The Wonders (11 page)

Thy hand, Belinda, darkness shades me,

On thy bosom let me rest,

More I would, but Death invades me;

Death is now a welcome guest.

At the moment the recitative ended, the tech snapped on a spotlight aimed at the door where Leon would enter. The voice swelled. As the singer launched into the lament, he pushed through the doorway. The only object clearly visible in the room was the gleaming polished brass of his heart seeming to float in the air inside its titanium cage.

When I am laid, am laid in earth, may my wrongs create

No trouble, no trouble in thy breast;

Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.

Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.

Tremulous sighs and groans from the crowd formed a sibilant bass accompaniment to the aria. Every time he heard this music of humanity, even though it may have happened three nights in a row, goose bumps erupted on his skin, and his own breath stuttered in his chest. Under the music was a deep man's
voice that Rhona had recorded while they were setting up the show. It was almost inaudible, perhaps subliminal, but he could hear it because he knew it was there.

The spotlight shone into his heart. He raised his arms in a wide embrace of the room and turned slowly. He moved around the space, between the furniture, followed by the spotlight. In the last few moments of the performance, when the singer's voice had soared to the last line and he stood where he had entered, hands at his sides, head bowed, the man's voice spoke under the music, directly into the minds of the audience. “What a piece of work is a man,” the voice said, and without knowing they had been prompted, the spectators burst into applause. The whole performance took four and a half minutes.

With his part of the show over, he backed out through the doorway to where Kathryn was preparing to go onstage. They always left three full minutes between each appearance for people to chat and for the anticipation to build.

“They're laying down their short-term memories,” Rhona had told them. “Let them talk about what they've seen, turn it over in their minds. They'll remember you better. If you go out bang bang bang one after another, it's too much. They'll only remember one of you.”

“More circus wisdom?” Kathryn asked.

“You might sneer, my girl, but ‘circus wisdom,' as you call it, is making us all rich.”

After Leon had come offstage, the music dropped to the low Muzak sound track that would enhance the buzz of the audience but not intrude into their excited chatter. Kathryn did some stretches to warm up. She moved with the litheness of a cat, although Leon would never dare say so.

Kathryn had originally wanted a rock-and-roll song as her tune, but Rhona overrode her choice. Pop music was too
ephemeral, she said. The song would become unfashionable and Kathryn would seem outdated. Classical, she insisted, or jazz. “It's us who will determine what these rubes go away thinking, not some cheap ditty from a pop song that's lodged in their brains. And even though I hate most of that opera wailing, there are some songs that make the tingle start in your tailbone and rise up to your skull, and that's what we want.”

“Are you ready, Kathryn?” Yuri pulled the door open a fraction. He managed the timing of the show as well as looking after Christos's wings. None of them wanted too many strangers running around. He signaled to the tech, who used the remote to start up Kathryn's tune, the aria from
La Wally
by Catalani. A tune that had graced a hundred television ads yet still made people close their eyes in a wash of pleasure.

During the dinner she had been wearing a scarf on her head that folded down into her cape so only her face showed. As she reached the doorway, the audience could see that the scarf went much further, that her body was wrapped from head to toe in a kind of sari arrangement. She stood silhouetted against a faint flickering candlelight as the orchestra introduced the music. The moment the pure voice of the singer floated into the room, Kathryn stepped through, and the sari began to unwind and fall in folds behind her as she moved, until by the end of the first verse, she stood naked, arms crossed over her breasts, eyes heavenward. There was no gasping from the audience during Kathryn's piece, only a stunned silence. Women sometimes reached out their hands, as if to take Kathryn, as if to hold her.

In these private shows, if Kathryn's woolly arm did brush a woman's outstretched hand, Kathryn smiled. Later, all touching was disallowed, but in these early exclusive shows, the worst anyone did was snicker behind their hands or rear away when one of the performers passed by too close. They were the
innocent times. Tonight Leon watched as Kathryn crouched and whispered into Maria Eleven's ear.

Kathryn tripped offstage, skidding and clattering in her ridiculous high heels and laughing.

“Did you see that woman? That stunning woman, the goddess?”

“I was sitting next to her. Maria. She's nice.”

“Leon, are you kidding? Nice? She's out of this world. She's”—Kathryn looked to the side, searching for one of her rehabilitated words—“utterly ravishing. I told her she was the fourth wonder in the room and she giggled.”

Christos came to stand at the entrance with Yuri following, adjusting the wings as he walked. “She probably thinks the same about you, sexy lady. You're ravishing.”

Kathryn pulled up as if she had been slapped. She looked down at her body, then up at Christos. She shook her head. “I still can't believe it. Skanky old me, turned into a sexy thing.”

Yuri made a final adjustment to the wings, signaled the tech to start Christos's tune, and wiped Christos's oiled chest with a cloth before slipping into the shadows as the door opened. The wide-angle spotlight snapped on and burned a beam from heaven onto Christos's body. His signature tune was so clichéd Leon had doubted it would have any effect, but each time he raised his wings to the dramatic notes of “O Fortuna,” the power of the image and the music combined to arouse extraordinary emotions. They had seen women begin to cry, men half stand before sinking into their seats with their mouths drooping open. The fingers on the metal wings spread and folded while people sobbed. Leon was not sure why it was so powerful for them. Perhaps the religion, all the angel mythology. Christos had obviously known exactly what he was doing when he started the wing project.

O
NLY FIVE REMAINING
circus animals were living at Overington with the Wonders. Two elephants, a chimpanzee, an old brown bear and a miniature pony. The elephants, the chimpanzee and the pony roamed the grounds, and the chimpanzee, Rosa, also had the run of the house. She never urinated inside, but sometimes Leon would notice a puckered turd in a corner of a room or a banana peel or fruit rind under a table. Still, she was good company, and her screeches sounded uncannily reminiscent of Rhona's laughter. Rosa had arrived after the chimpanzee kidnap and assault incidents. She had only known hard work in Hollywood and this new life of leisure.

August, the brown bear, had his own enclosure on the south side of the house, a large wilderness of trees, vines, bushes and artificial caves surrounded by a double fence. In winter, he slept long hours in a cave dug into the side of a slope in the enclosure. During the rest of the year, his food was thrown in at different points along the fence to simulate, according to Rhona, a life in the wild where he would have to hunt. Not that the food
was alive—he was fed meat with shreds of fur and bone, whole fishes, buckets of fruit—but he did have to find it. Leon couldn't see the point since August had been trained to dance and walk on a rolling barrel, probably in captivity from when he was a cub. The keeper put his age between thirty and thirty-five years old. Six years earlier, he had attacked and mauled his trainer. He was destined for the needle before the animal rights group contacted Rhona to give him a home. “He's not dangerous, I'm sure,” Rhona had told Leon. “But the keeper says he's happy in there alone. Bears are solitary animals.”

Leon had ventured into August's enclosure a couple of times, wielding a Taser for safety. He glimpsed a gray snout poking from the shadows of the trees and that was enough of a thrill for him. Christos liked to enter the enclosure and spend time with the bear. He said that it was because he believed the bear must be lonely, having been brought up in the company of humans.

“In the wild they are alone, but he is no wild bear. Plus, we performers,” he said to Leon once, and as usual Leon couldn't tell whether he was joking, “need to perform. I go in there and I let August perform for me. He shuffles a few steps, takes a bow, makes a fake roar. It is the only thing he knows how to do. For other bears, hunting is their work. For August it is performing. The same as us. We are made to hunt and gather, so now we create other work for ourselves.”

Kathryn's familiar was the pony. When she went for a stroll in the fresh air, usually with her scarlet outdoor cloak draped across her shoulders, Agnes the pony cantered up and nuzzled her, trying to get under her cloak to the hidden pockets in its lining. She fed the stumpy pony apples and hay and carrots, and they ambled together through the different habitats that had originally been set up for the lions and tigers, the donkeys, the zebras, the camels.

Leon had not bonded with any of the animals in particular, but if he had free time, like today, he walked around the grounds. Walking alone, he found the empty enclosures eerie. Tall trees with lanky trunks that resembled the legs of the former giraffe occupants gave way to the arid sands of the old camel enclosure, which led to a vine-looped jungle area that once belonged to the chimps. The walls had been removed so that they were no longer technically enclosures, yet the contrast in vegetation and topography and even soil in the purpose-built sections made it seem as though in fifty paces he had crossed continents and oceans, strayed into the domain of creatures from other worlds. Invisible creatures also, for most of them had long since died, and all that remained of them were scraps of fur caught on twigs, gray patches of dirt worn into the grass or pasture where the animal used to sleep, the ripe odor of certain spots where it may have sprayed or rutted or simply rubbed its scent over a tree trunk or a boulder.

“One day the whole earth might be empty. No animals left.”

He hadn't noticed Christos and Yuri behind him. It was Yuri who had spoken. From things he had said here and there, his veganism, his cotton clothes and hemp sandals, and the way he took care with everything he used, it was clear that Yuri, alone among the residents at Overington, believed this way of life could not last forever. He was afraid humans may have gone too far, that they had poisoned the planet beyond redemption, that they should be showing greater respect to the animals and plants of the earth.

“Do you really think so?” Leon was glad to hear Yuri speak. He wanted to have a long conversation with him one day, but so far Yuri had always found a reason to slip away after a few moments. At twenty-two, his unlined Russian face shone with boyish innocence. Leon had the peculiar impression it was a face
recently released from having a great big hand pressed against it—the expression was consequently a mixture of surprise and relief looking out at the big world. Or perhaps that was his true expression, the expression of a young man unshackled from poverty and aimlessness in Russia by an accidental meeting outside a gallery.

Christos gestured around the dusty landscape they had entered. “This reminds me of our island in the hot summer.” His need to dominate the conversation may have been one reason Yuri was so quiet. “Except for our land. We had a vegetable patch, always green.” Christos smiled with the memory. “My mother sent me out to harvest olives from the trees that grew wild on the hills. She kept a couple of goats and fermented the milk to make cheese.”

Yuri shook his head in wonder. “Paradise.”

“Hard work.”

Leon tried to imagine it. “Goats! In the country town where I grew up, we had bottlebrush and geraniums in our garden. You couldn't kill them if you tried. My parents preferred playing sport to gardening. Or to reading. Or to anything, really.”

They reached the mound in the former lions' enclosure. It had been designed so the big cats could sleep high up, alert for intruders, which, during their lives as captives and performing animals, would have been human beings, the ultimate predators. The mound was a series of small hills undulating into occasional hollows filled with the seeds and dried grass of earlier generations of spring weeds. Together the three men climbed the rise and stood on the highest mound, about twenty feet above the terrain around it, admiring the grand vision of the house and its stately timber louvers.

“I want to see this place where you grew up, Leon.” When Christos announced such desires in his sonorous voice they could
have been commands. “I want to visit your hometown. And I want to see the council flat where Kathryn grew up in Dublin, the slum. And Yuri's family house in Kashin, and then you must all come to my village on Chios.”