The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

Before long, the days grew to weeks and the two strangers found a steady rhythm at 16 Hubbard Street. Hai’s main task was to make sure Grazina took her vitamins, like she said, except these “vitamins” turned out to be in a plastic trough filled with prescription bottles. “For my brains,” she said, pointing to her head.

The mind in dementia, Hai learned, can be like one of those Etch A Sketch things he had as a kid: a little shake and it vanishes to a grey and otherworldly blankness.

He not only had a position in the company—but the company had no idea what his past looked like because none of that mattered. He had become an employee and thus had obtained an eternal present, manifested only by his functional existence on the time card. He had no history because one was not required of him, and having no history also meant

having no sadness. Instead, he was part of a workforce that fed people. He was America’s fuel. And he was burning to be used, to be useful.

he realized now how odd it was that despite her derangement of senses, she’d managed to enter such a clear, lucid state of linearity as the one they were in now. But then again, he knew nothing of dementia, what wide, unbroken vistas it might hold.

These gunfights, a dream inside a dream inside an illusion, occurred around three times a week, where they’d fire at each other throughout the house, their finger-pistols locked and loaded as they crouched among the floral furniture.

In this theater they made of her memories, the war was drawing to a close.

The longer Pepper existed, Hai realized, the easier it was to manage Grazina’s episodes.

It meant having a portal into which he could usher her when the present burned away, like the fog burning up now over the river as the first sunrays splintered over the mountains. “You know what?” She held up a finger,

It showed a child standing on a shoreline caught under a tsunami wave made entirely out of silhouette, as if the wave itself was cut out. The wave’s shadow fell on the child, who was merely an outline filled with light. Below the scene was printed, in block letters, the command Don’t let your child be swallowed by depression. Underneath this was the name of a pill, Luminkind, that was to rescue your kid from this natural disaster of the mind.

Hai wondered if he was too old to take something made for children. At what point does childhood sadness become adult sadness anyway? Does the tsunami get larger as the figure grows? Was his wave already twice the size of the one in the poster?

What good is beauty, any beauty, if nobody wins?

“To be alive and try to be a decent person, and not turn it into anything big or grand, that’s the hardest thing of all.

If you can be nobody, and stand on your own two feet for as long as I have, that’s enough.

There are even doctors among them, lawyers, custodians, minor politicians, bureaucratic functionaries, pilots, bakers, and barkeeps, varied stations of life now equalized in the only true egalitarian wing of the American dream: the nursing home, where the past is nothing but what it’s done to you. Where “a home,” like this one, is often a place to hide the aging body, the crepe-paper skin, the wounds weeping

with yellow sap, anemic bruises that stay for weeks, bloodshot brown eyes. How is it that we have become so certain that the sight of years, the summation of decades, should inflict such violence on the viewer—including family—that we have built entire fortresses to keep such bodies out of sight?

But where was she going? She was going to a place where freedom is promised yet made possible only by a contained egalitarian space fashioned with walls and locks, where measured nourishment is delivered each day through long corridors by staff born from a never-ending elsewhere who forgo watching their own children grow up in order to watch strangers

grow old, all this to keep you alive so they can suck up money from your bank account while you’re warm, immobilized by tranquilizers, and satiated and numb, a body ripe for harvest even beyond ripening. She was heading to America after all. The truest version of it. The one where everyone pays to be here.