Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

  “Also, I would only advocate an attempt at separation in the case of the death of one,” the doctor said. “Then it would be worth risking, true, to prevent endangering the life of the other.” He gave our band a slap. “But only then. So in closing, I paraphrase Montgomery: These boys are ‘distinct as the billows, yet one as the sea.’ Thank you, hold your applause. I judge their health to be at present good. It is probable that the confinement of their situation, not to forget the sudden shift from their barbaric habits, will bring their life to a close within a few years. Thank you so much, so now I turn the floor over to your questions.”

  One reporter, wearing a tight-fitting brown suit and holding a little notepad, stood and asked us: “Do you both speak?”

  “Yes, they do,” answered Hunter, leaning with his good ear to the crowd.

  I tried to gain Chang’s attention. What was it the doctor had said about our lives coming to a close?

  As the first reporter took his seat, another man stood.

  “Are they the same age?” asked this one. “If not, which one is older—and by how much?”

  Hunter chuckled. “Yes, of course they are the same—”

  “No,” Chang interrupted. Hunter, surprised, nervous, turned to my brother. The crowd was suddenly transfixed. Chang smiled. “We are not same age. Two years different, because one day I am twenty years old, and Eng will be twenty, too!” I did not know how Chang could joke at such a time. Had he heard what the doctor said?

  The crowd, meanwhile, was laughing as one. Brushing his hand through his hair, Chang was covered in bravado, as a tuna, just netted from the Mekong, is drenched in a skin of gleaming water. But the bravado was bound to evaporate before long. Remembering he was naked, my brother quickly hid his groin with his hand.

  After a few more questions, a man sitting alone in one of the highest tiers rose from his seat and took a step forward, and everyone gasped as he did so. The man wore a red silk cravat over which a great fold of skin drooped. His hair had retreated to the top of his head in two tufts, leaving in its wake a strip of exposed flesh running wide atop his sizable head, out of proportion with the squat face beneath it.

  “Barnum,” whispered Hunter, after which his mouth fell open.

  “I have a question,” this man, P T. Barnum, said in his loud, deep voice. Next to him sat a black-haired man, with a face and skin like ours, and what looked to be a peasant’s frock.

  “Mr. Barnum, I did not know you were here.” Hunter was trying to regain his composure. “Our invitation was extended only to—”

  “Fellows, my question,” Barnum said, his jowl dancing, “is a moral one. . . .” He let his sentence trail off for effect. “I promote acts. Big Frenchie de Bouchamp. Little General Thaddeus Pinky. Strange? Of course. But my acts are Christian men. Foreigners, sometimes. But Christian men. What about these twins? Are these God-fearing attractions? I’ll bet not. Just what are we subjecting the families of New York to?”

  “Yes, exactly what are we doing?” asked a man sitting in a lower tier. With suspicious quickness, this “reporter” had spit out his question just before Barnum finished speaking.

  “Well, yes, they are God-fearing,” said our promoter Hunter. “My attractions are in the process of conversion to the Presbyterian faith, and are set to read the Bible.” Hunter turned his red face to Chang and me with eyes that begged us not to contradict him.

  “Good,” said Barnum. “Interesting to behold, that’ll be.” He smoothed his cravat. “The good newspapers of this fair country have an obligation to follow that. Check on its veracity.”

  Barnum tapped the head of the yellow-skinned man seated beside him. The man stood up and stepped forward: the doctor from Siam who had tried to separate us, now moving restlessly from side to side. He had shaven off his goatee, and looked considerably older.

  Barnum pointed to the physician. “A genuine witch doctor from the city of Bangkok, country of Siam. He doesn’t speak much English. Dr. Lau. Arrived this morning. Barely a word. I got the yellow fellow a ticket myself. Lau says that they grow these double-boys on trees over there. Is that not right?” he asked, and patted the doctor on the arm. The physician looked at Barnum as if the bigger man had spat on him. The promoter tapped him again, harder this time.

  “Yesh,” the doctor said. And he gave his thinning braided hair a nervous tug.

  Barnum said: “And it is also true that they—” Here Barnum paused for dramatic weight, at which point panicky Dr. Lau said “Yesh,” which ruined the tension.

  Barnum continued anyway: “—can in fact be separated.”

  Hunter looked at Dr. Rosen with pleading eyes. Rosen understood, and took a step toward the stands. “Mr. Barnum, I doubt your claims.” The physician pounded a fist into his palm.

  Hunter, smiling, saw his cue. “Gentlemen,” he said, “do you take the word of a witch doctor over an American physician?” The room erupted in laughter. Hunter went on: “I think you would all agree that these boys are not little General Thaddeus Pinky, what?”

  As the last snicker quieted, and before Barnum could think of a reasonable reply, Hunter looked at his pocket watch. “Thank you for joining us for our little spectacle, gentlemen—and Mr. Barnum. But the time has come to take our attractions home.”

  Traveling back to New York City, after hours of riding, the road curved away from the quiet countryside hills and toward an open view of approaching Manhattan. Hunter was asleep. Sitting side by side, Chang and I did not speak to each other, each no doubt thinking about what Dr. Rosen had said—that we only had a few years left to live. Chang’s chin trembled.

  I cleared my throat. “I’m sure that the doctor was just playing his part in their little show. Think, brother, did we have two fathers? No, but isn’t that what they said to make our act ‘better’?”

  After a moment Chang answered in English. “How come you not scared?” He rubbed his chin with a clenched fist. “How much is few years?” His words trembled. “How would it happening if we—die?” Tears were forming in his eyes.

  “What good could it possibly do to be scared?” I said. “Quit crying, now. And why don’t you speak in Thai?”

  “We am in America, what?” He looked over at Hunter as if to indicate I was about to get us in trouble for talking in a non-American tongue. “I am not scared that we’ll die. It just that—” He narrowed his eyes at me and stared long into my face. “Why are you not scared?”

  I turned away from him to look out the window. “Did Father not say that in the next life we would return as something better?”

  The carriage creaked, and not so gently. Chang’s nose nearly swiped my brow as he shook his head. “I am not believing you. Are you idiot enough to think death is a way to get what you want?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. Out the window two sections of a forest opened like a shell onto a narrow clearing as we approached. I could hear Chang’s breathing and feel his stare on the back of my neck.

  “You wanting to be alone,” he said, “that is all you thinking about.”

  He whispered in my ear, with intimacy and surprising tenderness. “How come you never ask if I want to be separate? Do you think I do?”

  I don’t care if you do, Chang, I said to myself.

  “I do not think of it, ever,” he whispered. “Do you want to know why?”

  If I were to speak openly, I thought, I’d say that I would not want a life after death if he were present, that I hated him from time to time, and that now when I closed my eyes I was fantasizing that we were a shell opening, its two halves being let apart. As if even daydreams could not go unshared from him, Chang snorted, “Why try wishing to separate if that not possible?”

  I stared out at the countryside. As we approached dusky Manhattan, I was like some inverse counterpart to Lot, prudent enough to look only behind me, and not to the jumble of firelight and frenzy ahead. What fine, careless rapture it must be to live your days alone, wholly alone.

  “Tomorrow, w
e escape,” I said.

  Fully dressed by the time Mrs. Sachs came in with our breakfast the next morning, we said “Good-bye, missus” as she opened the door, and we slid past her, skipping out into the hallway in our sailor’s suits.

  “What are you boys doing? You’re not allowed to—”

  We had the front door opened—and shut behind us—before she could finish her sentence. My brother and I were going to walk south toward the docks and then find our way back to Siam. That was our plan, such as it was.

  The weather was cool and the air smelled as though it had been sweating. Uptown lay a grassland in the distance upon which a few cows still grazed. Shoulder-to-shoulder we walked south, down one of the spacious cobblestone avenues that was shaded by weeping willows and lined with wooden and brick buildings in varying degrees of completion.

  We came to a populated section of town, and people stopped whatever they had been doing to point at us. Chang and I continued walking, not looking at anybody else, nor even at each other. We passed a newspaper-print house, a tavern with high plateglass windows, an inn four stories tall, a tobacconist, a laundry, a chemist’s shop with its green and red and blue bottles displayed, a locomotive that ran right down the street, a fire tower taller than anything near it. The sun was throwing its harsh glare in shafts on the ground between the shadows of buildings and unlit gas lamps, and I thought that even the daylight was different here, not at all like the soft warm gold of the sun as it slept on the lilac-colored Mekong. We walked down a street whose name I did not catch, with marble estates and granite mountains. Where this avenue crossed Broadway, traffic began to increase dangerously. Policemen stood in the street, helping carriages narrowly avoid collision.

  Even at this time of weekday morning, people were heaped into taverns, drinking. “Just let’s continue walking,” I said, uncertain and improvising (at times I could be impetuous). The atmosphere of general blight had grown worse; the air was impregnated with wretched smells, and drunken fools—men and women—were wallowing in the filth of the ever-narrowing streets.

  “Do we go back to Mrs. Sachs?” Chang’s voice conveyed fear and regret.

  I did not want to go back. Even if the taller and taller buildings now cast shadows more like sections of nighttime across the sidewalk on this clear morning.

  From several of the doorways, great, mean-faced men emerged, shielding their eyes from the morning sun before wagging a finger at my twin and me. This was why I feared people’s eyes, the nuisance of being stared at.

  Now the entire street noticed the conjoined boys, and a community crowded around us in a circle. Chang’s forearm behind my head felt heavy, like the arm of a deadfall.

  We continued scuddling ahead, and the circling crowd moved with us. People began piling out of doors to join the circle, and those who did not screamed from the inside of buildings.

  “Look at the people.” Chang was suddenly smiling, his eyes as far from me as Siam. He began to wave to the people like he was greeting friends. I recoiled from the muttering crowd, but Chang responded to the noise, drifting toward it, and—for the first time since we were children—my brother and I tried to go in opposite directions, and we almost lost our balance as our band smacked us together.

  A loud huzzah erupted. Maybe the crowd took our awkward lack of harmonized movement as proof that our condition was not a hoax. A call came for “The Siamese boys!”

  “They know us!” Chang said (Hunter had been hiding the truth; without realizing it, we had become very famous while we had been cloistered in Mrs. Sachs’s apartment). The hoop of people crowding around us grew.

  The human circle closed in. I caught the eye of one boy who stood directly in front of me, snub-nosed, flat-browed, dirty, and with the dull little ugly black eyes of an old man. He walked backward on his heels under the sunny sky, the calm breeze stirring his collar. The coat he wore was too large for him, and his hat was perched at such an angle that it barely stayed on his head.

  This boy stepped toward me, touched our band, shrieked in mock horror, and then ran into the heart of the laughing crowd. People behind us started scampering ahead to get a look. The circle closed in on itself. A hundred hands, two hundred, grabbed at my brother, pulling back his shirt to get a look at our body. And then it all moved in, punching.

  A lost animal would have perhaps been shown some kindness; we had to kick and to claw, two teenage boys felling six or seven with each blow, but it wasn’t enough. The crowd swallowed us, the air around us went black, and we were knocked unconscious.

  This was New York, and Captain Coffin had been right; neither she nor we were ready for the other.

  My brother and I awakened in a police station, having been taken into a third-class waiting room. We made an interesting problem for the police. The law as interpreted in Manhattan trains an officer of the peace to apprehend burglars, or to harass moldy tramps—what was the protocol for handling a bruised double-boy? The reporters arrived just before Hunter did.

  Chang had trouble keeping his eyes open, and when the police helped us to our feet, we found it hard to stand.

  We told Hunter we had just been going out for a walk, wanting to see New York.

  He shook his head. “A man gets what he deserves, and maybe a double-man gets double, what?”

  Still, the publicity generated by our beating would be precisely what we needed, Hunter said. He was right. Our notoriety grew with each performance. A few more shows in New York and then it was up to Boston for a week’s stay at the Exchange Coffee House.

  The shows in Boston—which, after New York, we found a little underwhelming—went well, as did our conference with the local press, at which a reporter from the Daily Courier asked if we felt particularly close to one another.

  “I thinking we about five inches close,” Chang said.

  After the press conference we returned to the Tremont Hotel (its eight toilets were the first of their kind in a public building in America—it took Chang and me, face-to-face, and then side to side, quite some time to navigate that device). We slept on the floor of Hunter’s room, and before allowing us to retire for the evening, Mr. Hunter sat down, a solemn look across his face. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then stopped to clean his monocle.

  “You have been steady fellows, boys—literally superb,” he said. “If things continue and I remain satisfied, we will work out fine together. Here are four dollars,” he said, holding up a black velvet change purse. He smiled as if he loved us and returned the purse to his pocket. “I don’t want any of this business about you going into the streets on your own, so I’ll hold on to these wages, eh?”

  I opened my mouth to ask a question.

  “—Your mother has been sent her share of the money.” Hunter sounded irritated.

  My brother started to say something, but Hunter held up his hand to silence him. Hunter’s eyes flashed. He seemed about to stand but remembered himself, and instinctively he brought his fingers tenderly to his throat. He looked like one of the drunks who had come from the taverns of New York to flog us in the middle of the day (I was developing a hatred for alcohol even then).

  With all this talk of Mother, I thought of her for the first time in—oh, I don’t know—minutes. Her hazel eyes, her dark hair, and her reedy convincing frame. I felt a sort of gladness, too—at the thought of the improvements the money we were sending her would bring. Perhaps she had moved from the riverbanks and into a village, and it could be that she had gotten rid of Sen, and maybe she was happy again.

  “Where is In?” Chang asked.

  “Eh?”

  “Duck.”

  Hunter bent his head quickly, as if he had thought Chang was issuing a command.

  “Your pet?” he recovered, smoothing his hair as he brought his head back to its normal position. “The creature is safe with me.” Hunter wiped a bit of perspiration off his right eyebrow. “I’m having a trip out tonight. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you not to leave the hotel, nor even
to open your window shades, what?”

  We heeded his warnings, and went to bed early.

  Before I dozed, I turned to my brother. “Chang?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t you want me to help you with your English?”

  He blinked at me. “Help why?” he asked. “My English no bad, what?”

  We wished each other pleasant dreams and went to sleep.

  Though our Boston shows drew ever-larger crowds, generated increasing newspaper ink, and, thanks to our expanding ticket sales, brought forth even a few smiles from Mr. Hunter, I was doing poorly in my attempts to pretend to be content.

  Chang would chat playfully with any splinter who would break off from the body of the crowd to speak to us. “Back in line,” he’d joke, “or you have to join us.” He entertained the reporters and talked in soothing tones to the frightened schoolchildren (wan-faced nitwits) brought to see us as part of their science studies. “Do you know where Siam is?” Chang would whisper. “It beautiful, but not like America.” And his face would beam when he made jokes with the contingent of Massachusetts-based doctors who in their white lab coats visited the Exchange Coffee House in a gaggle—they quacked and poked our band, and quacked again while they jotted notes. At this point Chang picked up the title “the More Dominant and Charming of the Two,” while I lapsed into periods of despair and even complete disgust. This was a wretched career, we were not seeing any of the benefits of our success, and I yearned for home.

  When we got back to New York and Mrs. Sachs’s, the widow began to treat us better. She began to serve us, along with our usual bread, maple syrup that coiled around our spinning forks and slithered in a golden mass down to our hands, where it stickied our suddenly delicious fingers. Then she showed us into her water closet, handed us a bar of English soap—black as tar—and after she left, we bathed in her collapsible tub. I found nothing suspicious in the improved way Mrs. Sachs treated us. We had not seen her spying daughters in many nights, either.