Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

  “Tell me,” he asked. “What wrong with one drink to delight the occasion? The show over.” His grin was a taunt. “Everyone choosing a drink now and then.”

  “Alcohol makes people unbalanced.” I was too tired for this. “It blackens the crevices of your mind.” How many times had I shown him the scientific evidence?

  “I am having drink.” Even elephants back down. In this way, my decrepit brother was stronger than the mighty beast.

  “The black bubbles hinder the encephalon,” I said, “and with each of your drunken jumps and hurrahs, with every instance of vomiting and hugging strangers in a saloon, you send out shards of hardened blood, shattering your bowels.”

  “I not going to hug anyone tonight.” His breath was like moldy meat.

  Chang called over to Franco Santoro, an Italian immigrant who served as Mr. Wood’s assistant. He motioned for Santoro to get him a drinking glass.

  “Good,” Chang said when the hefty, dark-haired immigrant brought us an oversized glass. I sent the Italian to settle with the ticket booth and to pack up.

  I was doubly angry, not just because Chang knew my feelings about alcohol but also because he seemed to be taking pleasure out of irritating me. I controlled the urge to spit at his ugly face.

  In a blast of memory I saw Chang as he had been, handsome as a young man, with smooth skin, a rich olive complexion, his hair black and shining. Now his complexion had faded.

  Meanwhile, the scotch slid across our connector to work its witchcraft. My brother was drinking more than usual. Already there was the reverberating around the ears like the aftermath of a loud crash. This was the calm that tempts weak souls into the storm.

  Santoro returned, and Chang told the immigrant to get him some more alcohol from our dressing room. Then my twin breathed the sigh of a man who had reached the end of a drawn-out torture. “Please now, Mr. Santoro.”

  Chang’s eyes followed the shuffle of the immigrant, and though my brother seemed to be functioning sufficiently, he was now more a mass of desirous cells than a conscious human. “What you are looking at, Eng?” he asked. “People would think there another fire, by your sad face. Chang just having a cocktail, I am not burning down theater.”

  After a few duplications of that scene—Chang proceeding to guzzle, I to sulk, and Santoro returning with more—my brother grew far worse for liquor. He missed his wife, he said, laughing. “Can you believe that?” (From the Handbook: “The tainted nectar ... denies the learning that usually chaperones sorrow.”)

  The air remained heavy and close onstage. The black bubbles collected like minute marbles around my medulla oblongata, the world lurched off its moorings. I had never felt this drunk. The auditorium smelled of sweat, and was completely empty save for Chang and me.

  “I’d like to go to the hotel, please.” I began the forward motion that signaled to my brother I wanted to stand; he sat rigidly. I snapped back to the settee. My head was lost in inky bubbles.

  “Drink with me, Eng. Why won’t you? Just once, now what about that? Would it be bad”—his mouth was hurrying to keep pace with the effervescence in his brain—“so very much, Eng, to have some drink with Chang?”

  Chang licked his finger and smoothed my eyebrows. The clear light of the lamps behind his head was clouded as if seen through waves of cream.

  “Your breath stinks of hooch,” I said.

  “Yours, too.” He was grinning like a baboon.

  “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  Perhaps what I did next was out of guilt—I did not deny my responsibility for Chang’s alcoholism. And so, despite my hatred for alcohol, and that my brother and I had not enjoyed each other’s company for years, and despite my onetime high honorary position in the North Carolina Ladies Temperance Society, and my disappointment that Chang would slight that position by asking if I’d join him for a drink, I said, kindly, for him, my brother, “All right, Chang.” I felt a fondness for his pathetic skinny face. “For you and only for you, I will try a taste.”

  I put down my book, swiveled, and sat face-to-face with my twin. He handed me his glass. I lifted it to my mouth, and when this cup of alcohol closed in on my face, it thrust a thousand tiny pins inside my nostrils and I recoiled, my nose afire.

  Chang seized the glass before I dropped it. “Maybe I hug someone tonight, after all,” he hissed, and brought the glass before my mouth, tilted it—

  When we fell to the floor in a heap, he was saying “Stop, stop,” his face growing maroon from the pressure my squeezing fingers were applying to his throat. I accidentally rolled onto the glass.

  The pain in the side of my head came as a surprise; he’d gotten me with his elbow. I lost my grip on the choke hold.

  We clambered to our feet, leaning on one another, face-to-face, two sixty-two-year-old men swinging ferociously, but in unison. Chang looked frantic with his ballooned, bloodshot eyes. Chips of broken glass stuck to his pants. He was trying the extended-arm, bent-leg fire-and-stones stance—circling slowly to try to fend off my blows—but I was too close to him. Through the chaos of punches, in the smallest part of an instant I caught a look at my brother’s wrinkled face, weak, tired, angry. My knee to Chang’s ribs threw us backward, his skinny arms flailing.

  We crashed together onto the settee, sounding a dull poof that echoed across the empty theater. We landed in a tangle, old twins wrestling in unnaturally close quarters. And Chang punched me in the face as we fell to the floor. I had known a moment before he threw it that he would punch me—I simply did somehow.

  He shot a knee at my groin, then with his fists he tried to strike my nether half, but he missed, hitting my hips, which caused a blunt pain with each blow. That he was trying for such a sensitive area enraged me; I landed an elbow against the soft bone of his temple, and he moaned, and went limp, bending me back with him. We rolled over, and I grabbed hold of his throat; from below me, he grabbed mine. The force his cold antique fingers managed was surprising; his choke hurt and I was beginning to lose my ability to breathe. I saw his wheezing face only through oscillating black spots. Oxygen could no longer get to my lungs through my windpipe, and I was unable to keep up my own pressure on his throat. He was winning, and I had become the weaker one. I believed it was the end. I felt a chill on the back of my head. I was conscious of each hair on my body and I began to black out.

  But, eyes closing, I could actually hear the bones in Chang’s neck creaking. His strength had begun to course from him to me, and his fingers lost their thrust, and he could not help but let go of my neck. My grip around his throat tightened.

  “P-please,” he was saying.

  I saw, looking at his gasping face, a scene out of memory: when Chang and I were the littlest of children, we had run along the banks of the Mekong, our first unsupervised excursion to the edge of the river. As I kept the pressure on his throat now, we were again children scurrying along the banks in the sun, in my mind we were children running and catching sight of our double-reflection, it must have been the first time. We bent toward the river together, two little boys in the warm wind, stepping on pink snail eggs, peering at our shared image; Chang appeared more near to me in that reflection than I would have believed, closer than consciousness, closer than a whisper. That double-reflection moving in unison on the blinking water had offered so little information about me. My reflection had not been entirely me.

  Now I was putting more pressure on his throat, my fingers slowly sinking deeper into the skin. He had given up fighting back, the only activity in his body was in his eyes, which were pleading for me to stop. I knew I had to let go, but in my brain there trickled something sour that made everything light and clear and I forced the back of my brother’s head harder against the floor. It was he who had kept me from returning to Siam, all those years before.

  “Aahh, ahh,” he said, his face greening.

  Tears, spasms, choked whispered pleas came from Chang. I punched him flush in the face, and he writhed and I punched him again,
and again, as hard as I could I punched his face. We were a pair of attached sixty-two-year-old men inches apart and rolling on the floor. And over the cries of my elderly brother I punched him again until my hands hurt and I felt something crack in his jaw. I kept on, freer from Chang than I had ever felt. His lips and nose were bloody and he had trouble keeping open his eyes. I even hit our band. “Snap,” I said weakly. “Snap.”

  A croak came from behind me: “Stop—stop what you are doing!” The stout proprietor of the auditorium, Mr. Wood, was running toward the stage through rows of chairs. He was frantic, waving one arm while he used the other to keep his white hat from falling off. “You’re grown men!” he shouted around his cigar. Of course we were grown men. We knew that.

  I was lying on top of my brother now, spent, chest-to-chest, his sick, labored breath in my ear, a whisper. “I did a wrong to you,” he whispered.

  Wood ran onstage, and he came to stand beside us, hands on hips, looking down at this aged tangle. “Your brother ain’t looking so good.”

  All the while, Chang was whispering in my ear, “I did wrong....” His murmuring was barbed by such fervor I’d never know for sure whether he was prideful or penitent. With all the emotion of sixty-two years of cinders in his chest, he said to me, “I know everything. Idiot, I knew, I knew, I knew....”

  His whole frame trembled. “You five inches from me all the time,” he said. “You not think I would have eyes to see everything?” He narrowed those eyes at me, and stared long into my face. Next, his features began to warp. “I do things when you sleeping,” he said. “You do things when you think I sleeping.”

  I looked into his red eyes. I was unable to find the words to say anything. My hand under his head, Chang could not move, but he strained to list away from me. “You kill the home in your way.” His voice was not trembling. “I light fire.”

  Chang had had a stroke. It cost him most of the sight in his right eye and paralysis to that side of his face. The skin of his right cheek hung off the bone like wet dough. With that entire half of his body weakened, he was a deadweight to my left, and I was forced to carry a leather strap that supported his right foot as we hobbled along. Chang’s illness affected the workings of his mind, and I began to fear my own dissolution.

  We saw the finest doctors in New York; the best prescription they could design was the application of cold water to the face, arm, and leg—and that brought some very little benefit. But with no real signs of improvement, we left for home. In New York Harbor, my feeble limping brother and I boarded the twin paddlewheel steamer Northern Beacon. Chang was laid up in our berth, and I with him, of course. I was healthy for my age. We’ll go together, I thought. When it’s time for that.

  Chang and I never discussed the fire, nor what happened with Adelaide and me that one lovely awful night. On the Northern Beacon home, I knew the human fundament of misery. My wife, Sarah, whom I may have loved once, and my twin’s bride Adelaide, the woman I have loved more than I thought possible, my children alive and dead, and of course my brother, none of them could I see when I closed my eyes—all these people coalesced in my memory, melting into one form. The one form was that of myself, all I had.

  In my way I have been twice most men in that my life has had two meanings—as a young man I craved nothing more than solitude, and in my old age I longed to be less alone and denied the absence of love. But Father’s philosophy has proved hollow. Not even a Mekong fisherman can diminish the influence of fate.

  Soon the Northern Beacon sailed into the port of Wilmington, North Carolina. We were going home together.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Our First Ever Day in North Carolina

  Monday, December 10, 1842

  Wilkesboro

  Chang-Eng,” the children chanted. “Mutant, mutant.” Chang and I were thirty-one, and just now coming to the end of yet another tour, exhibiting the bond that the public could not see without assuming we were so very different from everybody else. It had been four years since we’d found out Mother was dead, and it was nearly Christmastime. Chang and I were entering a place I had never been, it was called North Carolina. My ear tingled with the nearness of my brother. I was tired of touring, tired of being irritable.

  Why is it he never seems unhappy? I asked myself. Chang stays abreast of change, he reacts to it. His dark eyes showed little reflections of me, and he was smiling.

  Like my brother without care, I told myself, I need only react to life. That will bring me contentment.

  For the first time since arriving in this hard-hearted nation, I experienced a sense of repose traveling in this Southern place, felt the consanguinity between lush, forested Siam and waterless North Carolina, thick with foliage. Appalachia and Siam: sides of the same coin, one dry, the other wet, both green, both utterly natural.

  The dust whisked us toward Wilkesboro, a little town where we were to rest for the evening.

  “Chang-Eng,” the children chanted, trailing our carriage. “Mutant, mutant.” Our buggy bounced into town.

  If my brother is an amenable person, I said to myself, can I not live that way, too?

  Chang had the driver roll us to a stop in Wilkesboro’s dusty square, and the people of Wilkes County rushed at us from every direction, cheering our names, which they’d read on the chipped yellow legend marking the side of our wagon. I felt an odd tenderness for my brother as he waved his patented wave at them all. He loved these people, my brother did. Why am I unable to open myself to the possibility of the same emotion, however unlikely?—any love, love of performing, brotherly love, or even something more burning.

  Main Street was rounded, with a humped center and sloping edges, and it led us across town. We crossed this dusty street side by side, arms over each other’s shoulders, in the calibrated rhythm of our united movement. “Chang-Eng acknowledges you, good people,” said my brother. The crowd had begun to follow us, at a distance. A small number of townsfolk did smile openly at us as we passed, and let escape a friendly giggle whenever Chang waved.

  “Eng,” said Chang. “It is exciting, yes?” With his free hand he smoothed the lapels of his jacket. His face was contented.

  I saw only those who taunted us, and so I disagreed. Chang drew himself closer to me, to wave at the people. Everyone clapped. Chang swung around to face forward again with a grin that spread across his whole face.

  Main Street came to an end at the Yates Inn, a two-story unpainted log house with eyelike windows and a modest front yard overgrown with chokecherry.

  A giant woman sat on the inn’s drooping front porch, fanning herself in the skeletal shade of leafless oaks. Two blond women stood next to her—the pair of daughters long-faced, flat-chested, and stepping on worms with their bare feet. It was the tail end of dusk, the veils of nightfall were only beginning to cover the Eastern sky.

  The taller sister, I later learned her name was Adelaide, stood just slightly out from under the shade of the porch, and the declining sun shone on her fine blond hair, cutting it into elements of gold and pink gold and shadow. I could have been smitten by either one of them at that moment, but it was the taller Adelaide who took me, standing as she was in the fading light and smiling—at me. She blushed and bowed her head, and I felt no body—not mine or his—no attachment. I did not know if this was hope I was feeling for the first time or an equivalent lightning. Chang turned to me, an entreaty—wordless, but complete—floating in his look.

  The smiling girl on the porch moved just to her right to lean against one of the posts. I swore she moved somehow outside the flow of time, leaning slowly, at approximately the pace of the Tower of Pisa—and as she moved, she and her shadow came toward each other to the point of touching. I did not know this blushing woman in the half-light, but I knew I wanted to be like that shadow, beside her. Like a shell opening onto a pearl, my shyness gave way to love. I had a clear sense of who I was, and found myself enveloped in a new-sprung skin of emotion. A bluebird sang in the trees.

  �
�Jefferson,” said the mother, a woman of size and optimism. “Go get your father.” She removed a little gnat that had flown into her mouth. “Tell him I found a pair of husbands for your sisters.”

  Both daughters smiled, both exquisite in their way, showing the world the whiteness of their teeth. My cheeks hurt from grinning. And Chang—oh Chang!—my brother’s happy heart had thrashed so that I could feel its ecstatic thrumming.

  Chang, these memories are yours as well. My poor brother, I am sorry for everything. You are gone now, Chang, and I am no longer incomplete. I love you boundlessly.

  I swear the townsfolk cheered.

  Epilogue

  January 17, 1874

  Wilkesboro

  Chang Bunker has died in his sleep, sometime after midnight in his brother’s house. Eng, who woke to the sight of his twin’s corpse, has said, “Then I too am done.” He has been seized by paroxysms of memory.

  Sarah, the elderly wife, hears the moans and runs to wake her son William. She hurries the boy to fetch the only physician in Wilkes County, Dr. William Cottard. But the boy will not reach the doctor in time.

  Eng is dying.

  Softly, Sarah returns to the frightful bedroom. She comes hesitatingly to stand beside her husband, his chest steeped in sweat. “It will be all right,” she tries to comfort him. “The doctor is coming and you can be alone finally and everything will be all right.” On the desk sits a gift in two parts from Tsar Nicholas.

  His voice a rasp, Eng asks Sarah to rub his arms and legs, which are cold, and she musters the resolve. She soothes his legs, she soothes his arms; she stops. Sarah will not look at him, and then she does. “Would you like me to get Adelaide?” Sarah’s voice does not break as she says this. She could not have spoken more clearly, but Eng acts as if he has not heard. He twists away from her—he draws his brother Chang closer to him. Eng takes his twin into his arms: This is the image Sarah keeps of her husband for the rest of her life. Eng dies.