The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

For a scant, luminous moment he was filled with a displaced benevolence for every soul in their tiny town. That some selfless, angelic people had the good mind to turn a burnt-down school into a home for the words I need help. He took one more look at the cornfield standing in the warm, still night across the road, fireflies blinking through the dark, and filled out his intake for the New Hope Recovery Center.

But then, slowly, one or two or seven of your friends will find the pills, and they will flood their young brains with artificial joy. And you will join them, running through the woods by the power plant, laughing at the immense night, your head levitating a foot above your shoulders. And their eventual deaths will not yet be used by politicians to gain traction with the base. It did not have a name, this slaughter, and yet your loved ones were being slowly erased, even teachers and lunch ladies overdosing overnight, then cremated without ceremony, their faces soon existing only in your mind. Those were the times, those who lived through it would say, years later, not knowing what it was they meant.

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.

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.