The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

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.

Hartford, the capital built on insurance firms, firearms, and hospital equipment, bureaucracies of death and catastrophe, is only twelve minutes by car down the interstate, and 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.

In August, the train tracks blaze so hot the rubber on your soles would melt if you walked on them for more than a minute. Despite this heat everything green grows as if in retribution for the barren, cauterized winter, 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.

Follow the tracks till they fork off and sink into a path of trampled weeds leading to a junkyard packed with school buses in various stages of amnesia, some so old they’re no longer yellow but sit grey as shipwrecks. Furred with ivy, their dented hoods pooled with crisp leaves, they are relics of our mislearning.

Even the steeple of the boarded-up Lutheran church grows from dove-white to day-old butter by noon.

It’s a town where high school kids, having nowhere to go on Friday nights, park their stepfathers’ trucks in the unlit edges of the Walmart parking lot, drinking Smirnoff out of Poland Spring bottles and blasting Weezer and Lil Wayne until they look down one night to find a baby in their arms and realize they’re thirtysomething and the Walmart hasn’t changed except for its logo, brighter now, lending a bluish glow to their time-gaunt faces.

What do you really know about what you know of New England?

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

It 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.

Carrots,” she paused for effect, “give you the will to live.” He took a bite of the latke, which was perfectly made, crispy at the edges and delicately salted with a touch of herbs he couldn’t name. “What do you mean?” he said, chewing. “It’s a root. And roots prevent you from getting the blues.” She picked one from the bowl; it gleamed under the kitchen light. “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.” She tucked the carrot back in the bowl, gently, as if it were a tiny person. “Ever heard of a rabbit jumping off a bridge?” she winked. “Of course not. That’s because they have the light in them.”

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. But her brain, like his grandmother’s, had ejected her far away from where they were sitting.

He reached over, across the half century between them, and cleared the stray hairs from her damp face.

Two eagles were soaring over the shanty houses, their mildewed roofs like the backs of century-old whales.

He had no history because one was not required of him, and having no history also meant having no sadness. Instead, he was part of a workforce that fed people. He was America’s fuel. And he was burning to be used, to be useful.

My husband was one of those nerds. He read everything. He read so much his eyes dried up in his head. It made him blind, these damn books.” A film of dust had covered her glasses. “He used to read me from that Vonnegut book you’ve been reading,” she added in a fallen voice. “We were in Dresden at the same time, that little Billy Pilgrim and me. What a sham, all of it.” This must be why her husband was obsessed with translating the book into their native tongue, he thought. It was an American novel that told their story, if only in brief, apocalyptic glimpses.

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.

Down the road, a single leaf, the ochre of a dirtied Van Gogh star, clung to a girl’s hair as she bent to pour a stream of used cat litter into the sewer drain outside her house.

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.

“I 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.

He 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 turns you off just before your mind fades, as if they knew you wouldn’t choose it, that you’d stay awake if you saw sleep coming like the shadow of some colossal wave falling over you.

He listened to her wheezy breaths, and imagined a tiny fire scratching inside her. A little torch that forgot it was not supposed to burn underwater. 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. The idea made him sick.

He looked down at his hands, as though the answer could be found there. 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. But the drugs were dissolving in him as hers were dissolving in her, and in this pharmaceutical stupor, all he could hear was the rush of static filling the room. It grew louder and louder, as if the whole house were one big radio left on a bad channel and he was standing inside it, waiting for a reason. No, he said to himself. No, no, no—and he covered his ears to keep it all out. Though it was only the rain.

You see, the Germans, they saw us as just Slavs, slaves, and wanted us gone, sooner or later.” “And what happened after that?” “My mother was so scared, she became a Catholic. And then bombs. And more bombs. Boom, boom, boom,” she slapped the table.

A yellowing fern had spent the summer prying through a crack in the floorboard of a taxicab and now swayed in the driver’s seat like a person napping at the wheel.

He had the urge to pop five or six codeines just to sepia things out for a bit. Like putting yellow food coloring in the fish tank in your head.

She broke the corn bread in half and bit into it, dabbing her lips with her apron, and handed Hai the other half. “The reason why it’s so good,” she lifted her head, “is because it’s a lie. And incredible things can come out of lies. Just ask good ole Uncle Sam.”

“Listen here, this country,” she lowered her voice, “was purposefully built on war. The reptilians shape-shift into politicians and celebrities, then use these puppets to start wars so they never run out of bad energy to consume. Don’t you get it? War is fertilizer for their crops.”

When things died down and the windows darkened, an elderly man with a cane came in, his spine a jittery question mark, and grabbed his steaming tray from the counter and just stood there wobbling a bit. He opened and closed his jaw as if warming it up, then raised his chin, and you could tell there was a Boy Scout somewhere inside him standing up straight.

She leaned back and regarded Sony. “Thank you for the history lesson. God can be so good to us, yes?” Sony chuckled nervously. “Well, I suppose. All things considered.”

“It’s not so hard to kill,” Grazina said sleepily when a Confederate soldier was impaled by a bayonet as he ran up a tree-lined hill. “You just touch something until its color changes.”

“Everything bad always happens to the South,” and crossed his arms and fell back on the couch, deflated. “What you talking about? Hey—you okay? You’re acting weirder than usual today.” “The South always loses. That’s the rule.” “As they should. They were, like, huge dicks. Look.” Hai gestured at the screen. “They walked across this big-ass field and got shot up just to keep slavery going.” Sony wasn’t listening, though; he was drifting deeper into something. “My dad was a corporal for the South and they got smashed. Now he’s in a shack in Vermont and all he does is listen to old records and cry to himself reading books about maps.” “You’re joking, right? That’s a whole nother war.” “I know. But the norths and souths are the same everywhere on the compass.

Just as the blade of light under the pantry door started to glow with day, he shut his eyes and left the world for a while, 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.

Can camaraderie—the bond of working in unison—be enough to make you want to put your mouth to a kid with a busted face, to find him somehow more complete despite his unrecognizable beauty, the smell of his armpits seeping through his work polo, that garlicky, vinegary scent of humanness canceling the drugstore deodorant he wore to hide it? Yes, Hai realized now—it was.

In the gloaming, Russia’s acne, which in the day resembled smeared blueberry jam, was now blending with the smoother parts of his cheek, like weathered cuneiform on old marble.

The codeine would get him through talking to his mother, would make her crying seem like it’s coming from the basement of the world and not right in front of him. He nudged the pill, the smallest life raft he’d ever known, but finally shut the case.

That after Noah died, only eight months after bone cancer ate through Bà ngoại’s hip and put her in an urn on the altar, college and books, grades and papers, seemed so minuscule, so exactly as Randy had said: “the driftwood of childhood”?

The house was settling into its bones, and in between the cracking he heard his heart beating in its cage.

he was warm as a blood cell being swept through the vein of a fallen angel, finally good.

It’s the twenty-first century, fellas. You shoot everything in the head.”

On the other side of the tent, on a tractor cart to be pulled to the processing plant down the valley, was a pile of freshly slaughtered hogs, their legs stiffening 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 in.

Sony listened to the tinny music, his head lowered and very still. “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.”

“We might be beautiful, but it doesn’t matter when we’re losers. We’re short losers. Beautiful, short losers. And that doesn’t do anything for anybody.” “Beautiful short losers.” Hai nodded at the huddled faces staring back at them from the past. What good is beauty, any beauty, if nobody wins?

Her forehead wrinkled at the idea. “No, I didn’t outlive Stalin to be depressed.” She shook her head defiantly. “You kids blame everything on feelings. Do you blame starvation on feelings too? Floods? Earthquakes?”

That’s what wealth is, he realized: to live in a house where all the tools of living are out of sight.