Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

  Our captain screamed instructions to the pilot, who in turn shouted frenzied commands to the engineer and his assistants in the fiery engine room below. Everyone on the Main Deck was cheering and jumping up and down. We were going to race.

  The river was narrow on every side of Waveland, and it also keeled into a fierce bend, none of which prevented the Mirrorglass from closing in on our right. The banks on either side of us were cluttered with half-submerged trees that poked their sharp claws out of the water, ready to snare us like bear traps. Careering together down the narrowing river at an unsafe speed, the steamboats creaked and lurched, but kept right on downstream.

  “How terrible!” said Sarah, her shrill voice now a pain in my ears. She looked even more nauseous than before, which I wouldn’t have thought possible.

  Everyone on our boat was standing up and facing the Mirrorglass . People screamed into the wind: “Down with the Mirrorglass!” “We’ll make quick work of you!” “We’re for the Ivory Eagle!” My eyes rested on long-faced Adelaide, and her smile. “Go!” she laughed. “Go!” And I laughed, too. Her hand excitedly gripped her fan. She was holding her breath. I looked away. Before my heart had a single beat, my eyes were drawn back to her.

  Meanwhile, the Mirrorglass was gaining on us. As she pulled even with The Ivory Eagle, her passengers began to throw food and balled-up newspapers at our Main Deckers. Our fellow passengers responded in kind.

  Racing through the water, almost touching, maneuvering for position, and then actually coming to little brushing collisions, the two steamboats jockeyed like trotters after the starting gun—two nearly indistinguishable boats where there was room for only one. I could see the faces of our equivalents on the boat across from us, and they were filled with frenzy.

  Our main deck below was bedlam, too, as hundreds thrust about, pressed against the rails—people of every age, of every size and class—screaming and crying and rasping against their limitations. Crewmen hurled spoiled meat and tallow into our boilers to raise the pressure. Engineers tied down our safety valves, the cry of the steam rose to a lunatic pitch. Faster we raced, much faster than any steamboat should have dared. The river was no wider than a boardwalk.

  And my wife was now caught up in the excitement. She clung to the rails, laughing and calling out encouragement to our pilot below, her eyes rolled back in delight. I still fixed my stare on Adelaide, mindless of the wind and pitch of the race.

  You are a wicked man, Eng, I thought.

  I will never act upon it, I thought, because I’d never be a liar.

  As for Sarah, I thought, she’s an untrustworthy back-stabber.

  The boats were shoulder to shoulder now, the smoke from their funnels merging in a great black cloud just overhead, and we were near enough to the passengers of the Mirrorglass to witness their jumping and heaving, the veins that swelled their necks, and in every face the particular ecstasy of competition. As fast as we were going, the Mirrorglass was passing us. The engines of both boats were shrieking for mercy, and the flimsy woodwork of our ship began to creak at the last limit of endurance. “Go! Go!” shouted Sarah and Adelaide. “Go!” Chang shouted, hoping Adelaide would hear that he shared her enthusiasm.

  For a few seconds I looked without bitterness on Sarah’s flushing cheeks and her tittering mouth. How insignificant I must have seemed in the measure of her life. She smiled at the thrill of the race, her hair twisting in the wind, and I was watching as if I had never kissed her or touched her. Her flushed face, her wiry blond hair—how must these have looked when she was in the thrall of girlish love? I felt sorry for her now, this sympathetic woman with stringy hair, her face more wrinkled than when she had loved the slave. When she was caught with him, no one knew the truth except her sister; the Negro had been hanged for it. Sarah knew how to talk to men, certainly she did. How terrible the tumult of emotions she must have been keeping inside her, and how sad.

  My attention was pulled abruptly back to the boat race as wind lashed my face. The Mirrorglass roared more loudly than we did. Bright and innumerable sparks bolted to life on her main deck, a glowing fountain that set a quick fire. Screams flew on the air, horrible and immediate, and a shudder of horror passed over our boat.

  The Mirrorglass flared up and burned as kindling. Her pilot steered away from our boat, toward the bank, but the Mirrorglass did not reach the shore, lurching instead to a groaning fiery stop as it snared on a sandbar. As our Ivory Eagle kept on down the river, the passengers of the Mirrorglass were screaming and plunging into the water, men and women diving from the upper deck into the shallow Mississippi, aflame. An explosion lit the sky, a dazzling holocaust, and the Mirrorglass blew to pieces. Muffled cries and a hundred magnificent comets shot toward the sky.

  The pain of memory needled my heart. Amid the screaming, I had a silent recollection of the bodies of the Siamese dead—Father’s body, and Ping’s, and countless others’—that had clogged the Mekong decades earlier, and again I breathed in the odor, like burning excrement, and though I closed my eyes, the morass of Siamese corpses came horribly into view. But when I look back on our time on the Ivory Eagle, it is not that accident that springs first to mind.

  “Finally, some excitement to get the heart pumping,” Adelaide was saying to no one in particular a few hours after that tragic race. “Of course, it was terrible. It’s obvious to all that it was terrible, but how my heart was going!”

  She, Chang, and I were very uncomfortably in bed in one of the Ivory Eagle’s sleeping compartments—Sarah slept alone in another. And soon, much as they had been fighting earlier, my brother and his wife began having relations; she must have wanted children desperately. But she went about it with unusual zeal. From the candle that was burning, light flickered about their bodies; I did not want to see this, was not sure I could stomach it. If what I wanted more than anything when I was a boy was to be detached and alone, what I wanted now amounted to the opposite: love.

  Adelaide’s hand happened to brush my forearm, which was, admittedly, lying close to the thick, fleshy part of her leg, above her knee. She pulled her hand away very abruptly, shooting a nervous glance in my direction before looking at the ceiling.

  I moved my arm from hers, but as she rocked slightly backward, she touched me again. My thigh this time.

  I thought maybe she was doing it on purpose.

  The sheets felt warm. Adelaide’s skin was ghostly in the semidarkness. Once more, her knuckles brushed me, and gooseflesh rose on my arms and legs. Was it possible she was doing it on purpose? This contact seemed an impossibility coming from Adelaide, and as long as the experience of her skin touching lightly against mine felt so unlikely, it gave me no pleasure. Still, the sensation made everything about me seem unreal, as if in my shocked and half-trance state I were free from my body and from Chang’s, a perception strange and wonderful.

  Had she touched me on purpose?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Fame, and the Movement of Our Hearts

  1826

  New York–Boston–New York

  The night after our first performance in New York, we sat with the promoter Hunter in our room at Mrs. Sachs’s house. He congratulated us on “a good beginning.” Still, he muttered, things needed “to get quite better.”

  “First, our little financial question,” he said, pulling from his pocket a large leather wallet. He took out two bills, unfolded the joined halves, showed the money to us, and put them in his pocket carefully. “These I will send to your mother.” And then he fixed his eye on us strangely. “And now I need to talk with you two,” he said, “for literally about three minutes.”

  Hunter took a hasty step toward us and, winding up, smacked Chang across the face. Chang yelped, fell backward, and I followed, yanked along. We landed, in a stack, on one of the piles of laundry in the opposite corner. I could feel my brother’s chest heave as he fought off tears.

  Hunter adopted the stance of a pugilist posing for a daguerreotype after a match—knees bent
slightly, striking arm still extended, his hand above his head, as if frozen in the last moment of the slap—but his eyes gave him away, especially the left one, in which indecision was magnified through his monocle. Hunter was not comfortable with brutality.

  “Do not contradict me, ever,” he hissed, bringing down his arm to wipe his lips. “Especially not during a performance. If I say you had three parents, you had three parents.”

  Chang and I got to our feet slowly. My brother was moaning.

  “You boys understand me, what?” Hunter asked, a catch in his throat. Meanwhile, Chang and I assumed the tiger and crane positions. Hunter could not keep his eye on us for more than a second. We took a step toward him, another.

  He seemed to realize his size advantage suddenly. He stepped toward us. He was a grown man. We were fourteen.

  But he did not understand much about Chang and Eng. With our smaller girth came a quick agility no adult man could match. Not to mention that we were two, in sailor’s suits maybe, but ready to strike in perfect synchronization. Hunter’s face was mottled red. He was shiny with sweat.

  When I started into my flip, I knew Chang would be doing the same. As one, my brother and I tumbled shoulder-to-shoulder through the air toward Hunter. Each with an arm around the other, we both touched the ground with a hand as we somersaulted to our destination. Hunter likely could have moved out of the way or at least put up his fists in defense. But as Chang and I were cutting circles over the drab fluffy mountains of Mrs. Sachs’s underthings and in the direction of his head, he did neither.

  At the apex of our last rotation, we twisted in mid-flip and kicked at the same time. We had judged the original distance between Hunter and us perfectly, and our kicks—mine angled a bit downward, toward Hunter’s throat, Chang’s straight out, hitting Hunter across the face—struck at the same moment.

  Hunter’s raw, frightened cry buffeted among the peaks and valleys of Mrs. Sachs’s underthings, and by the time Chang and I had alighted on a corset, Hunter was lying on his back with his four limbs in the air, stiff and groaning.

  The door was locked, the window bolted. We could not escape just yet—but this was good news: we could handle him, and that would make for an easier getaway. But for now, we needed Hunter even more than he needed us.

  Chang and I shuffled over to our vanquished master and helped him to his feet.

  The New York newspapermen were smitten with us. The next day’s Herald was one of a bushelful that printed a long editorial about my brother and me.

  We are set to pondering by our Yellow Visitor in two costume sailor suits, about the whims of Dame Nature, and about how men keep score, when they are forced to show the sign of “Two to one,” and hang it over their door? We expected to see them pull their cord in opposing directions—it is for this that the spectacle under the tent in Madison Square is well worth seeing, most especially for learned masters of metaphysics and theology, not to mention divers into other scientific departments. This pretty yellow enigma poses Knotted Questions: What would be the implications for their unholy, double-freak souls were one half to remain a disciple of the Great Buddha and the other half should be converted to the true Gospel? Learned men of the Law, would ye indict two heathens as one heathen? Dare you send little Chang to jail if his brother shall happen to disregard the letter of the Law? Could one half sue its double if a falling out occurred ‘tween the halves? And, metaphysicians: can ye tell us in this case how sorcery can turn dark into light? how Chang and Eng can settle the philosophical quandary of what’s what, who whom? Despite the justified excitement surrounding the unholy, double-freak show, their unholy, double-freak intimacy is repugnant to any strong Christian investigation, and we support the possibility of effecting a separation of the unholy double-freak by surgical operation.

  The morning after our fight, Hunter arrived early and awakened us. He was dressed neatly, the bruises on his cheek and throat not too visible for the most part. Handing us two black suits cut in the Western style, he said, “Hurry and get dressed.” Then he averted his eyes. “We’re going for a ride, if you please,” he said to the floor.

  As we piled into his carriage, Hunter drew the curtains, looked at his pocket watch, and sighed. “It’s seven forty-four,” he said. “I wanted to be on our way by seven-forty. Now, we’ll be five minutes late.” Obsessed by the way one second detaches from another, Hunter corralled each day into precise tracts; the mental fences he was always building seemed painful for him to cross.

  “We are going to a meeting arranged for the press, north of Mount Vernon.” He tried to hide his irritation with a kindly tone as he returned his chronometer to its pocket. “Do you know anything about God?” he asked. “That is something the reporters may ask, what?” He looked again at his watch. Seven fifty-three: time for a smoke. “I remember the exact moment I started to believe,” said Hunter, pulling a cigarette from his coat pocket.

  “I was literally a great runner when I was a boy. Quite a good distance man, I was. Like an Indian, the schoolmaster said.” He traced the outline of the bruise on his throat gently. “Alone on the track, all alone, you are different than other people, what? Not bothered by anything, do you understand?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer; he was trying to teach my brother and me something. “Perhaps I’m not expressing it correctly, but that feeling of solitude, it’s almost a paradox if you think about it, but being so alone in front of all those people showed me that there was something that was all-powerful, in its absence. Does that make sense?”

  “No,” said Chang.

  Hunter ground his teeth. “I’ll get you a Bible,” he mumbled. The heavy scent of tobacco lolled around the carriage.

  “So,” Hunter said, “you had a father.”

  “Yes,” we answered.

  He thought about this for a moment. “You miss him.”

  “Yes,” said my brother immediately; I did not answer as quickly.

  “No,” I lied. Chang turned his head toward mine with a start. The carriage bucked over an unlevel patch of street.

  Once the carriage ride had ended, Mr. Hunter opened the door to see if the street was empty. After a few moments, he ushered us quickly inside a two-story white building, a small college.

  In the center of the Irving Wallace Medical College, a circular observation room was scalloped into concentric, ringed tiers. Beside Hunter and a doctor who wore a white lab coat, my brother and I lay naked on a cold metal operating table within the innermost circle. All but the uppermost rows were filled to capacity with gazers; the press, along with a smattering of medical scientists, sat in the benches that ran along the successively larger ascendant rings. Neither Chang nor I yet saw that there was a familiar face hidden among them.

  Standing near Chang and me, pale, lean-faced Dr. David Rosen was in his forties, tall and thin, a mere skeleton with hair. He had shaggy brows over bright gray eyes, and a fine spray of curls on top of his head.

  “Good men of the newspaper world, fellow doctors, and circus enthusiasts,” Rosen read from a piece of paper with a creak in his voice that belied the ostentation of this display. “The highly respectable gentleman Mr. Robert Hunter wishes me to examine these yellow twins of Siam, in order to ascertain if anything fallacious or indecorous exists in their bondage, a task which I am proud now to perform, under the aegis of God and Hippocrates.” His words carried an echo in this large chamber. Chang shivered at my side; the room was cold, the metal of the table colder.

  “I miss In,” Chang whispered to me.

  A Mr. Nick Reding, of the New York Herald, wrote in the next morning’s paper that the “diminutive-statured doctor” seemed to enjoy having an audience. Reding described how the doctor put his right hand under our connecting band and—with his left—“punched his fist hard against its flank.” The punch hurt. Chang and I screamed; the crowd gasped. Dr. Rosen looked at us and blinked.

  “This bond, it is not particularly sensitive, I don’t think.” The doctor placed
his palms on our chests. He stood motionless for a second, his lips shaping words noiselessly, his sweaty hands moving about us. “The movement of their hearts seems not to coincide.”

  Dr. Rosen’s pale hands were spotted, and crossed with ropy blue veins. His fingers squeezed the bond. “Also, their connection is—more complicated than I expected.”

  He turned his back on us now, to face the crowd. “The . . . link, as I’ll call it, seems to be cartilaginous, a mass somewhere about five inches long at its upper edge. Also it is able to stretch to greater length; it is thicker up and down than it is in the horizontal direction. So it is quite—loathsome to the touch, full of gnarled cartilage below the flesh.” He took a fortifying breath. “Not to forget the web of connecting vessels, lymphatics, abdominal viscera, and small nerves intersecting therein. The boys may share a stomach.”

  The doctor looked even more pale than when he began. “So, I am surprised to find it extremely solid. It’s not as firm on the lower edge, not to forget there’s a single umbilicus, through which passed a single umbilical cord that would have served to nourish the children in the fetal state. It is my opinion that, despite the protests made in print by your colleagues, separation is not the answer. True, that seems the humane solution, but the peritoneal membrane that lines the cavity would rupture the intestines, liver, stomach, and spleen.”

  Hunter smiled brightly: Separation is not the answer. How many times in my life did I have to hear that terrible news?