“The first aerialist with a bionic leg,” he murmured, dollar signs in his eyes.
Rolando took the news of the amputation and prostheses 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 himself 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 blond 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.
If there was a carpet spread on the floor, gravity would contrive to have it entangle his feet and pull him into a humiliating fall. Stairs tripped him. His silverware clattered noisily to the floor in restaurants.
He shunned the big top altogether, where the people who had once paid to see him soar through the air could see how heavy and clumsy he had become—even though a nasty voice in his mind told him that no one would recognize the fat old man he now was as the once magnificent Great Rolando.
As the years stretched past, Rolando grew grayer and heavier and angrier. Furious at gravity. Bellowing, screaming, howling with impotent rage at the hateful tricks gravity played on him every day, every hour. He took to leaning on a cane and stumping around their mobile home, roaring helplessly against gravity and the fate that was killing him by inches.
His darling wife remained steadfast and supportive all through those terrible years. Other circus folk shook their heads in wonder at her. “She spends all day with the big cats and then goes home to more roaring and spitting,” they told each other.
Then one winter afternoon, as the sun threw long shadows across the Houston Astrodome parking lot, where the
