The Wonders

by Paddy O’Reilly

  Since the TV debut of the Wonders, more universities and pharmaceutical companies had contacted Leon, offering inordinate amounts of money for the opportunity to examine him, to take scrapings of the titanium-bone cement, to do imaging of the inside of the heart and map its mechanisms as if he was a newly discovered island that explorers were desperate to claim as their own, driving a flag into the earth, a stake into the heart. Aside from Rhona’s insistence that he keep the workings of the heart secret, Leon knew he shouldn’t allow those people into his body. Their motives had nothing to do with his well-being.

  Minh tapped around other sections of his chest. The sound reverberated through Leon’s bones in minor quakes.

  “I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you have a face that looks like it belongs to another era,” she said as she worked. “There are some famous and truly lovely illustrations in seventeenth-century books of anatomized bodies. Something about your face reminds me of them.”

  “Oh, great. I remind you of an anatomized body.”

  She laughed a strong rising laugh, melodious, a laugh that made Leon want to laugh with it. “I didn’t mean that! Only the face, Leon, your lovely, long, melancholy face. Oh . . . sorry, I didn’t mean so be so, um . . . Anyway, yes.” She cleared her throat as she took his wrist in her hand and pulled a watch from her pocket.

  As she moved her two fingers around the thin blue skin of his inner wrist, searching for the pulse, he waited for it to dawn on her.

  “Oh.” She sat down quickly on the stool behind her, as if she had no control of her legs.

  “Please, doctor, don’t make a zombie joke.” The last physician who had discovered his lack of pulse had gone a little haywire.

  “So it doesn’t beat.”

  “If we turned off the machines in the room you would be able to hear a very faint whirring. Spooky, everyone says. It took me a long time to get used to not having a heartbeat.”

  After she had caught her breath, she drew blood into four small vials that she labeled for testing and placed in a rack on the bench. She took photos of the heart and the cavity from different angles. Next she rolled the sphygmomanometer stand to Leon’s side. Leon watched her face as she wrapped the cuff around his arm and started the machine. The cuff swelled and squeaked against his skin. She released the valve and listened. A moment later she laughed and tore apart the Velcro panels to release his arm.

  “I’m an idiot. Of course, your arterial pressure isn’t like anyone else’s. I have nothing to measure it against. That, together with no pulse. They certainly didn’t teach us any of this in med school.”

  Susan had warned him about how he would have to learn to live with a new pitch of silence. “I can’t imagine what it will be like,” she’d said. “You will not hear the life beating inside you. I wonder how it will feel.” She’d rested her hand on his head for a moment before turning her focus to her workbench, where she was screwing miniature titanium pins into fine silver branches.

  “Are you making a sculpture?” Leon had asked, imagining a gleaming bonsai tree tucked in the corner of the room alongside the piles of technical drawings and metal parts tried and discarded by Howard over the past months.

  “Yes, I guess I am,” she had replied, looking down at the silver bone in her hand. “It’s you.”

  After Minh ensured the titanium rib bone gate was fastened in place, Leon endured her measuring his reflexes, weighing him and pinch-testing his fat. While he filled out a questionnaire, she made more notes, and finally he went into the bathroom and came out with his urine sample in a jar.

  “Nearly done,” she said, taking the sample in her gloved hand and decanting it into two tubes.

  “Why did you take this job? Won’t it be boring, looking after only three people, no matter how medically odd we are?”

  “I don’t think you three will ever be boring. As you may have noticed, you have blown away my whole concept of ‘alive.’ A man with no pulse. Extraordinary.” She snapped off the thin latex gloves and dropped them into a plastic bin under the examination table. “It’s true though, I’m hoping the work here won’t occupy me full-time, because I paint. I love to paint. My parents hated the idea that I might turn into an artist and so I went to medical school. Now half the doctors I trained with are in writing and painting and acting classes on the weekends. But don’t worry, I am an excellent physician with some specialist training. You’re in safe hands.”

  “I believe you.” He did. Her calm confidence made him want to put his health, his body, his everything, completely and immediately into her care.

  “I’ll need to do some imaging of the inside of your heart, which will be tricky because it’s probably metal. We’ll have to either take you to a facility that has a special machine or get one transported here. It would be very expensive to do that though.” Minh glanced around the room before fanning herself with the paper she had been using for notes. “I’m sorry, but what on earth is that smell?”

  “It’s elephant dung, near the window, probably. The keeper can move it for you,” Leon said. “And I’m afraid I have to say no.”

  “No to what?”

  “No imaging.”

  “But what if something goes wrong with your heart?”

  “Are you an engineer?”

  “No.”

  “Then you couldn’t fix it anyway.”

  “But I could call people in. People who know.”

  “No.”

  This was Leon’s third heart. When it failed, his time would be up. That’s what he had decided. No more intervention. Next time death would have its way.

  ONCE THE TV launch had catapulted the Wonders into stratospheric fame, Rhona began the program of intimate “meet the public” dinners. It was time to start making real money.

  The public wasn’t public at all. No one in “the public” could afford the fee required for a ten-guest dinner with the Wonders. Leon couldn’t believe anyone would pay that kind of price but the requests piled up and had to be culled. In August they met with ten gridiron players who were being rewarded for a successful season. By the time the Wonders’ show began, the football players were so drunk they could barely speak. One of them peed into the cleaner’s closet, thinking it was the urinal. Next was a fund-raising dinner put on by the Republican Party. In England a few models and peers got together and flew the Wonders over for a special showing in a castle in Kent. Two months and several events later, they arrived at the actress Julia Vickers’s house in Los Angeles for a dinner engagement.

  Walking through that house, it became clear what a million dollars meant to movie people: nothing, a small tip, a mistake when buying furniture, a diamond collar for the puppy. Leon was surrounded by so much crystal and polished silverware he joked to Rhona that he needed sunscreen. Three or four staff appeared every time someone lifted a hand and Rhona complained that she should have charged ten times the fee. Surely these ten wealthy guests, the paying guests, could never return to a normal life after experiencing this kind of opulence. Would he and Kathryn and Christos become the kind of people to pay a fortune to meet another celebrity even more famous than themselves?

  Because that’s how fast it had happened. Six months after Rhona had formed the Wonders and two months after their first public appearance, they were bright shiny celebrities, flickering presences in the lives of countless humans they would never meet. They were the topic of conversation across borders, across races, across classes, when they had done nothing but appear. Of course they were living in the era where if you appeared enough, if you paraded around in the right places like something worth seeing, you must inevitably become celebrated. Even if they had been fakes they would have been celebrities. And now they were hovering inches from the ground, already detached from the grubby earth trudged by ordinary people.

  “I don’t really know why I’ve come to this event.” At Julia Vickers’s dinner the woman sitting beside Leon, on the other side from Rhona, put on a mock-glum face. Her face displac
ed the air, opened the room with such perfect symmetry that even the glum expression could have sold magazines. Leon had been trying not to stare at her since they arrived, fully aware of the irony that he was there for the purpose of being scrutinized.

  Behind the beautiful woman, the blinds on the window wall were pleated into an arrangement that kept drawing Leon’s eye, something geometric that made them appear as if they had been hung sideways or that he was looking at them with his eyes crossed. All of the furniture in the house sloped and bent at angles that made him feel unbalanced, as precarious as an ornament teetering on the edge of a table.

  The woman tilted her head. “I’m embarrassed. I mean, I think you’re fascinating, and so are Seraphiel and Lady Lamb, but it’s a bit pathetic, isn’t it, that I’d pay to meet you?”

  “Don’t people pay to see you?” Leon was taking a guess, but it was likely in this company and with that face she made her money because people wanted to look at her.

  “Yes, but I’m only a clothes hanger, a vehicle. For fashion, for a script, a product. For someone’s idea of a joke. You are the thing itself. Clockwork Man.”

  “Or simply the vehicle for the heart.”

  Rhona nudged him to get his attention and asked loudly if he could see any butter on the table. There was no butter, which she knew full well, only shallow dishes of oil and balsamic vinegar and bowls of glistening rock salt in perfect shapely hills.

  “I’m sure the waiter person will bring you some.”

  “It’s the trendy thing I hate.” Rhona was tearing her bread roll into pieces and mashing it into the oil dish. “What’s wrong with a pat of butter, I say. One teeny scrape of butter, that’s all I’m asking for.”

  “I haven’t eaten butter since I was fourteen.” The woman on his other side made her captivating glum face again. “I’m Maria, by the way.”

  “Do you have an allergy?” Leon asked.

  Maria’s velvety lips curved into a pouty smile. “Only to getting fat. I’ve been on a diet for sixteen years, since I started modeling. I’m past my use-by date, but no one’s thrown me offstage yet.”

  He recognized her now, from advertising perhaps, or a film. Her nickname was “Eleven,” as in one better than a perfect ten, and she had established a hugely successful cosmetics business called Eleven.

  “Lady Lamb is across the table so I can’t tell her myself, but would you pass on a message for me?” Maria Eleven said. She was leaning so close that her silky words tickled his ear. Even her breath was perfect, warm and smelling faintly of rosemary.

  She moved even closer. Was that her moist lip skimming the lobe of his ear? A quiver of desire passed through him. “Thank Lady Lamb for insisting there be no pets at the dinner. Ursula usually brings her nasty little yappy rat thing to parties and we all have to pretend we don’t notice when it piddles in the middle of the room.”

  He would not mention that to Kathryn. She loved dogs and cats but some reacted to her by cringing or hissing or barking. The stipulation about no pets was written into a clause of the Wonders’ contract, wedged somewhere in between the list of security requirements and the financial penalties for events that went over time. “Believe me,” Rhona had said while Leon was flipping through the contract, “they won’t want to go over time.”

  Once the hostess had introduced everyone and toasted the Wonders, the waiters brought out the entrées, slipping them in front of the guests silently and smoothly as a conjuring trick. The dish was announced as white truffle soi tan. Leon had no idea what soi tan was, but the chefs must have gone to exceptional lengths in order to feed all three of the Wonders with their difficult appetites as well as keeping the paying celebrity guests, who must have tried the most expensive foods in the world, satisfied that the food was exotic and rare enough to justify at least part of the dinner cost.

  He needn’t have worried. The models and actresses took a couple of tiny scoops and pronounced the dish extraordinary and delicious before nodding at the waiters to take the rest away. The male guests devoured the whole serving in two or three spoonfuls, since it had been delivered in a dish the size of an egg cup. Leon ate his slowly. Inside was custard, warm and salty and rich, with a tiny flake of white fish resting on the bottom of the cup.

  When he had finished his dish and pushed it aside, Kathryn caught his eye. “Hungry,” she mouthed, and grimaced. In the world of high couture, high celebrity and high prices, the fashion of huge plates with tiny servings of food had never gone away. The wealthier that people became in this country, the smaller the servings of food on their dinner plates. The Wonders soon learned to have a snack before their events. Food was important to each of them, especially Christos, who used power grids of energy in the operation of his wings. The lean servings of the stars left the Wonders ravenous and cross, reminding Leon of the snappy tempers of hungry children at school in the late afternoon.

  By eight thirty the dessert had been cleared away and it was time to prepare for the show. Rhona called it the “déshabillé.” “Déshabillé” sounded to Leon like lounging around in your underwear.

  As coffee, cheese and fruit were served to the guests, Rhona led the three performers out to the room that had been set aside as the dressing room. In every venue this was a different type of room rigged up for the night. It could be a maid’s room or a storage cupboard or an anteroom off the lounge. Tonight they ended up in the swimming pool annex. The weather, as usual for Los Angeles, was warm and the annex roof had been opened so that the smoggy yellow stars could blink weakly down on them.

  “Chlorine, ugh.” Kathryn waved her hand in front of her face.

  “Hurry up, then. The sooner we get ready the sooner we’re out of here.” Rhona ushered Kathryn to a bench where her makeup kit and a mirror were laid out.

  Yuri wrestled with Christos’s left wing in the corner of the room while Leon stripped off his cravat and shirt and undershirt.

  Rhona offered to help Yuri with the wings. Christos refused. “He has to learn to do it alone.”

  “What about you, Leon? Can I do anything?”

  He told her to help Kathryn, who had slipped off her cloak, and was twisting herself around trying to pick something off the seat of her sari and muttering about how the filthy rich were so filthy they couldn’t keep their chairs clean. There was little for Leon to do in preparation for the show except pump his arms a few times to try to make the muscles stand out, and oil up.

  In the early rehearsals, where they had performed for a few of Rhona’s friends, he had paraded his clammy white chest around the room, flailing his skinny arms in an ungainly attempt at graceful movement. He could sense in the room a hum, if not of disgust, of distaste. He was a weakling, a puny survivor of an outrageous medical procedure that should have killed him, and that’s how he looked. Rhona brought in fitness equipment, a personal trainer and a dance teacher, and she sent him off to get spray-tanned.

  The transformation took months of daily workouts, but once he had built himself up he finally saw in the mirror a fit and erect man rather than a weak, flabby patient debilitated by major surgery. Instead of the quickly smothered gasp of dismay he used to hear when he walked into the room with his torso bare and his heart winking inside its cavern, now he heard the admiring grunts of an enraptured crowd. Rhona was right again. The observers had become an audience—the specimen had become the performer. Leon wished his father could see this new Leon, who may not have become the sporty robust man his father hoped for but had built, at least, the muscles that would move that man.

  Back in the room set aside for the performance, the tech dimmed the room lights and started Leon’s signature music, “Dido’s Lament.” The first bars played in the darkness, the singing voice calling round and prayerful.

  Thy hand, Belinda, darkness shades me,

  On thy bosom let me rest,

  More I would, but Death invades me;

  Death is now a welcome guest.

  At the moment the recitative ended, the t
ech snapped on a spotlight aimed at the door where Leon would enter. The voice swelled. As the singer launched into the lament, he pushed through the doorway. The only object clearly visible in the room was the gleaming polished brass of his heart seeming to float in the air inside its titanium cage.

  When I am laid, am laid in earth, may my wrongs create

  No trouble, no trouble in thy breast;

  Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.

  Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.

  Tremulous sighs and groans from the crowd formed a sibilant bass accompaniment to the aria. Every time he heard this music of humanity, even though it may have happened three nights in a row, goose bumps erupted on his skin, and his own breath stuttered in his chest. Under the music was a deep man’s voice that Rhona had recorded while they were setting up the show. It was almost inaudible, perhaps subliminal, but he could hear it because he knew it was there.

  The spotlight shone into his heart. He raised his arms in a wide embrace of the room and turned slowly. He moved around the space, between the furniture, followed by the spotlight. In the last few moments of the performance, when the singer’s voice had soared to the last line and he stood where he had entered, hands at his sides, head bowed, the man’s voice spoke under the music, directly into the minds of the audience. “What a piece of work is a man,” the voice said, and without knowing they had been prompted, the spectators burst into applause. The whole performance took four and a half minutes.

  With his part of the show over, he backed out through the doorway to where Kathryn was preparing to go onstage. They always left three full minutes between each appearance for people to chat and for the anticipation to build.