Narrated in first person by Ali Shams, the chapter recounts his life as an immigrant single father in Fort Wayne, Indiana, working at a chicken breeder farm—a sterile, laboratory-like operation engineered to produce industrial chickens that convert grain into protein with maximum efficiency. Ali leaves before dawn while Cyrus, from first grade onward, dresses himself for school, establishing the boy's early independence.

Ali describes the routines that structure his life: showering into scrubs for biosecurity, collecting thousands of slimy fertilized eggs from the shavings each day, then washing them one by one alongside coworkers like the Congolese Jean-Joseph and the Guatemalan Edgar. The men, mostly immigrants, practice English and trade descriptions of food from home. Ali drinks cheap bulk gin nightly as "medicine," and on weekends cooks stews, watches Westerns, Pacers games, and rented videos with Cyrus.

Ali reflects on Cyrus as precocious and self-sufficient—teaching himself chess, writing for the school newspaper, dreaming of songwriting and Mandarin—growing up almost without Ali's involvement. Their main contact with family is an annual Nowruz call to Uncle Arash, during which Ali learns about his own son's life secondhand. Ali admits he is a slow thinker and a bad talker, never knowing how to respond to Cyrus's enthusiasms.

A hadith Ali learned as a boy—about God answering a starving man's prayer by sending him a baby to care for—frames his understanding of his own purpose. He fixates on a 4,000-year-old Babylonian tablet Cyrus once showed him, an ancient complaint about substandard copper, taking it as evidence that human souls have always been petty and self-pitying despite scientific progress. Soul-learning, unlike science, cannot be inherited; each generation begins from zero.

The chapter closes with Ali summarizing his existence as a numbing loop—work, eggs, food, basketball, gin, dreamless sleep—and concluding that complaint is pointless. Living continues until it doesn't; saying yes to each new day is simply the only option.