The Wonders Read online

  “But what you do now isn’t so different. If it was so hard, why make a career of it?”

  “I don’t deny it’s a punishing life, the traveling circus. At six years old I was working the ring. Each night I did a five-minute cameo as a clown. Tiny and decked out in big shoes and a pink frizzy wig, I stepped into the ring and the whole crowd went awww. All I had to do was run around being chased by two clowns in a bull suit, with the audience screaming for my safety. A trapeze artist swung down from the sky and scooped me up to the cheers and shrieks of the children. That was my act. And that’s the pull. That was where I learned what it is to be loved by the crowd. You’ll soon understand it too, Leon. There’s nothing like it. It’s what sends the famous mad. The huge chasm between being the object of pure hysterical adulation and spending the rest of the time the same way as every other mortal, squeezing your pimples and being disappointed by the people you love.

  “I knew when I set up the Wonders that it shouldn’t be a circus, but I wanted to bring elements of a circus to it, the things missing from the entertainment of today—so flat and easy and fake. That’s why the logo, Leon. I wanted to bring radiance, humor, aching tiredness and satisfaction and pain and mystery and the knowledge that the performers would have to do it all again tomorrow. Hard physical work makes humans sing. My father taught me that as well.

  “When you sit on the wooden strutted seats in the audience at the circus looking up, mouth open like a flycatcher, what you see in the air above you, flying in bird formation, are tiny delicate trapeze artists in sparkling costumes. The girls standing on ponies that canter around the ring seem to be made of glitter and air. That is part of the magic. Get up close—these people are muscular and thickset and have bunions and bad teeth. They’re sinewy but can bend themselves over backward without a thought. They’ve got unbreakable will. That’s what you need to make it in the business.

  “And that’s the other thing, Leon. If you think about the ones I chose—you, Kathryn, Christos—what linked you wasn’t only the bizarre transformation of your bodies. It was the immense pain, the long tedious recovery, the endurance and determination that kept you all alive. You may look fragile. I was never fooled. You three have gone through so much already—you are the toughest people I know.”

  She stretched over to the side table and picked up her phone.

  “For a while I actually considered calling our show the Enchanted Circus, in memory of where I came from. Even now I can’t see sawdust on a floor without my heart contracting. I’m an old woman, Leon, but I still miss the dirt and the aching muscles and the cowboys and trapeze wires and corny music and the sticky sweet smells. And my father. That cruel old bastard, I miss him still.”

  She switched on the phone and began downloading information. The conversation was over. It was the longest speech Leon had ever heard her give. It occurred to him that Rhona probably felt like a freak sometimes. She’d grown up in a world so alien to his that she might have come from another planet. Perhaps every human being was a freak. Hadn’t he read that every person has at least a handful of damaged genes? That all humans embody a myriad of nature’s mistakes?

  LAUNCH DAY WAS approaching, and Kyle and Rhona had drawn up a list of questions that were not to be asked by journalists or interviewers.

  “Members of the media will always try to slither around and pose a question you don’t want to answer,” Rhona told the three weary Wonders, who sat lined up opposite her like puppies at obedience school. One distraction and she could lose them. “I’ve seen it all in my time as a producer. You need a few techniques to divert the conversation. The reporters will be given these lists well before they meet you so they can prepare other questions. If they go off script, smile. Shake your head. Talk about how much you love the city you’re in and how welcome they’ve made you feel. Or answer the question you wanted them to ask.

  “So, the forbidden topics. Christos, as we discussed, we will not mention your age. You’re still a young man, but you’ve got ten years on these two. You know, we all know, youth is what the public and the media love, so we’ll simply avoid the subject. You can get away with a few years anyhow with that olive skin. I also won’t let the interviewers bring up anything to do with religion. I know the name Seraphiel will flush out a few religious nuts and the press will try to make something of it, but it’s a good name, a powerful stage name, and we’ll avoid all mention of religion to damp down any of that kind of thinking. Is that okay with you?”

  “Yes, I understand. So can I go now? I need to rest.”

  “No, you can’t go yet. You all need to know all the points because if the reporters can’t get an answer from you, they’ll try the others. So when I say don’t talk about religion, I mean nobody talks about religion. You need to know every single point on the list, and never, ever answer a question that starts with ‘I heard that . . .’ or ‘Rumor has it that . . .’ They’re fishing.

  “Leon, obviously the number-one question they’ll not be allowed to ask is anything about the mechanical heart surgery. Procedure, location, personnel, don’t tell them anything. We’ll do the reveal at a time and place to be decided by me and Kyle for maximum effect. You’d better not have told anyone yet, Leon, because that is the last bit of information we need. It’s our final meal ticket.

  “The second verboten topic is how you maintain your heart. We don’t want you talking about medications or exercises or medical appointments. It makes you sound feeble. You’re not an invalid, you’re a Wonder. And the third one. No talk about your love life. You’re not trained up enough yet to answer that one smoothly. You’ll blush, you’ll stutter, you’ll end up with every single woman in the known world knocking at our door to propose marriage to you. Give it another couple of months, once you’re better with the media, then we can drop this one off the list.”

  Leon shrugged, trying to seem insouciant. Strange women proposing marriage to him? He’d only ever had two girlfriends and they didn’t last. He felt the rise of blood to his cheeks as he remembered the second girl lying stiffly on the bed while he pushed into her, and the way she would roll off the bed and hurry to the bathroom, shielded in a sheet or a piece of clothing, as soon as he had finished. “Is there anything you’d like me to do for you?” he’d asked several times. She smiled and told him it had been lovely. After two months she’d said she didn’t want to see him anymore because she was too busy at work.

  “Look,” Rhona said to Christos and Kathryn. “He’s blushing already and no one’s even asked him a question.”

  If only there was some treatment to stop a man blushing. It was as if shame was an essence carried in the blood.

  “Kathryn has asked that we do not discuss her family or her ex-husband. I think we can all respect that. Family includes the possibility of children. We’re not having some women’s mag hack roll out the usual questions about kiddies and a family. Secondly, no talk about sheep.”

  Kathryn broke in. “Exactly. So, I’m woolly. I’m not a damn sheep. I never want to hear the word ‘sheep’ spoken about me again. Lady Lamb is a pretty name. Lady Sheep sounds like a car-seat cover.”

  “And these two probably don’t realize, Kathryn, because they don’t see the mail you’re already getting, but there’s to be no talk about animal protection societies, animal cruelty, animal liberation, other animal-related causes or organizations. They think that because Kathryn’s got wool, she should be patron of the Save the Polar Bear Society of South Wisconsin. We have to keep the public on the other side of the privacy fence. And the media too. Big walls, that’s what we want. Walls of silence and privacy, the public seeing only what we give them. Crazies keep out.”

  Leon looked up at the giant louvers outside the windows, which were folding with the grand and slow momentum of the sun. Outside, in the rambling estate with its green canopies and wandering animals, its replanted indigenous understory and its old enclosures now becoming overgrown, the birds and the ground dwellers were settling to roost a
nd sleep as they did every night when the light dimmed to a dusky blue and the earth began to cool. They followed ancient trails and lived in ancient unchanging ways. Whereas inside the house, despite its calm aesthetic and rich furnishings, there was no old way. Everything was new and untried, even the bodies they inhabited. Leon’s sporadic lurches of misgiving, like he was experiencing right now, may have been a reaction to the new place, the new life, the new sphere, let alone his new body. Or perhaps he was unnerved by the way Rhona and Kyle talked about the audience and the media as if this was war and they were enemies to be outmaneuvered, barricaded out or ambushed.

  “So we are finished?” Christos curled forward in his chair and groaned. “My back is torturing me tonight.”

  “Ah,” Rhona said, tapping her screen. “Nearly forgot the last one. Christos being gay. We don’t talk about it.”

  “Because?” Kathryn asked. “Aren’t you out and proud, Christos?”

  “Because most of his fan base will be women, and we don’t want to disappoint them.”

  Christos levered himself off the chair and pressed the heels of his hands into his lower back. “My sexuality is irrelevant to my art. There is no need to bring it up. Now I must go and lie down.”

  “Not irrelevant to the disappointed women,” Kathryn remarked before she too collected her things and left the room.

  Leon paused in front of Rhona on his way out. “Rhona, I’ve been thinking. I’m not sure how good I’ll be at this. I’m not like the other two. They’re so confident—”

  Rhona rapped her rings on the wooden arm of the chair. “Get with it, Leon. This is a job, and you’re going to be paid a fortune to do it. If you’re not worth the money, I’ll have no hesitation in dropping you. There are other wonders out there, believe me.”

  When Leon was a boy, the human wonders of the world belonged in the category of men who performed amazing feats of strength, who ate metal and glass, who escaped from boxes chained underwater. Leon didn’t do anything—he had been forged as a wonder by someone with far greater powers.

  “Do you understand me, Leon?” Rhona pulled his attention back. She faced him, hands on hips. “You’re a physical wonder all right, but I’ll say it again. This is a job, pure and simple. You perform the job badly, you get fired and I hire another wondrous damn wonder.”

  “Yes, I get it.”

  “Well, you’d better. I think you’re really sweet, Leon. You’re a doll. But at the end of the day, this is a business.”

  An accident of fate had turned him into a wonder of the world while the person ahead of him on the waiting list for a heart transplant had probably died. The one risky decision he had made in his life had blown open the door to a new dimension. Again, he experienced that lurch in a part of his body that no longer existed.

  LEON’S MOTHER AND sister and nephew and niece were packed and ready to leave. Already the day seemed brighter, the air clearer. He’d brought them over for a week because everyone at Overington expected him to, and realized his mistake the day they arrived. He didn’t want them there. They would only have considered coming because they also thought it was expected. Curiosity had probably helped them decide.

  The media trainer had suggested Leon’s mother and sister act as audience for his press-conference training. How foolish and pretentious he’d felt, striding across the sprung floor of the rehearsal room, lifting his chin to speak, the trainer adjusting the angle of his limbs as if he were a mannequin. After three months of work, he still stuttered over occasional words when he caught sight of the red eye of the camera, still surreptitiously checked his reflection in the studio mirrors to see if he was standing or sitting straight enough.

  During their stay the two women spoke in awkwardly formal voices with everyone. They tried to help the staff because they were unused to being cooked for and having a housekeeper make their beds. While Leon’s nephew spent all day outdoors following the gamekeeper around, his niece had stared openmouthed at Kathryn for the entire first day, then started asking her question after question, then turned her attention to Christos and Yuri, then to Rhona. On the last day of the visit, as they exchanged their relieved good-byes, the girl threw her arms around Kathryn’s waist, pushing her face between the folds of Kathryn’s cloak and into the warm woolly belly. Kathryn went still. She had made it clear that she was not to be touched, ever, not to be hugged or to have a hand held or even to be tapped on the shoulder.

  “Oh dear,” Rhona said softly. “Oh, sweetheart, you shouldn’t . . .”

  They watched, amazed, as Kathryn bent her head and drew the girl in tight, kissing her swiftly on her crown before pushing her away and offering a polite spoken good-bye to Leon’s mother and sister. She was shaking. The moment Leon’s family turned to gather the suitcases, she melted from the room.

  While the Wonders trained, Kyle had been doing groundwork for the launch. A filmed four-second clip of Christos opening his wings in a darkened room was set free on the net. For a couple of weeks Kathryn flew around the world in a chartered jet. She turned up at a club in Tokyo, a film premiere in Paris, a restaurant in Shanghai, the after-party of a location wrap in Berlin, the opera in New York. She was fully swathed, the image of a wealthy fashionable woman. At each venue, her instructions from Kyle were to go to the ladies’ room and, while she was there, stand in front of the mirror. She was to shrug off her head and shoulder covering and give herself a quick finger massage of the neck or adjust her makeup. If anyone stared or spoke, she would yawn and make an innocuous remark, such as: “It’s exhausting, isn’t it?” or “These events really wear me out.” Then she was to smile, pull her scarf up over her head and shoulders, and leave the venue. Kyle would escort her to a waiting car to hurry her away. He would have given her the go-ahead to perform as soon as the bathroom was populated with three or four of the important people he had targeted who had enough influence and talking power to become vectors.

  For Leon, he commissioned a comic animated game called Clockwork Man in which the player had thirty different ways to assemble a mechanical heart and get it into the character before any number of silly disasters happened. It was addictive, and within a week it was the top-selling app on handheld devices.

  Once that was all in place, and the buzz was happening, the Wonders were to appear together on the world’s most famous TV talk show and launch with a bang.

  Finally the day came. Training had begun in March and now, in July, they would be tested. They’d driven out of Overington, with the sun flaring over its flower-dotted gardens, down to a fetid New York and into a cool dry TV studio.

  The cameraman came toward Leon, lens aimed at his breast as if he was about to pin a victor’s ribbon on the chest of a race winner. I am a winner! Leon kept smiling as he tried to follow the mantras of the media trainer. Think positive! A winning smile! Everyone loves you! His self-help books had said the same things with the same exclamation marks. Fake it till you make it! I say YES to life!

  When the close-up of the hole in his chest flashed up on the large screen behind the host, the studio audience screamed as one. Even Leon, catching a glimpse from the corner of his eye, was aghast at the woody topography of his scarred flesh with its new “healthy” tan magnified five hundred times. It could have been a gnarly medieval forest or the carved relief of an Egyptian battle. Only when the shot pulled away to reveal firstly his heart, tiny, snug and gleaming in its place, then his human torso, and lastly his strained face, did any of it seem real.

  His heart, steady as it was, no longer told him he was afraid. It kept pushing through blood at the same regular pace without regard to his emotional state. Other parts of his body made up for the heart’s equanimity. The adrenaline zinging through his bloodstream stung his fingertips and face in prickles of fear. He was dizzy and disoriented. His eyes watered, and his eyelids fluttered under the glare of white light.

  “Settle down, ladies and gentlemen.” Matt Karvos, the show’s host, gestured for Leon to join Kathryn and Chris
tos, who had already endured their own scream reaction, on a couch facing the audience.

  As rehearsed earlier, Leon pulled on a loose shirt that a hand passed to him from behind the curtain. At last he could sit down. He stumbled across the studio floor snaked with gaffer-taped cables and leads, and sat down beside Christos and Kathryn on the couch. At the far end Kathryn lounged on the fat cushions with her legs crossed and her cape wrapped loosely around her body. She appeared relaxed, nonchalant, but Leon could feel the vibrations of the couch caused by her left foot, under the cape, jigging madly against the floor.

  Medical examinations had been documented to validate the Wonders’ authenticity before they were invited on the show, so the producers were happy. Rhona was happy because she had managed to keep tight control over the whole appearance. Hap was handling security. Kyle had negotiated the deal and coached them and checked and confirmed every detail until he was convinced nothing could go wrong. Kathryn and Leon were still wary. It was Leon’s first time on television. Kathryn had appeared on television before, but only in guerrilla footage shot as she tried to run away or push shut the front door while a burly cameraman thrust a lens at her and a reporter tried to muscle his way inside. Christos was the only one with real camera experience. He had appeared on various shows in the past talking about his art. He had warned the others to be aware that the camera might shift focus to any one of them at any time.