Free The Secret History of Las Vegas by Chris Abani Page A

handkerchief and handed it to her. It was pretty threadbare, but clean, and if she noticed its condition, she said nothing. She dabbed delicately around her lips with it and handed it back.
    Later, he walked her back to class, and then after, naturally, easily, to her car. They stood in the gloom of the car-park lights, lingering, neither wanting to go home, it seemed.
    Yet the next day, in class, it was as if none of it had happened. She was still very polite to him, but nothing more, until a week later, when they happened upon each other in Gogo’s, which was the only neutral space in the city, where all races could interact without fear or concern.
    Returning to the present moment, he placed the fruit and raw fish on a stoneware plate garnished with ginger and then cleaned up.
    He took the food to the living room, crossed to the sectional, and flopped in front of the fire, over which hung a large print of a William Kentridge painting,
Felix in Exile
. Reaching for the remote control on the coffee table, he turned down the fire and turned on some music—Chopin’s Nocturnes in E Minor. He ate quickly, barely taking in the view that spread fourteen floors below. When he was finished, he fetched the rather thick file from the sideboard, adjusted his glasses, and began to read.
    There were two theories about how conjoined twins are formed—fission and fusion. Fission theory postulated that conjoined twins occur when a fertilized egg begins to split into identical twins, but is somehow interrupted during the process and develops into two partially formed individuals who are stuck together. Fusion theory argued that conjoining happens after an egg has split into two distinct but identical embryos and that the joining is a result of early cellular development in embryos in close proximity.
    A human embryo in its early stages consists of three layers of cells that seek out cells of the same type and use these stem cells to build organs and the rest of the body. When identical embryos lie in close proximity, such as in the case of identical twins, these cells can have mixed signals, which cause them to attach to the cells of the same type but that are already part of the twin embryo.
    Sunil rubbed his eyes and skimmed the rest, letting only the major classifications jump out at him. Craniopagus twins are joined at the head. Thoracopagus twins are joined at the upper chest, usually from clavicle to sternum. Omphalopagus twins are joined at the abdomen from their groin to their sternum, resulting in a shared liver and even parts of the digestive tract. Xiphopagus twins are joined at the sternum but only by cartilage, like the famous Chang and Eng, and only rarely share organs. Ischiopagus twins are joined at the front of the pelvis and at the lower spine, with their spines twisted at a 180-degree angle from each other. These twins can have three or four legs between them; the third leg in these tripus cases is a fusion of two legs that didn’t separate. Ischio-omphalopagus twins have spines joined in a
Y
shape, three legs, and a single set of genitalia; and on and on, in a seemingly unending list.
    Sunil thought that it all read like a bizarre biblical genealogy, or the taxonomy of dinosaurs. He understood only too well this need to classify; that had been the backbone of apartheid.
    At the back of the file he found a reference to Edward Mordake, a nineteenth-century Englishman with no recorded birth or death dates. He was unusually handsome and gifted as a scholar and musician. He had a second face growing out of the back of his head. This other face, rumored to have been female, wasn’t fully functional and couldn’t speak or eat. But it could laugh and cry and its eyes would follow people around a room. Edward claimed that this devil twin, as he called it, whispered awful things to him at night while he tried to sleep. He begged to have it removed, but no doctor would agree to the risky operation. Finally