The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

The hardest thing in the world is to live only once. But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree.

We are the blur in the windows of your trains and minivans, your Greyhounds, our faces mangled by wind and speed like castaway Munch paintings. The only things we share with the city are the ambulances, being close enough to Hartford for them to come fetch us when we’re near dead or rattling away on steel gurneys without next of kin. We live on the edges but die in the heart of the state. We pay taxes on every check to stand on the sinking banks of a river that becomes the morgue of our dreams.

He was nineteen, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light.

There was no shame, the boy thought, in losing yourself to something as natural as gravity—where one doesn’t jump but is pulled, blameless, toward the sea. If nothing else, this would hurt his mother least.

How come anytime he heard of such unimaginable places, such utopias, he always heard of them too late, the path invisible until he’s long past their junction?

He had no history because one was not required of him, and having no history also meant having no sadness.

Hai’s number was 2163. He didn’t care what that meant but secretly wished it would be the year the sun finally drank up all its gas and blew up the solar system.

“There, we’ve fed the spirits on their own little table. Now the food is filled with their desire to live, making it more powerful.”

How strange to feel something so close to mercy, whatever that was, and stranger still that it should be found in here of all places, at the end of a road of ruined houses by a toxic river. That among a pile of salvaged trash, he would come closest to all he ever wanted to be: a consciousness sitting under a lightbulb reading his days away, warm and alone, alone and yet, somehow, still somebody’s son.

The folks who made up the crew were just like people anywhere else in New England. Weatherworn and perennially exhausted or pissed off or both.

There were times, too, when people were just people, which meant they were assholes.

In Vietnam, the Americans had left the fields a ruinous wasteland with Monsanto-powered Agent Orange, not to mention the two million bodies nameless and scattered in the jungle and riverbanks waiting to be salvaged by family members hoisting woven baskets on their waists full of sun-bleached bones. On top of that the country was fighting the genocidal Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who were invading the western border. People starved, naturally, and scavenged for rats or stretched their rice rations with sawdust from lumberyards.

You lose the dead as the earth takes them, but the living you still have a say in.

He lay waiting for the dark to be truer than it was. Ever since he was little, it bothered him that you can never recall the exact moment you fall asleep, as though someone turns you off just before your mind fades, as if they knew you wouldn’t choose it, that you’d stay awake if you saw sleep coming like the shadow of some colossal wave falling over you.

“Hitler!” she cut him off, then considered him with one eye, her way, he would learn, of measuring character. “Don’t forget Stalin, Mr. Pepper,” she said coldly. “There is more than one devil these days.”

Because to remember is to fill the present with the past, which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all, is life itself. We murder ourselves, he thought, by remembering.

He wanted to tell her that the body was just this stupid little shovel we use to dig through the hours only to end up surrounded by more empty space than we know what to do with.

No matter how many years the body wrecks itself on the shore of living, the mouth stays mostly the same, faithful through its empty, eternal void. Some call this hunger. Others call it loss.

What if the soul is just as tired as the body?

At what point does childhood sadness become adult sadness anyway?

the trains moving through kingdoms of ungodly death made by God’s children.

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

There was so much space. That’s what wealth is, he realized: to live in a house where all the tools of living are out of sight.

“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. You think being president is hard? Ha. Don’t you see that every president becomes a millionaire after he leaves office? If you can be nobody, and stand on your own two feet for as long as I have, that’s enough. Look at my girl, all that talent and for what, just to drown in Bud Light?” Water dripped from her nose. “People don’t know what’s enough, Labas. That’s their problem. They think they suffer, but they’re really just bored. They don’t eat enough carrots.”

What did it matter which timeline they were in? It was all one skeleton anyway.

Somebody goes ahead and dies and all of a sudden you become a box for them, he thought, you store these things that no one has ever seen and you go on living like that, your head a coffin to keep memories of the dead alive. But what do you do with that kind of box? Where do you put it down?

An icy wind had blown out the sun and the street was a sick monochrome.

“Most people are soft and scared. They’re fucking mushy. We are a mushy species. You talk to anybody for more than half an hour and you realize everything they do is a sham to keep themselves from falling apart. From prison guards to teachers, to managers, psychiatrists, even fathers, anybody—even your stupid generals. People put on this facade of strength. They act like they have a purpose and a mission and their whole life is supposed to lead to this grand fucking thesis of who they are.

“When you’re somebody’s mother, nothing’s good enough. Good and bad doesn’t exist.”

Where on earth was elsewhere possible?

These people, bound by nothing but toil in a tiny kitchen that was never truly a kitchen, paid just above minimum wage, their presence known to each other mostly through muscle memory, the shape of their bodies ingrained in the psyche from hours of periphery maneuvering through the narrow counters and back rooms of a fast-food joint designed by a corporate architect, so that they would come to know the sound of each other’s coughs and exhales better than those of their kin and loved ones. They, who owe each other nothing but time, the hours collectively shouldered into a shift so that they might finish on time, now brought to their knees in a forest to gather around a half-burnt headrest of a Nissan Maxima on a Tuesday in mid-April, their bodies finally touching, a mass of labor cobbled together by a boy’s hallowed loss—on the clock.

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.

In a few weeks the roads will be filled with bike spokes you can hear from your room at night, so clearly that you have to put down your book and look out the window to see what propels a person so fast through so much summer, the gasoline sweetness of young skunks and lilac blossoms wafting through the window as a deep urge to make something, anything, mounts in your chest and you decide, once and for all, to plot your escape from whatever tiny name on the map has tried and failed to claim you.

The trash was no longer just trash—but evidence. Because to discard is to move on.

Centuries from now, when the cosmos are no longer mysteries infinitely multiplied by syllables, they will unearth the ancient and mildewed libraries and understand us as the epoch that reheated chemically preserved sustenance we never cooked under red roofs, from which we asked How can I help you? endlessly, day and night, through droughts and earthquakes, through wars and floods and assassinated presidents, fallen towers and allegiances, impeachments and suicides, through birthdays, some so insignificant they will be forgotten even by those they crown, knowing so little can be kept—not even the gnomic words that nonetheless birth the histories between two people: Hello, Hai, Labas.

And that’s when he heard it—not the river’s rush, but the hogs. Dragged by their hooves into the emperor’s butchery, they were screaming from a galaxy far, far away, inside him. And they sounded just like people. Soft, simple people, who live only once.