'The Emperor of Gladness' by Ocean Vuong is already late back to the library and a queue of people are waiting impatiently to read it, so I am starting with the most recently read from the book pile. It was read mostly back and forth on the train to Devon, but not much while I was there because Claire and I were too busy pottering about and pretending to be retired (well I was pretending, she is semi-retired).I love this kind of story; people going through some kind of crisis find each other, and go through their crisis together. It's not all neat and happy ending, just human beings muddling along and making what they can of life. Hai is at the end of his tether. He is grieving. He has lied to his mum, and not just about the little things. Grazina has spotted him on the bridge, and is pretending (it turns out) to be trying to hang out laundry. The elderly frail Lithuanian is having trouble keeping her carers and after she has offered some words of solace and advice she invites him to stay. She thinks his name is Hello, so she calls him Labas, which means hello in Lithuanian. So for a while they muddle along together, her with a meagre pension and him working at HomeMarket with his cousin Sony, and Hai creating an alternate reality where he is rescuing her from the Nazis when Grazina's dementia episodes leave her huddled and terrified.
"He stood watching Grazina sleep under the photo of herself half a century ago, her face, the only part of her that wasn't covered, grey and compressed and smeared with strawberry jam. What did he know about her illness, after all, other than that four of the thirteen pills she took each day were supposed to 'subdue' it, like some sort of criminal in her head? How could he have known that her brain was actually collapsing slowly inside her skull, how this made little holes, which then made new neural connections and scrambled old ones? It must be like water, he thought, as the morning rose up around them. It must be like the lake she talked about. Diving under the surface until everything was muted and gauzed but still there. He listened to her wheezy breaths, and imagined a tiny fire scratching inside her. A little torch that forgot it was not supposed to burn underwater. 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. The idea made him sick. And without knowledge of his own legs moving beneath him, he crossed the hall to his bedroom, fished the contact lens case from his jacket pocket, and , having been sober for forty-seven days, tossed the Perc and codeines back in one gulp, then returned to where Grazina lay slumped in the jeep." (p.110)
As much as he saves her, she also saves him. She is just a person with no expectations, and so he never fears disappointing her. Here he finally tells her about Noah:
"He told her of their friendship, of the days driving aimlessly in a truck through a town far, far away from Europe, from Germany, called East Gladness. How they'd walk for hours through the pines, the back lots of that rusted strip of earth, singing in adolescent voices that crackled like wartime radios. About the pools of clear water that rose over the cattails and sweetgrass in the junkyards after a storm, how once they swam in a shallow tub made from the rainwater collected in a dent in the roof of an old school bus. And the water was so clear, so sweet, your skin looked truer that it did on the surface, warped and magnified by the tiny current they made from their scavenged laughter. He told of Noah's barn, where they knew the wrong inside them was the only thing that made sense of where they grew up, where the gods, after flipping the tables from losing their bets, left them alone to make a fugitive life. That a boy beside a boy could form an island of 'okayness.' 'With him,' he said, 'it wasn't that I was happy - but that I was okay. And okay is 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...' " (p.315)
The cast of characters at HomeMarket also have their own issues but equally they provide caring for each other: the manager BJ who is a part-time wrestler, Hai's cousin Sony who is obsessed with the Civil War, Wayne, Maureen and even the unnamed washing up girl. Here, surreally, they borrow a van to go to the site of Sony's father's untimely death on a roadside in Vermont:
"Hai could tell, from the faint throb in Sony's neck, that the boy was trying hard to hold it in. BJ's shadow slid across the dried leaves and covered Sony like a cape. She cupped the boy's head with her hand, as if to hold him in place, before reaching down to hug him. He turned into her embrace as Maureen took the headrest into her arms bouncing it like a living baby. Hai came forward, his mouth partly open, and threw his arms around the huddled group, his face buried in BJ's enormous back as the branches clicked above them in a spring gale. 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 into the psyche from hours of periphery manoeuvring 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 that those of their kin and loved ones. They, who owe each other nothing but time, the hours collectively shouldered into a shift so that they might finish on time, now brought to their knees in a forest to gather around a half-burnt headrest of a Nissan Maxima on a Tuesday in mid-April, their bodies finally touching, a mass of labor cobbled together by a boy's hallowed loss - on the clock." (p.366)
After a visit to Lucas, Grazina's son, who turns out to be real and not imagined as Hai had wondered, their ramshackle existence is threatened by his plan to move his mother and sell her house. They try to stave off the inevitable, inevitably.
Stay safe. Be kind. Read some really good writing.
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