The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

The hardest thing in the world is to live only once.

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.

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

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.

“Words cast spells. You should know this as a writer. That’s why it’s called spelling, Labas.”

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. It reminded him of homes he’d seen in pharmaceutical commercials.

Hai stared hard at the woods across the frost-covered road, the spaces between the birch trunks so dark they seemed filled in with Sharpie. “Look, touch me. Go ahead. Grab on.” He held out his arm and Sony squeezed it, cautious. “Harder. See? That’s the only real thing about me, that I’m sitting here next to you at this bus stop. That’s it. Everything else, what I do, what I’ve done, the goals and promises, they’re all, like, ghosts. For most people, their ghost is inside them, waiting to float out when they die. But my ghost is in pieces.” He pointed with his chin at the scattered trees. “It’s all over the place, caught in all the spots where I snagged myself.” Hai paused. He had actually never verbalized this before, and the sudden clarity made him queasy. It lay before him like a perfectly dug hole, the edges immaculate and sharp.

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?

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.