The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

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

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.

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.

There was no shame, the boy thought, in losing yourself to something as natural as gravity—where one doesn’t jump but is pulled, blameless, toward the sea. If nothing else, this would hurt his mother least.

“What’s your name anyway?” “Thanks for this.” The boy took a long drag from the bogie. “But I should go.” “Easy, little lamb. I invite you in my home, give you cigarette. And look,” she tilted the pack to show him, “I only have two left. I even let you cry in my kitchen. You know it’s bad luck to cry in the kitchen, right? You can at least tell me your name.”

The jacket once belonged to his friend Noah, a boy he met working tobacco when he was fourteen, the crop blooming verdant along the river that carved East Gladness in half. His real name wasn’t Noah, but that’s what Hai started calling him a week after he died. Because why shouldn’t the dead receive new names? Weren’t they transformed, after all, into a kind of otherhood?

“It’s a root. And roots prevent you from getting the blues.” She picked one from the bowl; it gleamed under the kitchen light. “You see, carrots become bright orange because it’s so dark in the ground. They make their own light because the sun never reaches that far—like those fish in the ocean who glow from nothing? So when you eat it, you take in the carrot’s will to go upward. To heaven.” She tucked the carrot back in the bowl, gently, as if it were a tiny person. “Ever heard of a rabbit jumping off a bridge?” she winked. “Of course not. That’s because they have the light in them.”

He listened, his head tilted with the weight of her offer. But even before she finished, he knew he’d say yes. After all, he had never refused anything given him without a price, which was how he ended up where he was in the first place.

“I used to want to be a writer. My dream was to write a novel that held everything I loved, including unlovable things. Like a little cabinet.”

“You wanna be a writer and you want to jump off a bridge? That’s pretty much the same thing, no? A writer just takes longer to hit the water.” She tried to laugh but started coughing. “My husband tried to be a poet, you know, and all that gave him was Alzheimer’s.”

“The rain. Maybe raindrops are like people…Well, that’s not what I mean—” His voice cracked and he suddenly felt unmoored, incredulous. A child. “Ha! The rain? Every writer who ever lived talked about rain. You know what writing really is?” She paused for effect. “Complaining. About weather. Beautiful complaining. No wonder why Stalin shipped them to Siberia.”

Their elders named them after whatever they hoped would manifest in life. Why toil away in factories to save for a Lexus when you could make her yourself?

You can’t just pop up like a ghost after people die, Ma had told her days after the funeral. We’re sisters. We got no one else but us. It sounded simple enough, but when you throw in decades of festering tensions, betrayals, refutations and backstabs, a country still smoldering somewhere in the caverns of memory, the argument became a symbol for everything rotting underneath, both sisters too proud to concede.

“With money I earned by myself, I gave my daughter a room just so she can read in peace for a day. Just one day. And I sat there and watched her read, sipping a scotch from the bar. And I cried like a baby. And Lina, my little Lina, she said, ‘Mama, why you crying?’ And I said, ‘I know how God feels now.’ A stupid thing, really, to say to a little girl, but who cares. She must’ve thought I was finally crazy.” Grazina let out a broken laugh. “And hey,” she pointed her pinkie at him, “she wrote poems too, you know, my little Lina. Better than Robert Frost, if you can believe it. What did he do anyway, look at trees and feel bad? That’s no way to live.”

How strange to feel something so close to mercy, whatever that was, and stranger still that it should be found in here of all places, at the end of a road of ruined houses by a toxic river. That among a pile of salvaged trash, he would come closest to all he ever wanted to be: a consciousness sitting under a lightbulb reading his days away, warm and alone, alone and yet, somehow, still somebody’s son.

“I could use some help,” he mumbled, then put his knuckles to his mouth to keep it in, realizing he’d never said those words before in his whole life. But that’s what you say when you come in here. There are entire places in this world built just so specific phrases can be said, he realized now. Phrases like “I hereby solemnly swear,” “Do you have any last words?” “I want a divorce,” “I want an abortion,” “Congratulations, class of 2006,” or “I do, I do, I do.” In this building you can say “I need help” and they know not only exactly what you mean but also exactly who you are.

Rehab, if nothing else, was a place to store yourself for a while. It was also, he quickly learned, a kingdom of boredom—but maybe that was the point, the goal even: to be with yourself, which was its own kind of hell. All the clichés about it are true. You wait around until whatever poison that’s ruining you empties into the world as time. Then you fill that emptiness with more time.

Inside those wide white hours, he often asked himself why he had deceived his mother in the first place. In the end, there was no good answer—only the image of her face brightening when he told her he was going to heal the sick, the cancer-riddled, the broken, the maimed, by becoming a doctor. After Bà ngoại died, his mother’s light dimmed, and seeing her shriveled in the corner of the couch, her head down and lit blue by her Game Boy, playing endless Tetris day after day, her hair thinning, he figured he had to do something. You lose the dead as the earth takes them, but the living you still have a say in. And so he said it. And so he lied.

Because to remember is to fill the present with the past, which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all, is life itself. We murder ourselves, he thought, by remembering.

He aims for the mouth because it’s the deepest wound he’s ever seen. 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,

The crew stood there a minute as the ambulance pulled off the lot, BJ wiping her face with her American flag handkerchief. Maureen, who had been clutching her Fluffernutter this whole time, dipped it into the leftover cheese on the side of the bucket, and kept eating. “Really?” Russia said, watching her. “I need to change the flavor in my mouth,” she shrugged.

“Once you realize they’ve lied to you, you lose faith in their fucked-up systems. Searching for another purpose, you start to root for outsiders. Underdogs. But then you realize the underdogs are nowhere to be found, the media has hidden them from you, the prisons and madhouses have locked them up, so you think you’re the only one out there losing your mind when in fact there are many like you, trapped in this supposedly free world of work and sleep and endless fucking cakes.”

“How can I know what Marta knows? Some things belong to those who lived them.” Grazina searched his face. “Who knows what happens to owls that are too fat to fly. Maybe they swim.” She turned away. “She was just a girl from long ago. No one remembers her but me.”

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

After a long silence, from which he thought she had fallen asleep, she said, “I wish I knew you long ago. We would’ve helped each other. Wouldn’t we?” “We would.”

“People vanish all the time and leave no trace, even here in America, especially in the national parks. Shit, my dad used to tell me that story right before bed, drunk as fuck sitting on the floor. But it worked.” He laughed with all his teeth. “I was so scared my brain just turned off. I think of that story about once a month. Like, where is that guy now? Is he just floating somewhere in nowhere-land?”

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 know, I’ve been cutting up these hogs for three years now. I don’t regret none of it. They were born to die. And I’m just a hammer. Somebody else is using the hammer, I know that. I just don’t know if it’s that dude up there,” he glanced at the sky, slate grey and ambivalent, “or the motherfucker down here.” 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.”

Hai realized, for the first time, in the smoky light that made Russia’s blue hair tinge silver with sweat, that the boy was handsome—but in the way that reveals itself only after you know a person for a while, the way a doorknob is polished to brilliance with use. Hai now found his buckteeth endearing, a reprieve after three hours of watching the yellow-mangled maws of hogs gritted into their ends.

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.

The three of them must’ve killed almost fifty that afternoon in their station alone (Hai had lost count after eighteen). If Wayne hadn’t been counting on them to get that bonus, Hai would’ve walked right down the road and hitchhiked back to East Gladness soon as he saw their faces. But what could he do? He was part of a team, and that meant something, didn’t it?

He wondered how far the hogs’ souls had traveled by now. He wondered if they’d ever catch up to the human dead, if there was even a difference between them. How silly, he thought, to believe souls go anywhere at all. Why should they? What if they just lay down like this pig here and decided enough was enough? What if the soul is just as tired as the body? Just as worn out from seeing its family get tricked into a tent with dog treats only to come out emptied, soon to be roasted b...

When I feel fucked up sometimes, I just start clapping. Like this.” Maureen clapped. And the blood on her hands, dried from cold, burst into purple clouds, which delighted everyone. And they all started clapping, the puffs of blood blooming before their faces.

and like all things without meaning, it made no sense.

the song’s called ‘The Summer Ends.’ I listen to it when I’m fucked up.” Sony listened to the tinny music, his head lowered and very still. “But it sounds sad. Why would you listen to sad things when you’re already sad?” “I dunno.” Hai drew circles in the pavement. “Guess it gives the feeling a place to stand in. Like a little bus stop.”

“You kids blame everything on feelings. Do you blame starvation on feelings too? Floods? Earthquakes?” “Look, I have it too. It’s just like weather. Like clouds and rain and stuff. They go away. But some of us spend more time in London, you know? Or Seattle. You’re just raining right now.

“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.”

“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.”

“Hey. Do you think a life you can’t remember is still a good life?” The question sounded almost silly aloud. “I mean, like—” “Yes,” said Sony. “Why’s that?” “Because someone else will remember it.”

“I’m just really proud of you for taking this chance. At everything. I mean, not just taking it. But you made your own opportunity. You went out there and strung it together. You know, all my life, after you were born and your father left us, I kept thinking something else would come, and it just didn’t. I always thought it would stop for me like some boat while I waited on the shore with my son and my mother, our bags all packed and ready. But it never came for me and…” “Mom don’t.” “No, let me finish. I never tell you anything and I need to say this. The truth is, it never came for me, okay? Sometimes you have to be lucky but also very brave. And I wasn’t either. But you are. You made your own way with just your mind. No one helped you—I know that, okay? Just know that your mother knows that.”

the memory gone but its sadness remaining, like smoke from an invisible fire.

“So on summer evenings, when summer finally came, and the full moon lit the fields so silver, you could squint and it would still look just like it did after snowfall. On those nights, Noah and I would run together through the tobacco, like this. And there was this mighty clear sky full of stars that made you stop and look up, your head empty as a ladle as you tried to locate yourself inside an immeasurable universe. And no one knows where you are and you feel, for a tiny second, that you have no parents, that they never existed at all, which is impossible and shameful to love, but I did. I loved that feeling.”

“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.

The superpower of being young is that you’re closest to being nothing—which is also the same as being very old.

No one in his life knew he had such a friend until now, until Sergeant Pepper told her. Somebody goes ahead and dies and all of a sudden you become a box for them, he thought, you store these things that no one has ever seen and you go on living like that, your head a coffin to keep memories of the dead alive. But what do you do with that kind of box? Where do you put it down?

“I’m sorry they sent you to war. Nobody should go to war. Boys should be owls running in snow fields. I’m sorry you had to find me.”

“I don’t know who I am. Wait a minute. How can that…” And like that the world was falling away in slabs, rinsed and pooling at the periphery. “You’re you, okay. You’ve always been you.” He was starting to shake. “But am I still me if I don’t remember who I was?” “I don’t know!” “I can still hear the river from here,” she said. “It’s saying I did a good job. It said I did good.”

He tried to will her back to the present, but when her eyes grew blank and unseeing, he couldn’t take it anymore and got up. He floated through the halls, the porcelain owls clutched in each fist, her voice thinning behind him. The nurses, busy on their phones, didn’t even notice. By the time he got to the parking lot, he had a delirious urge to scream.

Only when he tasted the salty snot did he realize he had fallen to his knees and was crying. “Please leave me alone. I’m sorry, okay?” he shouted at the ground. “Noah, Grandma, I’m sorry you had to die when everybody else fucking lived! But it’s not that great here, okay? It’s as shitty as it was before. Trust me.”

What does it do to your mind to see “your people” die so vastly that you can’t even tell that they are not, in fact, your people at all? Hai thought, looking back. How easily a face is disfigured in the abstraction a pile of bodies so naturally makes. After a while, it was not the dead but merely death itself that Hai saw folded into this scene of American triumph.