The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

What if they just lay down like this pig here and decided enough was enough? What if the soul is just as tired as the body?

Beautiful, short losers. And that doesn’t do anything for anybody.”

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.

She was the kind of person who would say “You look tired,” her head tilting with feigned concern, and mean that you were actually ugly.

“You don’t look like a grandma anymore,” the girl said. “You look like Regis Philbin.” “On crack,” the boy added in a whisper, as they chortled behind their glasses.

Neither of them spoke for a long time during the ride back. It was that vast emptiness one feels after any gathering, where the muscles still throbbed with people’s voices, energies both expelled and unspent, and the cab became a kind of cradle lulling them to stillness.

“To be alive and try to be a decent person, and not turn it into anything big or grand, that’s the hardest thing of all. You think being president is hard? Ha. Don’t you see that every president becomes a millionaire after he leaves office? If you can be nobody, and stand on your own two feet for as long as I have, that’s enough. Look at my girl, all that talent and for what, just to drown in Bud Light?” Water dripped from her nose. “People don’t know what’s enough, Labas. That’s their problem. They think they suffer, but they’re really just bored. They don’t eat enough carrots.”

“Labas, I’m scared to die. I want to live a little more, just a few more years, if God wills it. I know it will be a good rest when we go—but—oh, to taste freshly brewed tea, with a spot of cream. I still want that. Especially when it’s cold outside.”

What did it matter which timeline they were in? It was all one skeleton anyway.

Then she reached out and brushed aside his bangs. “Tu esi mano draugas.” “That some sort of Christmas prayer?” She shook her head. “Then what’d you say?” She stared at the water, saying softly, “You are my friend.”

never got to study hard and fail a test, then go to the library with my friends to study again. To improve. I don’t have any second chances. Just you. That’s it. You’re my second chance.”

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. “I don’t have nothing left.

“I’m just really proud of you for taking this chance. At everything. I mean, not just taking it. But you made your own opportunity. You went out there and strung it together. You know, all my life, after you were born and your father left us, I kept thinking something else would come, and it just didn’t. I always thought it would stop for me like some boat while I waited on the shore with my son and my mother, our bags all packed and ready. But it never came for me and…” “Mom don’t.” “No, let me finish. I never tell you anything and I need to say this. The truth is, it never came for me, okay? Sometimes you have to be lucky but also very brave. And I wasn’t either. But you are. You made your own way with just your mind. No one helped you—I know that, okay? Just know that your mother knows that.”

What you see might not always be what you feel. And what you feel may no longer be real. Somewhere inside him the boy believed this law was what turned the planet on its axis.

There are even doctors among them, lawyers, custodians, minor politicians, bureaucratic functionaries, pilots, bakers, and barkeeps, varied stations of life now equalized in the only true egalitarian wing of the American dream: the nursing home, where the past is nothing but what it’s done to you. Where “a home,” like this one, is often a place to hide the aging body, the crepe-paper skin, the wounds weeping with yellow sap, anemic bruises that stay for weeks, bloodshot brown eyes. How is it that we have become so certain that the sight of years, the summation of decades, should inflict such violence on the viewer—including family—that we have built entire fortresses to keep such bodies out of sight?

And there was this mighty clear sky full of stars that made you stop and look up, your head empty as a ladle as you tried to locate yourself inside an immeasurable universe.

He told of Noah’s barn, where they knew the wrong inside them was the only thing that made sense of where they grew up, where the gods, after flipping the table from losing their bets, left them alone to make a fugitive life. That a boy beside a boy could form an island called “okayness.” “With him,” he said, “it wasn’t that I was happy—but that I was okay. And okay was even better than happy because I thought it had a better chance of lasting.” He turned and was startled to find her staring right at him. “Okay is underrated. You know what underrated means, right?” “More than what the Lord planned,” she said. “Yes. And we were very underrated. But we were also very okay.”

The superpower of being young is that you’re closest to being nothing—which is also the same as being very old.

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?

Then he took medicine to make his wounds go away. He wanted too much of one feeling—and I guess his heart gave out because of it. I don’t think we’re made to hold too much of any one thing.”

New York being unbearable in grief, its massive and unending throb of human magnetism making the vacant parts in him more vacuous than he could bear.

“So you’re a liggabit then,” she said, sniffling. He looked at her hand on his sleeve. “What?” “You’re—” she gestured at him, “a liggabit. Boy and boy, girl and girl. I see them in newspapers. Liggabit community.” “Oh—oh, you mean LGBT?” He wiped his eyes and let out a single disbelieving laugh.

“I can still hear the river from here,” she said. “It’s saying I did a good job. It said I did good.”

She walked up and was about to tap him on the shoulder, but then stopped and regarded her boy, who was finally doing a normal-boy thing—watching a war movie with such devotion, it was the closest he came to peace.

What does it do to your mind to see “your people” die so vastly that you can’t even tell that they are not, in fact, your people at all?

“Finders keepers, liars weepers. And she shouldn’t have lied anyway.”

No one gave me a job cause of my brain problems, but she did. She believed in me.” His eyelids flickered. “She said, Anybody can become a diamond. All they need is a bit of pressure.”

“Most people are soft and scared. They’re fucking mushy. We are a mushy species. You talk to anybody for more than half an hour and you realize everything they do is a sham to keep themselves from falling apart. From prison guards to teachers, to managers, psychiatrists, even fathers, anybody—even your stupid generals. People put on this facade of strength. They act like they have a purpose and a mission and their whole life is supposed to lead to this grand fucking thesis of who they are. But what happened, huh?

judge ’em. Scared somebody will see through the fake-ass armor they’ve wasted their whole lives building.

We all want some story to make it bearable so we can keep living long enough to work our asses off until we’re in the ground,

“Look, being fucked up is actually what’s most common. It’s the majority of who we are, what everybody is. Fucked up is the most normal thing in the world. You’re both fucked up and you’re normal, got it?”

You can be a person doing what you do every day and that’s fucking enough. Don’t you get it?”

“People aren’t so bad. They’re just wounded little kids trying to heal. And that makes them tell each other stupid stories,” he said softly. “Would you just stand in your skin with me and stay? Just for a bit, while I sort this out? Will you stay? Please? I can’t do this anymore.”

“Oh! How lovely!” Grazina suddenly sat up. “Why don’t we keep talking like I’m not here. Like I’m meat on a hook. How nice, huh? I’m not slow, you know. My brain is just on and off.” She looked over to Hai, stunned at her own brashness. He squeezed her hand.

“I should’ve known all along that you were liggabit.” “Really? How so?” he whispered. “You ask so many damn questions. Normal boys don’t ask so many questions.” She chuckled and turned the other way. “Good night, Labas.”

Is it possible for a hole to be cut open and for you to step inside it—not to be destroyed, but simply gone? Where on earth was elsewhere possible? Is that what the pills do, in the end? Is

You’re fucking great, Sony. You’re an amazing person, okay? You’re the best soldier I ever had.

Don’t let whatever your father is or was knock you down on the mat.”

Don’t be too sad, boy. You still have your hands. And with these what you make is yours.”

Of all the money that ereeee I’ve had, I’ve spent it innnn good company. Of all the harm that ereeee I’ve done, alas it waaaas to none but me.

For all I’ve done, for want of wit, with memory now I can’t recall. So fill to me the parting glass. Good night and jooooy be with you all. Then she stopped, remembering something. “Here, you have it.” She turned around and handed Sony a used scratch-off ticket from last night. “They were all busts except this one.”

They were a nightfall away from the end, he thought, and almost laughed at the absurdity of it.

we did a lot, didn’t we? Didn’t we do so much?”

Don’t cry. Never cry in a diner. They charge extra if they catch you. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen.”

“You’re gonna go and you’re gonna get married in that house up ahead. You’re gonna have two beautiful, talented, and kind children who will love you and tend to your every need until your very last breath.” His eyes were so wet he thought he was having a seizure as the cloud line on the horizon lifted above the river and a blade of amber light slashed through the valley, diffusing the fog and alighting on the slate streets with a Nordic glaze, gold and grey everywhere.

“Bless the demons in your soul. You’re a brave soldier. And brave soldiers get broke in the brain when they come home.

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.

He walked in a dazed aftermath.

The trash was no longer just trash—but evidence. Because to discard is to move on. Inside the dumpster, he was pressed on all sides by human forwardness. Everything’s a room, he realized, too late.

whatever’s holding us, and shouldn’t that be a good thing? To have your uselessness become a marker of time, waste being the proof of having lived at all? He had successfully thrown himself into the trash, and the act was so complete, so total, it felt clean. He was a container inside a container filled with containers contained by space—and somehow this made him full.