The Wonders (24 page)

Each of the residents of Overington had come to this mismatched family from a family of their own that had failed in some way. Even Christos, to whom family meant everything, had only once mentioned his dead father, and that was to say that the old peasant had disowned Christos for refusing to live in the mud and eat shit. With this group of misfits as examples, it seemed there were no successful families, only ones whose members didn't manage to destroy each other. The question of whether Leon and Minh could make something different together bit into his dreams some nights.

After Leon left Rhona he went to Minh's studio. She was busy sorting sketches. Intoxicating fumes from recently sprayed fixative drifted through the room. Minh was tossing white cartridge sheets, some scored with thick charcoal strokes, others crosshatched in pencil, into a tin rubbish bin beside the bench. Her paintings were stacked on the floor, leaning against the wall, only the bones of their frames and the ragged edge of the tacked canvas visible. Leon peered over Minh's shoulder at the sketches on the bench.

“When I came here,” she said without pausing in her task, “I had no idea that what you do would be dangerous. I thought you three had overcome the danger of your illnesses and surgeries, and my job would be routine. You're performers. Performers don't die doing their jobs.”

He threaded his hand under her hair to experience that intensely intimate frisson of it spilling through his fingers. “Minh . . .” He hesitated.

“Christos nearly died. What if something had happened to you?”

“Minh, I've found Susan.”

She pulled away. Leon's hand was left caressing cool air. “Why didn't you tell me you'd gone on with the search?”

“I didn't want to make you lie to Rhona.”

“My decision, I would have thought, Leon. A decision I would make after we'd talked, because couples are supposed to talk about these things. And now? You'll contact Susan?”

“I don't know.”

Minh picked up another sketch and tore it into four pieces before dropping it into the bin.

“Why are you throwing these drawings away?” Leon bent to pull out a few sheets.

“Leave them,” she said. “I can't believe you went on looking for her without telling me.”

Leon let the paper in his hands slide back into the bin and settle on top of the other work.

“Minh, I—”

“I'm throwing them out because they're just pretty pictures. Here you all are around me and yet I've been drawing you the same way I've always drawn people. I have to rethink the human body. I don't know what it is anymore.” She folded another sheet into a small square before speaking again. “Of course you'll contact Susan. How could you not?”

He waited in case Minh had more to say but she returned to her task, ripping and discarding, ripping and discarding, tearing more work off the walls until the studio had been stripped of months of drawing and painting, and the bare walls were left with splotches and smudges, pinholes and staples and penciled notes and adhesive hooks and the yellowed outlines of work now gone.

I
N THE MONTH
since Christos had returned to performance, his ascendancy in the tabloids via the constant reports on his courageous recovery had fallen away. Kathryn was back in the spotlight. Following a live interview where she claimed that there could not be a god because no god would allow what had happened to her, her hate mail had come close to overwhelming the threat-assessment system. One lunatic had painted in huge lettering on the Flatiron Building in New York that Kathryn, the Lamb of God, had betrayed her father and she must die.

They had already discussed many times how long they would continue to work, and to Leon's relief they had set their retirement date at three months in the future. Only three more months of displaying their bodies to people whose rapturous attention no longer meant anything, three more months of cities dissolving and forming between cushioned rides in planes and limousines, of seeing their own faces everywhere as though the
world was a mirror maze, only three more months before he and Minh could retire to a proper life, a normal married life with squabbles about who should do the cleaning and what movie to see.

Kathryn had already found a small Caribbean island she wanted to buy. Christos had hired staff and set up a lab in Malaysia that was working on preproduction for his mysterious new art project. After the final show in three months, there would be no more Wonders. Leon and Minh would withdraw into a private world. All they had to do was stay safe till then.

Now Hap was proposing they stop their small shows and move to large auditoriums.

“I don't understand. There will be way more people than we've ever had. Crowds of crazies. Big open spaces. How on earth can that be secure?” Kathryn sat on the couch with her legs crossed and a cape wound in a tight bandage around her. She rocked backward and forward. “It's sending the lamb to the slaughter.”

“I know it sounds counterintuitive.” Hap rolled his shoulders as if he wished he was outside punching boxing bags or whatever he did to build the steely physique, the pillar of muscle that was his body. “But think bulletproof glass, metal detectors, cameras. No actual contact with the public. Think moving you three in and out of a protected greenroom under armed guard. I need to be able to contain you.”

That phrase threw Leon back to the laboratory with Susan and Howard, the day they had made the decision to cut away the necrotic tissue in his chest.

Susan had told him it was a radical surgery that had never been attempted before. “It's wildly risky, but the damage to your tissue is spreading fast. We need to be able to contain the
risk of infection and rejection. Containment is the key. There will be no return, Leon. Once this is done, you can never have an organic heart. And this heart will be your last. If it fails, you die.”

Two mechanical pumps in his chest were pushing his depleted blood through his veins and lungs. He could hear the pumps, gurgling with the sound of a swimming pool filter, day and night. The sound made him nauseous. But the pumps were keeping him alive until the final operation, the one where Howard's specially constructed heart would be implanted in his body. Meanwhile Howard was tinkering late into the night in the computer room next to the cubicle where Leon slept fitfully on his hospital bed, blanketed by hot pain and uncertainty.

“Or I die anyway. Without the new heart I die anyway.”

“Yes, you die anyway. And some of your tissue is already dead.”

“It will be painful?”

“It will be excruciating.”

“But I'd die without it.”

“You may die because of it.”

“But I'd die anyway.”

The next day they began work on the possibilities for his replacement ribs. They would be smoother, shinier and stronger than his original ribs. They would have hinges. They would enclose a space that no other human body had ever contained. A hollow for his brass heart and the secrets that his body would harbor from now on.

“I can make it work.” Rhona's voice brought Leon back to the present. She was thinking fast, playing on her screen. “I can make us even bigger, even better this way. And it solves the problem of those stupid commentators who are always trying to
discredit us. We'll be out and available and yet more protected than we've ever been.”

“That's right. It's the only way.” Hap nodded vigorously. His T-shirt bulged with enthusiasm. “The only way.”

“Oh my god!” Rhona lurched to her feet, dropping the tablet, which bounced a few times and emitted a few jumbled sounds. “Of course, of course! We'll bring in the rubes to a show in a huge space. Aerialists, strongmen, acrobats, jugglers, whatever we can find. Wandering through the space, barking at the crowd, performing their incredible feats. It'll be—”

“Rhona, really?” Kyle interrupted. “Aren't we going backward here?”

“It's vintage, darling. Everyone loves vintage. And we'll have cotton-candy stalls and toffee apples and magicians dressed in tails and top hats doing three-cup shuffles and the egg-and-coin trick. A few fortune-tellers and sideshow stands. Maybe even sawdust on the floor. Everywhere you look there'll be performers and music and magic and fun, old-fashioned fun. Then, wait for it, slowly, slowly the performers will melt away, the noise will recede, the lights will dim, until the audience is standing in a dark silent room. They'll stop talking. They always do when they don't know what's happening. And you, one by one, rise into the space, under glass, lit like gods.” Rhona had been conducting the whole imaginary show with her arms and now she lifted pillows of air in her hands and held them above her head. “Lit like gods.”

“Won't that cost a fortune?” Kathryn asked.

“We'll make a fortune, my love. It's a premium event, premium price. People will pay.”

Kyle was nodding. “And a sound-and-light show to go with the Wonders. The past to the future.”

Kathryn raised her teacup and held it out in a toast. “So at
last you get your circus back, Rhona. Congratulations. I haven't seen you this happy in a long time.”

Rhona spread her arms and took a long low bow. She rose scarlet and shiny. “There is nothing, nothing in the world like a circus, my darlings. My Enchanted Circus for my Enchanted Wonders.”

That night Leon completed his message to Susan. He had been working on drafts for weeks to get the tone right. Grateful, warm, friendly, eager but not pushy. He wrote about his heart, his rejuvenated robust body. He described the world he lived in, the travel, the people who paid to see him. He told her he was married now, and happy. He tried to explain how he was within this world and without at the same time, a part of it yet a wonderstruck observer.
Come and see
, he wrote.
If you don't want to speak to me, soon we'll be performing in big venues where you can observe anonymously if you prefer. Come and see what you've made.

When Minh read what Leon had written she frowned and said, “You've never told me anything like this.”

Susan's answer came almost immediately.

Dear Leon,

I have been keeping up with your exploits and the incredible world you live in. I'm so proud that you are well and happy. Congratulations on your marriage, by the way.

I do appreciate that you want to thank me in person, but as I said when we parted, I am finished with the project of your heart. I lost Howard not long after you left and I still grieve for him. We should have had more time together.

I have a different life now, with no wish to go back. So
I won't be coming to see you, and I hope you will respect my privacy.

Please enjoy the life you have been given. That's all anyone can do.

With love,

Susan Nowinski

A
MONTH LATER LEON,
Kathryn and Christos were shown the three booths that would be transported from venue to venue. Each booth was constructed of thick aluminum beams and a reinforced transparent material stronger than glass. The booths were wired for sound and lighting effects. One wall of the booth functioned as an invisible door that swung open for equipment to be taken in and out. The performers would enter on a platform that raised them from underneath the floor of the venue. Even the air would be pumped in. Once inside, they would be performers in bulletproof domes.

“Or popes!” Kathryn laughed. “I'll be the female pope in her very own popemobile. At last an Irish pope. Dublin will celebrate itself into a coma.”

Rhona brought in a writer and a director to create short monologue shows for each of the Wonders.

“The general public has seen you on-screen and they know who you are. Seeing you in the flesh is going to blow their minds. But they have to have something to talk about later. Not
just, ‘Wow, did you see the hole?' We have to make you into a narrative. Each of you a different narrative, something memorable, something exotic. A stage personality. You have to have a story. Without a story, you're as good as a statue.”