The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

Just then the cuckoo clock went off; a headless owl emerged from the door and swiveled as it chirped above them. “I guess Stalin’s invading Vilnius again,” he said, nodding toward the sound. “No.” Grazina was looking out the window at the bridge. “That’s 6:43 p.m. The time Lucas was born.”

“Don’t hit me again. I’m high and can’t really see straight.”

“Look, being fucked up is actually what’s most common. It’s the majority of who we are, what everybody is. Fucked up is the most normal thing in the world. You’re both fucked up and you’re normal, got it?”

You can be a person doing what you do every day and that’s fucking enough.

Only in springtime, it seemed, does gravity work backward here, the dandelion pollen rising in great squalls, the flower buds shooting up, further from the ground, as if pulled by the sky’s sudden need for them, all of it under the crisp brilliance of April sunlight. Watching this, Hai felt himself displaced by a wild, untenable gratitude.

The trash was no longer just trash—but evidence. Because to discard is to move on. Inside the dumpster, he was pressed on all sides by human forwardness.

“Yes,” he gasped into the dark, like a boy seeing his name in ink for the first time, “there’s so much room in a person, there should be more of us in here. There shouldn’t be just one.”