The Wonders (19 page)

She was making Leon cross. He didn't think it was funny that he felt physically ill.

“Rhona? Is something wrong?”

So now Minh was paying some attention. Rhona has a laughing fit and that's worth a doctor's attention, but not Leon, one of the people she was hired to look after.

“Don't start me up again.” Rhona sighed. Wiped her eyes with her damp tissue. “Let's just get to this sightseeing place.”

“Yep, we're there already.” The guide eased the car to a stop, then sprang out of his seat to race around to Minh's door and open it for her.

Rhona and Leon managed to battle their own way out of the rear section of the van. Rhona passed Leon a bottle of water, and together they walked to the edge of the mesa, a wide plain sitting thirty feet above the surrounding land. Minh and the guide stood gazing into the distance.

“So this is what ‘mesa' means.” Minh lifted her hand to shade her eyes. The lower plain stretched out in a tufted sweep of grass and scrub. An occasional scraggly tree broke the monotony.

“Nothing much could survive out there, right?” the guide said.

Rhona and Leon might as well have not been there. The guide pointed across Minh to the west. Leon watched in horror. It seemed to him that the guide's elbow might be brushing against Minh's breast. He couldn't understand why she didn't flinch.

“Snakes, lizards, even jackrabbits live here. Plenty of bugs too, so watch out for the little stingers.”

“Leon.” Rhona took his elbow in her hand. “Leon, would you like to walk a little with me?”

“No thanks, Rhona. I think we should stay with the guide.” And with Minh, who, after all, was his doctor and should, as an employee, be keeping an eye on him. Under the disconcerting heat of the sun, sweat began to squeeze through his pores. The capillaries near the surface of his skin would be dilating to pull the blood away from his core to cool.

Mapping the mechanics of physical and osmotic exchanges always calmed him. When he was in the basement with Susan and Howard he used to study their texts. The orderliness of the chemical processes, the gaseous exchanges, the Newtonian motion of the levers that were his limbs and the mechanical advantage of multiplied effort, settled hysteria into reason for him. When his mind was beginning to race and trip and stumble with panic, as it had so many times during the ordeal of having his body remodeled for the heart, he had trained it to focus on analyzing the body's response until everything slowed—knowledge as a ballast.

“Leon, please escort me.” Rhona sometimes put on the
Southern-belle lady thing. It didn't suit her cowgirl outfits and brash manner at all, but somehow she pulled it off. Her hand hung in the air waiting for an arm, which Leon was obliged to provide.

“Where do you want to walk?” he asked. He glanced over his shoulder. It seemed that the guide, even taller from a distance and with quite the movie-star rugged looks, was leading Minh in the other direction. “What about we head for that sticking-up rock over there?” Leon indicated the rock that could be seen in the distance beyond Minh.

“No, Leon. We need to walk away from there.”

“Why?” he asked, still craning his neck to see where Minh and guide man were going. Why wasn't Minh sitting on her heels and sketching as she usually did when she saw something striking or unusual?

“Leon!”

“What, Rhona?”

Her hand, which was supposed to be resting on Leon's arm as he led her in a constitutional ramble, clenched his forearm until he winced in pain.

“Come with me and listen for a minute.”

They walked in the opposite direction from Minh and the guide, striking out across the plain. He could feel burrs catching in his socks. The top of his head began to sting where only a few days ago he had noticed in the mirror a lighter patch, as if his hair might be thinning there. He'd rushed to the common room, where Christos and Yuri were playing a board game while the news droned in the background. “Can you see my head?” he'd demanded, bending from the waist to give them the best possible view of his crown. “Yes, I can see your head,” Christos had answered. “Is this some kind of riddle?”

“Leon, look at the horizon.” Rhona released his arm.

He immediately reached up to finger his burning crown. His finger almost sizzled. He lifted his cool water bottle and rolled it across the top of his head.

“I think I need to go to the van and get a hat, Rhona.”

“You will not get cancer in five minutes. Stop and smell the mesa for a moment, Leon.”

Leon did understand what she was saying. Good health involves a sound and collected mind, and today something was throwing him off balance. He passed her the water. He closed his eyes, folded his hands across the thinning spot on his head to protect it and took a long slow breath of the clear dry air. He pictured the hemoglobin picking up oxygen molecules in the lungs the way a train picks up passengers from a crowded station, distributing them around the body to fuel the work.

He envisioned miles and miles of scrubby bush. A dead flat horizon, which the guide had said dropped away at the edge of the mesa. Blue distant sky. Two planes intersecting at a line where white-blue met pale washed-out yellow. No animals, no color, no life. Not even the vibrant red sand of the Australian desert. Gripping his burning head, he wished he hadn't come.

“Listen to this.” Rhona pulled a brochure from her handbag. “ ‘The vegetation of this plain is dominated by sand sagebrush, Mormon tea, squawbush and yuccas.' Aren't they beautiful names, Leon? Mormon tea. I wonder if the Mormons really made tea from it. Squawbush.”

“Mm.”

Rhona jabbed him in the thigh. “Look, Leon.”

He opened his eyes. The landscape bloomed before him. Lavender streaks and purple tufts and even violet hues in the shade of sage green.

“Is that an animal down there?”

“Yes, darling, I think it is. Good boy. Keep looking.”

Above the vast plain a brown-and-white kite wheeled with the air currents, silent, watching, while a flicker at Leon's feet was a tiny lizard slipping between stones. In the distance a few large-bottomed gray birds waddled through the sparse vegetation.

“It's beautiful, Rhona. You're right.”

To his amazement she took his hand and held it between her two dry palms.

“When you stop and allow yourself to see, Leon . . .”

“Yes?”

“I'm starting to sound like a greeting card but, Leon, you have to look quite hard to see what's in front of you.”

“I see what you mean, Rhona.” He didn't, exactly.

“You always seemed so self-aware, Leon. Always examining yourself, your thoughts. I guess we all have our blind spots.”

He was still standing beside Rhona and staring in a trance at the tableau of muted color laid out before them when Minh and the guide came up behind.

“Hey, isn't this stunning?” Minh's voice was more animated than Leon had ever heard it. “I need one of Kathryn's rehabilitated words to describe it. Sumptuous. Sumptuous and rich and so colorful. If you stand here long enough, you get new eyes. I wish I'd brought my camera. I need to paint this.”

He wasn't sure what was happening. Minh's voice, a stream of liquid gold, slid inside him. The hole in his chest closed over and his heart heaved as if it was a flesh-and-blood organ newly steeped in life-giving fluid.

Rhona seemed to know. She rubbed her hand in the small of his back. She applied enough pressure to make him turn around. Minh looked at his face and she knew too. She flushed and blinked and laughed all at once. And then Leon understood.

The next night Leon and Minh were standing on the hotel balcony overlooking the plain. They watched as a last flare of light fingered the sky. The sun sank below the horizon, and after a few moments of deep darkness, silver stars began to bloom.

Leon was thick with panic, his whole body a twisted tongue. Would she refuse him? Did she see him as the useless disabled man without a heart that she was hired to nursemaid? When he tipped the champagne glass to his mouth, a spill dribbled down his chin and onto his gray shirt. It was dark. He pretended nothing had happened.

“I haven't been . . . you know, with a woman, since I first became ill . . .” He couldn't say it.

“Are you talking about sex? It won't hurt you, Leon. A little challenging to the heart, but nothing you can't handle.” Brusque, clear, efficient. So she wasn't interested. He was certain now. She was his doctor, simple as that. Answering him as if he'd asked her advice on a routine medical matter.

He balanced his champagne glass on the balcony rail, then watched with alarm as it tipped and fell. For a while there was no sound.

“Oh god.”

The glass broke into a faint tinkle below. Minh stretched over the balcony rail to look. They were on the twenty-seventh floor. Afraid she would fall, Leon clutched at her. He grasped a fold of her silky dress, feeling the ripple of her warm skin underneath. When she pulled back from the edge, she stumbled against him.

Her hair lay along his throat. Her bare shoulder blade pressed into his chest. He only had to move his hand inches to reach around her waist and press his palm and splayed fingers across her flat belly. She was firm and warm and solid and whole.

If it were possible, his clunky metal heart would have been
hammering around the walls of his cavity in terror and passion. Instead, his fingers and nose prickled with the adrenaline surge. His stomach hollowed into a skin drum. Knees clenched, jaw clenched, buttocks clenched.

He whispered into the screen of her hair, behind her ear, “I love you,” and she pressed into him and turned her face to be kissed.

T
HEY'D HARDLY BEEN
back at Overington from New Mexico twenty-four hours before Rhona called a meeting to discuss security.

The Wonders Incorporated was the global sensation Rhona had planned. A Russian engineering society was dedicated to replicating Leon's heart. Christos had inspired a school of techno-body art. Artists around the world were transplanting circuits, wheels, levers, switches and other assorted mechanical devices onto and into different parts of their bodies. The Wonders were besieged by messages from fans across the globe.

Kathryn received so much mail and so many electronic communications that a woman came twice a week to assist in sorting through them. The old saying could have been made for her. Men wanted Kathryn; women wanted to be her. Or hated her. If Leon and Christos were wonders of the body, Kathryn was a wonder of the consciousness. She was awesome, mythic, fantastical.

Her correspondence assistant sent out signed black-and-white photographs in reply to many of the messages. These retro
souvenirs had regained popularity after the fashion of digital photos and electronic frames flickering relentlessly on people's mantelpieces. The fans liked to hold something original in their hands, something that couldn't be downloaded off any old website or printed at home, something with the imprint of a handwritten signature that could be passed around and discussed and held up close to the face to examine. Once a young woman in jeans and a grubby tracksuit top waved one of the publicity shots as the Wonders walked the red carpet to a film premiere.

“I sleep with this, Lady,” she called out. “I love you.” She thrust out the battered photograph, which had creased and wrinkled like old skin.

“Lady” was what everyone called Kathryn by now. Sometimes “Lady Kathryn,” as if she had become royalty. The “Lamb” part of the moniker had been dropped. Leon's new nickname, originally used in an ad for heart-shaped chocolate with a printed pattern imitating the mechanical workings of his own heart, wrapped in silver foil and promoted heavily before Valentine's Day, was Valentino. The name pleased him. It was the opposite of Clockwork Man—alive and passionate. And Christos had become Angel. They were each familiar enough to the world to be known by a single name.

If a message to Kathryn seemed threatening or contained obscene material, and many were and did, the assistant forwarded two copies: one to Hap, the security chief, who ran it through his own threat-assessment program, and the second copy to the police.

“I've dealt with thousands of these letters in my time,” Hap said, taking the latest wad of printouts from Rhona. “We analyze them, sort them into threat levels. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but statistically it's rare for the ones who keep sending letters or trying to get in contact to actually attempt anything
violent. We call them the howlers. The other ones, the hunters, they're the types we have to be wary of, because you don't see them until they're on you.”

Hap caught sight of the look on Leon's face. “It seems frightening at first, but you'll get used to it. Celebrity attracts stalkers. You learn to get on with it and not even notice them.”

“I remember the days when film stars lived on normal streets,” Rhona said, sighing. She fingered the fringe of her shirt, then smoothed the leather strips into a neat row as she pondered. “Where the hell do all these lunatics come from?”