The Wonders (2 page)

When his original prescriptions finally ran out, he was forced to visit a local doctor for more immunosuppressants and antibiotics.

“I can't just prescribe these medications for you, Mr. Hyland,” she said to Leon, who sat hunched in a question mark on a straight-backed chair beside her desk. “I need to refer you to a specialist, and to do that, I have to examine you.”

He had no choice. He swore her to secrecy. The moment he left the surgery she called her husband. They kept silent for a week, until one of them, or someone they had told, got on to the local paper. Then bedlam. There was no more hiding away: his secret was out, and life was forcing its way in.

Reporters chased him down the street as if he was a slum landlord or a dodgy car dealer. He locked himself in his apartment for two weeks before hurriedly relocating to a cheap flat on the outskirts of town and changing his phone number. But he was tracked down again. The rumors spread further. Celebrity agents appeared. They courted him, treated him to lavish dinners, teased him and winked at him and tried to be friends, all so he would open his shirt.
So this is how a woman feels,
Leon thought wryly one night after the gaze of his dining companion, a mustached promoter with a big gut and a fat wallet, kept dipping to Leon's chest.

His suitors name-dropped about their other clients. They promised wealth, fame, a sensational new life. One of the agents offered so much money Leon was close to signing, but when he was told what kind of appearances and events he'd be asked to do—live talk shows, interviews with journalists, parades through the marquees at horse races and fashion shows and movie premieres—he balked.

“What will I talk about?”

“Yourself, of course. How you got that magnificent heart. The medical process. The emotional journey. Your favorite food. Whatever you like. We'll train you to be media savvy.”

It sounded to Leon like those excruciating school speeches where you had to talk about your hobby or your most exciting vacation. Stammering red-kneed boys with spittle in the corner of their mouth, girls crossing their legs and twirling their hair as they ummed and gazed vacantly at the ceiling, the teacher tapping a pen on the desk in exasperation.

This particular agent had traveled to Leon's town on the high plain northwest of Melbourne. The two of them sat in a small dark café with rows of CDs behind the tables and jazz music playing softly. Leon used his fork to push a cube of
luminous white sheep's cheese around his plate. He had always been a careful thinker, one who needed to disguise his long deliberations with sleight of hand. He lifted some oiled rocket leaves and decorated the cheese with them.

“I haven't got that much to say.”

“Mate.” The agent put his knife and fork down on his plate of pasta ragout and leaned forward. He had the lined handsome face of a retired movie star, and he wore a tan jacket of leather so fine it creased with the softness of cotton when he moved. “Mate, they all say that. Once you get started you won't be able to stop.” He put on a mock falsetto. “
Oh, I couldn't possibly talk about myself all the time!
Then you can't shut them up. Trust me, you'll love it.”

It was the sneering imitation of his own clients that put Leon off. Would the agent end up talking about Leon like that?

Rhona Burke, American entrepreneur and touring agent, called the next day.

“I'm not asking you to say yes or no until I give you an idea of my show.”

Everyone else had been talking strategies, coverage, media saturation. Rhona began with advice.

“Don't tell anyone the story of how you got that heart. I don't know how many people were involved or who has seen the heart already—don't spread it any further. Have you told the story to anyone else who wanted to book you?”

“Not really. No details.”

“Don't. No matter who you end up with. It's worth much more than you realize. You need to hold on to it until the crowd can't stand the wait any longer. Then you make them wait a little more.”

“A tease?”

“Not a tease. A performance. I can explain better in person.”

He would meet her. If nothing else, it would mean a trip out of the small town that had so abruptly become known in the media as “the home of the man with the metal heart.”

T
HE TRAIN TO
Melbourne traveled through a series of worn mountains with flat tops called the Pentland Hills. They looked to Leon as if some giant had taken to them with a sword and sliced off their peaks, leaving them as dining tables for his guests. They stretched to the horizon, floating in the sky, and the train swayed on the track across them like a chariot above the clouds. Humming to the rhythm of the train and tapping his fingers against the glass, Leon felt bubbly and shy, like a kid on the way to his first job interview.

Once the train had passed through the Pentland Hills, it started to travel downhill toward Melbourne. It stopped at Bacchus Marsh, then moved into the bleak uniform plain of Melton, where plastic bags fringed the wire fences and piles of boulders marked the sites of failed enterprises and building projects. In the distance, a yellowish dome of smog enclosed the city of Melbourne. As the train approached the city, the dreamy optimism that had lifted Leon through the hills sank into a flat pragmatism.

He had begun to think that this Rhona Burke person was most likely a swindler, an American hustler come to exploit him and make him into the Elephant Man of the modern world. Leon was no performer. He couldn't sing or dance or even make a decent speech without turning to jelly. What else could this woman mean but to put him in a sideshow?

If the train had stopped at that moment, Leon probably would have jumped off. Instead he sat smoldering with humiliation, picturing himself being jeered at by teenage thugs, pitied by women.

“Oh, the poor, poor fellow,” he imagined one sideshow visitor whispering in her English upper-class accent. In Leon's vision everyone was wearing Victorian clothes and carrying canes and umbrellas. Ladies caught their horrified gasps in gloved hands and looked away delicately.

What a shock, then, to meet Rhona at the station in Melbourne. She was waiting to greet him when he got off the train, wearing cowboy boots and rhinestone jewelry. Titian-red hair. A big white handbag studded with fake rubies. Leon had been stewing in indignation about how he was to be displayed as a monster, gawked at by strangers, until he stepped onto the platform and found himself staring at Rhona as if she was the exhibit. Around him the other travelers were staring too.

“Mr. Hyland, a pleasure to meet you,” she said in her big American voice, stretching her hand out to shake. “Geez, honey, they told me that Aussies always shut their lips tight to keep out the flies.”

Only then did Leon close his mouth. He shook the short woman's hand and observed her more closely. Under the glitter of the gold and rhinestones, and behind the jeans and cowgirl attitude, Rhona Burke was older than she first seemed. He guessed from the downy skin and the softened jawline that
she was in her sixties. She was clearly manic, though, he could already tell: one of those people who hurry through each day not to get it over with but to make sure that every morsel of everything good is sucked out of it and savored.

“Come with me, hon. We'll have lunch. Or just a coffee if you want.” She took Leon's arm and urged him along the cold busy road to a taxi. They bent into the warmth. Once they were settled in the backseat, she handed Leon her card.

The business card sported her name in raised red lettering, shining like nail polish dripped onto the white surface. Her trade name,
The Penny Queen,
was spot-varnished copper underneath a stylized stroke of the brush that evoked a big-top tent. Leon stared at the card, leaning his cheek against the cool glass of the taxi window. So this was what she wanted. In the space of this single morning he had been thrilled at the idea of working, furious that he might become a sideshow freak, charmed by Rhona's sassy style, now flung into despair again by the idea that she wanted him for a circus.

“And what would I do for you?” He waved the flimsy business card. “After all that talk you only want me for show-and-tell? I'm not the bloody Elephant Man.”

The driver glanced at Leon in the rearview mirror, quickly shifting his head out of the line of vision when he caught Leon's eye.

“Leon, darling, don't be such a drama queen. I've already signed one drama queen for this troupe, and a small team cannot last if it contains two drama queens.”

No one had called Leon darling since he'd left hospital after his first organic heart transplant when the nurses, who were too busy to remember anyone's name, called the patients darling and sweetheart and love, and the doctors, also too busy, called them Mr. Um or Mrs. Err before launching into
medico-talk. Now this stranger, this cowboy-suited exploitative charlatan, was darling-ing Leon like a condescending teacher.

“Forget it.” He tapped the glass window behind the taxi driver's head. “Would you please let me out at the next intersection?”

The driver shrugged and began to ease the taxi into the left lane of traffic. Horns tooted behind them. A cyclist rode by shaking his gloved fist. Rhona put her hand on Leon's knee. Her heavy gold and silver rings rested in a row of knuckle-dusters on the fabric of his trousers above his kneecap. They were menacing but beautiful at the same time, and curiously warm.

“Not a sideshow exhibit. Not a freak the way you're thinking. Hon, you're going to be like Elvis. You're going to have women screaming and fainting over you. Not with fear or horror, but with passion. You're going to be whoever you want. It's not just people staring at you. You're going to entrance the people who come to see you. More than a weird body, more than a trick, you're going to give them a story, a life, a legend. The rubes want to feel they're getting to know you on a personal basis even when they're forty deep crushed against the stage. I can make you into a celebrity everyone loves. The one everyone wants.”

It is the skill of the entrepreneur to recognize what people desire and provide it for them. Leon could feel the loneliness and longing etched into his features. It was a map for a pro like Rhona.

Rhona waited while Leon gazed out of the taxi window at a tram trundling by, loaded up with bored commuters on their way to lunch, staring at their phones or nodding off with their leaning heads leaving oily prints on the windows. He had begun to believe he would be alone for the rest of his life, a miserable
hermit with a mutilated body. He was sure his broken-open chest and his scars and his breathlessness meant that no one would be able to overcome their distaste enough to hold him, let alone love him.

“More money than you've dreamed of, Leon. Fans. Adoring fans. You'll be a rock star.”

“Right. Me. A rock star.”

His gut told him to say no. He could move to Sydney or Brisbane, travel to distant suburbs for medical treatment, use false addresses and post office boxes to keep his anonymity, try to build himself a normal life again.

But Rhona had ignited hope in him, and hope can make fools of us all.

T
WELVE WEEKS AND
six thousand miles later, Leon stood outside the door to his new life. His third life. Behind the door were his future business partners.

He knew little about these people except that Kathryn Damon was an Irish woman whose gene therapy for Huntington's had cured the Huntington's but left her covered in wool. He had a vague memory of seeing her on a current-affairs show a year or two ago. Or he could be thinking of someone else, that girl raised by dogs in Romania maybe. Christos Petridis was a Greek performance artist who had somehow transplanted metal wings onto himself. Kathryn had been recruited months before. Christos had arrived last week. Leon was the last. Tomorrow they would relocate to Rhona's country estate Overington, in Vermont, to begin intensive training for the show.