“Salt,” I said.
“Salt,” echoed my brother, though not as well around the / as I had.
The crew, of course, laughed. The Captain licked his palm and nodded. “Good,” he said in his weird Thai.
From that evening onward, whenever he was free of the burdens of command, Coffin was at our side, teaching us English and walking the two decks. If he was occupied, the crew would take to educating us. Despite our newness to the language, they taught Chang and me to play checkers.
Why did they all wear vests and coats—surely they were not all royalty? Did they never eat rice? Why were they so pale? Were their hands so clumsy that they needed to use knives and forks?
These questions were slow in the answering, because Chang and I spent most of our time at play in our cabin, on our bed—which was about six feet by four feet, attached to the wall. The cabin was situated in annoying proximity to the clanging handbell of the poop deck. Our only possessions were our clothes, our pet In, and the jade dragon King Rama had given us.
Passing the hours, learning English, learning checkers, I was kept occupied and fell into a kind of numbness. Every few hours, each time a surprise, my homesickness opened its eyes and rose again to life, and there was nothing but the familiar agony. “We need to think up a plan,” my brother said, his face filled with wanting, “about how to get back home.”
Yes, he was right—a plan. “As soon as we get there, we will figure a way to escape,” I said. We would work together and return to the Mekong before we knew it, he said.
But, my brother, it is my very togetherness with you that ruins everything, I thought.
“Eng?” Chang asked. We were alone playing checkers one night before bed. I heard my own softened voice say: “We are going to be fine, brother.”
Chang’s eyes fell to his lap, and he put his hand on top of our connecting band. The game was positioned midway between us, and as we were unable to sit far enough apart to station ourselves at opposing ends of the board, our sideward view gave my brother and me a complete enough picture of the contest easily to defeat the sailors we often played. But now it was just the two of us at the board; he slid his lone king into a position that would surely lose the game for him. I corrected his move, sliding his piece into position to jump three of my checkers. He did not look up as I did so. The ship rocked, her hull creaking and cables singing.
That night we slept soundly, and I dreamt Chang and I were dressed in white, lying on a white bed in a white room; hundreds of fat pink twigs were poking at us, into our chests, stomachs, eyes, into our band.
I awoke with a start, unsure where I was, but I saw Captain Coffin standing over us, his pointer finger extended and hovering just over our ligament. Behind the Captain stood a sailor holding a dim candle and a journal.
“Hmmph?” Chang muttered, opening his eyes. My leg began to cramp under my brother’s. His body next to mine felt strangely small; this cabin was not my home.
“Back to sleep now, double-boy. No one was ever here,” Coffin whispered in Siamese. He and the sailor backed out past the porthole, which was rimmed with sea salt and moonlight. Our duck In awoke and began to quack in the corner.
I had picked up enough English to piece together what the Captain had recited to the sailor on their way out: “Experiment A: When one twin is touched, both awaken simultaneously.”
“As soon as we arrive in New York, understand?” I said to Chang.
“We will be back home soon,” he said.
Early the next morning, as sunup was starting in and the sea just applying its sunshine rouge, Chang and I stood at the center of a ring of sailors. I tried to concentrate not on the situation at hand but on the lone cloud fenced in, from our viewpoint, by the random corral of the Sachem’s masts and cables. Directly in front of me, the situation at hand: Captain Coffin, and, next to him, a sailor holding a thick rope. The sailor had a neck thick as a pontoon and a great living puff of white-blond hair. Around us, every face in the circle was stupid with anticipation. The sailor’s rope was wrapped around our connecting band like thread over a spool.
The Captain wore his pants pleated and white in the summer sun. He held his white-gloved hand high over his head. “On my signal, Mr. Lawrence,” he said. He seemed twice as tall as the sailor.
“Aye, sir.” The blond Mr. Lawrence could almost be called a boy. His face sweaty and sallow from sea- or heat-sickness.
“Now,” said the Captain, dropping his hand.
I took a quick breath and held it. I dug my nails into Chang’s shoulder, as he did into mine. My brother squeaked as the sailor tugged the rope. Come apart! I thought. Come apart!
“Gave it a sharp yank, did you, Mr. Lawrence?” the Captain asked. I opened my eyes and exhaled.
“Aye, sir.”
“And again, Lawrence.”
Another tug. Squeak. And a burning feeling.
I panted. The lone cloud overhead was impaled on the mizzenmast.
The Captain turned his attention to Chang and me. He fiddled with his monocle. “Double-Boy, did you feel that?” In his wobbly Thai.
“Yes,” my brother and I answered.
“Would you characterize the sensation as ... uncomfortable?”
“Yes.”
“Would you say painful?” He tilted his head toward us as he spoke, as if he wanted his face physically to accompany the words as they left his mouth.
“Yes,” we said. My brother’s eyes were glassy. “Yes,” he repeated.
Captain Coffin considered this for moment, scratching his whiskers thoughtfully. The rope still chafed our skin, though the sailor held it less than taut.
“Mr. Smithers!” the Captain called. A skinny sailor stepped forward from the circle, carrying a journal. “Smithers, note that neither twin completed the experience free of pain.”
The Captain turned to us. A wide smile crossed his face. The crew nodded their heads, turning to one another approvingly like relatives after the birth of a healthy baby. One sailor applauded, realized he was the only one doing so, then stopped abruptly.
The Captain touched Chang and me on our cheeks. “I am very tall, and perhaps that is why the only thing that has ever loved me besides the sea is the sky. But the whole of the New World will love you.”
We were again free to roam about the ship.
And roam we did; the decks were the only playing field available. Our synchronicity had become a delight to the crew, and often they played games with us, mostly in good fun. One sunny day found us scampering at the stern of the ship, on the poop deck above the main deck. We were being chased around the fore-topsail mast by Mr. Lawrence, the sailor whose disheveled hair looked like a tousled white lapdog stretched from his scalp to his neck. Other sailors stood here and there, shirtless, blond mostly, doing work scrubbing or folding cloth and ropes. They looked up to smile at us. “Get the Chinamen, crony,” they laughed as Chang and I, never out of step, fretted our way through the labyrinth of men and ropes and masts and rails. I could hear my brother almost chuckling through his heavy breathing when suddenly we came to an open hatch in the deck.
What happened next was as natural as birdsong in a North Carolinian wood, but it left the sailors openmouthed, as if we had lifted the very ship in our hands. When conjoined people are running and suddenly there is nothing underfoot but twenty feet of uninterrupted air, a moment’s disharmony—when one twin hesitates and his brother jumps—could mean death.
But it is different with Chang and me. Our intrinsic appreciation of one another’s body creates a spark in our shared blood that smooths differences and brings the universe into our own current.
The two of us vaulted together with the grace and harmony of a bounding deer and its reflection in a still pond, clearing the open hatchway in unison and landing safely on the far side to continue our run. A look over our shoulders revealed that our pursuer was standing before the hatch, wheezing and resting his hands on his knees.
Mr. Lawrence was the one
who had become chiefly responsible for teaching us English. Every day after breakfast, he would come in and sit on our bed and read to us. He was not much older than we were—maybe four years older—and very tall and unsophisticated. He’d instruct us by drawing simple concepts on a pad: the word “house” and then a crude representation of that idea.
He sat there for what must have been hundreds of hours while we lay on the bed. Chang complained of a toothache and learned slowly, and I waited for my brother to pick up what I had grasped hours, days, weeks earlier. The ship would rise, and my porthole—with the sun setting in its lowest quadrant—looked like a guillotine after a beheading.
Once Mr. Lawrence had had to repeat the word “examine” more than a hundred and fifty times before Chang understood it, and “help” at least two hundred, and I began to hate English not only because it was an odd tongue spoken by strange-looking men from a land that I was unhappy to be visiting, but also because of the slug’s pace at which I had to learn it.
As soon as we get there, I told myself, I will devise our escape.
The evening of one of our lessons, when my brother and Mr. Lawrence were bringing to an end an hour-long dialogue that consisted of the word “house,” I felt some shift in the position of our vessel as it sailed, and even through the hull I heard the buzzing excitement of the crew outside.
“We are dropping anchor soon,” said Lawrence. “Anchor.”
“Anchor,” parroted Chang. I could hear the shouts of the sailors as they crowded each other and leaned on the mahogany rails. Laughter too.
“St. Helena,” said Lawrence. “We’re at St. Helena. It’s an island.” He started to sketch the ocean on his pad, and then drew a dot.
“Herena-it’s-an,” said Chang. “It’s-an.”
The Captain entered our cabin, the smoking meerschaum bowl of his pipe in his fingers. He wore his deep blue captain’s coat spotless and pressed, his monocle fixed in his eye socket as if by magnetism; Coffin seemed dressed for some formal event. He was too tall for the cabin.
“You are relieved, Mr. Lawrence. Go.”
The Captain brought the nub of the lacquered pipe stem between his teeth, dragged, then withdrew it and aimed the stem at us.
“This will be the last conversation you have that is not in English,” he said in Thai. “Even amongst yourself. It is important you can speak the language well when we get to New York.” The pipe smoke filled our cabin, smelling like a flower bed in smoldering decomposition. “Do you understand, Double-Boy?”
“I can’t sleep, and my tooth hurts,” Chang said in Thai, rubbing his eyes. “What is New York like?” The wings of his nostrils were raw and glistening.
“You are easily excited, little half,” the Captain laughed. Then he began to speak in English: “The city of New York is like the Garden of Eden.”
We both looked to him for help. Coffin put his hands on our shoulders and bent his huge bulk forward as if he were leaning over the deck rail, and he stared at the wall as if it offered a delightful view. He was back to speaking our tongue: “New York is radiant.” And then again in English: “A great eddy of terra-cotta and stone.”
“What are we to do there?” I asked.
And the Captain raised his eyebrows, parted his lips. “You are to do nothing.” He brought the pipe to its home in his mouth like he was doing it a favor. “And the world will watch.”
Coffin turned and went out, presumably to the island of St. Helena, in the Atlantic Ocean, some 3,500 miles west of Siam.
Once again, Chang and I were left to lie alone together
Eight months had passed at sea. The captain was letting us spend our afternoons and evenings in the crow’s nest atop the main mast. Solid on the crown of the sail pole, the crow’s nest contained a comfortable seat, and a leather rack for maps and speaking trumpets. The crow’s nest was where we were sitting when we saw our future.
It was the early watch; the sky was darkening with eveningtime. Below, the seamen were standing in a cordon near the taffrail, looking out into the distance. Only the occasional flap of a sail broke the silence, or the infrequent rasp of the advancing keel.
A rangy seaman named Tyrone Miller who was slouched against the after-hatches jumped straight up and called out, “Hark! Do you see it?”
After traveling seven thousand, five hundred and twenty nautical miles, the Sachem was approaching New York Harbor.
Even after two hundred and fifty days at sea with Captain Coffin, we were not prepared for the first sight of Manhattan. As much as we would come to see in our traveling life—and within a short time Chang and I would seem always to be on the move—nothing would ever compare to that moment.
The shoal on the horizon came into view. I had never seen a city lighted up before.
As the Sachem curved around in a long arc toward the city, her bow gliding past flat Brooklyn, Chang and I climbed down to the deck to get a better view: a glowing city of narrow concrete mountains stretching sixty and seventy feet to the sky! With their steep wedge-shaped walls and sooty cupolas and with their glass windows, these roughcast peaks were blinking from summit to base with the reflections of streetlamps.
Burning piles of wood formed a string of pearls up and down the docks far into the night; with flanks steaming, enormous animals called horses pulled queer conveyances along the waterfront. “Look at it!” Chang was bouncing us up and down. “It’s wonderful!”
I disagreed. It was the buildings, the very solidity that the city conveyed, despite being right on the water, and the pervasive grayness of the place—the smokestacks exhaling gray breath; the gray leafless trees slouching up from the gray concrete in the gray evening; the smoke that fled the burning piles of wood; the clouds, gray in the receding light, hiding in the clefts and angles of this tall horizon—that led me to imagine Manhattan as a herd of freakish elephants that assembled to congeal in stone along the water’s edge.
We were standing by the Sachem’s mast, wrapped in a blanket—even at Rama’s palace we had never seen glass windows before, or brick, or a horse—as the skysail poles sailed into the spires of the port. Where were the junks? I wondered. There were none. Even at the docks, people sat on benches, strolled idly, they rode in carriages, four-in-hands, or in crowded streetcars. And oddest of all were the elegant, well-fed, well-dressed, white-skinned men and women loitering, come to watch the ships. On the far side of the spyglass that I was pressing to my eye, ladies held lorgnettes between their fingers, gentlemen sat balancing silver-topped canes over their knees. When could we go home?
The Sachem’s sailors were readying to lower our sails on their masts, and, with her foresail swelling like Captain Coffin’s whiteshirted breast, the ship slithered into place in the landing pier. The Sachem’s decks moaned with the lowering anchors, her unfastened chains squealed toward the ground, and her sailors began to cheer.
At our side, the Captain laughed and grinned at our disbelief. “This is New York.” His great cheeks were quivering. “Neither you nor she is ready for the other.” He did not look thrilled so much as frightened. “That will change.”
Captain Coffin had us ushered off the Sachem under a blanket. When the cover was lifted, Chang and I found ourselves beside the Captain on a darkened stretch of dock, beside stacks of crates and bales, out of the sight of any passers-by From out of the shadows, a man came toward us.
“Well?” Coffin asked the gentleman when the latter reached us. “Was I not telling the truth about our boys?” There were four of us now standing in the shadow of the ship’s hull, which was a deeper shade of darkness against the sable night.
The Captain lit a match and held it near our connecting ligament. Mr. Hunter screwed up his eyes, touched the ligament, smiled. “Yes, people will come in droves.” He was a tall, lean middle-aged man who wore a neck cloth and gaiters.
I could feel Chang growing antsy. We stroked each other’s shoulders. In, our pet duck, was inside a basket at our feet and starting to quack. I looked aro
und at all the shadows; how would we escape?
“Quiet that duck.” Coffin looked back and forth, making sure no one could see us, and he shook his match until its flame died.
“Hello, mister,” my brother blurted out, his l’s bending under his heavy accent.
“I am Eng,” I said, “and this is Chang.”
The man answered, “Hello, double-boy. I am Robert Hunter.”
Coffin started to belly-laugh. “Hello, my golden egg.”
Both men cackled. Perhaps we could stow away on one of these ships?
“Hello, life of velvet and clover,” Hunter said to my brother and me, once he caught his breath.
“And how do you do, you fluke of my good fortune?” The Captain was giggling now. As well as bouncing a bit.
And now it was Hunter’s turn: “Hello, millions in the bank!”
And the Captain: “Salutations, my heavy purses of Fortunatus!”
“And good morrow, answer to my prayers of cash and coin!”
“Pleased to meet you, loaves and fishes fallen into our laps like manna! ”
“Good evening, argent fait le jeu!”
“Come and relax your bonnet on my chair, you happy combination of fortuitous circumstances!”
“Greetings, you good bet on ice!”
“Why, hello there, my twin pot of gold!”
“Welcome to New York, my coupled wellspring of boundless booty!”
Both men laughed and laughed, until Hunter recovered command of himself, looked at his pocket watch and said: “All right, literally enough of this.”
Coffin left us in Hunter’s hands, and we said good-bye to the Captain.
Hunter’s horse-drawn carriage took us through the vivid agitation of nighttime in New York. We clip-clopped up Broadway (it was like a Mekong in cobblestone), past the green-shingled Cortlandt Street ferry house and the marble City Hall building, which had on its roof a miniature skyline of turrets, columns, and gables. We passed the towering Franklin House Hotel with its countless windows, which gave onto Bogert’s bakery with frosted cakes on display. Landmarks passed in sequence, the stone and brick of Hanover Square followed by stately Putnam Booksellers, followed by the squat gray theaters on Chatham Street, each flying its own flag. Theatergoers, top-hatted and white-gloved, their complexions so much fairer than our own, had gathered to compare the evening’s entertainments.
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