The Wonders (25 page)

Over the next couple of weeks the Wonders each sat down separately with Jade, the young writer who had made her name penning plotlines for a science-fiction show on cable, and tossed around scenarios that might make a good bio story. She sat opposite Leon at the long rosewood table, sucking on the straw of an energy drink and rapping out ideas.

“Do you feel a connection with this one?”

“Flesh-eating microbes of the jungle invaded my chest? Jade, take a look at me. I'm not exactly Tarzan.”

“The shark that took a piece out of your chest? A hole punched by an anaconda? No, wait, the heart was created first, and you, Leon, man of flesh, were grown around it in some crazy scientific laboratory!” Her glossy pink mouth dropped open as if she was tickled by her own brilliance. “Hothouse man. Test-tube man. No, that's been done. A man made for a heart. That's it. That's it, Leon. I love it.”

Leon asked her what would happen when they made up some guff and the people he'd grown up with heard it. “And who would believe this rubbish anyway?”

“Come on, Leon, it is all bullshit and everyone knows it. You can say whatever you want. If someone pops up to contradict you, all the better. More coverage for you. Think about all those autobiography fakers. They must have had plenty of family, neighbors, friends who knew their real story, but they made millions and so no one said a thing. It was reporters who sniffed them out. Your fans don't care. What's a bit of creative license?”

Not long after the Wonders had gone global, Leon had seen photographs of the woman from the office who resuscitated
him after his first heart attack. She was made up by a stylist and featured in a two-page spread in a women's magazine. Her skin was so pink it made him think of a pig's ass. Her eyes were a touched-up luminous blue instead of the faded denim of her real eyes, and they had airbrushed out the conspicuous mole on her neck. “I only did what I was trained to do as first-aid officer,” she was quoted as saying. “But yes, I guess without me Leon would have died. He never did come to say thank you.”

He had said thank you. He'd returned to work, fiddled around adjusting the height of his office chair, switched on his computer and tried to behave as if he was fine. He'd bought that filthy liar a bunch of flowers and apologized for the fuss.

All right,
Leon decided,
I can do better than her.

M
EN IN THEIR
best navy jackets cupped their arms around their wives' shoulders, craning their necks to see where the next part of the show might begin. Young women had come in pairs and small groups. They held sticks of spun cotton candy and gripped their handbags tight to their sides in the crowd. Older couples stood side by side, heads nodding unconsciously, waiting. These were the rubes, the public who had bought the magazines and the toys and played the online games and built avatars of the Wonders and written the obscene letters. The first part of the show, the circus performance, was complete. The performers had dispersed, the stalls had slid on rollers back to the walls, the music had faded away. The auditorium was eerily quiet.

To the roar of their signature themes, the Wonders rose one by one, starting with Christos, then Leon, then Kathryn, into the dazzlingly lit glass booths, spaced in an equilateral triangle around the room. The audience members shuffled around in formation as each of the performers appeared.

When Kathryn spoke the first few words of her monologue, Leon watched the audience run from the center of the hall in a tumbling cascade of bodies constrained by clothes and bags and the elbows and backs and feet of others. Once Kathryn was done, Leon began. People veered and thundered across the empty space of the floor toward him. His amplified voice skipped as if there had been a break in an electronic signal. He was half afraid they would crash into his booth and smash it open in their eagerness. Children under fifteen were not allowed into the booth shows, but the adults, with their hands splayed on the glass and their mouths open and pink and wet, were as enraptured as their offspring would have been.

The booths taught Leon what it was to be a rock star. The screaming. The voracious looks from women. He was already accustomed to the income. He and the other Wonders could buy anything they wanted. But this, the adulation, the saliva glistening on the lips of people who were so hysterically besotted they seemed to want to absorb him, the fainting and the shrieking, the throwing of handmade gifts and the weeping, the weeping as if these fans were undergoing a religious conversion—this made Leon feel invincible.

Only Christos was unimpressed.

“You've made us a proper circus now, Rhona. Entertainment, nothing else. Once I was an artist. Now I am a whore.”

Kathryn tapped Leon on the knee and mimed at him,
“I'm
an a-a-artist.” He tried to hide his smile from Christos, who was ticking off the things he despised about the booth shows.

“Stupid costumes, an audience that wants to eat hot dogs and chatter to each other more than look at what they have paid to see, fake stories, the way I am supposed to smile all the time. Smile, smile, smile, you say. I have nothing to smile about in that glass prison with those monstrous people staring at me.”

“It's just a job, Christos. And it won't go on much longer,” Leon said.

“You know I nearly died after the accident, Leon, but I took the chance of destroying my health to continue with my wing project. My
art
project. We're more than circus clowns! You, Leon, Kathryn, of all people, should understand. We are the posthumans. What we do should have meaning.”

Kathryn was silent, staring at the floor. Christos cuffed Leon's head as he left the room in the way of a parent with an errant child.

“He always forgets,” Kathryn said after Christos had slammed the door behind him, “that he is the only one of us who chose to be this way.”

Soon after their conversation, Christos began turning up late or pretending to have technical difficulties with his wings to delay going onstage. It wasn't long before he missed a complete performance. Two weeks later Yuri crept backstage three nights in a row to explain that Christos was unwell and would have to pull out again. “I'm so sorry,” he said. “I'm sure he will be better soon.” Christos declined to be examined by Minh. It was exhaustion rather than illness, he claimed. He needed rest.

“He's perfectly fine,” Rhona said on day four. “Tell him he'd better get back onstage even if he is far too important to be performing with us. He can shove his art up his ass. This is business, and he's under contract.”

At the end of a month of Christos's snide comments about the show and failures to perform, Rhona burst into the private room of the hotel where the Wonders were staying in Berlin. Everyone leaped from their chairs, terrified they were under attack, save Christos, who did nothing but raise his eyes to Rhona.

“So you say you can't perform tonight because you're exhausted? Enough of your bullshit, Christos. You fail to go
onstage one more time, you're out, and I take my percentage of your fees plus the penalties that are written into your contract and good-bye. You'll have”—she pulled out her screen—“about four hundred and thirty-seven thousand dollars left in your account.” She glared at him.

He ignored her. The armchair where he sat balancing a plate of cheese and crackers on his knees creaked as he recrossed his legs. He was getting fat. No exercise, eating all day. Stubble bristled on his softening jaw.

“I'm ordering you to perform tonight. It's only a couple more months, then you're free to fuck over whoever you like. Don't do it to me.” Rhona didn't take her eyes off him. She had a glare honed by growing up in a van beside the lion cage. No animal or human could outstare her. Christos closed his eyes.

When the hour came for his performance he refused to go on. Rhona ordered again that a third of the ticket price be refunded to every audience member.

“What the hell will I say to the press this time?” Kyle asked as the group, minus Christos, crammed into the elevator to their floor in the hotel. He was seething. He had knocked on Christos's door and tried opening it, but Christos had locked it from the inside. Even Yuri was shut out and pacing the corridor.

“Say he's dead, for all I care.” Rhona mashed her finger into the elevator button and the elevator, as if in protest, jerked to a start. “We are so close, so fucking close to the finale. I'm not going to let him ruin it. That was my last warning. He's out, he's finished.”

She was up late on the phone to her lawyers instructing them to draw up the termination-of-contract documents.

“I'll say it to you too, Leon. Fuck him,” she told Leon first thing the next morning when he found her bleary-eyed in the room adjoining their suites, still dressed in the clothes of the
night before. She lifted her cup and drained the last of the coffee. “I'm going to strip Christos of every fucking cent. I made that man. I took him from obscure art galleries and measly grants and shady doctors to this. He's too old to compete in the art world now. He's fucked himself over and I'm not rescuing him this time.”

“But, Rhona, he's not well.” Minh had come in behind Leon. She rested her elbows on the mantelpiece, yawning and stretching her toes to the front, ballerina-style. Leon could smell the minty shampoo in her damp hair. “He's still recovering from the surgery after the accident. Something like that affects your mind as well as your body. And he's Christos!”

“I couldn't give a shit, Minh. He's pushed me too far. I'm tired. I knew I was taking on a lot with this project, but . . .” Rhona tapered off and rubbed her bloodshot eyes. “I'm tired, that's all. We're nearly at the climax and he pulls this. I've invested millions already in our final performance. Kyle and I have been planning it for months and Christos wants to ruin it. Well, he can fuck off right now. If he's been out for a while his absence at the gala won't be so obvious.”

Minh straightened up.

“We can't let this happen,” she said.

Leon wanted to offer a suggestion but this kind of thing, dealing directly with people, was his weakness. Minh had been so crotchety with him lately that he'd locked the door of his study and started haunting marriage-counseling websites. “If he's made up his mind, what can we do?” he asked.

“Let me fix it. Rhona, you know I'm right,” Minh said as if she hadn't heard Leon speak. He reached for her but she pushed his hand away.

Kathryn appeared in the doorway, a cup of tea cradled in her hands. “What's going on?”

“Rhona's actually fired Christos this time.”

Rhona stood up and shook her head. “I can't take his tantrums anymore. He's ruining our reputation. The three Wonders are two Wonders half the time anyway, and I refuse to pay him for nothing.”

Leon saw the look that passed between Minh and Kathryn. For all the complaining Kathryn did about Christos, she was the one who defended him when others attacked. She was the one who would defend any of them.

“One more chance, Rhona,” Kathryn said. “We'll talk to him.”

After a minute of staring out through the window at the blooming roses in the beds at the side of the hotel driveway, Rhona sighed so hard and with such a shudder it could have been mistaken for a sob. “One chance. One only. I simply cannot take his shit any longer. So much for my Enchanted Circus.”

“We tried every argument and all Christos did was stare at the floor,” Minh told Rhona and Leon later. “We said, what about the transformative power of art? You are changing people's lives. ‘It's not art,' he says. What about the money he'd need for his next project? ‘I'll find it another way,' he says. On and on until finally Kathryn blurted out, ‘Don't leave me.' He lifted his head then. She said, ‘You told us we were family. Don't abandon us.' I think that's what did it. And we said we would all have turns helping with his wings. To show him that we respect what he does for his art. Yuri's told me about it and I think it's much harder than we've realized. Plus Yuri can't take much more of Christos swearing and shouting.”

The next night Leon and Kathryn had the job of inserting a wing each on condition that Christos not emit a single word of complaint. It was a strange and strangely moving activity, taking the wire wings, those large fragile insects, into their arms, holding the posts above the bulbs of the joins between their gloved
thumbs and forefingers and easing the bulbs into the ceramic lilies. Leon closed his eyes, as you do when your fingers try to read surface marks invisible to the eye. He held his breath as he concentrated on feeling, knowing, the moment when the bulb had clicked into the join. “Not yet, not yet,” Christos cried as he heard Leon release his breath in a sigh of relief. The muscles in Christos's back convulsed. “It's not in properly. We have to try again,” he said, and he heaved in a lungful of air and let it out in a gust. “Again, when I have relaxed my muscles enough to make the connection.” Leon had never realized before how every stage of inserting and manipulating Christos's wings depended on an almost superhuman level of muscle control.