Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

  With His slightly jutting chin and a smile like a lackadaisical sneer, He spoke with the drowsy deliberation common to the cultivated classes of all societies. He was about twenty years old, and He was adjudicating: a legal hearing was in progress. The litigant, a short farmer, bowed his forehead to the floor when the judgment did not fall his way. The man was ushered away, crying.

  The multitude of courtiers in attendance stared at my brother and me. This was our first encounter with the concentrated gaze of a crowd; the assembly, and all its eyes.

  Don’t look my way, I thought. Look at Chang.

  My brother and I now had our turn before the Great Lord. At this point many strange courtiers strode up to us and whispered in our ears.

  “Do not talk to the almighty King directly.”

  “Do not look at the almighty King directly.”

  “Nor at the almighty King’s wives, either.”

  “The eternal sovereign has two thousand of them, you know.”

  “If the all-powerful monarch calls you ‘Illustrious Dog,’ meet the term with the utmost thankfulness.”

  “It means He likes you.” (The King of Siam addresses His young prince as “Acclaimed Rat,” so great is the divide between a sovereign and the most exalted of His court.)

  We dropped to the floor before King Rama. Though we were forbidden to look at Him, I peeked. His Highness had no neck, and His hair was a slick black tidal wave surging high above His brow. His eyes were the color of sable.

  A few steps below His Majesty’s feet sat a serious-looking man with a smoothly brushed mustache, a rattan cane across his lap. This man was the King’s listener. He would be the conduit for all conversation with the King.

  As the King and this other man scrutinized my brother and me, a skinny boy of about twelve came running up to us quickly and jerking like someone in spastic paralysis. He whispered: “Repeat after me.” Then he recited the proper way to address the King.

  “Exalted Lord!” Chang and I said, parroting the whispering boy. “Sovereign of manifold princes! Let the Lord of Lives tread upon me, a slave who here grovels, and stomp upon this slave’s spine! I am prepared to receive the dust of golden feet upon the summit of my simple head!” Meanwhile, the swarm of courtiers had gathered behind us, forming a half circle. I was afraid that if I closed my eyes, someone would chop off my head when I wasn’t looking.

  “So this is the challenge Nature has for me?” The King puckered His royal face as if He were referring to some noxious smell. Then, furrowing His brow, He said: “Scurrilous dog, ask them if they have eaten rice yet today.” His voice an instrument that employed petulance and thunder and surprising tenderness.

  The man sitting by the Royal Feet repeated His Highness’s question. We replied that we hadn’t had any yet. (Siamese make use of the rice question the same way the English initiate conversation with “It is a nice day today, isn’t it?” Each greeting reveals a different national obsession.)

  “Sniveling toad,” the King addressed His conduit, “remind this double-child that We will gouge out its eyes if it continues to look at Us directly.”

  The King’s listener jumped to his feet and ran over to us. He was much taller than I had thought. He struck us a blow across our backs with his rattan cane. We gasped for breath; Chang’s skin turned white like a phantom’s. The listener went back to sit at the King’s feet.

  “Tell His Highness we are sorry,” I said. “Yes, please do,” said Chang.

  The marble was cold against my cheek. The Princess, too, made sure not to look at her father, instead watching the tapping of her own slippered feet.

  “The twin has apologized, Your Highness.” The conduit looked straight ahead as he spoke to the monarch sitting over his shoulder.

  The King continued: “Confounded idiot, ask the twin: Has the Lord of Deaths sent it here to presage the destruction of our kingdom?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, the pain from the rattan blow subsiding. It had begun to seem less me with my head against the marble and more some other hapless boy in my situation. Chang smelled of sweat and days away from home.

  “Can you be sure?” The King’s voice now depended wholly on intimidation, all tenderness stripped away. The Princess sat at his side noiseless as a flower, and she dropped her eyes when they met mine, and she cringed.

  The man at the King’s feet said: “Can you be—”

  “Siam can speak to this creature Ourself!” the King roared. Then He narrowed His raging eyes and allowed them to take on a penetrating shine. I did not look away.

  “Do you deserve to live, double-child?” His tone was calm now, as if He were asking whether we thought it might rain.

  “I think so,” Chang said in a quiet voice.

  “Analyze the process expressed in the words ‘I think,’ ” the King sniggered. “You’ll find a series of assertions that are difficult to prove. For example, that it is I who think, that there is a self, that this self knows what thinking is.” His face twisted in a smile that held little joy. “You don’t understand,” He said, smoothing His sash. He was going to decapitate us, I knew it.

  If this is the end, I thought, how will Chang handle our death?

  “Get up,” King Rama said. “Get up, get up, get up.”

  Chang and I hopped to our feet, making a squeaking noise on the marble.

  “We are curious to see how you travel about.” He let no sentiment into His voice or face now. “We question whether you will be fit to make your life a substantial contribution to Our kingdom.” As He spoke, Chang and I began to tread a small circle before the throne.

  “Cooperative syncopation,” He murmured quietly. “We did not realize you were so graceful.” Then, recovering the rumble in His voice, “Faster, now!”

  We informed King Rama’s manservant we could walk on our hands.

  “But this is a surprise,” the King said, laughing. “Can you now?”

  “We’d like to show you.”

  “Come, come. We’re watching.” The King gave a knowing glance to the aristocrats standing behind us. Then came the shuffling sound of everyone looking away, careful not to meet His gaze.

  The man at the King’s feet said: “Come, come, Double-Boy.” The King stamped His foot at the man. His royal face had reddened. The hall was in absolute silence. The conduit looked sadly at his own lap.

  “We’re watching,” the King said finally.

  And there, in that glorious court, Chang and I gave our first performance.

  We bent toward the double-reflection rising at us from below the surface of the burnished marble, patting our four outstretched hands on the cold floor. Then we hoisted ourselves in the air with a flick of our hips and trudged ahead, like a pair of wheels connected by a small axle.

  I swear the King clapped. He smiled, too. And so did the Princess. My brother and I had the ability to walk on four hands as assuredly as other children ran on two feet. Despite my exhaustion and loneliness, I enjoyed the pride I was feeling. Answering the applause, we began a string of backflips, cutting quick, precise rings in the air as we tumbled over and over. The Gung-Fu moves were painful, as our band was still compromised by Mother’s knife, but we managed a four-point landing, and stretched our arms in the air, hoping to have averted our own murder.

  King Rama cocked His head, grinned amiably, and threw up His hand. I felt a new-sprung twinge in my heart! The grin and the lissome gesture belonged to a frieze on the royal ceiling! The breeding and charm in the smile and movement were, at what could have been an awkward moment, pacifying. He knew how to captivate. He was kingly.

  “Lovely,” He said. “What a lovely creature.” He nodded in the direction of someone at our backs; gongs crashed. All the courtiers in the Great Hall dropped to the floor in genuflection. People whooped and whistled; Chang and I held our ears. “I want to go to sleep,” I told my brother, who could not hear me for the clamor. My excitement had soured into exhaustion. I could feel tears gathering behind my eyes
. Attendants would not stop banging the deafening gongs. My brother hugged me. We were going to live.

  The King stood and lifted His arms and nodded His head up and down as a number of manservants ran to close the curtains that had been concealed in back of the throne. In a moment King Rama and the little princess were gone behind the concealments.

  The room grew quiet. The people of the court got to their feet and shuffled toward us. The King was done having His look; it was their turn. They crowded my brother and me. We had never been near so many people.

  I thought I saw a familiar face, far from us, and deep in the crowd: Dr. Lau, the Bangkok surgeon who had come to our houseboat with plans of separation. He smiled, and laughed, and pantomimed the act of sawing through our bond. Before I could point him out to my brother, however, too many faces had swarmed around Chang and me, and the doctor was out of sight.

  Another man, a fat aristocrat dressed in gold, stepped between us and everyone else. He crooked his neck and threw up a hand—the same gesture his monarch had used minutes before. The movement had little charm in this man’s care: a royal gesture muffled by the charmlessness of an ignoble body.

  And now a multitude of fingers touched our band from all sides.

  “Does it hurt?” someone asked.

  I began to cry.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Not usually.”

  “Do you share thoughts?”

  We said nothing.

  “Do you share thoughts?”

  We said we did not know.

  “Do you relieve yourselves at the same time?”

  My brother and I did not understand.

  “The toilet. Do you use the toilet together?”

  “Often we both have to go at the same time.”

  Another odd person stood back from the crowd, watching the excitement of the throng as much as he was watching us. His skin looked strange—it was white as rice—and his thinning hair was brown. He wore a black three-piece Western-style suit, and was the first Occidental I had ever seen. I thought him a freak.

  Then a man who smelled of sweat and linseed oil took Chang and me by the hands and escorted us from the hall. This was the end of my childhood.

  Though he kept many women, strictly speaking Rama had thirty-five wives. The other nineteen hundred or so were concubines. We were taken to see these women immediately after we had our audience with the King.

  The linseed-oil man led us through a great mirrored hallway. The hallway was narrow and curled around itself like a nautilus shell. I had trouble keeping my eyes open as we walked. I had not slept since they had taken us from our fishing boat days before.

  “Why are you crying?” the man asked me, mistaking my closed eyes for tearful ones. “You are going to meet wives of our King.”

  “My brother is tired,” Chang explained. Then, as if by suggestion, the tears ran down my cheeks.

  “Aren’t you tired, then?” the man asked Chang.

  “Not particularly.” He shrugged. “When can we see Mother?”

  We entered a large boudoir with blue silk curtains hanging in drooping arches from the high ceilings. There were no windows to deliver light into the room. Our guide disappeared as soon as he deposited us at the Queens’ doorway.

  Chang and I were alone with the women. These royal wives were young—ranging from twelve to twenty, I’d guess—and they lounged across lavish beds (we had never seen proper beds before), wearing golden gowns similar to the one the King had worn, except that their garments lacked Rama’s royal sash. There were thirty-five of them.

  “Look, a half of it is crying,” one said. She could not have been much older than we were, and her arms were as thin as handrails.

  The King’s exquisite maidens bade us step before each bed and answer questions. I can’t remember what most of them asked, harmless interrogation of the womanish sort, but I’ve never forgotten what happened as we came to the last of the circuit of beds that traced a line around the chamber.

  The final queen was the oldest, the most regal and beautiful. She seemed uninterested in the spectacle we were making. Each of the others had sat up as we approached, but this one simply rested flat on her back with her nose pointed at the ceiling. She didn’t even move her head; she just slid her eyes and looked at us with sidelong glances.

  “I want to know if you have one sex or two.” She was a woman of snarl and excess. “Strip yourselves naked.”

  She pushed herself up by her hands and sat.

  We hesitated. In the years since, I have suffered heartbreak, been spat upon, been attacked, I have felt alone and anomalous in the gunmetal-gray cities of the West, but nothing has pained me more than the humiliation of that moment.

  “You will do as I say or die,” the Queen murmured. “I want to see.” She pulled on the lobe of her ear absentmindedly, and she showed her nasty smile. “Now. ”

  I might wish to blame my submission on lack of sleep, or on the timidity of youth, but the fact is that we stripped without enough protest. As an adult I would debase myself for no queen, no king.

  My brother and I stood before her, bared. The other women, roused from their beds, flocked to us. We were twin bodies, complete and distinct and face-to-face, with two parts for every one found on an ordinary birth. Plus a single connecting ligament.

  The Queen who had made us undress nodded at us for a while. The others watched her. Chang and I stood there, the cold air goose-pimpling our skin. The silk ribbons hanging overhead remained absolutely still.

  Then the Queen pursed her lips tightly. Her cheeks distended and she began to heave like some drunkard holding back her own sick. The laugh burst forth, however, and proved contagious. The royal bedchamber began to vibrate with chortling feminine laughter.

  Until I’d arrived in Wilkesboro, this was what I knew of intimacy with women.

  Soon Chang and I found ourselves back in our unlit little cell, prisoners, with In, the three-legged cat. I could not sleep. I do not know how long it was that I lay awake, because we could not tell the changing of days or weeks in that cold and damp place. The cell smelled awful from In’s waste.

  Chang would not stop chattering when he was awake, asking the same questions repeatedly. “Do you think we can leave here, brother?” or “Will Mother come?” I did not answer him aloud.

  No, I said to myself. And, no.

  Every once in a while, Nao entered our cell, carrying a tray of rice and a waste-bucket. Chang and I grew accustomed to using the bucket; if only we could have trained In to follow suit.

  Time passed slow as lava in that dank chamber. Our band started to heal.

  “Not much in the bucket this morning, boys,” said our bald attendant on one of the occasions when he came to remove our foul matter.

  “How do you know that one day we won’t attack you, Nao?” Chang asked. We were still wearing the very pants and jacket the servant had given us to wear before the King. They were now blackened and stinking. “How do you know we won’t take you hostage?”

  Despite the dark, I could make out a smile creasing the skin of the attendant’s immense face. His scalp was smooth. The full curves of his body beneath the robe seemed to float in the shadow illuminated here and there by light stealing through cracks around the door. “You don’t have it in you,” he said.

  Many days must have gone by, and still I could not sleep. And that’s when I learned that the high spirits of malice may masquerade as kindness.

  One morning or night, as Chang slept and I did not, the uncomfortable heat and my lack of rest made me sluggish and I did not immediately detect His arrival. But there He was when I raised my eyes. Did He really kneel His silk-covered knee to the damp floor and look at us? Yes, I did not dream it. I saw King Rama’s soft, brown sandaled feet and heard and smelled Him. In our cell. His perfumes put me in mind of ginger and of a forest grander than any I’d seen.

  I sat up in shock, pulling Chang with me. I looked around, but He had left. Or vanished. I begged
in the direction of the slamming door. I needed Mother, and though I was a young boy who had never wanted to before, I felt so dirty that I wished desperately to bathe. Our clothes were completely in tatters now.

  Maybe He had come to kill us.

  I told myself to remain calm. Mekong Fishermen stay abreast of change. Make the appropriate decision at the appropriate moment and diminish the influence of fate....

  Even sitting up, Chang slept. I hated him then, for sleeping, for merely existing. If I could somehow have managed to separate from him before all this, I would be with Mother now, I thought.

  Time, as it will, kept passing. My brother persuaded me to play games of our own invention, though I was beginning to tremble with fatigue. We practiced handstands, flips, somersaults. It was probably this exercise, and the fact that we were growing older and bigger, that caused our coupling band to change. The ligament was lengthening, gradually, and after a few weeks or months we were able to walk almost side by side, with our arms around one another’s shoulders like two men posing for a portrait.

  I sometimes felt the concrete floor was about to open, and at our feet an abyss bristling with—what? Sharp-toothed monsters or downy pillows? The high spirits of malice, or kindness? The marsh of the Mekong had always felt too cold and grimy between dry toes. I tried to comfort myself with facts like that, when lying awake.

  Each time Nao cleared away our bucket, he gave Chang and me instruction; we learned the Hymn of Ramkhamhaeng. We were shown a map and told where Cochin China was. We practiced genuflecting. And then Nao would leave, Chang would sleep, and I would talk to the cat.

  Once, while Chang snored, In limped into a bit of its own stool, and then over to me. Gathering a little energy, I picked up the smelly creature and for the first time told it, “I love you.” It looked at me, perplexed. I glanced at the space where its fourth leg should have been, then down at the pools where the feline water was freshest, and where some cat dung had been steaming recently, and I said: “I have come to love you in spite of—”