“They never try to escape though, do they.” Kathryn was looking at the razor wire.
How did she feel being part prey animal, part predator? Leon wondered. Surely she would smell different from other animals. Not human, not sheep, but something in between. How did the circus animals behave when they scented her?
“They might,” Rhona said. She made a mock tigerish growl. Her yellowish teeth were one of the few giveaways of her age. She had obviously never bleached them, unlike everyone else Leon had met since he arrived in the States. “I’m joking. It’s paradise for them here. And they’re not dangerous animals anyway. The fences are to stop people from getting in.”
The second gate groaned shut behind them, and the car eased into a driveway flanked by newly dug flower beds. Straggly thin trees arched over the path to form a shadowy tunnel. Though the car windows were closed, the white pebbles crackling under the tires made the sound of wealth—limousine pulling slowly down a long, manicured driveway.
Rhona sighed. “I still love Overington. I built it twenty years ago. I had a crazy dream that one day it could be a retirement home for some of my old friends. Never again. Give me a wild animal over a greedy human anytime.” Rhona leaned forward to peer through the window. “Here it comes. I hope you’ll love it too.”
The limousine swept around the last curve and the house came into view. It was two stories with a long roof, pitched low despite being in Vermont, where, Leon had heard, in winter the snow fell for days on end. Ribs of blond beam framed the stucco walls. The same blond timber surrounded the windows and doors. At the top of the walls, under the roofline, hung long wooden louvers, silvered with age.
“The louvers open and close over the course of the day to let in light. If you look from above, the building is shaped in the form of a cross. Four wings extending from the central shared space. Four fully self-contained apartments, plus a communal kitchen, dining room and living area. Gymnasium, sunroom, massage room, that kind of thing. What do you think?”
“Why all the cameras?” Christos asked.
Leon had noticed them too, hanging from corners of the building, fixed at regular intervals to the fence.
She told them the cameras had been installed for the animal sanctuary. When the animals were first brought in eight years before, the landscape designer built discreet wire fences covered in vines and wild grasses around the enclosures. One morning in the third week after its arrival, an aged lion, doped up on pain medication for arthritis, was found by the animal keeper stabbed fourteen times and left to bleed to death on the rocky mound at the center of its enclosure. The next month an elephant was shot in the thigh with a homemade bow and arrow. The tip of the arrow was steel, filed so sharp it could have pierced brick. The boy who did those things was caught, but a year later two of the five chimpanzees were kidnapped, and a video of them cowering in the corner of a student dorm was posted online. They were later dumped at an animal shelter and returned to Overington.
“I should have realized earlier—the animals would stay in, but I had to keep the humans out. Don’t ever underestimate the cruelty of the public. Especially you three, you need to be prepared.”
“Kids are kids.” Christos shook his head. “They do silly things without thinking. Most of them don’t mean to hurt anyone.”
Leon agreed. “I’ve never met a bad kid. My niece is a sweetie.” He could remember the moment she first saw his metal heart, her terror mingled with delight and laughter, the way she ran screaming to her mother, then rushed straight back to have a closer look. “She calls me See-Through Man.”
Rhona shook her head. “Not all kids are good kids. We’ve ruined some. You give them too much, they forget their humanity. I’m not joking. They don’t care about anything or anyone. It’s all sensation to them.”
After the incidents, Rhona had built the double fence around the perimeter of the estate. But fences were not enough. Fences were mere passive protection. A year later a young woman climbed the fences and tried to cuddle the chimps. The two chimps who had been traumatized by their last encounter with outsiders turned on the intruder and bit her savagely, after which she brought a lawsuit against Rhona’s estate that dragged on for a year. It had become clear that the animals, of whom only a few were left, needed aggressive protection. So Rhona installed electronic surveillance and trip alarms, and hired a security firm to carry out regular patrols.
When the limousine finally pulled up at the front door and the four of them stepped onto the driveway, Leon couldn’t help staring at Kathryn and Christos stretching and yawning and examining their surroundings. Together they were three problematic creatures, part human, part something else. Surely as curiosities for young delinquents they would be worth more than a few old circus chimps. Not for the first time since he had left Australia, a spasm of apprehension rippled down his spine.
THE DAY AFTER their arrival at Overington, more staff were brought in: a security overseer whose name, Hap, was as neat, solid and reassuring as the bulky man himself, and a marketing director, Kyle, very high energy and known for the success of his viral campaigns. Rhona had decided she’d taken on too much. She would remain as the personal manager of the group and hand over the bulk of the marketing to someone else.
“It’s all changing so fast. Publicity used to be schmoozing and boozing and press releases and freebies. That’s what I’m good at. Now it’s social networking and crowd-sourced campaigns and smatternet, whatever the hell that is. We need someone to take care of the new markets.”
From his first morning on the job, Kyle changed things. While she was introducing him, Rhona mentioned she wanted to call the show Überhumans. It was the first Leon had heard of the name, but then he was not yet fully participating in conversations and decisions. This new world had thrown him off-kilter. More than ever he had fallen into the role of watcher and listener, the silent student: orienting himself, steadying himself in the face of monumental change. He had been the same as a boy, collecting his self-help books at home, reading, studying and thinking but slow to act. Despite cramming The Popular Teenager he had still failed to be picked for sports teams or clubs—to his parents’ deep disappointment.
“Überhumans?” Kyle said incredulously. “Like, you mean, some German thing?”
“No, sweetheart.” Rhona turned to the three überhumans and rolled her eyes. “I mean, like, better than human. Über—it sounds sexy, don’t you think?”
“Sexy if you’re a university student, maybe. I mean, how long is it since you ran a show, Rhona? Audiences don’t want to think, they don’t want to be educated, they want to be entertained. I’m sure that hasn’t changed.”
“Listen, sonny, I have three shows still touring that I set up fifteen years ago. Quality doesn’t go out of fashion.”
Kyle shrugged. “Sure, but, Rhona, trust me. Überhumans? No. You’re paying me to know what works now. What about Superhumans?”
“You think that hadn’t occurred to me? They’re not superheroes.”
They settled into an energetic argument about what the show should be named while Leon pushed himself off the chair and went to continue organizing his new apartment. Überhumans? More like unterhumans. That was the German word for “under,” wasn’t it?
He picked a few more books out of the box beside his bookcase. He examined each one, flipping open at a random page to read a paragraph or two, before lining up the volumes on the shelves he had marked for war history, arranging them loosely in alphabetical order between the medical texts and the shelves for his childhood books. Überhumans; what a joke. His own ravaged body put him in mind of an old man in a bathrobe shuffling out to the mailbox, looking up and down his lonely street, shuffling back to the cup of tea and burned white toast with a scraping of butter waiting on the kitchen table.
That night Rhona convened dinner at a local Italian restaurant. She had booked the whole place out. The three future celebrities could still move around freely—only Kathryn’s physical diffe
rence was evident in normal clothes, and she could easily disguise it by dressing in pants and a long-sleeved blouse topped by a bohemian arrangement of scarves around the head and neck—but without strangers in the room they could relax. They drank an aperitif in a private room while their meals were laid out next door. Once everyone was settled in front of their plates in the dining room proper and the doors were locked, Kathryn unwrapped herself and stretched out.
Kyle curled strips of creamy linguine onto his fork, which he then rested on the side of the plate. It was clear from his bent head and frown that he was formulating a speech. After a few moments, as the rest of them were eating, he raised his face and spoke.
“Well, everyone, I love it already. I love Overington and I love your whole setup. I know it’s normal for the incoming person to be toasted but, you know what, I’m going to jump in and toast you.” Kyle rose from his seat and lifted a glass of champagne from the table. “I’ve been in marketing all my adult life, worked across the States, even Europe. You could say I’m a workaholic—my ex-wives always do. I’ve seen a lot of crazy things and run a lot of top campaigns that gave people a mighty surprise. You’ll soon find that I’m no normal marketing guy.” On the word “normal” he’d hesitated and his tongue had tripped. N-normal. He recovered in an instant. “That’s funny, me saying to you three that I’m not normal. I guess I’m trotting out my usual spiel. You’ve caught me out! I’ll have to be more original in the future.”
Leon expected Kathryn to be listening with her usual impassive expression, but she was smiling. Everyone got Kyle’s charm except Leon. Kyle was forty-three, twice divorced, supporting three children in California, but he could have passed for twenty-five. His skinny frame and his thin sandy hair and his assured manner for some reason bothered Leon. His words were too shiny, like bright lights that blind you to what waits in the shadows behind. One of the women at the office where Leon used to work had lived in another country for five years. She said she had learned to speak the day-to-day language easily, but the nuances, the origin of phrases, the irony implicit in a word or a missing word were beyond her. She described it as living with a child’s comprehension in a world of complex adult conversations. Leon felt the same way with Kyle.
Kyle loosened his thin black tie before he spoke again. “Phew, that’s better. I will never get used to the noose, no matter how long I live.” He rubbed his throat. “Now, what I’d like to do is toast each of you. Firstly, Rhona, for having the good taste and good sense to hire me. Then you three, Kathryn, Christos, Leon. You’ve come a long way already, but I’m here to make sure the whole world gets to know you. And a toast to Yuri too, because we all need support. I understand there are a lot of other staff behind this project and I’ll be getting around to meet them later. But tonight, I want to celebrate you three wonders of the world and assure you that I’ll be working my ass off for you.” He lifted his champagne glass.
Rhona lifted hers. “To the new wonders of the world.”
“The wonders of the world,” Kyle chimed in.
AND SO IT was decided. They would be called the Wonders, Rhona announced.
Leon laughed. The Wonders sounded like toys, or a game show.
“The big wonder is that any of us is still alive,” Kathryn said.
He’d already noticed how quick she was with a joke. Afterward she would fold into herself, return to reading her book or quietly leave the room. This time she stayed, giving her full attention.
They had gathered to watch Yuri demonstrate the insertion of Christos’s handwings, in case for some reason Yuri was unavailable and someone else would be called on to manipulate the unwieldy frames into the sockets in Christos’s back.
Christos stood with his feet apart and knees a little bent, hands on hips, visibly bracing himself to support the extra weight. He was naked from the waist up. The scaffolding implants that would hold the triple-jointed metal wings were clearly visible between his shoulder blades, on either side of the spine. They were ceramic, ivory colored, and shaped like arum lilies. Inside the sockets, he had told them, were wet joins where nerves and tissue were protected by a valve that opened when the handwings were inserted into the scaffolds.
He turned his head to speak to Rhona and Kyle as Yuri lifted the left wing from its case.
“ ‘The Wonders’ is a good name,” Christos said. “It has charisma. Also, Yuri and I have discussed it and decided that, yes, I will accept Seraphiel as a stage name for this project.”
Yuri took a deep breath, then lifted a handwing from its case and grasped a joint at the end between his thumb and forefinger. He folded the wing into a concertina shape that would be hidden from view to anyone in front of Christos. Leon moved around to see more clearly. The handwing was beautiful, wrought of multiple bronze-colored metallic strands with tiny joints at elbows, wrist and fingers—the insect-like skeleton wing and hand belonging to a new creature fused of metal and flesh.
Christos bent from the waist, his back muscles tensing in ridges. The moment Yuri fixed the second wing in place, sweat beads balled on Christos’s upper lip. At least Christos sweated. Leon had been starting to think that Christos was inhumanly fit as well as inhumanly handsome and inhumanly vain. Christos straightened his back and opened the wings. They unfolded upward from the first elbow then outward from the second until they arched above him, fingers curled at the tips.
“Can you move them around?” When Kathryn stretched out her hand, one of the long spindly handwings extended slowly over Christos’s shoulder. Light pulsed through the transparent tips at the ends of the handwings. The three-fingered hand grasped Kathryn’s fingers, and she let out a giggly breath of astonishment.
“It’s like a bird taking my hand with its beak. And the fingers, what is that, electricity?”
“It is the passage of current through the nervous system. The metal strands are nanoengineered metal with optical conductive strands inside.” Christos spoke with effort, frowning, eyes squeezed shut.
“You’ll have to learn to work those things with your eyes wide open, Christos,” Rhona said from the other side of the room, where she had retired to perch on a steel and leather chaise longue and observe. “The rubes want eye contact. It makes it real for them. It makes you real.”
Kyle stood beside Rhona, ash-blue eyes narrowed as he observed Christos. “It would be better if it looked easy. Right now it looks like a whole lotta hard work.”
“Yes, yes. It’s practice. I haven’t had enough practice yet.” The sweat from Christos’s face was dripping in dark splotches on his blue cotton shorts. Yuri pulled a wipe from his gym bag and dabbed Christos’s forehead.
Across the room, Kyle pulled out a recorder and began talking softly into it. “Sweat, posture, effort,” he muttered. “Angel mythology, how to work it in. Revisit strategy for graphic work.”
As Rhona circled the room, inspecting Christos from different angles, Leon shivered with a surge of nostalgia for the days when his surgeon would do the same to him, checking to see how his body was holding up, cupping her hand around his shoulder as she leaned in to examine his cavity.
“We might have to get those sweat glands on your face closed up. It’s not very attractive when you’re dripping like that. There’s some kind of laser thing they can do.” Rhona peered at Christos’s chest. “You’ve got no underarm or chest hair?”
“In my exhibition Palliative Art Care, many years ago, it was necessary to have smooth skin for the application of the texts. My chest and arm hair was permanently removed. Excuse me, Kathryn, would you please stop doing that?”
Kathryn let go of his wing hand, which she had been massaging with her fingers, separating one metal finger from the other, flexing the joints and pushing the fingers together.
“Marvelous,” she said. “Splendiferous.”
It sounded unlike the way Leon had heard her speaking so far. Was she was mocking Christos? Rhona seemed to be wondering the same thing when she asked sharply, “What do you
mean, Kathryn?”
“I mean exactly what I say, Rhona. I’m rehabilitating words that have fallen out of use. Having just read P. G. Wodehouse, I think I’ll start calling things ‘marvelous.’ I like ‘smashing’ too. And ‘dandy.’ ”
“Hello?” Christos’s voice reverberated through the room. “Are you finished with me? My wings are exhausting to wear.”
“Sorry, darling. Yes, we’ll close up those face pores. You’ll still sweat from your back and underarms, so there won’t be any health issues.” Rhona touched a liver-colored blemish the size of a coin on Christos’s arm as she spoke. “We have some work to do. Physical and mental. Not just Christos but all of you. You’re fine specimens, but now you also have to learn what it is to be fine performers. Once Kyle has taught you a few basic tricks we’ll bring in a proper performance coach.”
Leon shrugged his shoulders and twisted his neck to release the tension in his back. His reason for joining Rhona’s troupe was exactly that: they would be performers, not objects for passive exhibition—two-headed cows or giant pumpkins. However, what performers actually did was not clear to him. The night before, sleeping in his new bed in this new house, new country, new world, he had dreamed of Liberace and woken with a yelp. His pillow was slimy where he had obviously been openmouthed and dribbling during his dream. Now Rhona was using the word “tricks.”
RHONA LED A tiny woman wearing grimy checked pants and a chef’s hat into the common room.
“This is our cook, Vidonia. I realize you each have some food issues, so Vidonia will plan out a diet for you and prepare your meals each day. She’s a qualified nutritionist as well as a chef.”
“Hi, Vee.” Kathryn smiled and went back to reading her book.
Vidonia pulled a small notepad and gold pencil from her pants pocket. “I found some good recipes for your black rice, Kathryn. I’ll try one tonight.”
The Wonders Page 3