Passenger(53)

Nicole giggles in the dark. Our shadows stretch out way ahead of us on the sidewalk. There are a multitude of shadows further up the street. I can tell she has embarrassed herself.

“He tells me the chicken’s name is Felipe and that it is not really a chicken at all, but an American rooster. He says his father decided to replace Felipe with a younger rooster after Felipe stopped mating with the chickens. So Vijay’s father bought a younger, handsomer chicken and took old Felipe to the chopping block. Vijay said he watched as his father swung the axe down, lobbing off old Felipe’s head. But Felipe did not die. Often, Vijay explained, a bird’s legs will keep going after its decapitated—it’s something like adrenaline or something, I guess, or a nervous reaction—but that wasn’t the case with Felipe. He simply refused to die. Headless, the rooster jumped down from the chopping block and ran in comic circles for a while. Vijay and his father waited for the bird to die. But it did not die. And when it stopped running and started to strut around like it was a regular, average day, Vijay said his father wiped his brow and said Felipe was a bird with some fight in him yet. So Vijay’s father allowed Felipe to live. And Felipe lived without a head for nearly eight months.”

I ask how that is possible.

“The cut from the axe left part of Felipe’s brain intact, way back on its neck. And the precision of the chop cauterized the wound almost immediately.”

I say this is not possible.

“Sure it is,” she insists. “I’ve seen it.”

“How did Felipe eat? He must have had to eat.”

“Every day Vijay would take an eyedropper and squirt a special formula into the hole in Felipe’s neck. Vijay did this religiously for eight months until Felipe finally died.”

I ask how Felipe died.

“Loneliness,” Nicole tells me, and her voice is melancholic with the memory. “It had nothing to do with having no head. It was loneliness and, in a sense, it was jealousy. Of the new, younger rooster, you see. Because old Felipe was no longer fit to breed, and they kept him locked away by himself in a wire-mesh cage, with the young rooster having the run of the roof. The cock of the walk, so to speak.”

“Loneliness,” I repeat.

“Loneliness,” whispers Nicole.

“Was your friend Vijay sad when Felipe died?”

“No. Vijay was too pragmatic to be sad over the death of a headless bird.”

“What about you? Were you sad?”

She thinks for a long time. Then says, “No.”

“Nicole?”

“Hmmmm?”

“Whatever happened to the head?”

She laughs and I feel her press herself up against me. “Vijay kept it in a tin box in his bedroom. When he showed it to me, it was dried out and like a withered old apple core or something. Mummified. An apple core with eyes and a beak.”

“That’s some story.”

“Growing up, there were many stories. And I would collect them all throughout the year until the end of summer, when my parents would send me off to spend two weeks with my grandfather in Georgia. He’d spent his life as a state trooper, my grandfather, and in his retirement he carved out a fairly modest niche as a fiction writer. He’d write all sorts of short stories for different magazines. Every year during my summer visit I would tell him about all the things that had happened throughout the year. The story of Felipe the headless chicken was just one of a thousand. And my grandfather would listen and teach me to write the words down, and to tell the story on paper as if it were the first time I was telling it to anyone. He was a good man, my grandfather.”

“What happened to him?”

“He got Alzheimer’s and my parents relocated him to a facility in Queens.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I made it a point to visit him whenever I could. Most of his things were in a storage unit in the city—my parents had sold his house in Georgia and had his belongings shipped up north and stowed away—and one afternoon I went to the storage unit and found a bunch of the old magazines he’d been published in, and brought them to him.

“It was one of his good days that day—meaning he recognized me—although he didn’t recognize the magazines when I set them down in his room. ‘What are these?’ he asked, and I told him. ‘I don’t remember any stories,’ he said, and asked me what they were about. ‘Read them,’ I told him. And when I came back the next day, I found him doing just that—curled over his table, scanning the pages of the magazine. I approached, happy to see him reading his old work—and how amazing would it be to read something you’ve written that you had no memory of writing? But when I got closer, I could see he was crying. He made no sound, but I could see the tears coming down his cheeks. I asked him what’s wrong. He slammed a fist down on the table and for a while didn’t say anything. Then, eventually, he said, ‘These stories are terrible!’ He made me throw them all out.” There is a lull here as she perhaps relives the incident in her mind. Respectfully, I do not look at her. I envy her memories—even envy her pain. When she speaks again, her voice is choked with tears and, in a strange way, I envy that, too. “He died a few months later.”

I tell her I’m sorry.

She says, “Is the forgetting like that? Like reading a story you’ve written but never read before?”