The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

Your worm is your only emperor… We fat all creatures else to fat us and we fat ourselves for maggots. —Hamlet

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

When the prehistoric glaciers melted, the valley became a world-sized lake, and when that dried up it left a silvery trickle along the basin called the Connecticut: Algonquin for “long tidal river.” The sediment here is rich with every particle welcoming to life.

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 so wide and deep that, days after a summer downpour, minnows dart freely in the green-clear pools. And out of the dark of an unlit porch, someone’s laugh cuts the air so quick you could mistake it for a gasped-back sob. That beige shack flanked by goldenrods is the WWII Club, a bar with three stools and a wood-paneled vending machine stocked only with Marlboros and honey buns.

Look how the birches, blackened all night by starlings, shatter when dawn’s first sparks touch their beaks. How the last crickets sing through fog hung over pastures pungent now with just-laid manure. 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.

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.

Though skeptical, we are not ambivalent to hope. Under all this our main drag glows with its two Irish bars, a diner, a florist, the God First beauty salon, the Panda Gate China Wok, a hole-in-the-wall taco joint with no name, a funeral home painted sky blue to comfort the ravages that lie in its calling, a laundromat whose back entrance leads to a basement housing exactly three coin-operated porn booths. Two doors down is the American Legion, where they sell Saran-wrapped slices of pumpkin bread and black coffee every Friday under a windblown tarp. There’s the migrant farm laborer’s law office behind the YMCA, which last year finally had one of its wings converted to a needle exchange. There’s the huge Victorian on Lilac and Main. Home to our first mayor, it’s now a halfway house for recovering addicts, the walkway lined with polyester roses that poke out blue and violet from snowbanks after blizzards.

Further up, where the street widens into Route 4 and the sidewalk crumbles to dust and patches of northern poppy and blue asters spray over the green to your right, you’ll find the Colt factory where the founder, Samuel Colt, became one of the wealthiest men in America, selling revolvers to both sides during the Civil War. Now it’s a Coca-Cola plant where polished red trucks line the old brick loading bays as the sun slips behind the mountains in the west.

What do you really know about what you know of New England? 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 cement abutment loops with colorful graffiti that reads SpyKids 2, Guerra a los ricos, Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!!!, Laura & Jonny ’92, niños malos, and 9/11 was an inside job. It is also the last way out of town.

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 leg over the rail and decided, like a good son, to jump.

A few yards in, he paused. The bridge was over a hundred feet tall, he knew, from a field trip back in middle school. It was once the town’s most prized achievement, meant to bring passenger trains and money into the heart of Main Street. But the trains never stopped, passing the town on their way to Boston, Providence, Buffalo, Portland, even Montreal. Now only the freighters cut through, carrying strapped lumber or barrels of grain from Ontario. The bridge was painted bright yellow to signal this errant optimism, the color gone now save for a few bolts buried deep enough in the beams to be spared from weather.

A creaky rail house built by freight workers over a century ago, the home was one large hallway divided into three rooms: a parlor, a dining room, and a kitchen, whose dim light now glowed at the far end like the hearth of an ancient cave. Furnished in a style the boy had seen only in the black-and-white TV series Lassie, whose reruns he watched on a three-channel Panasonic as a kid, the house had the stuffy odor of rooms whose windows rarely opened undercut with the mildewy rank of crawl spaces.

“May the Lord forgive us this sin of wastefulness,” she began, her voice wobbling with her balance, “may He also watch over the strangers and uphold the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked He brings to ruin. For the Lord is not slow to fulfill His promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”

He was reading Slaughterhouse-Five one morning during breakfast, a copy of which he found wedged in the desk drawer in his bedroom. It turned out Grazina’s husband left it there while working on translating the book into Lithuanian, a project he spent over a decade on and ultimately left unfinished.

Sony was named after the Sony Trinitron, the first TV his father bought once he arrived in America after being released from a reeducation camp back in Vietnam. Though the TV was made in 1968, his old man didn’t get one till ’91, the year Sony was born. Naming your child after electronic devices was not uncommon among people in refugee camps back then. Hai knew a kid in Windsor named Toshiba (which got him mistaken for Japanese). Aspirational monikers didn’t stop at electronics either, but extended to any cultural relic possessing social or monetary value. One of his mother’s coworkers named her daughter Simba because she had watched The Lion King on repeat while she was pregnant, sobbing each time Mufasa fell off the cliff. Another was named BMW. One kid from the same refugee camp as Hai’s family was called MJKarlMalone Truong; rivals in life, Jordan and Malone would be united in the body of an asthmatic Vietnamese boy with a lazy eye who landed, of all places, in North Carolina, home of Jordan’s Tar Heels.

“A good soldier can’t turn against his ranks.” Sony straightened. “General McClellan, the first commanding officer of the Army of the Potomac, had untrustworthy lieutenants and ultimately failed in capturing Virginia. Though he wasn’t as incapable as some historians assume. Burnside, on the other hand—” “Okay, okay.” Hai waved him off. “But we’re not traitors. Or soldiers. We’re related. We’re blood.” “So were the North and the South during what some still call the War of Northern Aggression.” “Sony. Please. Look, I’m just trying to get a job, okay? You think I can get a job here?”

Hai worked through the dust, one arm over his mouth, and peeled back the sheet. As spores swirled through the cone of light, he saw the books, all of them paper gold. Rows and rows of the perennial classics: Homer, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Austen, Montaigne, Flaubert, Turgenev, Faulkner. But there were also Nabokov, Toomer, Salinger, Atwood, Baldwin, Morrison. Most of them paperbacks, like the ones from Bantam, the pages thin as newspaper, cheaply bound and printed for vast distribution. But that didn’t change what was inside. There was also the entire leather-bound collected library of Steinbeck and Hemingway. His mouth agape, heart tapping, dust in his lungs, he ran his fingers along the spines. “Holy shit,” he said, breathless. “How did you do this?” “I didn’t do squat,” she said. “I told you. 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.”

“You’d make a great Marine, Sony. Or whatever it is. If anyone can defend this country from evildoers, it’s you, buddy.”

In Vietnam, the Americans had left the fields a ruinous wasteland with Monsanto-powered Agent Orange, not to mention the two million bodies nameless and scattered in the jungle and riverbanks waiting to be salvaged by family members hoisting woven baskets on their waists full of sun-bleached bones. On top of that the country was fighting the genocidal Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who were invading the western border. People starved, naturally, and scavenged for rats or stretched their rice rations with sawdust from lumberyards. Two years later, by miracle or mercy, Hai and his family arrived in snow-dusted Connecticut, their faces blasted and stricken, sleeping their first weeks on the floor of the Catholic church that sponsored them, between the pews, using Bibles for pillows. He was only two and remembered none of it.

“I’m not going to fight again, especially not when you’re high. I mean, look at you—you can barely open your eyes, Hai. I can’t do this today, okay?” She set the Game Boy down. “I have enough to do.”

Five months later he was sitting in the same kitchen, a backpack and a suitcase tucked under his feet. The bus to Boston would leave in two hours, and the house was filled with that frenetic, fraught air that permeates when someone is about to depart for a long trip. There was nothing to do but tap the table and feel his heart pump as he waited for Ma to finish packing the coconut rice. Though it takes no more than an hour, she had woken at five, in the cold blue dawn, to steam the rice and boil down the coconut milk, which left her staring out the kitchen window for the rest of the morning until her son came down with his bags. “You’re going to be a great doctor,” Ma said into her hands, head lowered.

And their eventual deaths will not yet be used by politicians to gain traction with the base. It did not have a name, this slaughter, and yet your loved ones were being slowly erased, even teachers and lunch ladies overdosing overnight, then cremated without ceremony, their faces soon existing only in your mind.

José cocked his head and squinted. “Sort of. But don’t worry, we’ll get your meds worked out. While that happens, take this.” He reached into his chest pocket and gave Hai what looked like a fortune cookie fortune, grease splotching the edges. Hai read it aloud: “Victorious warriors win first, then go to war. Defeated warriors go to war, then seek to win.” “Sun Tzu, my friend.” José leaned back and grinned. “He doesn’t miss, huh? And hey, don’t think I’m showing you this cause, you know,”

The whole thing was no different from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, strangely enough, each patient dressed in standard-issue pajamas with a barcoded bracelet on their wrist (which the nurses scan each time they hand you a pill or when you take a tray of food at the mess hall). After all, a rehab, under God or not, was still a business. But Hai found the nurses to be good folks. Genuine, salt-of-the-earth women. No Nurse Ratched here.

No matter how many years the body wrecks itself on the shore of living, the mouth stays mostly the same, faithful through its empty, eternal void. Some call this hunger. Others call it loss. He knows it only as the law. Whole nations have burned from this little oval ringed with teeth. Were we even human until God opened us here, His fingers singeing a place in the lower face so we can say, eyes narrowed at the embered new world, “The fuck?”

“Of course, we didn’t know what they were actually capable of. What was happening in the ghettos. If we knew, we would have left like the others, the smart ones. 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. “And your father, what did he believe in?” “No Catholicism, no Judaism for him. But he did convert to Alcoholism.” She bit her lip and shrugged.

The Red Army, after pushing back the Nazis, invaded Lithuania in June of ’44, just five years after the Nazis marched past the bakery. Two weeks before Vilnius was occupied, her father took her and her brother onto a train heading west into Germany, where they would hopefully sneak into occupied France, then perhaps London. Though the Germans might have had plans to exterminate them eventually, the Communists posed a more immediate threat, seizing private property and splitting entire families, deporting them into Stalin’s working camps in the nether realms of the Soviet Union, many of whom would never return. “Like I said, there was more than one devil those days. You understand?”

“A rock and a hard place.” “More like being crushed by two ballsacks filled with demon blood. You ever been crushed by a ballsack?”

“Stalin was worse for us only because he lasted longer. Ever heard of the pogroms? ...

“It’s alright, man,” Hai offered. “Your tats can mean B-Rab and be a sex-positive message. A double meaning. Most people have tats that are a bunch of stupid shapes or barbed wire or Chinese words they can’t pronounce. But yours is sick.”

“Man, I forgot you’re just a child.” There was no free-floating globe, Maureen explained, because the earth was controlled by reptilians living underground, whose tunnels can be accessed only through a secret entrance on an ancient ice sheet on the “forbidden continent,” and all the politicians—including every American president since Kennedy—have privately visited Antarctica to make deals with these lizards. For some reason, Hai hadn’t pinned Maureen for a tinfoil hat. “What, you think they just all love icebergs? Even the goddamn Pope? Give me a break. They’re checking out the entrance, maybe even going down there, snooping around. Why you think there’s no country in Antarctica? Think about it now. Really think about it.” She swallowed as they stopped at a crosswalk. An old woman with a headscarf was struggling against the wind, a tiny smudge of a dog in her arms. When they passed, she turned up her face and stared blankly at them with black eyes. “The dinosaurs, they never died off, you get me? They evolved, just like us. Except they got a few million years’ head start on us. Now they’re intelligent lizards feeding off our negative energy,” Maureen went on.

He had never heard of a lizard conspiracy before, but in a van cramped with trays of food, the overpowering smells of their twenty-one menu items mixing together, the world outside blurring by like a washing machine, amorphous and out of reach in its ruined stretches, it was hard not to believe her.

Behind the strip, like a cardboard backdrop in a film set, was the Bowen power plant, its two water towers looming over the skyline. Beside the plant, in a grove of pines, was an unfinished SAM site built during the Cold War. In high school, kids would go there to make out, throw parties, do lines of coke off the old steel pipes while punk bands played in the concrete chambers with generators stolen from shop class.

“Where do you think he is?” “Where who is?” “I mean with Antarctica and the lizards and all that. Where does somebody like Paul go when they’re done using his energy?” “Ha! My baby’s with God.” She looked at him as though willing him to believe her, as though his believing would confirm its truth.

She waved at Nacho, who stopped on the truck ladder and waved back. “Oh, Nacho? An old friend. Well, I’ll just say it.” She removed her cap and fixed her hair. “A friend with benefits. He’s not bad-looking, right? A gas station ten with a good heart. What, you don’t think I’m out of commission for a little joy yet, do you? His name’s short for Ignacio. He said that nachos—you know, the ones you eat—were invented by some guy named Ignacio.” She stared dreamily at Nacho’s truck. “But he’s so full of shit he probably pulled it out of his ass just to get in my panties.” “Guess it worked.”

It was almost three by the time they returned to East Gladness. Everyone helped unload the boxes, which, to no one’s surprise, were full of salads. There were four tiny muffins shoved in the corner of a box of dressing packets. “I knew it!” Wayne said. “Every damn time. It’s a scam, man. I don’t know why we even do this shit anymore.” And he proceeded to carve up a meat loaf for everyone while Russia started making his corn bread and chicken skin sandwiches.

The fire department came seven minutes later. They were just down the road and lately had been responding more to fent-dope ODs than fires and were ready with the Narcan.

Maureen packed a bunch of corn breads in a paper bag and handed it to one of the EMTs, who had a mullet and a lip ring. She shoved it in her cargo pockets and said “ ’preciate chuh” as she carried the woman away, who was so plastered in cheese she looked like Han Solo trapped in carbonite. The crew stood there a minute as the ambulance pulled off the lot, BJ wiping her face with her American flag handkerchief.

Hai headed out back for some air, cleaning cheese spray off his glasses with his apron. The sauce was gluing his hair into blobs as it cooled. He sat on the milk crate and tried lighting a cigarette but his fingers weren’t working.

Since HomeMarket was the place for “Thanksgiving every day of the year,” you’d think it’d be empty the day before actual Thanksgiving, when people would make their own versions of the menu items from scratch, surrounded by loved ones, but you’d be wrong. The store was slammed.

“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.” “You’re telling me this HomeMarket is the third-most-grossing because of sugar?” Hai swallowed. “Listen, we deceive people by calling this bread. Bread sounds wholesome. You tell the public this is boring old bread, but then it hits their tongues and—boom—it’s cake! And even if it’s the shittiest kind of cake, which it is, they’d think they’ve eaten the best bread in the world.” Sony rushed in to grab a finished rack of corn bread and headed back to the front. “But the question is…” She leaned in, her left eye bloodshot and smeared with eyeliner. “At what point, my friend, does the corn bread become corn cake? Can you locate the crumb where this deception happens?” She waited for an answer, her arms swaying at her sides. Hai considered this. Indeed, at what granular material moment did bread become cake? Or was it always cake, falsely named to amplify bread beyond its potential? “That’s kinda fucked,” he nodded, biting into another one. “I can’t tell.”

She laughed. “Oh, my poor naive little boy. Once upon a time, they also said women in Salem had to be burned alive because science said they were witches. And then that science became law. Now they use science to get people to bomb each other. Like I said, rook,” she suppressed a smile, “everything in this world is Star Wars. Good versus evil. Dark and light. There’s the Jedi and then there’s the Empire. And in case you haven’t noticed, I’m Obi-Wan Kenobi, and we’re running out of time.”

This person is sauced 🍶

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. “I’d just like to say thank you for being open during the holidays. You folks, you’re saving a lot of people from heartache, you know. From eating alone around Thanksgiving. And…and—” He bit down, chin juddering, then shook his head, lifted his cane in a kind of salute, and shuffled away.

James Salisbury, Sony told them, believed that diarrhea, which was rampant among Union soldiers during the war, could be curtailed by consuming coffee and ground beef. “He also believed starches like rice and potatoes caused tumors in the digestive tract, and was the first advocate for a low-carb diet. So he created the Salisbury steak to prove his hypothesis.” Sony lifted the ziplock bag of frozen steaks and marveled at it. “It’s a true feat of Victorian-era innovation.” Grazina examined the steaks in the bag. “Huh. A kind doctor invented the best dish in the world. No wonder we love it.”

“Grazina,” he whispered. “What?” “Who’s the president?” She pointed at the TV. “Lincoln.” It was good enough. By the film’s crescendo, she was passed out for good. “This is Pickett’s Charge.” Sony swayed in his seat. “Robert E. Lee’s biggest mistake in the war. Arguably. A suicide march against Meade’s cannon barrage, the largest in the history of all Napoleonic-style battery engagements, ricochets heard all the way in Washington.” He leaned forward, munching on more Goldfish.

“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.”

“I’m doing well, Ma,” he said. “I’m making money too. As an assistant in a medical lab on campus. It’s not much but it’s something.” “I knew you would, baby,” she whispered. He said he’d send her a check, which she refused, saying he should repay instead the money owed from his first time at college. And when she mentioned she had made herself rice porridge and was sitting by the altar “eating it with Bà ngoại,” he couldn’t bear it and made an excuse to wrap up the call and hung up.

“Okay, so I’m gonna say right out the gate that the Jacksons did own slaves. But,” Carol notes, her smile more a grimace as she pushes up her glasses, “we call them servants here—since that was how they were referred to by the Jackson family.” She pauses and looks around the room.

👀

“Two of the servants had even asked for Jackson to buy them. Which was very common,” Carol emphasizes. “Jackson even allowed one of them, Albert, to work and give over his wages, thereby purchasing his own freedom in the end.”

👀