The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

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

Beyond the graveyard whose stones have lost their names to years, there’s a covered bridge laid over a dried-up brook whose memory of water never reached this century.

everyone rushes past us, either on their way in or to get the hell out. 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.

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.

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.

For a scant, luminous moment he was filled with a displaced benevolence for every soul in their tiny town. That some selfless, angelic people had the good mind to turn a burnt-down school into a home for the words I need help. He took one more look at the cornfield standing in the warm, still night across the road, fireflies blinking through the dark, and filled out his intake for the New Hope Recovery Center. • • •

Rehab, if nothing else, was a place to store yourself for a while. It was also, he quickly learned, a kingdom of boredom—but maybe that was the point, the goal even: to be with yourself, which was its own kind of hell. All the clichés about it are true. You wait around until whatever poison that’s ruining you empties into the world as time. Then you fill that emptiness with more time.

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.

How rare to see one’s mother lost in such unfixed and unknowable contentment, so privately realized through a scarce, snatched freedom.

“But it sounds sad. 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 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.

“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.”

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.”

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?

“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.”

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. She shrugged. “Yeah, I’m a liggabit.” “A liggabit soldier,” she said, her head slipping to the side. “Must be rare.”

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

not yet, not with the green season on the cusp of breaking open and the days about to melt into a stream of hours under fluorescent lights, time so vast and empty, pulled forward by the promise of summer, longer days and more light to live by.

“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.

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.

“I’m scared, Ma,” he whispered. “Of what? What are you talking about?” “Of what’s coming. Of the future—it just seems so big.” “That’s only because you’re young. Eventually, it gets smaller. But don’t be afraid of life, son. Life is good when we do good things for each other.”