The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

“Good, you got your glasses? Where are your glasses?” Grazina stared at him, blinking. “I dunno—oh! In microwave.” “What?” “I was making tea.” “Okay, hold on.” He grabbed the glasses from inside the microwave and put them on her face. “There, you ready? Good.” When they climbed in the car, Maureen glanced back, surprised that this landlady actually existed.

“Well, you got a kid trying to get some jewel from his dead dad. Sorry, hun,” she said to Sony. “It’s kinda epic, don’t you think? Darth Vader, Anakin Skywalker, a cosmic quest to save Princess Leia trapped in the state pen—all that stuff.” She sighed and checked the time on her dead Han Solo watch. “It’s a beautiful thing. A kid looking for his people.”

“Whoa! This is where half the rifles were made for the Union Army. That’s why it was called the Springfield rifle.” Sony pressed his face against the glass, as if someone on the street might be spotted carrying one of the rifles. “Like I said,” Maureen picked at her nose and watched the city come into view, “everything is Star Wars.”

“In my head I am,” he lied. “Good boy.” She finished eating but seemed lost in thought. “What you thinking about?” he said. “I should’ve known all along that you were liggabit.” “Really? How so?” he whispered. “You ask so many damn questions. Normal boys don’t ask so many questions.”

“Don’t let the emperor get you, buddy,” he said as the whistling dwindled to an airy whir. The hog’s eyes roved, as if searching for a crack inside the boy, a way in. Then Hai started to sing along. And as he did the hog shifted on its hooves, and its eyes rolled back, revealing two white pool balls before slowing to a stop, like a statue that suddenly remembered it was made of stone. Hai bent close enough to feel the beast’s breath on his face. “I’m sorry, Bà ngoại,” he said in Vietnamese. “I’m so sorry. Sorry, Noah. Sorry, Ma. Sony, Aunt Kim, Uncle Minh. I let you all down. I tried my best, but I don’t know how to be here.”

“I miss you so much, Ba. I won’t ever do anything to make you not proud of me. And I won’t forget you long as I live.”

These people, bound by nothing but toil in a tiny kitchen that was never truly a kitchen, paid just above minimum wage, their presence known to each other mostly through muscle memory, the shape of their bodies ingrained in the psyche from hours of periphery maneuvering through the narrow counters and back rooms of a fast-food joint designed by a corporate architect, so that they would come to know the sound of each other’s coughs and exhales better than those of their kin and loved ones.

“All my fucking life,” the HomeMarket monster said, its voice muffled in flesh and clothes, “I tried to convince everybody that I was stupid. I convinced myself too. But I’m a smart person. I’m a daughter,” the monster said, “sister, a wrestler. And so are you. You’re fucking great, Sony. You’re an amazing person, okay? You’re the best soldier I ever had. Don’t let this shit turn you into anything else. Don’t let whatever your father is or was knock you down on the mat.”

“What is it, Labas?” Her eyes narrowed at the paper. “It’s a notice from Hartford County Family Services. Says they’re coming back at four p.m. tomorrow to ‘escort’ you to the Hamilton Home.” “Of course! All prisoners get escorts.”

The Town Line Diner was actually one Hai had been to before. He and Noah used to get two-dollar English muffins there after driving all night in Noah’s truck with nowhere to go. It was a casual and homely place that served your eggs on paper plates, and nobody ever asked you if you wanted anything else, like your order wasn’t big enough. Hai and Grazina were the only ones there save for the waiter, a scrawny man with raccooned eyes and lips that never moved when he spoke. He took their order and walked away as if they were part of the wall.

She was still in her jacket, and underneath was her favorite owl sweater she insisted on wearing, the owl’s sad eyes now peering at him over the table’s edge. “So this is the last supper,” she chuckled and pushed a dab of mashed potatoes on her lips into her mouth.

He let out this little yelp, his mouth wanting to say, Sony, grab my hand. Sony, come grab my hand. But his cousin was nowhere to be found. Sony was at a group home with no job, inside a fatherless world without diamonds or second chances.

“Where’s the book you wrote, Sergeant Pepper?” she shouted, conflating, at last, all his forgeries into one name. “I fucked up! I chose the wrong story to live in.”

Crossing King Philip’s Bridge, he recalled, from a high school history class, King Philip’s ultimate fate. How his uprising was put down by the colonizers and how Philip, also known as Metacomet, was subsequently beheaded, his skull displayed on a stake for twenty-five years as a warning to other Native chiefs against reclaiming their lands. He felt every footstep over the rail ties as he crossed, wood cut from another time, hammered into place to carry the living toward whatever traps them.

It must have been evening by the time the HomeMarket sign came into view. He passed a telephone pole where, in the coppering filament dusk, a splash of violet snowdrops fanned out from under the base as if tossed from a passing car, remnants from years of memorial bouquets placed to mark where Rachel Miotti was last seen alive, now gone to seed and wildflowered. He approached the back door, where he sat down on the milk crates and held his head in his hands. It wasn’t his shift, but having nowhere to go, he went toward order, consistency, discipline—but mostly toward these people, these little people who make the world turn by making food faster than we have ever prepared it in the history of our species.

Centuries from now, when the cosmos are no longer mysteries infinitely multiplied by syllables, they will unearth the ancient and mildewed libraries and understand us as the epoch that reheated chemically preserved sustenance we never cooked under red roofs, from which we asked How can I help you? endlessly, day and night, through droughts and earthquakes, through wars and floods and assassinated presidents, fallen towers and allegiances, impeachments and suicides, through birthdays, some so insignificant they will be forgotten even by those they crown, knowing so little can be kept—not even the gnomic words that nonetheless birth the histories between two people: Hello, Hai, Labas.

Within five years, the turnover in the store will be so complete that none of the original crew will be left at the HomeMarket on Route 4. But the HomeMarket will still stand—undefeated—an entire new team, like a new set of organs, implanted and running the same shifts inside its concrete walls. The only sign that they were ever there will be a faded Chewbacca sticker Maureen had placed in the back of the broom closet, next to the industrial tubs of BBQ sauce.