The Wonders (6 page)

“I see,” Leon's mother said, looking over the woman's shoulder at another guest at the wake and nodding hello.

“They gave him CPR for a long time.”

“You'll have to excuse me.” His mother handed Leon a plate of sausage rolls and walked away, leaving him standing beside this woman who knew he knew, both of them stiff as totem poles in the middle of the crowded room.

He never had a chance to ask his father things a teenage boy needs to ask. And he never believed he was living up to his name, unless he counted the lion in
The Wizard of Oz
, so timid he needs to drink a potion for courage. A weedy bookish boy should not have to grow up with the name Leon. He should have been called Egbert or Mortimer. When he joined Rhona's troupe and finally got the chance to choose a new name, Rhona decided his moniker would be Clockwork Man.

Even Leon sounded good after that. And what did she mean by it anyway? Was she trying to say something about Leon's character? That he was heartless, a mechanical man? How would she know? He spent the early sleepless hours of the morning during the first days at Overington thrashing and freestyling around the huge bed they had installed in his apartment, close to weeping at his own stupidity in becoming a part of this dubious venture.

Christos was still listing his dietary requirements. “I cannot eat tough meat; the membrane of citrus fruit; skins of fruits or vegetables; corn, celery, or sweet potatoes; chili or hot curry.”

Vidonia led Christos and Yuri to the kitchen to show them where she kept the ingredients Yuri would need to make Christos's special shake each day.

Rhona turned to Leon. “Is there anything else I should know? Any other things you need?”

“I need something.” Kathryn stretched along the couch and flexed her feet and arms before standing up and slipping the book she had been reading onto the shelf. “I have devoured your entire library. Haven't you got anything post 1940 to read?”

“Hell, I don't know. I bought someone's library and put it there. I only read business books. Leon can probably help. He brought crates of the damn things. We had to get a carpenter in to build more shelves in his apartment. I don't know why he doesn't throw them out and download books.”

“I'm an old-fashioned girl—I like paper books too. Let's go, Leon.” Kathryn walked off ahead of him toward his apartment.

His face heated up. He did read electronic books now. The physical books he had brought with him were from the old days. He kept them for comfort, for the spines that greeted him each day with their familiar typefaces and brand colors, their reassuring solidity. As well as his self-help library, which filled two long rows of bookshelf, he had books on the body, on biochemistry and surgery and prosthetics, and other medical texts he only partly understood but that had obsessed him as he underwent the surgery to implant his metal heart. He was a natural researcher, a habit that started when he was a child, hunting down every reference to the superheroes he longed to be. He had found solace in the joys of solitary study, in understanding the genesis, the history, the nature of a thing.

The top shelves were stacked with war stories and biographies of triumph over adversity. As a boy he used to lie on the bed with his
Guinness Book of World Records
or a history
of the Peloponnesian wars pressed open beside him and his mind saturated with images of his heroic possibilities: Leon on horseback galloping through the low scrubby mountains toward Attica to deliver vital communications that would prove the turning point in the course of the war; Leon in a business suit dropping his ultimatum on the table in the boardroom, six gray-haired captains of industry begging him to save their reputations; Leon in the lab adjusting the fine controls of the electron microscope before calling over his busty and adoring lab assistant to point out to her with quiet pride that, yes, here it was before their very eyes, the cure for cancer.

This was going to be Kathryn's first real moment of getting to know him. He was convinced she would take one look at his library and crack up laughing.

“It's all very tidy,” Kathryn said as she walked past Leon into his apartment.

He waited behind her, his reddened cheeks reflected in the hall mirror beside him.

“These books aren't what I read now,” he said.

“Sure,” Kathryn said. She moved to the wall of bookshelves and began to scan each row.

Outside the windows of Leon's apartment a man in overalls walked by with a chimp riding his shoulder. A blue jay fossicked in the leftover snow on the side of the garden bed while the sun spilled a trapezoid of light through the glass and onto the wooden floor. Leon skirted past Kathryn to the bench that divided the kitchen from the living area.

“Would you, um, like a cup of tea? I'm having one.”

“No, thanks.” She bent to look more closely at the bottom rows. “
Seven Steps to Self-Confidence
?” she read.

Leon switched on the electric kettle. The grumble of the heating element thrummed through the countertop.

“
You Can Be a Better Lover, Emotional Intelligence, Mood Therapy for the Introvert, The Power of You, Who Moved My Cheese?
So, Leon, have you found the power of you yet? And more important, are you a better lover?”

He felt a sudden urge to bare his feet in the trapezoid of light. The sun through glass licking his toes, heat rising through his body until he melted into an innocuous pool of butter.

“Oh jaysus, this is a good one.” Kathryn stooped sideways to read the title. “
The Wounded Heart
. Could be written for you, Leon.” She tipped the book out of the shelf.

The kettle was billowing steam beside Leon. It was supposed to turn off automatically but it seemed to have been boiling forever, clouding the air and dampening his face. He knocked the switch to off. The man in overalls walked past the window again, going the opposite way, this time without the monkey.

When Leon returned from the fridge with the milk, Kathryn was standing on the other side of the bench.
The Wounded Heart
lay between them.

“Oh Christ, Leon, forgive me. I shouldn't have made fun.”

He had forgotten what many of the books were about. He picked up the book and read the subtitle:
Hope for Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse
.

He caught Kathryn's eye and held it. He should have been able to fake a sorrowful expression to hide his amusement, considering his long, mournful face, but his lips disobeyed and twitched into a curve.

“It came in a job lot from a church sale,” he confessed. “I haven't even read it.”

“You mean . . . you weren't?”

He shook his head, unable to conceal his smile.

“I ought to punch you, fella, making me feel like a mean witch.”

“I just can't resist a book bargain.”

Kathryn snorted. She slipped
The Wounded Heart
back into the bookcase and hoisted a tower of borrowed biographies into her arms.

“Buy a few novels, will you?” she said over her shoulder as she swung out through the apartment doorway. “They're better than that self-help shite.”

T
HEY HAD BEEN
working as a group for many weeks, learning to tease without offense, complaining, arguing, joking, slumping into their beds after a day's training, getting up the next day to start again. Yet Leon was still intrigued by Rhona. She was as fleeting as the light off a spangle, all glint and glitter, then gone. One night, Leon found her dozing on the couch in the common room. He sat down quietly in the puffy maroon leather chair beside the fireplace, trying not to disturb her, and opened his book.

Even though he was itching to ask a question, Leon tried to read while she slept on the couch opposite him. Finally after fifteen minutes, when Rhona's crinkly eyes finally fluttered open, the question burst out of him.

“Why do you have the circus logo, Rhona? It makes me feel a real freak. Like I'm in a sideshow.”

Rhona yawned, covering her mouth with her hand, and let her tired gaze drift over to him. “But you are a freak, honey.”

“I mean, I'm not one of those freaks from the old circuses,
the pinheads and the dog men. I'm the opposite. I'm a medical miracle. Kathryn is too. She's cured.”

Rhona laughed and rested her head on the arm of the sofa. She spoke with her eyes closed. “Leon, sweetheart, no offense, but there are more medical miracles than straight-up humans these days. And freaks too, like my daddy used to have in his sideshows. You go to some of those third-world countries where there's one doctor for every ten thousand people and you'll find unbelievable human specimens. Freaks are everywhere. That's not what I was looking for. The first time I saw Kathryn I found what I needed to make the most amazing show of the new millennium. She was a mess, but I thought I could save her. And then I would put together a show to give her back some dignity. For that kind of a show I needed people whose difference or mutation or disability, or whatever it was, made them more than human. And they had to be young and they had to be reasonably good-looking, otherwise it would be an ordinary old freak show and I'd have the PC police down on me in a second. I needed performers. I needed to make it a spectacle of wonder and prestige, not a damn sideshow.”

Rhona jimmied herself up from the couch, where her short legs hadn't even reached the third cushion. She inched around until she faced Leon, eyes still bleary, her russet hair floppy as a rooster's comb.

“A few years ago, another troupe started up in London. You probably don't remember them, darling, they were only in the news for a week or so. They had some interesting specimens—a three-armed man, a pair of conjoined twins with full upper bodies each but joined below the waist, a torso woman. The show never went anywhere. It was far too much like an old-time freak show. They had no idea how to exploit what they had. And they had no idea how to read the world we're living in.
You have to give the people both what they want and what they can take, Leon. It's always changing and you need to have the intuition to read the times. I learned that from my daddy, the Penny King.”

Leon frowned, disturbed that she had used the word “specimen.” “Some interesting specimens,” as if he and the others were not even human. Rhona hadn't noticed his unease. She was smiling to herself, eyes half-closed. She let herself relax into the couch cushions as she spoke.

“He really was a king, Leon. A king of men. I'd sidle along behind him in his spurred boots when I was a kid. Behind those boots scuffing the dirt or spraying mud or aiming a swift kick at whatever useless animal got in his way. That's why I was always behind, where a kick never landed, where his eyes never strayed. Always behind, watching and learning. From the age I could stand up and walk I wanted to be just like him, the Penny Queen.”

Leon had never been to a real circus. When he was growing up, the traditional three-ring with lions and feather-crested ponies had fallen out of fashion, and his family couldn't afford hundreds of dollars for tickets to the new kind of circus, the glamorous spectacular with opera singers swinging through elaborate artist-designed stage sets.

“I was born in my mother's camper. She wasn't the kind to mollycoddle, so by the time I could walk I was exploring every part of my little world. I learned plenty as I trotted behind my father on his trips around the vans and the cages, the rings covered in sawdust, the vats of feed for the livestock, the tents and the booths. It was a different world, Leon. A world in itself. I saw the way he held the hands of distressed women, the money he slipped to men who were having a hard time. The whip he used on lazy workers. The cash that passed from his hand to the
city council that granted him space to set up. The bone china he drank his breakfast tea from, the bespoke jackets with linings of silk, the hand-carved walking stick he used to beat my mother. He was strong and cruel and handsome, and I adored him.”

“What about school?” The thing Leon had longed for most when he was a child was to escape the pitted brick walls and leering bullies of school.

Rhona coughed a little, sat up again and adjusted her skirt as if the memories were making her clothes feel tight and twisted. “They called me ‘circus girl' when I was sent to boarding school after my father had lost everything and the show had closed down. We girls all lay in our beds in a row, soft farts and snuffles and whispering carrying through the night, the sounds of animals in the darkness. I felt oddly at home there, enclosed with all those bodies the way I had always been. The night cries and the whimpering were as familiar and comforting as the narrow bunk in our old traveling van and the roaring of lions in their cages. The regimen of the school, the closed circle of our days cranking around and around like an old merry-go-round, gave me the feeling I had never left home. And when the other girls, skinny muscular farm girls who loved to run and throw balls and the spoiled haughty daughters of diplomats, began to torment me, to call me names and leave pins in my bed and tear up homework and spit into my meals and do everything they could to make my life miserable, then I was sure I had found a home not so different from my old one at the circus.”