The Wonders (5 page)

A
ND 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.”

R
HONA 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.”

During the orientation tour of Rhona's property, Leon and Christos had been shown the main kitchen. It was industrial-sized with long stainless steel benches, saucepans and sauce pots, crepe pans and tureens, a six-burner stove and an oven that could fit a suckling pig. Vidonia seemed as though she would barely be able to see the top of the stove let alone lift a stockpot full of boiling soup off of it.

“Mr. Hyland, what are your requirements? Any allergies or dislikes?”

He'd prepared for this, for the day someone would have to know about his odd eating pattern. “I'm sorry, I do have a few things. They had to take some of my stomach away after an infection during my surgeries. It's a third the size of a normal stomach. And part of my duodenum is also missing.”

Vidonia nodded, scribbling on her pad.

“I eat five small meals a day. I drink liquids between meals, never with them, because I don't have enough capacity in my stomach for both liquid and solid. Spicy foods give me indigestion, and offal can make me retch—it's dangerous for my stomach to react violently, so . . .”

His grandmother used to serve steak and kidney pudding on the third Thursday of the month. One evening when she asked Leon to help her with the preparation, he had to juggle the slippery kidneys from their wrapping to the cutting board. A particularly slimy one shot out of his grip and went splat against the fridge before sliding to the floor, leaving a trail of purple bloody material on the white surface. Later on, being wheeled in and out of surgery, he often recalled that dark meaty smear, the deadness and yet the fleshiness of it, the reminder that we are made of such mortal tissue.

“Anything else?”

“No,” he lied. “That's all.”

Leon was barely acquainted with the people who shared the house. Everything he said he measured first by what kind of impression it might leave on them. Besides his fellow performers and Rhona, Kyle and Yuri, there were the housekeeping staff; the security staff; the animal keepers and gardeners; the media trainer; a fitness coach; Kathryn's stylist, who came weekly to keep her coat shorn and neat. Coming out of a year of total
solitude, he was a man of gaffes and blunders, still sleepwalking, the social equivalent of a dining companion with a long red crease in his face from sleeping on the pillow seam.

Vidonia kept scribbling. “I'm going to be around six days a week, so you can always change your order.” She grinned, her teeth pointy but cute in a vampire kind of way. “And I'm a fabulous cook.”

“She is.” Rhona patted her own mounded hips with both hands. “I blame her for my great big ass.”

Vidonia turned to Christos. “Mr. Petridis? Your special diet?”

Christos sighed. He turned on his side on the divan near the window. Yuri sat cross-legged on the floor beside him.

“I have”—he paused lengthily—“a number of requirements. My diet is restricted, like Leon's, because of surgical intervention. Also, I am allergic to shellfish, and I prefer to avoid pork. As for the weighting of protein, fat and carbohydrate in my meals—think of me as an elite athlete. I must carbo-load before a performance. I must have muscle mass and endurance. I will need energy bars available at all times. Drinks high in amino acids and mineral salts should be placed beside each machine in the gymnasium. Yuri can make my special shakes. I prefer him to do this. And he himself is a vegan. He must not have any animal products in his food. I don't understand it, but I respect it.”

A dimple of pleasure appeared on Yuri's cheek. He was so in thrall to Christos that Christos gained even more stature when Yuri was around.

The first time Leon had met Christos it occurred to him that here was a man who deserved his own leonine name. Christos was a true lion of a man, shaggy haired, muscular. He moved with immense physical grace, the male leader of a pride
padding around his dominion. When Leon was eleven, he had asked his mother why she had chosen Leon as a name. She told him that his father had chosen it and she never knew why, except that the manager at the department store where his father worked at the time had been named Leon.

“I'm sure it was more than that,” she said, pausing to think, which was something she rarely did, preferring to set to a task rather than waste time “mooching about and getting maudlin,” as she called it. “It was probably some relative of his. I don't think it was his grandfather.” She stopped wielding the mattock long enough to look at the sky as if she would find the answer there, or as if Leon's dead father might be up in the clouds waiting for her to ask him a question.

He'd died when Leon was nine. It was a Saturday. Round three of the round-robin at the local church tennis courts. He and his mixed doubles partner had won the first two matches easily. The doubles partner had mentioned that to Leon's mother after the funeral. Leon was handing around sandwiches and suffering hugs from moist-eyed women.

“He didn't even raise a sweat in those first two matches. We won six–nil in the first and six–three in the second. We probably would have won the day.”

“Another glass of wine?” Leon's mother replied in such an arch voice that Leon was instantly certain she had known about this woman and his father behind the tennis club rooms. On one occasion, Leon had been sent to fetch his father and had come upon them as they tripped out from the shrubbery behind the clubhouse. The woman's skirt had been accidentally tucked into her underwear. They were both flushed and laughing, but when they saw Leon the smiles dropped from their faces and they turned formally to each other and said good-bye and thank you for the game.

The woman kept talking as if her guilty secret was forcing inanities from her mouth to fill the yawning space of what she couldn't say. “Other people had training in first aid. He was flat out on the court. I couldn't help staring at the dead leaf caught in his hair. His mouth was opening and closing like a ventriloquist's dummy.”