisliest and birdiest that he had ever had. He saw his old canary, the one he’d had a crush on, falling out of the sky to her death because her wings didn’t work. He saw little boys covering birds in kerosene and setting them on fire as they flew, to make stars. He saw battered birds — by battered he meant fried, of course — flying out of their buckets and into the sky, a whole skyful of Ken Lee Fried Chickens, crunchily flapping through the air, raining crumbs on them all.
And yet, sleep-deprived or not, he’d go to work as if it nothing was wrong.
“Is this some what-doesn’t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger shit?” Asiya hissed, during the phase when she started to get downright hostile about it, hating that fried poultry smell always on him, his greasy hands, his oil-stained shirts.
Sleep deprivation, at its peak, they say, can mimic madness. So in retrospect, Zal always blamed the scant rest of that era for what he did next, the worst thing he had ever conjured, period.
He chose Valentine’s Day to ruin his life — his life at that point, in any case.
The sickest thing anyone has ever done to me, a less sick Asiya later recalled. The sickest thing he ever did to himself.
I am so sorry, he said only later, and only in his thoughts, over and over to the Asiya of his memory.
Because on Valentine’s Day 2001, it was his gift to her — and to himself in a way, as he wanted to take that cannibal step, that suicidal partaking, on that night of romantic nights. He’d thought simply that bringing home several extra-large buckets of fried chicken — so filled with dead fried birds he could barely balance them — was a gift, one that a normal human man would give, itself a celebration of normal humanness even.
When she left, he drank himself to a sleep he wished was death, whatever that was — no amount of dismembering and frying of fowl could really explain that to him, since he was in the business of their post-death anti-existences. When he woke up the next morning and saw the crime scene — dozens of broken fried chicken wings, some in buckets, some strewn on his floor, and, worst of all worsts: two telltale little bones, almost perfectly cleaned — he contemplated suicide for the first time.
After several rounds of vomiting, he went in to Ken Lee and told him: “I am depressed. I can’t do this.”
Ken Lee didn’t understand at first but finally let him go, with his last paycheck, which Zal refused to take. When he left, Ken Lee turned to his wife and made a circle in the air beside his ear with his index finger, though who knew if Zal had it in the first place to lose it now.