She too feared Rolando’s ever-bolder daring, his wilder and wilder reachings on the high trapeze.
«There’s nothing to be afraid of! Gravity can’t hurt me!» And he would laugh at her fears.
«But I am afraid,» she would cry.
«The people pay their money to see me defy gravity,» Rolando would tell his tearful wife. «They’ll get bored if I keep doing the same stunts one year after another.»
She loved him dearly and felt terribly frightened for him. It was one thing to master a large cage full of Bengal tigers and tawny lions and snarling black panthers. All you needed was will and nerve. But she knew that gravity was another matter altogether.
«No one can defy gravity forever,» she would say, gently, softly, quietly.
«I can,» boasted the Great Rolando.
But of course he could not. No one could. Not forever. The fall, when it inevitably came, was a matter of a fraction of a second. His young assistant’s hand slipped only slightly in starting out the empty trapeze for Rolando to catch after a quadruple somersault. Rolando almost caught it. In midair he saw that the bar would be too short. He stretched his magnificently trained body to the utmost and his fingers just grazed its tape-wound shaft.
For an instant he hung in the air. The tent went absolutely silent. The crowd drew in its collective breath. The band stopped playing. Then gravity wrapped its invisible tentacles around the Great Rolando and he plummeted, wild-eyed and screaming, to the sawdust a hundred feet below.
«His right leg is completely shattered,» said the famous surgeon to Rolando’s wife. She had stayed calm up to that moment, strong and levelheaded while her husband lay unconscious in an intensive-care unit.
«His other injuries will heal. But the leg …» The gray-haired, gray-suited man shook his dignified head sadly. His assistants, gathered behind him like an honor guard, shook their heads in metronome synchrony to their leader.
«His leg?» she asked, trembling.
«He will never be able to walk again,» the famous surgeon pronounced.
The petite blonde lion tamer crumpled and sagged into the sleek leather couch of the hospital waiting room, tears spilling down her cheeks.
«Unless …» said the famous surgeon.
«Unless?» she echoed, suddenly wild with hope.
«Unless we replace the shattered leg with a prosthesis.»
«Cut off his leg?»
The famous surgeon promised her that a prosthetic bionic leg would be «just as good as the original—in fact, even better!» It would be a permanent prosthesis; it would never have to come off, and its synthetic surface would blend so well with Rolando’s real skin that no one would be able to tell where his natural leg ended and his prosthetic leg began. His assistants nodded in unison.
Frenzied at the thought that her husband would never walk again, alone in the face of coolly assured medical wisdom, she reluctantly gave her assent and signed the necessary papers.
The artificial leg was part lightweight metal, part composite space-manufactured materials, and entirely filled with marvelously tiny electronic devices and miraculously miniaturized motors that moved the prosthesis exactly the way a real leg should move. It was stronger than flesh and bone, or so the doctors confidently assured the Great Rolando’s wife.
The circus manager, a constantly frowning bald man who reported to a board of bankers, lawyers, and MBAs in St. Petersburg, agreed to pay the famous surgeon’s astronomical fee.
«The first aerialist with a bionic leg,» he murmured, dollar signs in his eyes.
Rolando took the news of the amputation and prosthesis with surprising calm. He agreed with his wife: better a strong and reliable artificial leg than a ruined real one.
In two weeks he walked again. But not well. He limped. The leg hurt, with a sullen, stubborn ache that refused to go away.
«It will take a little time to get accustomed to it,» said the physical therapists.
Rolando waited. He exercised. He tried jogging. The leg did not work right. And it ached constantly.
«That’s just not possible,» the doctors assured him. «Perhaps you ought to talk with a psychologist.»
The Great Rolando stormed out of their offices, limping and cursing, never to return. He went back to the circus, but not to his aerial acrobatics. A man who could not walk properly, who had an artificial leg that did not work right, had no business on the high trapeze.
His young assistant took the spotlight now, and duplicated—almost—the Great Rolando’s repertoire of aerial acrobatic feats. Rolando watched him with mounting jealousy, his only satisfaction being that the crowds were noticeably smaller than they had been when he had been the star of the show. The circus manager frowned and asked when Rolando would be ready to work again.
«When the leg works right,» said Rolando.
But it continued to pain him, to make him awkward and invalid.
That is when he began to hate gravity. He hated being pinned down to the ground like a worm, a beetle. He would hobble into the Big Tent and eye the fliers’ platform a hundred feet over his head and know that he could not even climb the ladder to reach it. He grew angrier each day. And clumsy. And obese. The damned false leg hurt, no matter what those expensive quacks said. It was not psychosomatic. Rolando snorted contempt for their stupidity.
He spent his days bumping into inanimate objects and tripping over tent ropes. He spent his nights grumbling and grousing, fearing to move about in the dark, fearing even that he might roll off his bed. When he managed to sleep the same nightmare gripped him: he was falling, plunging downward eternally while gravity laughed at him and all his screams for help did him no good whatever.
His former assistant grinned at him whenever they met. The circus manager took to growling about Rolando’s weight, and asking how long he expected to be on the payroll when he was not earning his keep.
Rolando limped and ached. And when no one could see him, he cried. He grew bitter and angry, like a proud lion that finds itself caged forever.
Representatives from the bionics company that manufactured the prosthetic leg visited the circus, their faces grave with concern.
«The prosthesis should be working just fine,» they insisted.
Rolando insisted even more staunchly that their claims were fraudulent. «I should sue you and the barbarian who took my leg off.»
The manufacturer’s reps consulted their home office and within the week Rolando was whisked to San Jose in their company jet. For days on end they tested the leg, its electronic innards, the bionic interface where it linked with Rolando’s human nervous system. Everything checked out perfectly. They showed Rolando the results, almost with tears in their eyes.
«It should work fine.»
«It does not.»
In exchange for a written agreement not to sue them, the bionics company gave Rolando a position as a «field consultant,» at a healthy stipend. His only duties were to phone San Jose once a month to report on how the leg felt. Rolando delighted in describing each and every individual twinge, the awkwardness of the leg, how it made him limp.
His wife was the major earner now, despite his monthly consultant’s fee. She worked twice as hard as ever before, and began to draw crowds that held their breaths in vicarious terror as they watched the tiny blonde place herself at the mercy of so many fangs and claws.
Rolando traveled with her as the circus made its tour of North America each year, growing fatter and unhappier day by humiliating, frustrating, painful day.
Gravity defeated him every hour, in a thousand small ways. He would read a magazine in their cramped mobile home until, bored, he tossed it onto the table. Gravity would slyly tug at its pages until the magazine slipped over the table’s edge and fell to the floor. He would shower laboriously, hating the bulging fat that now encumbered his once-sleek body. The soap would slide from his hands while he was half-blinded with suds. Inevitably he would slip on it and bang himself painfully against the shower wall.