The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

Your worm is your only emperor… We fat all creatures else to fat us and we fat ourselves for maggots.

The hardest thing in the world is to live only once. But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree.

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.

before shuffling back into smoky rooms where mini-TVs, the size of human torsos, lull them to sleep.

And it’s the very bridge the boy crossed one afternoon on September 15 in 2009.

He was nineteen, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light. He had not been forgiven and neither are you.

the red water tower in the distance announcing us—East Gladness—in faded white paint, before he turned from this place, swung one leg over the rail and decided, like a good son, to jump.

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.

the river turned toward Chester County, where the towns are so small you could light a cigarette as you drive in and be someplace else before you blow your first drag out the window.

“Don’t be stupid.” She glanced around and pushed her glasses up with her middle finger. “You can’t die in front of my house, okay? I don’t need any more spirits around here.”

He had never wanted to throw his name out, just the breath attached to it. The name, after all, was the only thing his mother gave him that he was able to keep without destroying. “Hai,” he mumbled.

For the Lord is not slow to fulfill His promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” He watched her as she prayed, this bent stub of a woman, hair matted at her temples, whose voice had earlier coaxed him back to solid ground.

Because why shouldn’t the dead receive new names? Weren’t they transformed, after all, into a kind of otherhood?

was one of those friendships that came on quick, like the heat on a July day, and long after midnight you could still feel its sticky film on your skin as you lie awake in your room, the fan blowing in what remained of the scorched hours, and realize for the first time in your peep of a life that no one is ever truly alone.

“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.”

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

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

After all, he had never refused anything given him without a price, which was how he ended up where he was in the first place.

How he would pull this off, there was no telling—but it was a narrow passage worth taking, a feeble tributary that should at least end up somewhere.

“You believe in God, boy?” He took a long drag and considered this. “He’s probably around sometimes.”

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, like the time, a few days in, when he woke to the sound of animated talking downstairs.

“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.”

How come anytime he heard of such unimaginable places, such utopias, he always heard of them too late, the path invisible until he’s long past their junction? But what has he done anyway—other than dodge the slow-moving “silent pill” of his life only to fall face down in the ditch he was now in?

One kid from the same refugee camp as Hai’s family was called MJKarlMalone Truong; rivals in life, Jordan and Malone would be united in the body of an asthmatic Vietnamese boy with a lazy eye who landed, of all places, in North Carolina, home of Jordan’s Tar Heels. Their elders named them after whatever they hoped would manifest in life. Why toil away in factories to save for a Lexus when you could make her yourself?

I have no skills and no personality. And I need to develop them. Fast.”

He had a job, which meant he had regained a real, quantifiable foothold in the world.

Parents make babies, God gives them personalities.

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.

The folks who made up the crew were just like people anywhere else in New England. Weatherworn and perennially exhausted or pissed off or both.

“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.”

Wayne didn’t laugh again for the rest of the day and they all felt it. He had a laugh that could vanquish depression in an elephant.

As long as you can work, it’s alright.” She ran her fingers through his hair. “I don’t want you to think you gotta be a hero. Just for me.” But he knew this news had come as relief, a thread they could follow together even as they were spinning apart.

the house was filled with that frenetic, fraught air that permeates when someone is about to depart for a long trip.

A thousand sons must have been where he was now and turned back from their horses, wagons, rickshaws, cyclos, buses, schooners, trains, even dusty, sandaled feet. They must have offered a face reacting to their mother’s shrinking form, a final enactment of separation, revealing to each other the cost this leaving imprinted on their brows.

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.

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.

He aims for the mouth because it opens the way time opens—whatever goes through never returns the same. Like a word. Like a you. Like I said, this is war.

Fealthy is what I call it. Fake healthy.

“A dead soldier who never killed anyone.”

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

the world their mothers brought them in, the one that they, in their hurry, barely survived. But he would survive, he decided once and for all, the money pressed against his wet skin. He was the richest he’d ever been.

There was a kind of luxury to be amongst this place of sweat and ache and yet sit and suck a cigarette down to its soggy nub and have no one tell you anything because you’re off the clock. A dignified, defiant rest.

He nudged the pill, the smallest life raft he’d ever known, but finally shut the case.

You don’t need to be beautiful to make other people beautiful, she once told him, sucking on a cigarette and sweating in the back room on her break at the nail salon,

he glimpsed her through the opening. How rare to see one’s mother lost in such unfixed and unknowable contentment, so privately realized through a scarce, snatched freedom. He felt like a voyeur and yet, like a voyeur, could not look away.

Hai realized, for the first time, in the smoky light that made Russia’s blue hair tinge silver with sweat, that the boy was handsome—but in the way that reveals itself only after you know a person for a while, the way a doorknob is polished to brilliance with use.

in the cold as the snow fell onto the hollowed cavities of their bellies, the flakes turning to rain inside the steaming walls of their ribs. Because that’s what happens when you die—the world gets