The Wonders

by Paddy O’Reilly

  “You think you are finished because someone else is talking and you let your face relax? Pow, they turn the lens on you and you come across to millions of people as a miserable party pooper.”

  “Thanks for the advice, Christos. I feel so much better now. Absolutely spiffing.”

  “No, Kathryn, I am not joking. It happened to me on the most important art show in New York. I watched the recording and there I am, thinking my part is over, rolling my eyes at something stupid I had said. But no one realized that. They believed I was rolling my eyes at what someone else had said. They never asked me back.”

  The regular guests of this program, a comedian and a “crazy news” reporter who entertained with offbeat anecdotes from the news or interjected sexual innuendo into others’ stories, were relegated to a couch at the far side of the stage for this special Wonders edition of the show. Leon had met them in the greenroom, where they smiled like hyenas. “Do you do anything?” the comedian asked through his handlebar mustache. “Or are you just for looking at?”

  Once the three were seated, Rhona appeared at the curtain where Leon had stood seconds before, on the mark where guests posed momentarily in the spotlight before bounding down the stairs to greet the host. Rhona may have been short and old and not particularly beautiful, but she soaked up that spotlight and reflected it ten times brighter. Even Leon and Kathryn and Christos began to clap as she raised one arm in a gesture of acknowledgment. She was back where she belonged—at the center of a three-ring circus.

  “Rhona Burke, the Penny Queen,” Matt Karvos announced, and the band struck up “Entry of the Gladiators,” the circus clown music.

  Rhona stepped carefully down the stairs on her high-heeled cowgirl boots and walked to the host. He kissed her on both cheeks, knocking against the felt brim of her hat. As the music came to an end, he held out his hand to escort her to her seat between the Wonders on the couch and him at the desk.

  “Here.” She pulled off the ten-gallon hat and gave it to him. “You can have this. It’s a genuine Penny King hat from the Enchanted Circus of 1955. Only six left in the world.”

  “Miss Burke, I’m honored.”

  With lights flashing Applause and a man running up and down the studio floor in front of the audience waving his arms to make them shout louder, the cheering escalated to screams again. Kathryn gave Leon a look that said, “Get me out of here.” Christos yawned a tight cat yawn of anxiety, which he hid with a hand gesture of smoothing his hair into place. Beyond the cameras on the stage floor Kyle was dictating notes, his head bobbing as he muttered into his recorder. When he caught Leon looking his way, he gave an awkward thumbs-up, like a parent on the sideline of his son’s losing soccer team.

  “Now tell us all about the Wonders, Miss Burke. Where did they come from? Are we looking at the future of the human race?”

  It would seem logical that the host would be interviewing Leon or Kathryn or Christos. After all, they were the “talent,” as they had been called backstage. A young runner with a clipboard had leaned in through the doorway of the greenroom. “Are you the talent?” he’d said hurriedly before pushing farther into the room and catching sight of Kathryn. “Oh yeah. You’re the talent.” He pulled his blunt head with its headphone and mic out of the doorway and raced off down the corridor, rubber shoes squeaking on the linoleum floor, his muttering voice a fading sound track.

  “By ‘the talent,’ he means the guests,” Kyle said, and patted Kathryn’s shoulder.

  “I said before I didn’t like to be touched.”

  Kyle shrugged and raised his hands in surrender. “Sorry.”

  “No offense, Kyle. I didn’t mean to be rude. But I don’t like it.”

  “Got it.” Kyle had crossed the room, lifted his recorder and spoken quietly into it as though he was noting this important instruction.

  At that moment clipboard boy had come to collect the performers and guide them to the live-broadcast studio. Kyle followed slowly, watching Kathryn from behind as she strode along the carpeted corridor, her cloak wrapped tight around her.

  Onstage Rhona was telling the anecdotes the group had agreed could be released at this point. She had decided Leon and Kathryn would be too nervous at the first gig and that she would set the scene at the launch herself. She was enjoying herself, chatting with the host, swapping repartee with the cohosts, who were trying to attract attention from their couch at the far end of the studio. She even posed a question to the studio audience.

  “Aren’t you glad I found these amazing people?” She nodded as she spoke.

  The audience cheered a yes. Leon’s innards were performing slow acrobatics somewhere around the region of his lower intestine. Christos was steady but tense, a professional, alert and focused. Kathryn sat immobile save for her hidden foot pile-driving into the floor, a rigid smile on her face.

  Last night from inside his hotel room, he had heard Kathryn and Rhona in the corridor. Kathryn told Rhona she was afraid.

  “They’ll tear me apart again,” she whispered. “They’ll make me out to be a monster.”

  “No, darling, that’s exactly what they won’t do. I’ve made sure of it. This is why we’re here.”

  THREE WEEKS AFTER their first TV appearance, Kathryn described to Leon how she’d woken that morning from a nightmare. She had dreamed herself a victim of fly-strike, an infestation of maggots in live sheep flesh. Her voice rat-a-tatted out the words as if to shoot down the whole ghastly picture.

  Although fly-strike was not a possibility in Kathryn’s world, Leon knew from experience that fear is more often about the unlikely than the likely. If only he could reassure her in some way—but how can you reassure someone that their fears are foolish when they already know it?

  “It’s crazy, I know,” she said, draining her glass of straw-colored wine. “Stupid, monumentally dumb to even imagine it. But I’m still aching with terror at that moment in the dream when I caught sight in the mirror behind me of the writhing mass of maggots, devouring me alive.”

  His fears were more prosaic: catching a cold or flu and sneezing violently or eating something bad and suffering convulsive vomiting that might shake loose the tubes to his heart. Even low temperatures bringing on a chilled shiver were enough to make him hurry to the closet and strap himself into the restrictive brace designed to maintain the stability of the heart during exercise. For Kathryn, the climate was irrelevant. Her wool kept her at an even temperature no matter what the ambient weather. Kathryn saved her terror for the diseases and parasites that belonged to the family to which she had become an unwilling relation: maggots, sheep lice, bluetongue, foot and mouth, pinkeye.

  Before she married she was a lazy housekeeper, she had told him. She described the bathroom of her singles flat crusted in a rind of steam-baked dust. Her living room carpet sucked at the soles of her shoes with the same gluey squelch as the carpet at the local band venue. She lifted her cleaning game a little after moving in with her husband. But by the time Leon met Kathryn, she had become a hygiene obsessive. When she disappeared into the bathroom with a kit bag of wipes and disinfectants, no one said a thing. If a buzzing blowfly entered a room she sat immobile until someone smacked it down. Leon found it discomfiting to see tough Kathryn blanching at the sight of a harmless insect. She, like he, clearly lived in fear of the day when her body would betray her yet again.

  Kathryn’s other trouble, earlier on, had been that sheep’s wool should be kept in prime condition by the lanolin secreted from the skin. Her skin secreted plenty of lanolin, enough to give her the supple skin of a teenager, but for the first year after her change she was shaving and washing herself constantly. Day after day she continued her obsessive attention to her skin and the wool as if she could make it less conspicuous, less bizarre. She ended up wreathed in scabs and rashes. Her regrowth was brittle. Every time she was caught in the rain she came down with terrible chills because the wool had lost its waterproof quality, and she stayed damp for hours. She was spending every
second day in the waiting room of her dermatologist. The hospital where she had the treatment that went wrong had provided no aftercare—they spent their time trying to deny culpability and ensure she wouldn’t sue. Which of course she did, or at least her husband did in her name, and he profited bountifully from Kathryn’s affliction.

  Leon had read the articles about her husband and his exploitation of Kathryn’s illness. He had sold photos of her that should never have been taken, let alone published. Kathryn barely mentioned him. Only Rhona referred to him, although never in Kathryn’s presence. He was trying to profit again by pressuring Rhona for a cut of Kathryn’s income. “I’m dealing with it,” Rhona had told Leon. “My lawyers are going to take that asshole down.”

  It was a farmer who cured Kathryn’s skin problem. He’d seen a newspaper report. She had already been exposed in the media when Rhona took over her management, but her fame was an ugly thing, a brutish perverted kind of fame where she was degraded and derided and she reacted with swearing and crying and shrieking when they chased her down the street, and so they slavered over her even more.

  The farmer sent her a letter written in fine cursive handwriting. She showed Leon the letter, which she had kept with her ever since because, she said, it was the most respectful and kind letter she had ever received. It made her believe once again that goodness was possible in the world. The letter apologized for disturbing her and commiserated with her for the treatment she had experienced at the hands of the media.

  I am ashamed to say that I saw you on television, the letter said, because that is admitting that I continued to watch and did not turn it off as I should have. It went on to explain that the letter writer was brought up on a sheep farm and had taken it over when he came of age, and he knew very well that when a sheep’s lanolin is stripped from the wool by pest treatments or excessive washing, which can also happen when well-meaning people hand-raise a lamb, the sheep’s skin will suffer terribly until the lanolin is replaced. So I wanted to make a suggestion, if nothing else works, that you might want to give your own skin a chance to replace the lanolin, which I understand it does of its own account, and I may be wrong but I think that in a few weeks you will be feeling much better. The letter signed off with a wish for her good health and a resumption of her privacy.

  She was in good health now, but the three Wonders each relied on large daily doses of medication and regular medical attention. Rhona had originally planned to use a local private clinic as their main treatment center. She had drawn up a confidentiality agreement and arranged to book out the entire clinic one day a month. It wasn’t enough. After three emergency visits to the clinic for Christos, whose emergencies had turned out to be little more than mild aches, and which necessitated the clinic shutting down normal operations and rescheduling other patients to ensure the Wonders’ privacy, she threw up her hands and hired a full-time doctor. Dr. Minh Trang would live with them, eat with them, travel with them, and work to keep them in good health. A fully equipped doctor’s office was established behind the kitchen, where the cool room used to be, and she was given the guest cottage in the garden, beside the elephant house, as her living quarters.

  “And it’s extremely odd,” Rhona said as they watched the moving-van men unload the new doctor’s boxes, “because when I introduced her to the elephants—and, yes, I had warned her about the animals before she signed up—Maisie did a back-leg stand and offered the doctor a plantain from the feed bin. Maisie’s usually quite standoffish with strangers.”

  Kathryn was happy. “A woman doctor of our own! Splendiferous. Thank goodness I won’t have to rely on farmers and veterinarians for medical advice.”

  If Christos had made that joke, Kathryn would have retaliated in kind. That she cracked the joke herself showed how far they had come since their early cautious courtesies while learning to live together. They may have had separate apartments, but Leon, Rhona, Kathryn, Christos and Yuri saw each other every day. For a loner like Leon, it had been a trial. He knew he was changing when he found himself missing Christos or Kathryn if they were away for a few nights. He was discovering a different kind of loneliness, one that involved other people and what happened when they went away.

  The day after she moved in, Dr. Trang called Leon to her office for his first examination.

  “Welcome to Overington, Dr. Trang,” Leon said from the doorway. He sniffed the air. A blaze of grief ignited in him for the surgeon and engineer who had saved his life, had transformed his body while he was dying, and had built and implanted the mechanism that brought him back. Even though he was certain he would never see them again, he always scoured the Australian news for any mention of a heart like his own, or a pioneering surgical technique, just in case. The hidden basement where he had spent a year in their care had smelled this way—sharp with antibacterials and the scorched dust of heating elements.

  “Please call me Minh. It’s a privilege to be here.” Minh stretched out her hand, welcoming Leon into the room.

  “Oh, we’re just normal people except for our little oddities,” he replied.

  “I’m sure you are. The privilege is because of the enormous amount of money I’m being paid and the very little work I’ll have to do.”

  Leon’s cheeks and forehead simmered pink.

  “Clothes off, please. You can leave your underpants on. I’ll come in when you call.” She was tall, long-haired, her face broad and open. Narrow from behind as she walked out of the room. Her band of black hair ended in a neat line at the shoulder blades.

  He unbuttoned his shirt and slipped off his shoes. He’d been working out in the gym, but his chest and arms still showed signs of years without exercise. Hints of the spindly, slack, bony man he used to be.

  The doctor paused at the doorway and inhaled a deep breath before she looked at his chest. When Leon first joined the Wonders, Kathryn was so spectacular he thought no one would be interested in looking at him. People’s reactions proved he was a spectacle of an equal order. What he’d grown used to over the course of the surgeries and the year of recovery was so shocking to other people that they were usually left speechless. Even Rhona had been silent for seconds when she first stood before him and saw the tunnel through his breast. Not Minh though.

  “How do I get to the heart?” She perched on a stool so that her head was at the same height as his heart. A couple of plucked eyebrow hairs were reemerging black and blunt above her eye, and the smoothness of her skin was a contrast to his own, lightly pocked from teen acne and further marred by open pores across the nose.

  He showed her the hidden catch, and she swung open the titanium bars. There were only a few functioning nerve endings left in the scar tissue, but he could sense her fingers as they played across the surface of the cavity. She moved around behind him, and once again her fingers tickled his skin.

  “A little dry here. I’ll get some ointment.”

  Leon closed his eyes. She ran her finger around the inside of the cavity like a child skimming cream from a bowl. Her other hand rested on his arm, warm and firm. His breath slowed. He felt the tension from his thigh muscles draining through to the floor. The touch of her gentle fingers gave him the odd sensation that the knotty damage was being smoothed out, as if being touched in this most private place was bringing together his emotions and his physical being in a way he hadn’t experienced since he had almost given up hope of life.

  “I would so love to meet the surgeons who did this,” she murmured, shining a light into the heart cavity and pausing to make notes on her recorder. “It’s completely crazy. Why metal? Of all the materials they could choose from, they pick metal. Hard to manipulate, difficult to repair, inflexible, prone to fatigue. Madness.” She stopped, took a pair of tweezers and tapped the surface of the heart once, very lightly. Leon quivered with fear, but she patted his arm. “Don’t worry, that’s all I’ll do. Maybe it’s not exactly metal. It doesn’t sound quite right. Could it be that it’s actually not a simple metal alloy but someth
ing else?”

  He didn’t answer. Leon had no idea what his heart was made of. While Susan and Howard were operating, manufacturing, measuring, doctoring, computing, he had tried to understand what they were doing to him by reading about pain receptors and blood cells and osmotic transfer. Learning a new language for his new body. Or when he couldn’t face another chemical formula that seemed impenetrable, or another text on the cauterization of blood vessels that brought to mind the burning stench as Susan waved away the surgical smoke of his flesh, he played electronic games or pored over jigsaw puzzles or figured out cryptic crosswords. Sometimes he had returned to his favorite books: the war stories, the biographies. Anything to keep his mind off the pain, and the inexorable and visible perishing of his body.

  What’s more, although Minh was his new doctor, he didn’t know enough about her to trust her. Already Overington had lost a housekeeper to the trash media. She’d sold her story of “working for the freaks.” Leon could imagine the next article. A doctor tells the gruesome medical stories of the Wonders.

  Minh and Leon stared at each other for a moment. Leon said nothing.

  Minh broke first. “Okay, I understand. Rhona said you wouldn’t answer questions about the mechanics of the heart. Doesn’t make my job any easier though. It certainly would help if I could talk to your doctors.”

  All he knew of Susan and Howard was that Howard must surely have died soon after Leon left the basement. He had been in the last stages of cancer. When Susan had dropped Leon at the train station with his small bag of clothes and a bank account full of money, he experienced the panic of a child abandoned by his parents, left to fend for himself with no skills and no tools and no idea about how to live with his new heart. He had sent the weekly updates they’d requested on his health to the e-mail address Susan had given him in the six months that followed, until one day the e-mails began to bounce. He went to find her at the university only to discover she had resigned. There was no forwarding address. She had told no one where she was headed.