The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

We pay taxes on every check to stand on the sinking banks of a river that becomes the morgue of our dreams.

Damn

“You see, carrots become bright orange because it’s so dark in the ground. They make their own light because the sun never reaches that far—like those fish in the ocean who glow from nothing? So when you eat it, you take in the carrot’s will to go upward. To heaven.”

And now rumors from the White House, the man on the radio said, claim that the president is hoping to broker another round of troop withdrawals—this time from Afghanistan—sometime by Christmas. Let’s go over to Lisa, who’s in Washington… The two stopped and listened, their heads angled in attention, truly believing that the worst, both here and elsewhere, was over. It was the kind of day where anything felt possible. As if the charity of the world had tipped, finally, to one side of the rusted scale. The kind of day where you can fill in your scars with Magic Marker and tell yourself you’re normal—and it might be true.

Truly a hopeful time <3

He also had coworkers—no, a team, one that was the third best at their job. Never in his life had he been so included in something as to be swallowed by it, invisible among a visible human mass.

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.

At HomeMarket, “made by hand” meant heating up the contents of a bag of mushy food cooked nearly a year ago in a laboratory outside Des Moines and vacuum-sealed in industrial resin sacks. Hai wondered if anyone ever thought they’d be eating leftovers at a restaurant. Or whether they knew that the FDA allows mashed potatoes to contain up to 2 percent rat poop and up to 3.5 percent insect “fragments.”

He searched his mind, still foggy with sleep, for a military name and ended up blurting out the first one that came. “This is Sergeant Pepper from the United States Army, Second Division.” He would learn only later that the Sgt. Pepper’s Pizza in town had been named after a Beatles album.

He had never heard of a lizard conspiracy before, but in a van cramped with trays of food, the overpowering smells of their twenty-one menu items mixing together, the world outside blurring by like a washing machine, amorphous and out of reach in its ruined stretches, it was hard not to believe her. It even made sense, in a way. Wasn’t that how taxes worked? Aren’t we alive just so they can skim our earnings off the top for as long as we live? But what would it matter if they were ruled by immortal dinosaurs hiding underground? He was not at war with them; he was only alive inside pieces of mistakes that gravity had collected into a life raft called the present. He was in a catering van, heading downriver, toward whatever iceberg lay ahead.

A beautiful paragraph

Can camaraderie—the bond of working in unison—be enough to make you want to put your mouth to a kid with a busted face, to find him somehow more complete despite his unrecognizable beauty, the smell of his armpits seeping through his work polo, that garlicky, vinegary scent of humanness canceling the drugstore deodorant he wore to hide it? Yes, Hai realized now—it was.

Gay

Randy also liked making fun of him for reading books, since he believed, like a lot of folks in Welles Village, that reading is what schools force you to do, and that by the time you reach eighteen, you should be forever freed from the tyranny of printed words. A nineteen-year-old who still reads must be dumb enough to willingly refuse the wide-open book-free utopia of adulthood.

How silly, he thought, to believe souls go anywhere at all. Why should they? What if they just lay down like this pig here and decided enough was enough? What if the soul is just as tired as the body? Just as worn out from seeing its family get tricked into a tent with dog treats only to come out emptied, soon to be roasted by a political candidate who will spend 50 million dollars on a campaign she’d end up losing anyway? Where’s the soul in that?

Damn. Profound.

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. There were no brooms or mops or laundry baskets, no endless trays or cubbies for receipts, bills, or pills and keys. Everything, from the counter to the furniture, the side tables to the credenzas—all of it was there for decor, for the pleasure of the eyes and access of the body. Nothing was in the way.

“But what about a passion, a thing. Don’t you ever want, like, a thing?” “I had a life, Labas.” She paused and thought about it. “It started on a burning hill. Then it went down that hill and did like this,” she drew a line across his face with her finger. “Flat. Kaput. Nothing. Just days and days, and sometimes a little bump. And that’s enough. The Lord gave me peace and it’s good.” “Tonight was peace?” She swallowed. “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.”

“We need to all get the hell out of this dead-end town. Is there a light that beams you out of here?” Sony turned to his hero with a hurt look. “But I love it here. East Gladness is the best place on earth. We have two McDonald’s and a GameStop. Who can say that? Only New York City, probably. But it’s too noisy and dirty there. We also have a higher life expectancy than all of Mississippi.” He turned to Hai. “Seventy-four point six years. And besides, when I needed a place to stay, the town gave me a room at the Meyer’s Center. No charge.” “Are you kidding me? This place?” BJ stared out the window. “Where some girl gets dragged from a car for, like, ten miles and nobody knows who did it, even with all the fucking cameras? This place that snows for seven months and summer is twenty-four seven swamp-ass and a shit ton of mosquitos? Where the concerts are packed with white kids with glow sticks and the wrestling shows are full of diabetic hicks? Where nobody appreciates real, authentic music and technical grappling?” She was near hyperventilating. “I’m not gonna stay here forever. I’m—”

Its all about perspective

The superpower of being young is that you’re closest to being nothing—which is also the same as being very old. “You can ride a thought in and out of somebody, and it’ll do so little damage, you think anything’s possible. You can say things like I want to be a gay father with a wife and kids, or When I’m high enough I start to feel sorry for straight people, they always seem trapped on front lawns, or When I’m sixty-five, I’ll be happier than my dad.”

“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. But what happened, huh? Robert E. Lee sent all those people who believed in him across a half mile of hell because he was too scared to say he fucked up and had no cavalry. His generals told him to fall back to the mountains, but he wouldn’t listen.

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.

And he was reminded of what they did there. That somewhere, right now, someone is waiting in line asking to be satiated. And those who serve them, who lord over nothing but a stainless-steel counter and its crumb-speckled dominion, stand at the end of the line saying, again and again, How can I help you? Because our kind has built a box using four walls and a roof and called it HomeMarket, called it McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, Burger Chef, Subway, Panda Express, Pizza Hut. 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.