The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

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.

peak of him laughing at the greatest joke he’d ever heard. This was the image imprinted on Hai’s mind when he signed in at New Hope. Every generation says this of itself, but these were indeed bewildering and unprecedented times he lived in, a time before iPhones were everywhere, and people still looked up as they walked, their heads filled with self-generated thoughts floating up from deep pits in the subconscious. A time when you still knocked on each other’s doors, and if you wanted to talk to somebody, you had to call them on a landline, listen to their mother’s breathing for a while, maybe the sound of her fixing a drink or shaving her legs, then meet up somewhere, one of you waiting about, shifting your feet and looking at clouds or trees or municipal architecture, cars passing, your dopamine levels higher for not having been depleted from blue-light screens throughout the day. A time when the drug dealer on the corner would, out of boredom, start balancing on a chain-link fence, the boy in him unable to help it, pants sagging from the effort, revealing his plaid boxers you can spot from the back window of the school bus. But then, slowly, one or two or seven of your friends will find the pills, and they will flood their young brains with artificial joy. And you will join them, running through the woods by the power plant, laughing at the immense night, your head levitating a foot above your shoulders. And their eventual deaths will not yet be used by politicians to ...

You lose the dead as the earth takes them, but the living you still have a say

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.

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.”

“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.

“People aren’t so bad. They’re just wounded little kids trying to heal. And that makes them tell each other stupid stories,” he said softly. “Would you just stand in your skin with me and stay? Just for a bit, while I sort this out? Will you stay? Please? I can’t do this anymore.”