The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

The first two sets had already gone and BJ was up next. “There’s only four,” BJ said. “I see six, I think.” Hai searched the faces. “Did you count Wayne?” “Yeah. And that’s an Indian couple.” BJ let the curtain fall and groaned. “Fuck. How are there only this many Black people at a wrestling match?” “Are you kidding?” said Hai. “It’s an amateur wrestling match. In a dive bar where biker gangs make drug deals.” “They don’t even look like they’re from East Gladness,” BJ sighed.

“Wait, where’d Maureen go?” Hai asked, looking around. “Isn’t she part of your set?” “She’s in the bathroom getting ready. She’s a real artiste when it comes to what she does, trust. We got this.” Hai was glad to see a calm come over her. “Now go out there and enjoy the show, rook.” BJ tapped him on the chest and winked. “We’re about to make Stone Cold Steve Austin look like Mr. Rogers.”

“Alright. Now put your hands together for…” He fumbled with his piece of paper, tilting his head to catch the handwriting. “Oh yeah! Make some noise for…Deez Nuts!”

Drowning Pool’s “Bodies” ripped through the smoke-machined air and BJ swaggered through the curtain in a taxi-yellow velour sweat suit. Hai, Sony, and Wayne looked on with bated breath as Hai realized, with sudden dismay, that BJ looked like an unhinged Big Bird from Sesame Street. It turned out two teenage boys a few rows up had the same thought and were now shouting into cupped hands, “Go get ’em, Big Bird! Yeah, go Big Bird.” Still, BJ held her own, growling to the entry song she had recorded in the HomeMarket office. Some girls in the front had even let go of their boyfriends’ hands and started bobbing to the bass. Sony, wearing earbuds to dull the noise, nodded along, wide-eyed and awestruck. His general was actually glowing onstage, the sweat dripping from her nose and chin like literal diamonds.

Hai spotted DJ Red Card, whose eyes were shut in laughter. That’s when the boos grew into a deep and resonant roar, rooting into the floors and felt through the soles of everyone in the bar. BJ, sensing this, waved her arms to cut the track, but somehow it kept going. A balding biker in a silver ponytail was the only one rocking enthusiastically. Maureen, oblivious to it all, played on, her cheeks jiggling to the plucked chords as she hobbled around the outside of the ring, while BJ did some half-hearted taunts on the turnbuckle, the boos intensifying. All this was made worse by Miss Magician’s legendary entrance, which began with an eternal twenty seconds of blackout, the anticipation mounting through the building before Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” slammed right into its chorus as a pandemonium of lights tore through the smoky room, searing everyone’s eyes.

It was terrible. Everyone immediately resumed booing as BJ’s music came on. She had not defeated a long-standing powerhouse, but rather destroyed, in bizarre fashion, an aging and beloved local icon. Afterward, the only sign that Deez Nuts had ever been in the ring at all was a cluster of sweat droplets and glitter, around which coiled a single saffron ribbon that had come loose from Maureen’s kilt.

BJ pressed her head into the steering wheel as Hai sat mute beside her, the heat from her body steaming up the windows. The bar’s neon signs purpled the van’s interior. “Tell my parents to go home, man. Tell them not to wait for me,” said BJ to the floor. “I’ll do it.” Maureen, eager to get away from her role in the disaster, dashed out of the van. “And tell them I’m sorry,” BJ called, but she was already gone, gingerly dodging ice puddles across the lot. It wasn’t until her mouth said sorry that BJ lost it, her shoulders jerking as she cried.

“The entry fee was three hundred dollars! I could’ve bought my sister a new coat and boots. She needed new boots.” “It cost money to get on that stage? I thought it was a local display of talent.” “It’s a ring. And yes, it’s a competition. You pay to enter a pie baking contest, don’t you?”

“Listen, buddy—or ma’am—I don’t make the rules. You think I make money off this shit? Why you think I’m in here trying to sell you trees? This isn’t no American Idol. Sob stories don’t work in this business.”

“Listen, friend,” Red Card said, resuming his Godfather tone, “don’t hate the player; hate the game.” He then patted BJ on the shoulder, threw up a peace sign, and hopped out.

“You know in another universe tonight never happened, right? I’ve been looking into this. It’s called the Mandela effect.” The Mandela effect, as Maureen explained, is when a large part of the population remembers something that never actually happened, at least not in the current universe.

“Okay, then. Is there a universe where you don’t wear suspenders?” She was looking at Maureen through the rearview. “Why didn’t you tell me you were gonna dress like some redneck grandpa?” “This was what my granddad wore when he played the banjo, the one who taught me this thing you so desperately wanted in your little charade. It’s also ergonomic. OSHA.”

BJ inhaled and trained her eyes on the road. “The banjo,” she let out a heavy sigh, “has roots all the way back to the Middle Passage. Before all those bluegrass folks used it, it was an instrument from West Africa. Did anybody know that? Huh? Exactly. When slaves in the cargo holds started dying on their way to America, these slave traders figured out that if they just played the fucking banjo, it would keep the stolen people’s spirits up long enough to make it through the journey. So they played it all across the ocean to keep their cargo alive. Before it was bluegrass or low-grass or whatever, it was African. My mom taught me this. That’s what I was trying to do. And I asked Maureen to join me cause she plays a mean-ass banjo. I was trying to give these wrestling heads knowledge.” She spat into a drink cup and scowled at the road. It wasn’t clear if she was about to scream or cry again.

“I told you it was a good idea,” said Maureen. “And I happened to already know this little tidbit about the banjo before she asked me.” She started rubbing her knee. “Now my cartilage is down to zero. Listen, you looked like a real star out there, okay? No one can take that away from you.” “I am a real star,” said BJ.

They all sat for a moment, none of them really wanting to get out. “I’m ordering a pizza,” BJ said decisively. Everyone murmured in agreement. “Let’s try them for once.” Hai pointed at the Sgt. Pepper’s across the way, the shop blazing like a crash-landed spaceship. BJ called the number and put in an order for two large special pizzas, no mushrooms (for Maureen), extra cheese (for Wayne). As they sat waiting, held in the van’s warm lull, the only sound the occasional rustle of somebody’s jacket, the misty parking lot an immense sweep around them, Hai considered Maureen’s multiverse. He wondered if there was another timeline where he was also sitting in a van in a parking lot at the beginning of a new year.

If wrestling and novels were merely the result of people trying to cast yet another universe where they’re the more heroic, patient, and capable versions of themselves.

Hai took out his copy of The Brothers Karamazov and thumbed through it, the book now half its original thickness. He had gotten to the part where they were carrying the boy Ilyusha’s adolescent coffin through the run-down church to be buried, and stopped weeks ago, unable to continue. “You know,” said Hai, “Dostoyevsky named the protagonist, Alyosha, after his own son, who died of epilepsy when he was only three. He made him the goodest person in the book and…” Hai shook his head, not knowing where he was going with this.

“Sony.” Hai stared hard at the woods across the frost-covered road, the spaces between the birch trunks so dark they seemed filled in with Sharpie. “Look, touch me. Go ahead. Grab on.” He held out his arm and Sony squeezed it, cautious. “Harder. See? 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.”

“Are you remedial or just being a wiseass?” Vogel’s bald spot was growing red as he spoke. Hai shrugged—a part of him had this wild urge to be fired on the spot. “It’s competition. A McDonald’s within a five-mile radius from a HomeMarket will decrease sales by 7.4 percent. Monthly. It means we’re fighting for our lives here!” He shouted this part so loud Russia dropped his drive-thru headset. “Every store on the Eastern Seaboard that Bill”—this was the other regional manager—“oversees is scrambling to keep up. And guess what? The store in Redding increased meat loaf sales by fifteen points. All while you chumps put on sideshow fights for dropouts and drug addicts.”

“That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. And what is this crap?” The fist pointed at the tray of fresh-baked corn bread cooling in the pan. “There’s a sheen on the crust. That means there’s too much sugar.” He picked one up, turned it in the light, then pinched the top crust and dropped it on his tongue, swallowed, and winced. “Jesus! This is basically a muffin! How? If you wanna sell muffins, go to Dunkin’ Donuts with all the other community college moms.”

Don’t insult the cornbread Pride goeth before the fall

“our customers swear by our corn bread.” The fist threw the bread, baseball style, into the trash. Russia tiptoed toward the bathroom, and Wayne, spotting an opening, headed toward the back door, fishing for the pistol flask in his back pocket. “First off,” Mr. Vogel said, “corn bread isn’t calculated in sales since it comes with every meal, so that claim can’t be proven. Secondly, why are you—” he pointed a crooked pinkie at BJ, “adding sugar to my corn bread? You want our customers to get diabetes?” The pinkie had a long nail, and Hai wondered if the guy had taken a bump of coke in the car beforehand, which would explain this impressively sustained burst of energy.

“Alright, alright. Wow. This is truly insane. I can’t believe Bill missed all this. BJ. In the office, now. Please.”

His agitated charade had dislodged the few reddish strands of his balding comb-over. Tamped down with drugstore pomade, they now hovered above him as if he were underwater.

“That’s…that’s my origami.” Sony tensed up. “If it’s not relevant to HomeMarket, it’s trash.”

“You cool? Hey, I’m sorry about the Cheryl thing. I shouldn’t have…” “I’m fine.” “Look, you know I had to do that, right? I respect you—really, I do. You’ve been with us since, what, right after 9/11, right?” “Sure.” “And by the way, I was doing you a big favor, Cheryl. You know that? Cause next month…” he lowered his voice to a whisper, “you’re gonna have to let go at least one from this crew, maybe two.” BJ was silent, but her chair creaked. “And what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna blame it on me. Bill’s doing the same spiel in Worcester. You can just tell ’em, whenever you’re ready, that big ole Mr. Vogel from evil headquarters made you do it, okay? Attagirl.”

“This way, you’ll keep your costs down and morale high. They’ve even mentioned this method a couple times at headquarters. Let us RMs be the bad guys.” “Thanks?” BJ mumbled.

“Hey,” he stood up. “That guy was a total dick, but BJ’ll be fine. And Sony will make new penguins. Hey, hey…what’s the matter?”

Maureen and Hai followed Russia out, where he placed the cake on a counter and lit the candles before carrying it out front. Wayne, Sony (somewhat recovered), and BJ, her cap back on, her manager’s bow tie cinched up, led the procession, clapping as they staggered out from the kitchen, singing “Happy Birthday,” their faces lifted into masks of glee as they crossed the rubber mats and onto the warm brick tiles of the dining room, where a family had gathered around a girl with a pink crown on her head, the wax number 6 hovering toward her as she shrieked with pristine delight, scanning the crew’s faces, then turning to her parents—no older than twenty-five—regarding them with what looked like the invention of gratitude, unbridled to the point of levitation. Russia set the cake down, Band-Aid hanging from his cheek, and the crew swayed as the song emptied out of them, the applause rising and falling, the father shaking BJ’s hands, conspirators of this tiny miracle, as MGMT’s “Electric Feel” came through the speakers, and underneath that, under the giggles, the clicking of plastic forks as they’re passed around, and the footsteps of each worker returning to their stations, the mounted TV in the corner, its voice announcing, Multiple suicide bombings, including one at a hospital, have killed at least thirty-three and wounded more than fifty people near Baqubah, Iraq.

And winter was over. Spring

“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.” He turned and was startled to find her staring right at him. “Okay is underrated. You know what underrated means, right?” “More than what the Lord planned,” she said.

“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.” “Sure.” A brightness had pooled at the corner of her eyes as they started tracing something on the ceiling. She was fading again. He didn’t know what to say, so he took her cold hands in his and said the only thing that came to him. “Tu esi mano draugas.”

Hai rose and brushed himself off. “Sorry,” he blurted, without looking at the guard, and made a beeline toward his bike. Fingers shaking, he zipped up his UPS jacket, the same jacket he had found hanging from a nail in Noah’s barn the day of his funeral, having ridden his bike through mud-frosted roads to get there. Because Hai was not invited to see the coffin. Because to Noah’s family he never existed. He was locked inside the head of the cold boy in the pine box.

“Chamberlain was a professor before the war, with no military experience,” Sony explained. Hai had downed three painkillers on the ride over and was hardly following, but had made it to that juncture in the high where everything sounded unassailably true.

Hai was actually there the day Sony first became enamored of the Civil War. It was like witnessing Larry Bird pick up a basketball for the first time, he thought.

The other film often shown on Memorial Day was The Green Berets, where an aging John Wayne is seen emptying his M16 into hundreds of North Vietnamese rushing to overtake an American firebase during another civil war. Hai didn’t know it then, but with not enough Asians to fill the number of corpses the film demanded, white actors wore black makeup as yellowface during night battles, the crude paint streaked with sweat shimmering across the screen as they died, in comically exaggerated throes, piling in heaps around sandbags stacked about the base, shot from a distance that would hide their whiteness but not far enough to frame the three million dead Vietnamese throughout the war. The film was released in 1968, before the war even ended, the deaths on-screen predicting the deaths in life.

Was this why, watching Gettysburg for the first time, Sony sympathized with the Confederacy? With the butternut- and grey-clad men who were, like the “Vietnamese,” dying in hundreds, mowed down in scene after scene by cannon and musket fire, their uniforms, like the Vietcong’s, made mostly from civilian clothes worn to rags, their bodies turned, it seemed, to laundry? And yet, unlike the “Vietnamese” in The Green Berets, the faces of Confederate soldiers in Gettysburg are clear, the camera lingering on their agonized expressions, casting their human deaths as felt losses, full of pathos. The illusion was made possible by the very fact that the “Vietcong” bodies were captured in passing, transient, blurring themselves toward death—and not, like Robert E. Lee or Joshua Chamberlain in Gettysburg, zoomed in and fixed to a distinguishable lived life.

Inside each room, from the fancy set table to the kitchen counter, the knife left on the cutting board beside a sprig of green onion, through the spotless banisters and dressers, the commodes that must be emptied, underwear washed and dried, and then, outside, among the verdant vegetable and flower beds around the property, the carriage that must be driven and tended to, its wheels oiled, horses fed, was the unmarked presence of Jackson’s six slaves, who Hai later learned were Albert, Amy, Emma, and Hetty, along with her two sons, Cyrus and George. Like the fake Vietnamese in The Green Berets, they were everywhere yet nowhere to be found.

A sharp agitation coiled through him. He thought of the stupid pizza bagels and how the Sgt. Pepper’s pizza shop would be destroyed because of them, the corn cake, BJ’s futile and ingenious scheme, the fake school in Boston, the fake life in East Gladness and the true lies that did nothing but prolong their nights in this crumbling house at the edge of the world.

“What the hell is wrong with this family? Why does everything have to be a lie?” A semi blared by and Hai was shouting over it. “What family are you talking about, boy? This isn’t a damn family. Are you living in a fantasy? You’ve let that American bullshit rot your head in. Who the hell got the time to sit down at a dinner table with you and be a family?”

“There’s nothing to talk about when this country’s falling apart by the seams and I’m out here trying to preserve this, our Union.”

“And you know what those rebels did in Kansas, don’t you? They went out and whipped up their own militia and put holes in the city hall with ten-pound cannons. That’s no way for a country to be, General Hai. There’s no proper decency out here anymore.”

Sony was breathing heavily, his face both calm and stricken at once. Hai picked his glasses from the gravel and put them on, the taped left arm completely broken off. He wobbled back to his feet and studied his cousin, the mole under his eye, as if for the first time. “The fuck was that? You can’t hit me. You’re autistic.” “I’m sorry, I had to make a statement.” “Yeah, and people usually do that with words.”

I didn’t know,” he stopped and swallowed, “that smoking a cigarette by the side of a road was considered an adventure. But now it’s my turn to go on my own adventure. To see him at last, after all these years.”

“Diamonds are forever,” Sony said softly, caressing the spot on the back of his hand where the diamond was on his father’s. “BJ told me that. A diamond can survive a fire. She told me that when I started. No one gave me a job cause of my brain problems, but she did. She believed in me.” His eyelids flickered. “She said, Anybody can become a diamond. All they need is a bit of pressure.”

“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. From prison guards to teachers, to managers, psychiatrists, even fathers, anybody—even your stupid generals. People put on this facade of strength. They act like they have a purpose and a mission and their whole life is supposed to lead to this grand fucking thesis of who they are. But what happened, huh? Robert E. Lee sent all those people who believed in him across a half mile of hell because he was too scared to say he fucked up and had no cavalry. His generals told him to fall back to the mountains, but he wouldn’t listen. You told me that, right?” “He also had dysentery,” Sony mumbled.

“They’re just scared somebody will look at them bad and judge ’em. Scared somebody will see through the fake-ass armor they’ve wasted their whole lives building. And for what? To have fucking dysentery while a bunch of people who think you’re some god walk into a wall of bullets? Don’t you see it? We all want some story to make it bearable so we can keep living long enough to work our asses off until we’re in the ground, like Grandma. Like your dad. Like…”

“People aren’t so bad. They’re just wounded little kids trying to heal. And that makes them tell each other stupid stories,”

Hai picked up the bike and nodded over his shoulder at the pegs. “Get on, Private. The Union’s not gonna save itself.”

“So, let me get this straight. You want me to drive you two and pick up some demented white lady you’ve been living with this whole time and go to Vermont to look through burnt dirt for a lost diamond to free this boy’s mama from jail?”

Tuesday

“Okay, I got it.” BJ clasped her hands under her chin and eyed the cousins. “Here’s what I’m going to do for you. And it’s just cause that douchebag fired you without my consent.” Her nails had been bitten down to the nub. “If I put in for a pickup of creamed spinach—which we do need—at that HomeMarket rest stop outside Thetford, then I can authorize the use of the catering van and keep us on the clock during store hours.” It was a bit past three p.m., and Thetford was only two and a half hours away and just north of where Sony’s dad was. “We’d be back before closing.” “Thank goodness. Alright, chicken’s not carving itself.”