The Wonders

by Paddy O’Reilly

  “And what would I do for you?” He waved the flimsy business card. “After all that talk you only want me for show-and-tell? I’m not the bloody Elephant Man.”

  The driver glanced at Leon in the rearview mirror, quickly shifting his head out of the line of vision when he caught Leon’s eye.

  “Leon, darling, don’t be such a drama queen. I’ve already signed one drama queen for this troupe, and a small team cannot last if it contains two drama queens.”

  No one had called Leon darling since he’d left hospital after his first organic heart transplant when the nurses, who were too busy to remember anyone’s name, called the patients darling and sweetheart and love, and the doctors, also too busy, called them Mr. Um or Mrs. Err before launching into medico-talk. Now this stranger, this cowboy-suited exploitative charlatan, was darling-ing Leon like a condescending teacher.

  “Forget it.” He tapped the glass window behind the taxi driver’s head. “Would you please let me out at the next intersection?”

  The driver shrugged and began to ease the taxi into the left lane of traffic. Horns tooted behind them. A cyclist rode by shaking his gloved fist. Rhona put her hand on Leon’s knee. Her heavy gold and silver rings rested in a row of knuckle-dusters on the fabric of his trousers above his kneecap. They were menacing but beautiful at the same time, and curiously warm.

  “Not a sideshow exhibit. Not a freak the way you’re thinking. Hon, you’re going to be like Elvis. You’re going to have women screaming and fainting over you. Not with fear or horror, but with passion. You’re going to be whoever you want. It’s not just people staring at you. You’re going to entrance the people who come to see you. More than a weird body, more than a trick, you’re going to give them a story, a life, a legend. The rubes want to feel they’re getting to know you on a personal basis even when they’re forty deep crushed against the stage. I can make you into a celebrity everyone loves. The one everyone wants.”

  It is the skill of the entrepreneur to recognize what people desire and provide it for them. Leon could feel the loneliness and longing etched into his features. It was a map for a pro like Rhona.

  Rhona waited while Leon gazed out of the taxi window at a tram trundling by, loaded up with bored commuters on their way to lunch, staring at their phones or nodding off with their leaning heads leaving oily prints on the windows. He had begun to believe he would be alone for the rest of his life, a miserable hermit with a mutilated body. He was sure his broken-open chest and his scars and his breathlessness meant that no one would be able to overcome their distaste enough to hold him, let alone love him.

  “More money than you’ve dreamed of, Leon. Fans. Adoring fans. You’ll be a rock star.”

  “Right. Me. A rock star.”

  His gut told him to say no. He could move to Sydney or Brisbane, travel to distant suburbs for medical treatment, use false addresses and post office boxes to keep his anonymity, try to build himself a normal life again.

  But Rhona had ignited hope in him, and hope can make fools of us all.

  TWELVE WEEKS AND six thousand miles later, Leon stood outside the door to his new life. His third life. Behind the door were his future business partners.

  He knew little about these people except that Kathryn Damon was an Irish woman whose gene therapy for Huntington’s had cured the Huntington’s but left her covered in wool. He had a vague memory of seeing her on a current-affairs show a year or two ago. Or he could be thinking of someone else, that girl raised by dogs in Romania maybe. Christos Petridis was a Greek performance artist who had somehow transplanted metal wings onto himself. Kathryn had been recruited months before. Christos had arrived last week. Leon was the last. Tomorrow they would relocate to Rhona’s country estate Overington, in Vermont, to begin intensive training for the show.

  The next few months, perhaps years, of his life would be spent with these people if he chose to stay. He waited at the rust-colored timber panels and pearly white handle of the door and he made himself a promise. If I hate these people, he told himself, if I can’t get on with them or I find them too creepy or disgusting to look at or I feel they are reacting that way to me, I will walk away.

  No matter that Rhona had provided enough money up front to pay for his medications and living expenses and any trifles and trinkets he might want for the next few months. Nor that she assured him he would have accumulated in three years a fortune large enough to fund a dream retirement. Nor even that she had committed to keep him safe from the biotech and pharmaceutical companies that had pursued him with terrifying ferocity since his clockwork heart was revealed. If he got the heebie-jeebies for any reason, he would politely say “Thank you anyway, Rhona,” as he had been taught by his mother, and he would pack his things and fly home.

  He went to grasp the doorknob. Too late. On the other side, Rhona had already twisted the handle. The door swung open. Three people stood inside waiting for Leon to cross the threshold.

  And that’s where he stopped. At the threshold. Stupefied by the sight of Kathryn Damon.

  Rhona stood beside the open door to Leon’s right. Christos was there too, further back, statuesque in the light of the floor-to-ceiling window that looked out across a paved sandstone courtyard flanked with urns and marble benches. The courtyard was so large it was difficult to believe the house was in the middle of Manhattan. And then there was Kathryn.

  Leon was trying to step through the doorway, but his legs had turned to pillars of rock. Kathryn was overwhelming his consciousness. A moment later, a panicky sensation streaked through his body, a shot of adrenaline, and he began to tremble. Seeing this woman, this human inhuman animal, was like confronting a shape-shifter forged by a capricious god.

  In the seconds while Leon teetered back and forth on his immobile legs, Rhona backed away and lifted a tiny camera, peering into the viewfinder, and panned across the scene. Immediately, Christos came to life. He strode across the room and placed his palm flat against the lens of the camera.

  “No filming, please,” he said. “I do not want to be recorded without my express permission.”

  Christos’s voice snapped Leon out of his stupor. How regal he sounded. He was a lord, a commander. His English was fluent and natural, if somewhat formal, but the hint of Greek accent, the deep voice, the pauses and hesitations before words he wanted to stress gave him an impressive gravitas. He had a voice that caused you to listen as if whatever he said would certainly be important and worthy.

  Leon returned his attention to Kathryn, who was observing him from her position next to a bookcase. In her hand was a book, a photography monograph with tropically hued greens and reds shining from the open pages. The bookcase beside her had a stepped effect, a kind of tumbling of colorful spines and classic dull crimson and blue hardcovers down to the large-format books and magazines on the bottom shelves. Leon shifted his focus to the ripples of spine in an attempt not to stare at Kathryn.

  “Go on, then, have a good look. This is me, all of me.” Her voice was not what Leon expected, even though he would have been hard put to explain what he had expected. Perhaps something otherworldly. High and thin, ethereal. Instead she had a warm mellow voice with an Irish lilt. “Get it over with.”

  He let out the breath he had been holding.

  Kathryn closed the book, which came together with the slap of hand on flesh, inserted it into the bookcase and lifted her arms. She twirled a couple of times with her arms held in ballerina position, dropped a quick curtsey. “I’ve been hiding away so long I don’t know what to do with myself when someone’s staring at me. I suppose I’d better get used to it.”

  “You sure better, all of you. You’re going to be looked at in ways you’ve never been looked at before.” Rhona returned to the doorway, patted Leon on the bottom and told him to come inside like a good man. “And thank god you’re not drooling like the security guard when he caught sight of her through the window. That stylist did an amazing job. We’re going to have to really make sure there’
s no sexiness at all in Kathryn’s act or we’ll be accused of performing pornography.”

  “Charming, Rhona.” Kathryn flopped into the armchair by the bookcase. “Very classy.”

  Leon was trying to look at Kathryn with a noncommittal gaze, but he had never seen anything so desirable. She could have been a voluptuous showgirl zipped into a skintight costume of black astrakhan. Her pale face and ears were framed in black twists of lamb’s wool, and yet she had normal female features, a wide red-lipped face. Her long wool-clad legs ended in bare feet shod in stilettos. The wool finished in neat cuffs at her ankles and wrists. Two bright pink nipples. Leon couldn’t understand exactly what it was about this hybrid creature that made her more womanly than a woman, but she was. She was luscious. And although he had never been religious, the word that came to mind was “sinful.”

  When she lifted her leg to cross it in the armchair, the whole room was eclipsed momentarily by a glimpse of pink. Of course, she was naked. There was no wool down there. Leon groaned inside.

  “Okay.” He moved his leg forward, began walking into the room to draw attention away from his suddenly swelling crotch. “Where should I sit?”

  “Somewhere with a cushion for your lap, I think.” Christos sniggered as he lifted a bentwood chair from behind the piano and placed it beside Kathryn. “At least with me you can be safe, Kathryn.”

  “Not by any willpower of your own, you big fag.”

  “Don’t be nasty. I thought you said you’d be my fag hag.”

  Leon caught sight of a young dark-haired man with thick curly lashes sitting in the corner of the room. The young man smiled sweetly at Leon’s nod. That would be Christos’s young Russian boyfriend, Yuri. Rhona had invited everyone to bring a spouse or lover or family member. Only Christos had come with someone.

  “Leon, come on. You’ve come a long way to be here and we might as well get to know each other. I showed you mine and Christos’s wings have gone ahead to the estate. Your turn to show us yours.” Kathryn winked.

  Rhona nodded, so Leon began to unbutton his shirt. Usually he wore an undershirt beneath his shirt. Without the extra layer, the hole in his chest cast shadows on the fabric when he passed near a light source or stood in sunlight. Today he had come prepared and underdressed, knowing that his fellow freaks, as he had already begun to think of them, were expecting to see his heart.

  Kathryn clapped a slow clap and started to hum the stripper’s tune. As Leon reached the last button he hesitated. For all the amazement his visible brass heart engendered in observers, how could it even compare to the phenomenon that was Kathryn Damon, that woolly sex bomb stretched out languorously on the armchair in front of him?

  “Show us your tits,” she hooted with her hands cupped around her mouth.

  Rhona’s cowboy boots had spurs. They jingled musically as she came to Leon with her hand out, ready to take his shirt.

  “You are magnificent. Believe me, Leon. You three are all different, and all magnificent.”

  Leon dropped his shoulders. The shirt slid down his arms, and he caught it with the fingertips of his left hand as it drifted toward the rug. Cool air flowed through his chest.

  “What the feck!” Kathryn used the arms of the low chair to push herself up. “Oh my god. Oh my feckin’ god. Now that is a proper spectacle. Can I come closer?”

  He nodded. She lowered her woolly scalp to Leon’s breast. The backs of her naked ears were pale and shot through with faint blue like old pen markings. A fragrance drifted up from her, a grandmothery cozy scent that Leon realized must be lanolin.

  “Do you ever touch it?” She raised her eyes to him, still bent toward his chest.

  “You can touch it if you want.” He had never said that to anyone before. He hoped she would say the same to him and that he would be permitted to cup the tight black curly wool cropped close to her skull. Or the breast. He willed himself not to think about the breast. “I mean, you can touch the metal part. Be careful of the joins.”

  He released the clasp that held the titanium rib section in place across the fist-sized hole in his chest, and swung open the door of silver bones. Kathryn peered into the cavity.

  “Holy shite, I can’t believe I can see right through you! The scarring in the hole looks so ancient, like bog-man skin.” She shifted to see from a different angle. “So that’s your blood going through the tubes out of the heart. And the struts—”

  “Ceramic, to hold the heart in place,” Leon interrupted, not pleased to be called a bog man. He was having second thoughts. He didn’t want anyone touching the heart, possibly knocking out a synthetic artery or dislodging a strut.

  “May I touch it too?” Christos asked. “I also have mechanical devices in me. It is vexing that I can’t see them without a series of opposing mirrors or examine them properly with my fingers. You are a lucky man.”

  The absurdity of that statement struck them all at the same time. Kathryn guffawed.

  “Let’s talk about what’s going to happen now.” Rhona intercepted the possibility of Leon’s heart being handled by passing out electronic schedules. She was shaking her head and muttering about discreet coverings for Kathryn.

  “The trouble with this new style is that it’s revealing when you move a certain way. We could have a camouflaged G-string thing made for you. No one would even know it was there.”

  “Oh, great. Underpants, the ones monkeys wear in the circus. I could get big striped bloomers. Do you want me to wear a matching pillbox hat too? Should I have a little organ strapped to me that I can grind while you take the hat around?”

  When Rhona had described Kathryn and Christos to Leon, she had mentioned that Kathryn was a little spiky. In their months together before Leon and Christos arrived, Rhona said, she and Kathryn had settled into a pattern of communication where Rhona, by nature the excitable one, would back down in the face of Kathryn’s withering commentary and wait for the fury to fizz out of her in odd interjections and mutterings before the conversation could continue. “It’s her way back,” Rhona had told him. “Her way back to herself.”

  “I know.” Kathryn was talking rapidly. Her Irish accent was much stronger now. “What about a bikini, then? Hot pink with spangles, maybe. And a costume I can rip off like a stripper. Pasties for my nipples, right?”

  Leon directed his gaze resolutely at Rhona. Anywhere but at Kathryn. Occasionally he would glance at Christos or Yuri and widen his smile to indicate amusement or agreement as if he was engaged in the conversation. It was imperative that he not look at Kathryn’s nipples.

  In high school this kind of thing had happened to him every day. The hot flush of lust, the guerrilla erection, the schoolbag draped across the groin. At thirty-one years old, he should have had at least a touch more control, but no. Clenched between his thighs and crushing his balls down into an impossible squeeze, his semihard cock pulsed each time the image of that pink cleft flitted through his mind.

  Rhona picked up a folder and tapped it against the arm of her chair. “We have tentative bookings starting in summer and I haven’t done a bit of promotion yet. It’s word of mouth. The rumors are flying. I’ve given you a paper copy and an electronic copy of what we’ll be doing up until the launch. What I want you to do is check whether there’s anything you aren’t comfortable about. I think you’ll be fine but—”

  “Comfortable, that’s what I need, sure. I could wear a nappy. That would be different. Sexy sheep chick in nappy. Oh yes, that’s right. With a dummy. And a comforter. Oh, kinky.”

  Rhona waited for Kathryn to finish speaking before going on as if she had heard nothing. To prepare the group for performance, she said, media training would begin immediately: posture, facial control, body language, pacing answers, deflection and targeting, voice modulation. Learning how to deal with questions and the “rubes who think you’re a toy.” The coming weeks would be intensive and intense. Back to school. Leon had learned little the first time around. Perhaps this would give him some of the social
skills everyone else seemed to have absorbed naturally.

  “Life is short,” Rhona said. “Fashions change, tastes change, laws change. Let’s get you out there before they make us illegal.”

  IN THE WARMTH of the limousine after the airplane ride to Vermont, Kathryn fell into a deep sleep, her head tucked into her shoulder and her face half-covered by the high collar of her velvet cape. Christos and Rhona talked in low tones that stopped and started like the rumble of a faulty engine while Leon stared out the window at the snow-covered fields and the spindly trees. It was spring. Although the trees seemed bare, they had a greenish haze in the sunlight that must have been the beginning of new leaves. Having never traveled farther than Sydney, Leon had only ever experienced this kind of landscape as the backdrop to a movie. And here he was, a character in the movie. In this new surreal existence, Santa might come riding over the hill in his red uniform and sleigh.

  Rhona reached across the divide between the limousine seats and tapped Kathryn’s knee.

  “Wake up, honey, we’re home. Boys, welcome to Overington.”

  Leon swiveled to face the front as the driver pressed a button on the leather dashboard of the car, and the steel and timber gates in front of the car swung open, only to reveal another pair of steel and timber gates. A wall of thick cypress hedge, six feet high, grown up and around metal posts and rails, formed the outer fence. Curls of rusty razor wire crowned the inner fence of cyclone wire. Between the two fences was a no-man’s-land of melting gray snow and stony ground, and beyond the fences stood a copse of pine and spruce. Farther to the west, a long tiled roofline with upturned corners, reminiscent of a Japanese temple, rose above banks of white snow.

  The second gate began to open as soon as the first had closed.

  “The double perimeter is for the animals.” Rhona nodded to the two men patrolling the inner fence. “I told you I give sanctuary to retired circus animals?”