The Wonders (18 page)

Hope you find her.

Keep at it. She's out there somewhere.

I know this is an attempt to steal my identity. Rot in hell, you scumbag.

They had finished with Australia and moved on to America,
first mapping out regions, tracing the state and county lines in thick black pen on a large map stuck to the wall, turning the USA into a jigsaw of possibility. The washed-out greens and yellows of the map, the resistance of the wall behind when Leon pressed a finger to a city gave the task a materiality missing from their electronic work.

The reply on Minh's screen said,
Dr. Trang, please pass along this message. Dear Leon, how lovely
it would be to see you. I treated you at a university in Melbourne, Australia. I have information to give you. Please send me your contact details.

Leon dropped his hands between his knees and let his head fall forward. “It's not specific enough and Susan would never say
how lovely
. It's another phishing reply. I hate that there are so many people who want to rip you off.” His hair had been styled in a 1920s cut with a part on the side and the hair slicked up and across. The cut might have looked good for the fans but whenever he bent over as he just had, hair fell down in a thick greasy flop over his eyes. He groaned, pushed it back into place and wiped his gelled hand on his trousers. “I'll never find her. The Americas will take years and years to work through.”

Minh used her feet to push her office chair away from the desk. It rolled backward and sideways until she was facing Leon.

“I think it's worth going on. We'll find her eventually.” She ran her fingers through her hair and stretched her hands to the ceiling as she yawned.

“If I last that long,” he said.

Again she used her feet to steer the chair, this time a little closer so that her knees lined up opposite Leon's. “Sometimes you talk about yourself as if you are a machine, Leon.
If I last that long.
Washing machines last. Phones last. Part of staying healthy is believing that you are.”

In her warm spicy presence, aware of her feet poised on the toes ready to push her off into another direction, Leon felt insubstantial, a mantle of inconsequential flesh grown around the clockwork heart.

“I am a machine.” He shrugged. “There's no use pretending.”

“We are all machines in a way. But we are all more too. Especially you, Leon. You take care to know people. Every day, I see you listen when someone talks to you, really listen, and then think and then, only then, do you speak. You allow people to be.” She pushed off again, rolling to the desk, where she caught the edge with her fingers and steadied herself. She was blushing. “Sorry. I didn't mean to . . .”

This was the Leon she saw? His breath was coming fast. No one had ever said such a thing to him. It seemed that no one had ever cared enough until that moment to want to know him.

“Anyway, none of us know how long we will live. We doctors are more sure of that than anyone. You'd think we'd make more of our lives, take more chances.”

“Aha, I suspected I'd find you two squirrelled away in here.” Rhona pushed open the door to the study and maneuvered her hips through the opening. The study was a repurposed dressing room fitted with a desk, two chairs and a small bookcase. The room was so compact that Rhona's round presence joining Leon and Minh filled it to capacity. “What are you up to anyway, hmm? I've seen you slipping away to this cubbyhole.”

Minh waved her hand as if to brush away any possibility of impropriety. “Research, Rhona. You know how Leon loves his research.”

“Research about?” She put her hands on her hips and raised her eyebrows.

“About metal hearts,” Leon lied quickly.

In the small room Rhona lifted her head as if she had caught
the moment of surprise, the imperceptible shift in understanding between Leon and Minh.

“Really? Is that right, Leon? And what have you found out?”

He was silent. He could have been at school, suffering the accusing glare of the teacher, crushing the offending note in a closed fist under the desk.

“Well?”

Beside him, Minh glowed pink, a flushing rose in the bland beige cupboard room.

“All right. I'm trying to track down Susan, the surgeon who, you know, put in my heart.” He had never been able to face down a direct question.

“And you've roped this poor girl into it too?” Rhona grasped the back of Minh's chair and tugged it toward her. The rolling chair jerked along the carpeted floor until Minh staggered to her feet. “Minh, go back to your apartment. Leon, you should be ashamed. You shouldn't have asked her to do this.”

“He didn't. I offered!”

“I don't care. Please leave. I need to have a few words with Leon.”

Once Minh had left the room, Rhona sat heavily in the chair she had vacated.

“Why would you do this, Leon? When you told me Susan expressly asked you not to look for her?”

“But, Rhona, things have changed. How could she know I would end up like this, a Wonder?”

“I see the celebrity bubble has already blanked you out, hon. That didn't take long. Sure, when she last saw you this doctor might not have known what would happen, but you'd have to be completely off the grid not to have heard about the Wonders these days. She could contact you in a second, Leon. Ever considered why she hasn't?”

“Because she doesn't understand, that's what I think. She was afraid she and Howard would be prosecuted. She still might be afraid of being prosecuted herself. But it won't happen. The Wonders are too public, too visible. You said to me once, way back, Rhona, that you reach a point in fame where the only things that can really hurt you are yourself and the people you love. That fame is power and it takes care of the rest. Remember?”

“Did you hear me, Leon? She knows where you are. If she wanted to contact you she would. Contacting you doesn't mean the police would come knocking at her door. If she wanted a simple meeting she would have called. Now let it go. Leave the poor woman alone.”

Rhona scanned the screen before switching the tablet off and dropping it on the desk. Leon didn't care. Everything was backed up. He would delete the database from this device and install it on his private computer in his apartment.

“Are we agreed?” She stood and faced him, looking down, hands on hips, cowgirl shirt fringe swinging from her bustline. In this nondescript office cum wardrobe she looked even more anachronistic than usual.

“Okay.”

“Good. You may well be the only one in this damn troupe who listens to me, Leon. I'm telling you now, I appreciate it, honey. I only do things for your own good.”

“Yes, I know.”

“So you're done with it?”

“Yes, I'm done with it.”

He was a poor liar, but Rhona had already started reading a message on her phone.

“I'll tell Minh,” she said over her shoulder on her way out of the study. “She should get back to her art.”

He wouldn't bring Minh into it again. It would be unfair to ask her to lie to Rhona. But it was an affront to his nature to give up. During these last months he had taken pleasure in the soothing repetition of the search tasks, the slow accretion of data, the expansion of his reach across continents in his search for one woman. Locating Susan did not mean he had to contact her. He would change his methodology, see how he felt once he had tracked her down. The work would still be satisfying, even if the surprise exhilaration of working with Minh had been taken away.

T
WO WEEKS LATER,
the night after a show at the New Mexico ranch of a man who had made his fortune from removable car bumper stickers, Rhona suggested they book a floor of the local Holiday Inn and pass a day or two in the clean dry air.

“We've been spending too much time in planes and hotels and stuffy rooms. Tomorrow we could go out. A guided tour, or a hike.”

Christos folded his arms and stared out through the window. “I do not hike. I spent my youth traipsing over the hills of a Greek island fetching this and that, taking messages, doing chores. Now I prefer to take my exercise in the gymnasium.”

“You especially, Christos, need some air. When you saw those trash media shots of yourself, I thought you were going to faint. You don't need a gym. You need to get out there and stride through nature. Get some perspective.”

“Those filthy photographs made me sick, that is why I almost fainted. What kind of animal hides in a changing room? Spies on another human being like that? I'm not going
outside where the perverts can photograph whatever they want of me!”

The footage of Christos had shown him trying on clothes in the spacious changing booth of an upmarket store in LA. Against a backdrop of silk hangings and mirrors on three walls, he preened in front of each mirror, trying different stances, looking over his shoulder and patting his own buttocks, running his fingers down the ridged muscles on his belly and obviously admiring himself. Leon and the others had laughed uncontrollably. Christos was mortified.

“Fine, a tour, then. In a car. You never have to leave the vehicle if you don't want to. Who wants to go?”

Kathryn tapped the side of her chair. “As long as we don't have fifteen photographers chasing us. I swear to you, Rhona, if one of those filthy paparazzi gets near me again I'll deck him.”

“Darling, I won't tell the tour company who we are. You dress up in your long shirt and pants and hat. We'll be fine. It'll be fun.”

Rhona booked the tour under the name of one of her many mysterious businesses, but the next day Christos and Kathryn both changed their minds. Kathryn was exhausted and Minh had told her to rest. Kyle had to fly to Japan to prepare for the next show. Yuri wouldn't come if Christos didn't come, and so it was Rhona, Leon and Minh waiting in the hotel lobby for the guide. Minh carried the bag with sketchbook and pencils and crayons and charcoal sticks that she hauled around whenever she took a trip. She had wanted to come on this trip especially so she could do some drawing, and she'd already been out on her own the day before.

When the guide turned up, tall and tanned in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, Minh took on a special glow. From that moment on the guide addressed all his conversation in her direction.

“I think Minh's behaving a bit . . .” Leon fell in next to Rhona, behind Minh and the guide who was leading them to the minibus. “You know, a bit . . .”

“Yes, Leon?” Rhona was using her patient voice.

“Well, do you think my doctor should be flirting with some tourist guide?”

“So she's only your doctor now. Didn't I hire her as the doctor for all the Wonders?”

Minh slid into the passenger seat beside the tour guide. Since she had stopped working on the Susan search, Leon had only encountered her at meals and for his weekly checkup. He had relapsed into his usual strained formality.

Leon ignored Rhona and climbed into the rear of the van. He felt the muscles around his heart twinge and tighten as they did sometimes when he was overtired or anxious.

“I'm feeling a bit odd. I might need Minh to examine me before we start.”

“Leon, will you take a good look at yourself? No wonder you're thirty-two and never married. Sheesh.”

He wanted to put on a haughty offended tone and ask Rhona what she meant by that, but his dignity prevented him.

Following Rhona's instructions, the guide took a gentle route along the road of the mesa plain. Leon's chest muscles were performing an orchestral overture, but it had no relation to the movement of the car. He couldn't call out to Minh—that would attract the scorn of Rhona. When he placed his hand on the unbroken part of the chest, as Minh had taught him to do, he could feel very faintly the reassuring thrum of the mechanisms engaging and shunting inside the heart.

“I think I'm stressed. Last night's gig went on a long time.”

“It went exactly as long as it was supposed to, Leon. You really don't know what's going on, do you, hon?”

“I don't think it's anything to do with my heart. Maybe some kind of indigestion.”

A laugh streamed out of her. She shook her head and looked away and kept laughing. Her cowgirl-shirt fringe danced with her laughter. Outside the window the plain stretched away in a flat blanket hooked with sprays of grass and a few bushes.

“If it was my heart, I think I'd know.” Leon was trying to reassure her, but Rhona laughed even louder. In fact, she couldn't stop. She cackled away, bent over in her seat, gasping and simmering down to “oh, oh” noises before setting herself off again.

“We'll be reaching the edge of the mesa plain soon,” the tour guide called back. “You okay, lady?”

Rhona lifted her head. Her eyes were red from laughter, and she was sniffling. She pulled a tissue from her handbag and blew into it. “Oh yes. Oh hell, this is a funny, funny day.”