The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

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.”