The Wonders (16 page)

“Leon, keep making that kind of animal reference and I will smack your prissy face.”

“Stop it. I can't stand this childish behavior.” Rhona may not have enjoyed the role of exasperated mother, but she played it perfectly.

They had come to New York to perform an exclusive show-and-tell dinner in a private room in the Maison Française building of Rockefeller Center. The day had started badly with Kathryn and Christos bickering on the trip down about the use of the gym equipment. Everyone was drained by too many shows, too many nights of being paraded and gawped at.
They'd been at it for six months, at least a show a week, with only a two-week break for Christmas. When the private show finished, they raced to change and escape through the service corridors. Leon was in a hurry to get home and follow up on more leads on Susan.

He and Minh were working their way through the list he had compiled on search engines and networking sites, sending e-mails and messages with a carefully worded inquiry that only “his” Susan would recognize. They each spent an hour whenever they could on the project and came together every couple of weeks to compare responses. That time spent together, poring over lists of names and following leads, was deliriously fun for no obvious reason except that they were two serious people who surprisingly could make each other laugh.

At the Rockefeller event one of the staff had leaked that the Wonders were appearing. Two paparazzi had already tried to sneak into the room dressed as waiters, cameras bulging in unsightly swellings under their uniforms. Rhona had no idea how many more were waiting for them outside, but the management had assured her that they could slip out a hidden way. Security would come around to meet them at the exit.

They filed out through a back door on the second floor of the building, wrapped in enough coats and scarves and mittens and hats to survive a hockey game. The door opened onto fire-escape stairs leading down to a cul-de-sac alley behind the building. At the bottom of the fire escape, silver spokes and eyeglasses winked in the striped light from barred kitchen windows. Steam surged from an exhaust grille in the building opposite.

A small crowd was fermenting below.

A voice shrieked, “You aren't freaks. You're too fucking beautiful. I bet your shit doesn't even stink. You're fucking movie stars. You're fakes, not freaks.”

“Oh shit.” Rhona backed up against Leon, and he stumbled into Kathryn. Rhona's hands were trembling. “Demonstrators.”

As Rhona and the others tripped and staggered backward in a Keystone Cops parade, Christos's bag caught in the door, wedging it open. A young man clanged up the stairs in an arm-windmilling whirl, grabbed the door and held it wide so that they were exposed at the top of the stairs, framed and staged by the lights in the corridor behind them.

“Assholes! This is fucking exploitation!” Again from down below.

Kathryn swore and started talking. “And who are we exploiting? Ourselves? Or maybe I'm exploiting you two. Christos, do you feel exploited? Leon?”

“We'll go out the other way. Where the hell is security?” Rhona pushed them backward into the passageway. Leon tightened his scarf around his neck. He didn't like being pushed. He didn't like any sudden pressure against his body. No matter how solid and securely his heart was anchored in his chest, he still feared that a knock would jolt it from its moorings, leave him spurting blood from a severed join, dying after his miracle because of some ridiculous accident.

“No.” Kathryn elbowed Leon aside and stepped onto the metal walkway that led to the stairs. “What do you want us to do, huh?” she shouted down at the group of demonstrators.

A woman and a man were in wheelchairs, one man had a seeing-eye dog and another was missing an arm below the elbow. Even in the dim alley light Leon could see the pin holding his empty right sleeve. The others seemed able-bodied. But then, so did the Wonders.

“Stop your show. You are shaming us all. You're whores in a peep show.”

“Right. We should give up performing and go home and
live on social security the way you do? You think that's something worth fighting for? We're making money, you fuckwits. We're working for a living.” Kathryn's voice was bouncing off the alley walls, a fighting punchy voice. Probably none of the people below remembered what she had been through before the Wonders.

“I work for a living,” the blind man bellowed. “I work at a real job. I do something for the world. I don't trade on being a freak. I don't run around posing like a slut and trying to be a celebrity.”

Rhona tugged at Leon's sleeve and pulled him further into the passage. The gesture made Leon think about how no one would dare touch the empty sleeve or the hard gnarly stub of the man who waited below. If the man was not married, he probably felt the same loneliness Leon had been experiencing since he was implanted with his brass heart. It was more than sexual frustration. It was a deep ache of physical loneliness. A hunger. Wanting to be gripped by the wrist when a friend was making a point or to have a hand pressed against his back as he was guided through a doorway. Leon was nervous about being touched and yet he craved it. And he knew from experience how disfigurement caused such discomfort and, at the same time, such fascination in most people that they were afraid to touch you even though it was the one thing they longed to do.

“Kathryn,” Rhona hissed out through the doorway. “Stop it. Don't provoke them. We're going to leave the other way.”

“Not me.” Kathryn slung her handbag over her shoulder and started down the staircase, her heels ringing on the pimpled metal.

Rhona turned to Leon and Christos. “Hell, we'll have to go with her. Are you two okay to do this?”

Leon was afraid but too embarrassed to say so. Christos
drew his overcoat around him before striding onto the metal platform and down the stairs. Yuri was still in the dining room, packing up the gear.

“Go on, have a good look,” Leon heard Kathryn say down below. “Here. This is what people pay a fortune to see. Count yourselves lucky.”

She tossed her hat behind her, unwound her scarf and threw it to the ground, and flung open her long cloak. The activists fell silent. They stared. The rest of the group arrived at the bottom of the staircase, its metal scaffolding clanging and bouncing under their weight as they each came off the last step. Rhona hurried to Kathryn's side and nudged her to close her cloak.

“My name is Rhona Burke. I'm the manager of the Wonders and if you have anything to say you should address it to me.”

“They can't.” Kathryn laughed derisively. “They're gobsmacked. Hey, Leon, open your shirt. Let's give them a really good show.”

“I can't believe that as a differently abled person yourself, you're calling us
them
.” The wheelchair woman who had been shrieking before was speaking at a lower volume now, but her voice still had the tight timbre of fury.

“I'm not differently abled. I'm super-abled.”

“Sure, me too. I've got wheels and gears. Most people only have working legs.”

Kathryn's spine straightened. Leon hoped it was a straightening of interest at the smart mouth of her opponent and not a straightening of anger at someone challenging her. Christos had plumped himself down on the bottom of the staircase, exhausted from the show, while Rhona rushed around with her arm out, an odd long-necked bird trying to shake hands with people.

“Lady, I don't have a hand. It's a bit hard to shake.” The man
with the pinned-up sleeve thrust his shoulder in her direction. “You wanna bump?” He snickered and turned to his companion. “I've always wanted to say that to someone.”

“What do you want from us?” Leon asked. Down among them he wasn't afraid anymore. These people were angry. Maybe they had a point. It was only fair to hear them out.

“We want you to stop this freak show. You're dragging the disability rights movement into the dark ages.” One of the women who appeared to be fully abled spoke. She was the same height as Leon and she moved toward him, focusing on his face like a predator who thinks her prey will bolt if she loses eye contact.

His eyes had adjusted to the darkness of the alley. The man in the wheelchair rolled his head. His mouth hung open with drool glistening on his gray lips. His neck, folded back, protruded thick and muscular from a T-shirt that said in luminous pink lettering:
STEPHEN HAWKING ON MARS
. His thin arms and legs embraced the mechanical angles of the chair. Mediated through an electronic device, his words rang out in the night. “Not all disabled people can be celebrities. We have to struggle every day to have our most basic needs met.”

Kathryn jerked around to face him. “So what? Not all normal people can be celebrities either. Most people have to work at boring jobs and struggle to make ends meet.”

Leon had learned early not to go crying to Kathryn. The only pity she'd ever shown was for mistreated animals.

“You're disabled but you can't be famous, you can't get noticed, so you attack us. Is that it?” She advanced on the wheelchair-bound man, who tried to twist away from her. “Are we supposed to go and hide?”

“No,” said one of the women, who had a face tinged a bilious green by the light of the exit sign on the side of the
building. “We're not attacking you. We're asking you to stop parading around in the media and inviting people to stare at you.”

“I want them to stare. Their parents have taught them not to stare. You should encourage people to stare. To ask questions. Then you wouldn't be freaks yourselves, with everyone trying not to look at you.”

“Kathryn, stop it! Leave them alone. I'm sorry, everyone.” Rhona spread her hands in a conciliatory gesture.

“Leave them alone? They're demonstrating against us! Rhona, don't ask me to be polite to someone who has told me I think my shit doesn't stink.”

“Hey, Lady Sheep, or whatever you're called. Can't you see that what you're doing is an insult to these people here?” This was the seemingly able-bodied man muttering from behind the other two.

“And you're their spokesman? Can't they talk for themselves? What's wrong with you anyway? Or are you hanging around these disabled people for some other reason?”

“I'm here with my wife,” the man said. “And it's not just us. There's a big group around the front.”

“Is that a fur coat your wife's wearing?”

In the cold everyone was bundled up. It was dark except for the exit lights of the building and a few bars of light from narrow windows. But Leon could see she was right: the woman was wearing an expensive fur coat. When she moved, the fine hairs on the coat shimmered like rippling water in sunlight.

“Don't change the subject. We're talking about humans, not animals.”

The man saw the hole he had dug for himself only after the words came out. The last word he spoke was clipped, its tail cut off. Kathryn rocked backward and forward on her heels.

“I see.” That's all she needed to say.

Rhona was looking around nervously. “Can we go into the light and talk about this?”

A couple of security guards arrived at the end of the alley. Their marching boots sent cans and bottles skittering across the concrete. They headed toward the small crowd with the forward lean and wide-shouldered gait of bulldogs.

“We're not going anywhere with you.” This time it was another woman. She wore a hood that shaded her face and a scarf wound tightly against the cold. Her breath jetted in white puffs through the wool of her scarf. “You don't want to listen. You think because you're beautiful that being a freak is a glamorous job.”

Rhona circled Leon and Kathryn and Christos, a wolf herding her cubs, before she turned to the demonstrators. “I'm sorry but we have to go. Here's my card. You can contact me if you have something to say. But stay away from my clients.”

She led the three out of the alley, threading her way in small steps past the blind man and his dog and between the two wheelchairs. She told the security guards that everything was fine, and they swiveled on their combat boots to escort them out. With Rhona ahead talking on the phone to Yuri, the others followed silently in file, Kathryn, Leon, then Christos, his teeth chattering with the cold. The heating units and exhaust fans venting into the alley gave it a moist and complicated odor in the freezing night.

As they passed the woman with her head covered and her face wrapped in the scarf, Leon heard the hissed words under the hum and clatter of the machinery. So did Kathryn; he could see from the way she stopped dead, then broke into a jog to catch up with Rhona.

You'd understand what it is to be a real freak if someone threw acid in your face.

They never mentioned what they had heard to Rhona, but from that day on Kathryn stopped shouting at people who abused them.

Was it a threat? Or had one of them, perhaps that woman, perhaps another of the bundled-up demonstrators they couldn't see properly in the darkness, been the victim of an acid attack?

Leon imagined being scarred by acid, trying not to flinch when a child pointed out the shiny scarified lumpy mass that was his face. He would hate the Wonders too.

Back home, listening to the recounting of the night's events, Kyle twitched the knot of his tie with his forefinger and thumb as he paced around the room. Rhona's theory was that the leaked photos had sparked the demonstration, that they had broken the spell of the magical Wonders and let loose the envy.

“It couldn't be the
Bared
photos. They're normal tabloid fodder, there was nothing in them that made you out to be superior. They were the opposite of superior. If that's what they were worried about, those disabled people should have applauded.”

“Well, it's your job to shut that garbage down anyway. You're the PR guy. Make it stop.”