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.

Though the train never stops in our town, its whistle can be heard in every living room three miles out. Nothing stops here but us, really.

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.

If you aim for Gladness and miss, you’ll find us.

It’s a town where high school kids, having nowhere to go on Friday nights, park their stepfathers’ trucks in the unlit edges of the Walmart parking lot, drinking Smirnoff out of Poland Spring bottles and blasting Weezer and Lil Wayne until they look down one night to find a baby in their arms and realize they’re thirtysomething and the Walmart hasn’t changed except for its logo, brighter now, lending a bluish glow to their time-gaunt faces.

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.

Shivering, he leaned into the cone of light, somehow more troubled that a stranger had caught him on the edge of his life than by his own impulse to end it.

It was pitiful, being found like this. What kind of idiot puts himself, on a whim, under a bridge and must now convince an old woman that it was all—what, exactly?

“Thank you, okay?” He waved the woman off. “It’s all good. I just wanted to see the girders up close. I’m heading home now, don’t worry.” “Bullshit! You wanna die. Come over here.”

It wasn’t that he didn’t like his name—only that he had been willing to toss it in the river. He had never wanted to throw his name out, just the breath attached to it.

“Hai,” he mumbled. “And hello to you too. But—” “No, Hai. It’s—” “Okay,” she breathed, “but who am I saying hello to?” “My name is Hai.” “Your name is Hello?” He decided to nod. “Sure.”

“But I’m glad that you, Mr. Hello, you didn’t become another chicken, huh?”

Before, in Lithuania, bread was precious. We had to eat even hard, moldy bread, green bread that tasted like gasoline. Now we can crush them anytime we like,”

“How do you feel, Labas?” Around them was a circle of decimated bread. “I feel beautiful,” he winked at her, refreshed by this bewildering new realm he had entered. “I feel Grazina.”

“For the eyes, right?” “That’s a lie the army told in World War Two to hide the fact that they used top-notch radar. Carrots,” she paused for effect, “give you the will to live.”

“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.”

“Ever heard of a rabbit jumping off a bridge?” she winked. “Of course not. That’s because they have the light in them.”

“When I get the blues, mostly in February, I boil a pot of these and dip them in honey. When my husband died, I ate nothing but carrots for six months straight, and you know what?” She pointed the butter knife at her eye. “Not a single tear. They’re stronger raw, but I lost my molars in ’91. Bush Senior, what can you do?”

“When did he die, your husband?” “When does anybody die?” she shrugged. “When God says Well done.”

“You want me to stay here?”

Oh I'll cry

“A son should make peace with his mother before anything else.”

“We’ll make a good team, right? We’ll make do with what the Lord gives us.”

Grazina especially loved The Office, even if she often mistook it for the news, the close-up interview sessions with suit-and-tie characters resembling special reports.

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. Or worse, when it draws things on its own to fill the gaps,

It was in these moments that he thought this new life, if you could call it that, wasn’t so bad. That he could bide his time until something ahead of him lifted, like the mist rising each morning above the river outside his window, revealing what was always there.

“I used to want to be a writer. My dream was to write a novel that held everything I loved, including unlovable things. Like a little cabinet.”

“You wanna be a writer and you want to jump off a bridge? That’s pretty much the same thing, no? A writer just takes longer to hit the water.”

“I just have to read a whole bunch first. Three or four years of reading, then maybe I’ll be ready to write. It’s like a pregnancy.” “Sounds more like constipation.

As he crossed the bridge, carrots in hand, she kept calling from the fire escape, but he couldn’t hear her over the river’s rush—only that she sounded hopeful, which made him hopeful.

It was the sixties and mothers don’t just make themselves disappear like that, you know. I felt like the most powerful woman in the world.”

“With money I earned by myself, I gave my daughter a room just so she can read in peace for a day. Just one day. And I sat there and watched her read, sipping a scotch from the bar. And I cried like a baby.

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.

One time he spotted Maureen, out of sheer boredom, flicking a fly right onto a roasting chicken, where it sizzled and sparked before welding itself into a black nub on the crispy skin.

Oh great

HomeMarket was not so much a restaurant as a giant microwave,

BJ ran into the freezer and came out carrying three slabs of side dishes on her back like they were stone tablets.

😂

Wayne turned to face them, breathing through his nose. “My father taught me this work.” He said this softly but his bottom lip was quivering. “And he learned it from his own dad down in Carolina. And his dad before that. They were pitmasters. Now I’m no master, but this is their work. And I get to do it.” He pointed so hard at his heart it left a greasy period on his apron. “I don’t even have a photo of my granddad but I got this, you understand?” He glanced at each of their faces. “So nobody’s getting me off this stupid-ass chicken line.”

Oh I love him

“What’s an army anywhere but a bunch of state-sanctioned mass shooters funded by our tax dollars?”

When he was younger Hai had wanted a bigger life. Instead he got the life that won’t let him go.

Hai shared the “Kabocha” room with a sex addict named Marlin, who was strapped to the bedpost with bungee cords to keep him from jerking off.

I'm sorry they did what to him

You lose the dead as the earth takes them, but the living you still have a say in. And so he said it. And so he lied.

All those hours playing make-believe with his grandmother, building forts while her own brain was misfiring—though in another way—were paying off.

This stirred something in him, and 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.

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.

This is East Gladness, Germany.

He was about to suggest they get back on the jeep when she stopped, looked around the room as if someone had just called her name, then walked into the kitchen, where she set out cups for tea as though none of this happened. And like that it was over.

“No Catholicism, no Judaism for him. But he did convert to Alcoholism.” She bit her lip and shrugged.