The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

“Did you boys learn a lot? Tell me, why was that man so important anyway? Or was it just cause he had a big house?” She turns to Ma. “Don’t you hate it when they’re famous just because they own something big?” “He was a military genius,” Sony chirps, “just like my dad.” “Your father’s a bum,” Aunt Kim snaps. “He doesn’t even eat Vietnamese food anymore, you know that?”

“I’m glad we’re out of that place,” Bà ngoại says to Hai. “It was full of demons.”

“Words cast spells. You should know this as a writer. That’s why it’s called spelling, Labas.”

“Sick boots,” Russia said. “These?” Hai tilted his head and regarded his boots from an angle. “Those the ones Nike made for the army, right? My cousin’s friend had ’em when he came back from Afghanistan. Said he dodged so many RPGs, those things should be sponsored by the NFL.” Russia laughed, his buckteeth flashing in the blue. “At least he came back.” “At least he came back.

She handed him a clipboard with papers to sign, then led him toward the door and buzzed open the security lock. “Now, we know nothing’s perfect. But I always say…” She paused and wrung her hands. “I always say I don’t wanna see you in here again. Even though I know most of you, I mean…most people, they come back, you know. Here, there’s more details in these pamphlets—and the numbers you can call, even if it’s late at night. We’ll always be here if you need us. There’s no shame in giving it another go, alright? Most folks need a few goes anyhoo.” “Okay.” “Normally I’d have tea and a Fig Newton for ya, but—” “Oh, that’ll be nice.” “No…I mean, it’s all the way in my car, so…”

“No, take my hands,” she said. “We’re gonna pray you out.”

He had imagined these nurses would end up hardened from seeing endless hordes of ravaged human forms whose warped faces upon closer inspection often revealed a neighbor or a friend, but Marylyn was tender with him, with herself. This is her special thing, he decided: to send people home—whatever that meant.

“Why, what’s wrong with you? Lose your library card again?” Randy cracked up, always laughing at his own jokes. Last summer, while on a mix of generic Perc and codeine, Hai had a bad trip and knocked on Randy’s window crying hysterically that he’d lost his library card. Randy also liked making fun of him for reading books, since he believed, like a lot of folks in Welles Village, that reading is what schools force you to do, and that by the time you reach eighteen, you should be forever freed from the tyranny of printed words. A nineteen-year-old who still reads must be dumb enough to willingly refuse the wide-open book-free utopia of adulthood.

The night he returned from New York, he had knocked on that very door. How could he have told her then that he had dropped out because Noah had overdosed, like nearly a dozen kids from his high school class, on a bad batch of fent-dope, and that a boy whose face she’d never seen had become the boy whose face he couldn’t forget?

On top of that he owed the school nearly twenty-five thousand dollars for defaulting on his scholarship. That night his mother nearly dissolved in front of him. “What do you mean you owe twenty-five thousand dollars now,” she said, her hand over her mouth as if hearing of murder. “Isn’t college supposed to help us? I don’t understand. How can it bring more debt than we’ve ever had money?”

Then, the catastrophe dawning on her, she bit her lip and pointed a finger an inch from his face. “I knew you’d fuck up—just like all the other trash around here. And I know it’s my damn fault too. I chose to raise you in this town when all the other Viets went off to California and Texas.

“Ma, I tried. But things got tough. Things you won’t understand and—”

They so seldom fought, the tiny apartment too small to hold festering tensions, that both of them were suddenly stricken by the blast radius of their words. “That’s right.” She wiped her nose. “Curse your mother. That’s what all that learning and wordsmithery did for you, huh? Give you just enough wit to shun your mother but not enough to take you very far outside this house, does it?”

“You just sit there and scrub rich people’s feet?” he said as his mother tried to turn away. “Fuck you. I scrub feet so we can have this shitty apartment. You think I like bowing my head to white people like they were gods twenty times a day?”

“We’re late,” Russia said from the back, his head pressed against the glass. “We’ll be there in five.” Maureen pulled the shift and the car rattled without speeding up, lightbulbs clacking the windows. “You said that half hour ago.” “Any of those bad boys come through?” she asked Hai, who was scratching a stack of lottery tickets she had handed him a few miles back. “If we score big,” Maureen said, “we can just turn the hell around.” Behind a line of elms, a pair of steel silos rose up from the muddy hills, their domes gleaming under the overcast. “That’s it,” Russia said. “Wayne said to turn right at the double silos.” “This better be fucking worth it.”

“My dad’s a drunk,” Russia said, shoving it back. “Guess you’re not that allergic.” Maureen winked at Hai. Warmed by the liquor, she swayed as they turned down a gravel path beyond the silos, the Christmas lights casting a sickly glow over their faces.

“Come on, Maur. I said eleven a.m. You’re all late.” He pointed at an invisible watch on his wrist. “It’s Sunday. We hit church traffic,” she lied. “You want me to run over little kids on their way to Communion? And the fuck you got a sword for?”

On Friday, while they were closing, Wayne had asked the HomeMarket crew if they were willing to make some extra cash packing meat at a warehouse an hour out east in Coventry. Wayne had been putting in days there to make more on the side during the holidays—and it paid well. A few guys had caught the stomach flu last week and couldn’t make the upcoming Christmas rush. And if they didn’t meet their weekly quota, they’d lose the $1,500 bonus they’d each get at the end of the month. Only Hai, Maureen, and Russia agreed. They already handled raw chicken at the store—how bad could pork be, the other white meat?

They got out the car, wind biting at their edges. “You know there’s no corn bread in there, right, guys?” Wayne laughed and pointed with his machete at their black HomeMarket uniforms.

“This is a slaughterhouse, isn’t it?” Hai said. “It’s an organic farm-to-store pork production facility,” Wayne said through shut eyes. “Holy fuckers!” Maureen leaned back on the hood. “I’m not stabbing any pigs with a sword, dudes. I’m technically a senior citizen—you know that, right?”

“And what do you mean by station?” said Russia. “How many stations does it take for a pig to die?” “Fast as you can cut the arteries.” Maureen didn’t look like she believed him but started struggling with the cap on her flask.

“You got us a squad, Wayne?” he said. “Good man. And look! You even got an Ornamental.” He grinned with the few teeth he had. “Super nice!” “You mean Oriental.” Wayne turned to Hai. “Right?” Hai gave Wayne a shove from behind and moved them along, too cold to bother. The barn was made of concrete blocks topped with a sleek, weatherproof metal roof, which made it look more like a place that produced weapons for a proxy war.

“Sounds like a bulle—Jesus fucking Christ!” Hai jumped back and clutched Russia’s arm as Wayne shot the pig in the forehead. It immediately collapsed, thrashing and screaming in the mud. “Usually they go out with just one,” Wayne grunted as he jammed a knee on the side of the hog’s face, blood foaming from its mouth now, and shot it again in the same spot. The legs went limp, then jittered as if being electrocuted. Wayne looped a metal wire to its hoof and pressed a button on a nearby machine that pulled the hog up by its legs. Wayne handed Hai the bolt gun. Then, in one swift gesture, as if striking a match, he cut the pig’s throat. A spray of blood flew over them.

“You guys’ll get used to it. This stuff’s inside us too, you know. People love eating meat but they don’t have a damn clue what it’s about. It’s alive. That means blood, piss, and shit.” He laughed at his own words, then slapped Hai and Russia hard on their chests. “You’ll both grow a third nut in a few hours—and you can thank me later.”

By the fifth or sixth pig, Hai learned to look not at their eyes, opened too wide, stunned at this terrible gun-wielding god suddenly before them, but at the ears, which, examined closely, resembled a piece of fabric flickering in the breeze. That’s it, that’s what he told himself while pulling the trigger: that he was stapling fabric. He was pinning death onto nothing.

And it worked.

Though he could still hear their torqued and anguished gurgling, which the heavy metal barely drowned out, this gave the killing enough d...

After a while Hai had to go out to get some air. The heat from the hogs’ bodies had warmed the tent to the point where their shirts were drenched.

“Oh, poor things,” Ma said. “You should pray for their souls after, okay? Otherwise their spirits will haunt you and shorten your life.”

He jabbed the ground with his boot. “But you see that tree there?” He nodded at a squat yew standing alone between two pastures beyond the silos. “My granddad told me when trees stand on their own, with no other trees around them, their branches grow wild like that. Branches twisted all over the place, like they’re trying to grab at everything and nothing’s around to hold on to.” “Yeah, I see it.” Hai studied the leafless tree, its branches scattered as if frozen in the midst of waving for help. “But when they’re in the forest, with their people, you know? They all go straight up, reaching tall as they can. Isn’t that odd? Probably bullshit, to tell the truth—but I believe it.”

A truck pulled into the lot. The KFC was here. The men, slumped on hay bundles, lifted their heads from their phones or from cupped hands. 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. “Look at her. She doesn’t give a fuck,” Russia said, shaking his head at the sleeping hog, snow glittering her back. Maureen stared at the hog and sighed. “And all the devils besought him, saying, Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them. And forthwith Jesus gave them leave. And the unclean spirits went out, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a cliff into the sea.” “My name is Legion and we are many.” Wayne winked at her and smiled.

In the dark his mind would snag on the features of some boy in his seventh-grade class: Chris, Nate, Tyler, Armando, Jason. But it wasn’t exactly the faces themselves, though each had its distinct charm, a curious openness common to twelve-year-olds: Hai saw no beauty or prettiness in them, but rather a forceful, brooding kinship to an amorphous boyness, that realm he was supposed to possess but was still partially hidden from him.

Sony shrugged, then glanced down at the pamphlet in Hai’s hand. Hai saw the words for the first time: Your Neuro-atypical Teen: The Next Five Years.

The employees ate it standing, some with eyes closed and swaying slightly, which made the mother lean back and fold her arms, nodding with preternatural pride. She looked up at her daughter with something even more luminous, her mouth half-open as the woman she birthed now towered before the room corralled to attention. “All right, all right, all right,” BJ said with a Matthew McConaughey drawl. “Y’all ready for the show?”

The zipper opened and out fell a pocket dictionary, along with a couple Death Note mangas. BJ snatched them and shoved them inside. “A dictionary, huh? And what kind of grown woman reads coloring books?” asked Wayne, a plate of half-eaten lasagna in his hand. “Do you know who else read the dictionary, cover to cover?” BJ glanced around the room. “Eminem. That’s right.” She looked at Russia, who nodded. “And don’t sleep on Death Note. There’s some good shit in there.” “You would be widely read,” said Sony, predictably sincere. “All great generals are.”

The room grew quiet. The women in the booth sipped from their sodas, skeptically amused. “You got this, BJ,” Hai said. “You can do it, baby,” her mother chimed in. “You were blessed by Him.”

BJ’s mother snapped her long bony fingers, the fur jacket flouncing around her shoulders. She opened her mouth to laugh but only BJ’s voice was heard through the speakers as she metal-screeched through a rendition of “Bodies” by Drowning Pool. BJ paced back and forth behind the counter as the bass raged on, the sight of their manager performing heavy metal behind the station where green beans and creamed spinach were usually served seemed conjured from a fever dream.

“Okay,” said Wayne, nodding along with his arms crossed. “Okay, so you’re all right. Damn, this sounds…well, it sounds legit. Like,” he turned to Russia, “like that crazy white music.”

The working girls were shouting BJ’s name, hooting between cupped hands, the tiny box of a restaurant in a strip mall suddenly a bizarre town square.

“Everyone listen up!” BJ cried. “On January eleventh. At Hairy Harry’s bar on Churchill. I’ll be in the lineup for the Valley Grand Slam Amateur Wrestling Association. So this was just a taste for you guys to get ready. It will be for real for real after New Year’s, alright?”

“I love what I do, rook. Shit, I’m trying to be, like, the Steve Jobs of wrestling, you know?”

“The generals of history. And I’m one of their soldiers. See?” He showed Hai his cap. Before they left, Sony went to his locker and switched out his HomeMarket hat with his Union infantry field cap, fixed with a shiny golden bugle, he had bought on eBay. “Why you wearing that thing anyway?” “For luck. We’re gonna need it tonight.” An icy gust blew up from the river and hit their faces, the boys wincing as they shouldered into the cold and the bike headed toward the lights in the distance.

Sony grew quiet, looked away at the dim headlights trailing off on the highway. The song was over. “But we’re still losers. All of us. All we did was lose. Just like Robert E. Lee, my dad also lost his war in the South. My mom said Dad used to be taller, like me, but he grew short after all the fighting. War shrunk him up, and my mom lost her house, then her salon burned. And I lost her to York Corrections. And Bà ngoại’s lost in heaven.”

What good is beauty, any beauty, if nobody wins?

“At first he just tried to speed up and he grabbed my hand and we ran, but the kids followed us. Finally my dad turned around and showed them his hand. He said he had a diamond in his hand from the war. That the war gave him diamond hands. And he let the kids touch ’em. They were quiet for a long time as they rubbed the diamond bulging under his skin. One of them asked if my dad killed anybody, and Dad said it was between him and Jesus, and the kid understood in his heart what that meant, and the boys whispered to each other and backed off a few steps. Then they just stopped and watched as we kept on walking. After a while my dad started humming this song in Vietnamese. And I held on to his hand, sometimes rubbing the diamond under his skin, until the library appeared.”

She paused, her eyes searching. “That sounds crazy, yes?” “You’re just clinically depressed,” he heard himself say. “Means you’re sad without a reason.” 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?”

Half hour later they were in the kitchen, onions sizzling in butter on a skillet. The day was windless, chilly, and overcast, which meant snow ahead. Grazina, engulfed to her chin in a lumpy wool sweater knitted across the chest with a huge white owl, the sleeves rolled up, spun about the tiny room with nimble, youthful footing—muscle memory aided by a double dose of Aricept. Her hands danced over the burners, chopping and stirring.

“I had a life, Labas.” She paused and thought about it. “It started on a burning hill. Then it went down that hill and did like this,” she drew a line across his face with her finger. “Flat. Kaput. Nothing. Just days and days, and sometimes a little bump. And that’s enough. The Lord gave me peace and it’s good.” “Tonight was peace?” She swallowed. “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.”

She fell silent and stared at the ceiling. “Labas?” Her voice wobbled, the voice of somebody looking down from a cliff. “Labas, I’m scared to die. I want to live a little more, just a few more years, if God wills it. I know it will be a good rest when we go—but—oh, to taste freshly brewed tea, with a spot of cream. I still want that. Especially when it’s cold outside.”

“One, two, four, five…maybe six.” “What are you counting?” Hai said. “Black people,” said BJ, peeping from behind the curtain at the crowd.