“And you’re their spokesman? Can’t they talk for themselves? What’s wrong with you anyway? Or are you hanging around these disabled people for some other reason?”
“I’m here with my wife,” the man said. “And it’s not just us. There’s a big group around the front.”
“Is that a fur coat your wife’s wearing?”
In the cold everyone was bundled up. It was dark except for the exit lights of the building and a few bars of light from narrow windows. But Leon could see she was right: the woman was wearing an expensive fur coat. When she moved, the fine hairs on the coat shimmered like rippling water in sunlight.
“Don’t change the subject. We’re talking about humans, not animals.”
The man saw the hole he had dug for himself only after the words came out. The last word he spoke was clipped, its tail cut off. Kathryn rocked backward and forward on her heels.
“I see.” That’s all she needed to say.
Rhona was looking around nervously. “Can we go into the light and talk about this?”
A couple of security guards arrived at the end of the alley. Their marching boots sent cans and bottles skittering across the concrete. They headed toward the small crowd with the forward lean and wide-shouldered gait of bulldogs.
“We’re not going anywhere with you.” This time it was another woman. She wore a hood that shaded her face and a scarf wound tightly against the cold. Her breath jetted in white puffs through the wool of her scarf. “You don’t want to listen. You think because you’re beautiful that being a freak is a glamorous job.”
Rhona circled Leon and Kathryn and Christos, a wolf herding her cubs, before she turned to the demonstrators. “I’m sorry but we have to go. Here’s my card. You can contact me if you have something to say. But stay away from my clients.”
She led the three out of the alley, threading her way in small steps past the blind man and his dog and between the two wheelchairs. She told the security guards that everything was fine, and they swiveled on their combat boots to escort them out. With Rhona ahead talking on the phone to Yuri, the others followed silently in file, Kathryn, Leon, then Christos, his teeth chattering with the cold. The heating units and exhaust fans venting into the alley gave it a moist and complicated odor in the freezing night.
As they passed the woman with her head covered and her face wrapped in the scarf, Leon heard the hissed words under the hum and clatter of the machinery. So did Kathryn; he could see from the way she stopped dead, then broke into a jog to catch up with Rhona.
You’d understand what it is to be a real freak if someone threw acid in your face.
They never mentioned what they had heard to Rhona, but from that day on Kathryn stopped shouting at people who abused them.
Was it a threat? Or had one of them, perhaps that woman, perhaps another of the bundled-up demonstrators they couldn’t see properly in the darkness, been the victim of an acid attack?
Leon imagined being scarred by acid, trying not to flinch when a child pointed out the shiny scarified lumpy mass that was his face. He would hate the Wonders too.
Back home, listening to the recounting of the night’s events, Kyle twitched the knot of his tie with his forefinger and thumb as he paced around the room. Rhona’s theory was that the leaked photos had sparked the demonstration, that they had broken the spell of the magical Wonders and let loose the envy.
“It couldn’t be the Bared photos. They’re normal tabloid fodder, there was nothing in them that made you out to be superior. They were the opposite of superior. If that’s what they were worried about, those disabled people should have applauded.”
“Well, it’s your job to shut that garbage down anyway. You’re the PR guy. Make it stop.”
Kyle went back to his pacing. “Don’t get this mixed up, Rhona. One thing is publicity, the other is security. I do publicity, period. Being caught up in a protest is a failure of security.”
As the man behind the scenes, Kyle rarely traveled with the Wonders. He worked ahead of them, either physically, checking out venues and meeting potential sponsors, or digitally, sowing the seeds of the next story. Even his body language, constantly leaning forward and on the move, read like someone peering into the future, sniffing opportunity. That youthful eager face. When they were all together at Overington, he spent more time talking on the phone than with the people lying on the couches in the room near him. His world, his life, seemed to be one story after another.
Leon had once heard Rhona asking Kyle to spend more time with them.
“Get to know us better. Be part of the family,” she said.
“You’ve got to understand,” Kyle had replied, “I do know you, and them, but I can’t be their friend. In this job, I have to do things that upset people. One gets a big boost in promotion, the others are jealous. I have to tell them when their performances are crap. A friend can’t do that. I have friends. You’re my clients. For sure, the strangest clients I’ll ever have.”
Later that night, Leon thought about what Rhona had told him of her father and the Enchanted Circus. People see glitter and fairy wings, she’d said, but up close the performers have corns and bad teeth. It was the same with him and the other Wonders. Their bodies on the stage were beautiful, extraordinary, dumbfounding, demanding of important philosophical and moral attention. At home, their bodies were painful, constipated, itchy, flaky, brittle, liable to exude pus or blood, weak and easily worn out. The most amazing humans were also the most feeble and vulnerable. Philosophical inquiry meant nothing to a man straining on the toilet.
He supposed he was an exaggerated version of every human. Keeping up appearances in public and collapsing into pathetic debility at home.
YOU’RE ADDICTED, ADMIT it. You’re in love with it.” Kathryn sneered as she tossed insults Leon’s way. Christos was out of the country, visiting his grandmother, and Kathryn had no one to joust with, so she had turned on Leon. Minh was working in her office, supervising the installation of a new monitoring unit. If she were here, Kathryn would be kinder to Leon. Minh made everyone around her kinder by paying no attention to meanness until it dissipated into the atmosphere. What appeared to be an attitude of common sense and practicality belied Minh’s understanding of what made other people behave the way they did. Leon was sure she knew more about him than he knew himself.
But she was not in the room now, and Kathryn was lashing and sparking like a shorn electricity wire. This temper must have been the result of last night’s phone call. Someone had tracked down the private number at Overington, asked for Kathryn, then spilled a savage discharge of venom into her ear. She wouldn’t tell anyone what the caller had said.
“I’ve got used to the attention, that’s all.” Leon ran his finger down the ribbed velvet of his chair. “Being stared at doesn’t frighten me anymore.”
The living room at Overington could have passed as a furniture showroom. Everyone had chosen different styles of furniture to suit their modified body shapes. Rhona, Kyle, Yuri and Minh sat on the original couches and chairs. Leon had ordered a big padded sofa and armchair with cushions that he often found himself absentmindedly clutching over the hole in his chest, whereas Christos had commissioned purpose-built chairs with apertures that supported his lumbar region without touching the ceramic lilies on either side of his spine. Today Kathryn sat on the other side of the room on her favorite chair, a designer vinyl and steel piece, flat and pocked with red cloth upholstery buttons. A frosted glass lamp shade in the shape of a tulip arched over the chair for her reading. But now she wasn’t reading, she was tap-tapping the heel of her pink sling-backs against the flat metal support of the chair. The pillar of books on the table beside the chair swayed with each tap.
“I was right about those disabled people, you know. They should invite the idiots to stare. Then the staring would become boring. If everyone was allowed to stare, they wouldn’t. They’d have one good look, then forget about it.”
Leon wasn’t sure. Were he
and Kathryn and Christos, the beautiful monsters, making everything worse for the different ones who were not beautiful? The image he had seen once in a news bulletin of an acid-scarred Afghani woman had come to him after the demonstration, and it flashed into his mind now and then, causing him to shudder. Could she bear to be stared at, even glimpsed, by a stranger?
“Stop it!” That’s what his mother would say when he was a child. A stern hiss. “Don’t stare.” “Stop looking.” Her hot hand would grab Leon’s and ball it into her fist and she would wrench him away. Because staring was the most satisfying pleasure but one of the most taboo. Anything odd, different. Anything too big or too small. Anything broken or too neat. Anything. Lips apart, jaw loose, a fold of frown. His favorite object of intense scrutiny for years was the lady who worked in the local fish and chip shop. He could get away with it when the neighbors were there buying their own fish and chips and his mother was distracted, chatting with them.
Mrs. Mac from the fish-and-chippery on Main Road had a mole below her lip from which sprouted three magnificent thick hairs, two black and one white. One of her bottom front teeth was missing. She swiveled her body around behind the deep counter as if her left side was useless, swinging huge baskets of cooked chips out of the bubbling oil onto the fryer drain and slamming fish around in flour before dipping it into the stainless steel batter bowl crusted with drips of dried batter and flinging it into the fish section of the oil vats. Best of all was her voice, so deep it was deeper than a man’s. All wrapped in a big greasy floral apron. To make the experience perfect, at the end of it Leon was handed salty hot chips to eat on the way home.
With his first transplant, surgeons and doctors and nurses never stared at him. He could remember so clearly the day he heard his failing heart would be replaced. In Rosebud, a beach suburb where the sea smell washed through the tea tree and banksia and the long flat highway drove straight through town without an invitation to stop, a young woman, nineteen years old, assistant in a pharmacy and student of hairdressing, tripped on an uneven slab of pavement. She teetered for a moment, arms full of boxes, then fell backward, the cardboard flying up and bouncing lightly off her body. Her buttocks hit the ground first, and she must have shouted or cried out with the pain. Then her head cracked against a jutting curb that pierced the skull. The boxes came to rest around her in a soft sculpture. An artery in her head was damaged. Blood began seeping through the tissue of her brain. By the time the ambulance arrived she was beyond saving. Leon was called. He had a bag already packed, like a woman waiting to give birth, and he raced to the hospital to receive the brawny gift of a dead teenager.
The doctors at the hospital examined him, a different procedure altogether from staring. An examination is an attempt to interrogate the body. It is detached from the person who is being examined. “Look at this,” the surgeon would say, pointing out the puckered skin around Leon’s stitched-up incision to his interns. “See the ooze here? You may think it indicates a rupture of the . . .” And the interns would gather in close and peer at the point of interest, nodding, making notes, offering interpretations. Behind them hovered the overworked nurses, impatient to do their jobs and move on to the next patient.
The stare is a different thing altogether. Leon had come to think of the stare as admiration. Maybe Kathryn was right. A child uses the stare as a tool of curiosity and wonder. The grotesque is wonderful. The malformed is wonderful, the unexpected is wonderful and so is the beautiful. There is far less judgment in the unguarded stare of a child than the hush-ups of their adult companions.
He told Kathryn how, at a private dinner, a child who was waiting in the corridor for her waitress mother to finish work had asked him if he was a robot. That made him laugh. “Is your brain made of metal too?” she asked. She was five, the age when the questions pour out of a child like milk out of a jug. “Do you eat nails? Why did they put it in that way? Do you have feelings?”
“Oh yes,” Leon answered her. “I have so many feelings that sometimes I think I’ll burst.”
“Me too,” she replied gravely. She touched his hand and looked up at his face with serious eyes. Eyes that didn’t waver. Eyes that never flickered once to the hole in his chest.
When Susan and Howard were working on him in that machine-packed laboratory theater, preparing him to receive the third heart, he felt comforted by their stares. They observed him constantly—examining him, scrutinizing him, checking with a glance whenever he coughed or groaned. His body was made solid by the way they created him with their gaze. Exhausted and feverish and weak and sometimes wishing he was dead, he could be buoyed by an appraisal from Susan, an inspection by Howard. He did sometimes call himself Frankensteins’ monster—they were the Doctors Frankenstein who were stitching him together. But at the same time, they loved his body. They looked into him, reached into him, broke him and cut parts out of him, mended him as best they could. And all the time they kept their eyes on him and at the end, he was the wondrous monster they had hoped to create. Then finally they could look again at each other.
Eight months before, when Leon had his first sessions of standing onstage, whether the stage was someone’s art-deco-inspired living room or the private meeting room of an international hotel decked out in modular red armless chairs and smoky glass-topped tables, the experience was agony. He twisted under the pinning gaze of the paying audience. He squirmed. He was wrong for the celebrity life; he would be better off hiding himself inside a normal life. He could put on an undershirt and a shirt and no one would know. He could be the same as everyone else.
But he had learned. Over time, a part of him had eased into the role as the object of fascination, even though he was reluctant to admit that to Kathryn. He had come to understand that if he stayed silent and let his body speak for him, he remained calm. Before too long it was only when he failed to cause the shock, when someone’s gaze slid away too fast, that he became apprehensive, concerned he was doing something wrong. To appear as the exhibit was not difficult: he could stand still while people peered at his heart, sighed, murmured their consternation. He revealed nothing of his real self to these strangers. But being himself in a crowd of strangers was harder than it had ever been. He wasn’t even sure what “himself” might be.
Did he really enjoy being the spectacle, as Kathryn accused? Did it matter anymore? He was something new again, and not only in his body. Onstage he wasn’t Leon, a man living his life. He was Clockwork Man, living a superlife to give other people the satisfaction of encountering a wonder of the world.
They gazed at his body, at the horror of it. They were silenced too, by its glory. Sometimes it seemed they were about to fall to their knees.
I THINK THIS IS it.” Minh held out the screen for Leon to see. He placed his hand on her arm to steady it so that he could read the message.
“I don’t know why I’m so nervous,” she said with a laugh. “She’s your surgeon, not mine.”
All the messages and e-mails had been sent under Minh’s name. The contact note gave the dates Leon had been under the care of a Dr. Susan Nowinski whom Dr. Minh Trang was attempting to find. Leon would know it was the real Susan if she could explain where his surgery had taken place. Apologies and sympathy notes and attacks from people who believed they were being scammed had flowed in.
It’s not me, but wishing you luck in your search.
Hope you find her.
Keep at it. She’s out there somewhere.
I know this is an attempt to steal my identity. Rot in hell, you scumbag.
They had finished with Australia and moved on to America, first mapping out regions, tracing the state and county lines in thick black pen on a large map stuck to the wall, turning the USA into a jigsaw of possibility. The washed-out greens and yellows of the map, the resistance of the wall behind when Leon pressed a finger to a city gave the task a materiality missing from their electronic work.
The reply on Minh’s screen said, Dr. Trang, please pass along this message.
Dear Leon, how lovely it would be to see you. I treated you at a university in Melbourne, Australia. I have information to give you. Please send me your contact details.
Leon dropped his hands between his knees and let his head fall forward. “It’s not specific enough and Susan would never say how lovely. It’s another phishing reply. I hate that there are so many people who want to rip you off.” His hair had been styled in a 1920s cut with a part on the side and the hair slicked up and across. The cut might have looked good for the fans but whenever he bent over as he just had, hair fell down in a thick greasy flop over his eyes. He groaned, pushed it back into place and wiped his gelled hand on his trousers. “I’ll never find her. The Americas will take years and years to work through.”
Minh used her feet to push her office chair away from the desk. It rolled backward and sideways until she was facing Leon.
“I think it’s worth going on. We’ll find her eventually.” She ran her fingers through her hair and stretched her hands to the ceiling as she yawned.
“If I last that long,” he said.
Again she used her feet to steer the chair, this time a little closer so that her knees lined up opposite Leon’s. “Sometimes you talk about yourself as if you are a machine, Leon. If I last that long. Washing machines last. Phones last. Part of staying healthy is believing that you are.”
In her warm spicy presence, aware of her feet poised on the toes ready to push her off into another direction, Leon felt insubstantial, a mantle of inconsequential flesh grown around the clockwork heart.
“I am a machine.” He shrugged. “There’s no use pretending.”
“We are all machines in a way. But we are all more too. Especially you, Leon. You take care to know people. Every day, I see you listen when someone talks to you, really listen, and then think and then, only then, do you speak. You allow people to be.” She pushed off again, rolling to the desk, where she caught the edge with her fingers and steadied herself. She was blushing. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .”
The Wonders Page 12