The Emperor of Gladness

Hai and Grazina begin engaging in regular “shooting drills via mock gunfights” (117) thrice a week, with Hai pretending to be Sergeant Pepper each time she has one of her “episodes.” In the time she emerges from them, she tells Hai about her life in Lithuania. Her baker father fended off the Nazis by giving the soldiers his bread and baked goods; however, when a new threat emerged in the form of the Soviet Army just years after Hitler, he and his children fled to Germany with hopes of moving from there to France, and eventually to London.

On BJ’s orders, Maureen and Hai head out to do a food exchange with Panetta, HomeMarket’s biggest rival on “Peace Treaty Day” (122), a regular occurrence. The HomeMarket crew despise Panetta for being pretentious and stuck up because they serve salads, despite being a fast casual restaurant exactly like HomeMarket, especially since their food is “fealthy” or “fake healthy,” as Maureen points out.

On the ride over, Hai discovers that Maureen is a conspiracy theorist: She reveals her beliefs about the earth being hollow and housing an evolved lizard species that lives underneath the surface and feeds off humans’ bad energy.