The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

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.

A time when you still knocked on each other’s doors, and if you wanted to talk to somebody, you had to call them on a landline, listen to their mother’s breathing for a while, maybe the sound of her fixing a drink or shaving her legs, then meet up somewhere, one of you waiting about, shifting your feet and looking at clouds or trees or municipal architecture, cars passing, your dopamine levels higher for not having been depleted from blue-light screens throughout the day. A time when the drug dealer on the corner would, out of boredom, start balancing on a chain-link fence, the boy in him unable to help it, pants sagging from the effort, revealing his plaid boxers you can spot from the back window of the school bus.

In supermarkets, the meat looks so serene, placid, and calm, like something formed in a studio. Here—among Slipknot and the alloyed blood, breath, and gastric fumes bubbling from gashed esophagi, the grass dyed yellow with stomach viscera, these animals with faces so human, eyelashes blond and thick, so expressive it felt like they should have names, so much so that Hai had to look away as he pulled the trigger—the work was chaos.