The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

For Frances, who found me.

Your worm is your only emperor… We fat all creatures else to fat us and we fat ourselves for maggots. —Hamlet Let be be finale of seem. —Wallace Stevens

The hardest thing in the world is to live only once. But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree. Mornings, when the light rinses this place the shade of oatmeal, they rise as mist over the rye across the tracks and stumble toward the black-spired pines searching for

their names, names that no longer live in any living thing’s mouth.

the Connecticut: Algonquin for “long tidal river.”

Conway’s Sugar Shack,

wooden sign that reads We Sweeten Soon as the Crocus Bloom

rubbed to braille...

Though the train never stops in our town, its whistle can be heard in every living room three miles out. Nothing stops here but us, really.

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. Down our back roads, the potholes are

sounds alot like Sturgis

moss so lush between the wooden rail ties that, at a certain angle of thick, verdant light, it looks like algae, like the glacial flood returned overnight and made us into what we were becoming all along: biblical.

If you aim for Gladness and miss, you’ll find us. For we are called East Gladness. Gladness itself being no more, renamed to Millsap nearly a century ago after Tony Millsap, the boy who returned from the Great War with no limbs and became a hero—proof you could lose almost all of yourself in this country and still gain a whole town. A

Though skeptical, we are not ambivalent to hope. Under

Against all odds, we have a library. It used to be an armory that once housed a group of runaway slaves en route to Nova Scotia, cause for the bronze statue of Sojourner Truth at the center fountain, three years now without water.

Past the concrete slab where the Citgo once stood, a deer steps cautious into a grove of milkweed, as if the last of its kind, then leaps into the brush where the creek spills into the river flowing under King Philip’s Bridge. A freighter bridge named for the Wampanoag chief who led a rebellion here to take back his land from Puritans, its

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

He had not been forgiven and neither are you.

The sky a benevolent grey as the afternoon drained to evening and the cold turned his breath to fog. Under his boots the tracks hummed from steady gales slamming the steel straps. Yes, it is beautiful here, which is why the ghosts never leave. I need you to know this as the town rinsed to a blur behind him. I need you to understand, as black water churned like chemically softened granite below, the lights coming on one by one along the cobalt banks, that the boy belonged to a cherished portion of this world as he glanced over his

shoulder and saw the phone lines sagging with crows resigned to dusk and the red water tower in the distance announcing us—East Gladness—in faded white paint, before he turned from this place, swung one l...

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. But once he raised his leg and

That’s when he saw the corpse floating toward him, its limbs stretched and opaque beneath the river’s surface.

Shivering, he leaned into the cone of light, somehow more troubled that a stranger had caught him on the edge of his life than by his own impulse to end it. “It’s

“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.”

“Lithuanian,”

You know it’s bad luck to cry in the kitchen, right? You can at least tell me your name.”

It wasn’t that he didn’t like his name—only that he had been willing to toss it in the river. 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.

“Labas means ‘hello’ in my country.”

“Hello, Labas. I’m Grazina. Means ‘beautiful.’ ” She grinned, the cigarette smoldering through her yellow teeth.

“How do you feel, Labas?” Around them was a circle of decimated bread. “I feel beautiful,” he winked at her, refreshed by this bewildering new realm he had entered. “I feel Grazina.”

been two years since Noah’s pine box was hammered shut, and nearly every day since, the UPS jacket draped over Hai’s bony shoulders, sometimes even in bed on especially cold nights, the leather torn in places and the U nearly peeled off. But skin is skin, he told himself, even when it’s not yours.

“I don’t got any people. Just my mom across the river.

He’d never used a saucer before and found the clack that punctuated each sip oddly satisfying.

So when you eat it, you take in the carrot’s will to go upward. To heaven.”

“When does anybody die?” she shrugged. “When God says Well done.”

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

She exhaled and lit her last two cigarettes, handing him one. “You believe in God, boy?” He took a long drag and considered this. “He’s probably around sometimes.” “Clearly not as much as the devil,” she cackled, her missing front tooth winking behind the smoke.

he learned Grazina was diagnosed with mid-stage frontal lobe dementia in the summer of 2004—nearly five years ago.

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.

She muttered a few gnarled words, eyes wild in her sockets. He spoke into her opened mouth as if into a well, each syllable a knot on a rope sent down for her to grab.

“Your body’s right here, in 2009. You just have to step into it, alright? Can you step into it?” He shook her, hoping to loosen her

“You’ll think it’s stupid.” “Maybe,” she said. “No promises.”

“I used to want to be a writer. My dream was to write a novel that held everything I loved, including unlovable

things. Like a little cabinet.”

“What’s your skill anyway? You have any skills or what?”

He bit his lip, thinking. “Well, I’m good at looking at

things. And, I guess, considering them, like i...

“Considering!” she said with a wheezing laugh. “That’s a first. I’m afraid being considerate is not a skill. Not in America. Maybe the Vatican, if you’re lucky.” “It’s called observing. Introspection,” he said, miffed. “You’re kidding. That’s it?” The cigarette hissed as she chucked it in the water. “Okay, then giv...

“Ha! The rain? Every writer who ever lived talked about rain. You know what writing really is?” She paused for effect. “Complaining. About weather. Beautiful complaining. No wonder why Stalin shipped them to Siberia.”