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.

We are the blur in the windows of your trains and minivans, your Greyhounds, our faces mangled by wind and speed like castaway Munch paintings. The only things we share with the city are the ambulances, being close enough to Hartford for them to come fetch us when we’re near dead or rattling away on steel gurneys without next of kin. We live on the edges but die in the heart of the state. We pay taxes on every check to stand on the sinking banks of a river that becomes the morgue of our dreams.

At the lot’s far edge lies the week-old roadkill, its eye socket filled with warm Coca-Cola, the act of a girl who, bored on her way from school, poured her drink into that finite dark of sightless visions.

As maples, poplars, and sassafras sway, the light filters amber through their leaving leaves.

It’s a town where high school kids, having nowhere to go on Friday nights, park their stepfathers’ trucks in the unlit edges of the Walmart parking lot, drinking Smirnoff out of Poland Spring bottles and blasting Weezer and Lil Wayne until they look down one night to find a baby in their arms and realize they’re thirtysomething and the Walmart hasn’t changed except for its logo, brighter now, lending a bluish glow to their time-gaunt faces.

What do you really know about what you know of New England?

He was nineteen, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light. He had not been forgiven and neither are you.

“Don’t be stupid.” She glanced around and pushed her glasses up with her middle finger. “You can’t die in front of my house, okay? I don’t need any more spirits around here.” She made the sign of the cross and gripped the railing as a slew of foreign words droned out of her.

“When did he die, your husband?” “When does anybody die?” she shrugged. “When God says Well done.”

Like most people, they spent their days watching cable TV in the parlor.

HomeMarket is what’s for dinner. Except all the time.”

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.

There were times, too, when people were just people, which meant they were assholes.

For a scant, luminous moment he was filled with a displaced benevolence for every soul in their tiny town. That some selfless, angelic people had the good mind to turn a burnt-down school into a home for the words I need help.

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

That’s what wealth is, he realized: to live in a house where all the tools of living are out of sight. There were no brooms or mops or laundry baskets, no endless trays or cubbies for receipts, bills, or pills and keys. Everything, from the counter to the furniture, the side tables to the credenzas—all of it was there for decor, for the pleasure of the eyes and access of the body. Nothing was in the way. It reminded him of homes he’d seen in pharmaceutical commercials.

She was the kind of person who would say “You look tired,” her head tilting with feigned concern, and mean that you were actually ugly. Her hair was the shade of red he had only seen in magazines. Simply nodding and staying silent would go far with her, Hai decided.

“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.”

Then she reached out and brushed aside his bangs. “Tu esi mano draugas.” “That some sort of Christmas prayer?” She shook her head. “Then what’d you say?” She stared at the water, saying softly, “You are my friend.”

Con trai tôi okay không? Hãy cho Dì biết sự thật nghe.”

There are even doctors among them, lawyers, custodians, minor politicians, bureaucratic functionaries, pilots, bakers, and barkeeps, varied stations of life now equalized in the only true egalitarian wing of the American dream: the nursing home, where the past is nothing but what it’s done to you.

How is it that we have become so certain that the sight of years, the summation of decades, should inflict such violence on the viewer—including family—that we have built entire fortresses to keep such bodies out of sight?

“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. “Yes. And we were very underrated. But we were also very okay.”

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

“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.” She touched his arm, her grip warm and stern. “So you’re a liggabit then,” she said, sniffling. He looked at her hand on his sleeve. “What?” “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.”

“But am I still me if I don’t remember who I was?”

“Look, being fucked up is actually what’s most common. It’s the majority of who we are, what everybody is. Fucked up is the most normal thing in the world. You’re both fucked up and you’re normal, got it?”

Don’t be too sad, boy. You still have your hands. And with these what you make is yours.”

But don’t be afraid of life, son. Life is good when we do good things for each other.”