The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

The kind of day where you can fill in your scars with Magic Marker and tell yourself you’re normal—and it might be true.

could use some help,” he mumbled, then put his knuckles to his mouth to keep it in, realizing he’d never said those words before in his whole life.

these were indeed bewildering and unprecedented times he lived in, a time before iPhones were everywhere, and people still looked up as they walked, their heads filled with self-generated thoughts floating up from deep pits in the subconscious.

Rehab, if nothing else, was a place to store yourself for a while.

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.

lay waiting for the dark to be truer than it was. Ever since he was little, it bothered him that you can never recall the exact moment you fall asleep, as though someone

to remember is to fill the present with the past, which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all, is life itself.

“Now, that a real situation or some gluten-free hipster thing?”

soothing to hear Lithuanian—not as white noise, but more like friends talking in the next room, inscrutable but warm and familiar.

Sony said something, just under his breath, either to Hai or to just give it to the air, he couldn’t tell. “Why do I feel so terribly

he believed, like a lot of folks in Welles Village, that reading is what schools force you to do, and that by the time you reach eighteen, you should be forever freed from the tyranny of printed words. A nineteen-year-old who

They so seldom fought, the tiny apartment too small to hold festering tensions, that both of them were suddenly stricken by the blast radius of their words.

curious openness common to twelve-year-olds: Hai saw no beauty or prettiness in them, but rather a forceful, brooding kinship to an amorphous boyness, that realm he was supposed to possess but was still partially hidden from him. Though it had no source he could name, there was something beyond reach, a gleaming heat, the way one knows, at times, where the moon hangs in the sky on an overcast night. Or a word existing before its definition—and like all things without meaning, it made no sense.

shook him with a hushed but stubborn haunting, his lids fluttering as their faces came closer, and he’d pull his blanket over his head to cover from the chill he made of himself.

Hai’s head started to hurt. He felt like a reflection in a fun house mirror.

Why would you listen to sad things when you’re already sad?” “I dunno.” Hai drew circles in the pavement. “Guess it gives the feeling a place to stand in. Like a little bus stop.”

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

“But you can’t control your mind. Even if you think you should, you can’t.” He was whispering now—and for some reason Hai was afraid to see what his face looked like when he was saying this, so he kept his eyes down. “My mind only pulls in certain things,” Sony went on. “Sometimes I want it to pull in something else. Like my counselor dates, or the names of people I keep forgetting, or how somebody is feeling about CNN or the Patriots, or Wayne’s windowsill garden he loves so much…my mom. Your mom. But those things don’t come over and choose me. They leave me out of it.” He zipped his coat up to his chin. “Sometimes I want to think about being good. But it doesn’t choose me. It just doesn’t. I’m no good at goodness.”

All this, the debris of her living, somehow made her absence feel absolute and stifling. She was everywhere and nowhere at once.

BJ gave him a look you could collect debts with. Then