The Wonders (9 page)

Kathryn's other trouble, earlier on, had been that sheep's wool should be kept in prime condition by the lanolin secreted from the skin. Her skin secreted plenty of lanolin, enough to give her the supple skin of a teenager, but for the first year after her change she was shaving and washing herself constantly. Day after day she continued her obsessive attention to her skin and the wool as if she could make it less conspicuous, less bizarre. She ended up wreathed in scabs and rashes. Her regrowth was brittle. Every time she was caught in the rain she came down with terrible chills because the wool had lost its waterproof quality, and she stayed damp for hours. She was spending every
second day in the waiting room of her dermatologist. The hospital where she had the treatment that went wrong had provided no aftercare—they spent their time trying to deny culpability and ensure she wouldn't sue. Which of course she did, or at least her husband did in her name, and he profited bountifully from Kathryn's affliction.

Leon had read the articles about her husband and his exploitation of Kathryn's illness. He had sold photos of her that should never have been taken, let alone published. Kathryn barely mentioned him. Only Rhona referred to him, although never in Kathryn's presence. He was trying to profit again by pressuring Rhona for a cut of Kathryn's income. “I'm dealing with it,” Rhona had told Leon. “My lawyers are going to take that asshole down.”

It was a farmer who cured Kathryn's skin problem. He'd seen a newspaper report. She had already been exposed in the media when Rhona took over her management, but her fame was an ugly thing, a brutish perverted kind of fame where she was degraded and derided and she reacted with swearing and crying and shrieking when they chased her down the street, and so they slavered over her even more.

The farmer sent her a letter written in fine cursive handwriting. She showed Leon the letter, which she had kept with her ever since because, she said, it was the most respectful and kind letter she had ever received. It made her believe once again that goodness was possible in the world. The letter apologized for disturbing her and commiserated with her for the treatment she had experienced at the hands of the media.

I am ashamed to say that I saw you on television
, the letter said,
because that is admitting that I continued to watch and did not turn it off as I should have
. It went on to explain that the letter writer was brought up on a sheep farm and had taken it over when he came
of age, and he knew very well that when a sheep's lanolin is stripped from the wool by pest treatments or excessive washing, which can also happen when well-meaning people hand-raise a lamb, the sheep's skin will suffer terribly until the lanolin is replaced.
So I wanted to make a suggestion, if nothing else works, that you might want to give your own skin a chance to replace the lanolin, which I understand it does of its own account, and I may be wrong but I think that in a few weeks you will be feeling much better.
The letter signed off with a wish for her good health and a resumption of her privacy.

She was in good health now, but the three Wonders each relied on large daily doses of medication and regular medical attention. Rhona had originally planned to use a local private clinic as their main treatment center. She had drawn up a confidentiality agreement and arranged to book out the entire clinic one day a month. It wasn't enough. After three emergency visits to the clinic for Christos, whose emergencies had turned out to be little more than mild aches, and which necessitated the clinic shutting down normal operations and rescheduling other patients to ensure the Wonders' privacy, she threw up her hands and hired a full-time doctor. Dr. Minh Trang would live with them, eat with them, travel with them, and work to keep them in good health. A fully equipped doctor's office was established behind the kitchen, where the cool room used to be, and she was given the guest cottage in the garden, beside the elephant house, as her living quarters.

“And it's extremely odd,” Rhona said as they watched the moving-van men unload the new doctor's boxes, “because when I introduced her to the elephants—and, yes, I had warned her about the animals before she signed up—Maisie did a back-leg stand and offered the doctor a plantain from the feed bin. Maisie's usually quite standoffish with strangers.”

Kathryn was happy. “A woman doctor of our own! Splendiferous. Thank goodness I won't have to rely on farmers and veterinarians for medical advice.”

If Christos had made that joke, Kathryn would have retaliated in kind. That she cracked the joke herself showed how far they had come since their early cautious courtesies while learning to live together. They may have had separate apartments, but Leon, Rhona, Kathryn, Christos and Yuri saw each other every day. For a loner like Leon, it had been a trial. He knew he was changing when he found himself missing Christos or Kathryn if they were away for a few nights. He was discovering a different kind of loneliness, one that involved other people and what happened when they went away.

The day after she moved in, Dr. Trang called Leon to her office for his first examination.

“Welcome to Overington, Dr. Trang,” Leon said from the doorway. He sniffed the air. A blaze of grief ignited in him for the surgeon and engineer who had saved his life, had transformed his body while he was dying, and had built and implanted the mechanism that brought him back. Even though he was certain he would never see them again, he always scoured the Australian news for any mention of a heart like his own, or a pioneering surgical technique, just in case. The hidden basement where he had spent a year in their care had smelled this way—sharp with antibacterials and the scorched dust of heating elements.

“Please call me Minh. It's a privilege to be here.” Minh stretched out her hand, welcoming Leon into the room.

“Oh, we're just normal people except for our little oddities,” he replied.

“I'm sure you are. The privilege is because of the enormous amount of money I'm being paid and the very little work I'll have to do.”

Leon's cheeks and forehead simmered pink.

“Clothes off, please. You can leave your underpants on. I'll come in when you call.” She was tall, long-haired, her face broad and open. Narrow from behind as she walked out of the room. Her band of black hair ended in a neat line at the shoulder blades.

He unbuttoned his shirt and slipped off his shoes. He'd been working out in the gym, but his chest and arms still showed signs of years without exercise. Hints of the spindly, slack, bony man he used to be.

The doctor paused at the doorway and inhaled a deep breath before she looked at his chest. When Leon first joined the Wonders, Kathryn was so spectacular he thought no one would be interested in looking at him. People's reactions proved he was a spectacle of an equal order. What he'd grown used to over the course of the surgeries and the year of recovery was so shocking to other people that they were usually left speechless. Even Rhona had been silent for seconds when she first stood before him and saw the tunnel through his breast. Not Minh though.

“How do I get to the heart?” She perched on a stool so that her head was at the same height as his heart. A couple of plucked eyebrow hairs were reemerging black and blunt above her eye, and the smoothness of her skin was a contrast to his own, lightly pocked from teen acne and further marred by open pores across the nose.

He showed her the hidden catch, and she swung open the titanium bars. There were only a few functioning nerve endings left in the scar tissue, but he could sense her fingers as they played across the surface of the cavity. She moved around behind him, and once again her fingers tickled his skin.

“A little dry here. I'll get some ointment.”

Leon closed his eyes. She ran her finger around the inside of the cavity like a child skimming cream from a bowl. Her other hand rested on his arm, warm and firm. His breath slowed. He felt the tension from his thigh muscles draining through to the floor. The touch of her gentle fingers gave him the odd sensation that the knotty damage was being smoothed out, as if being touched in this most private place was bringing together his emotions and his physical being in a way he hadn't experienced since he had almost given up hope of life.

“I would so love to meet the surgeons who did this,” she murmured, shining a light into the heart cavity and pausing to make notes on her recorder. “It's completely crazy. Why metal? Of all the materials they could choose from, they pick metal. Hard to manipulate, difficult to repair, inflexible, prone to fatigue. Madness.” She stopped, took a pair of tweezers and tapped the surface of the heart once, very lightly. Leon quivered with fear, but she patted his arm. “Don't worry, that's all I'll do. Maybe it's not exactly metal. It doesn't sound quite right. Could it be that it's actually not a simple metal alloy but something else?”

He didn't answer. Leon had no idea what his heart was made of. While Susan and Howard were operating, manufacturing, measuring, doctoring, computing, he had tried to understand what they were doing to him by reading about pain receptors and blood cells and osmotic transfer. Learning a new language for his new body. Or when he couldn't face another chemical formula that seemed impenetrable, or another text on the cauterization of blood vessels that brought to mind the burning stench as Susan waved away the surgical smoke of his flesh, he played electronic games or pored over jigsaw puzzles or figured out cryptic crosswords. Sometimes he had returned to his favorite books: the war stories, the biographies. Anything
to keep his mind off the pain, and the inexorable and visible perishing of his body.

What's more, although Minh was his new doctor, he didn't know enough about her to trust her. Already Overington had lost a housekeeper to the trash media. She'd sold her story of “working for the freaks.” Leon could imagine the next article.
A doctor tells the gruesome medical stories of the Wonders
.

Minh and Leon stared at each other for a moment. Leon said nothing.

Minh broke first. “Okay, I understand. Rhona said you wouldn't answer questions about the mechanics of the heart. Doesn't make my job any easier though. It certainly would help if I could talk to your doctors.”

All he knew of Susan and Howard was that Howard must surely have died soon after Leon left the basement. He had been in the last stages of cancer. When Susan had dropped Leon at the train station with his small bag of clothes and a bank account full of money, he experienced the panic of a child abandoned by his parents, left to fend for himself with no skills and no tools and no idea about how to live with his new heart. He had sent the weekly updates they'd requested on his health to the e-mail address Susan had given him in the six months that followed, until one day the e-mails began to bounce. He went to find her at the university only to discover she had resigned. There was no forwarding address. She had told no one where she was headed.

Since the TV debut of the Wonders, more universities and pharmaceutical companies had contacted Leon, offering inordinate amounts of money for the opportunity to examine him, to take scrapings of the titanium-bone cement, to do imaging of the inside of the heart and map its mechanisms as if he was a newly discovered island that explorers were desperate to claim
as their own, driving a flag into the earth, a stake into the heart. Aside from Rhona's insistence that he keep the workings of the heart secret, Leon knew he shouldn't allow those people into his body. Their motives had nothing to do with his well-being.

Minh tapped around other sections of his chest. The sound reverberated through Leon's bones in minor quakes.

“I hope you don't mind me saying, but you have a face that looks like it belongs to another era,” she said as she worked. “There are some famous and truly lovely illustrations in seventeenth-century books of anatomized bodies. Something about your face reminds me of them.”

“Oh, great. I remind you of an anatomized body.”

She laughed a strong rising laugh, melodious, a laugh that made Leon want to laugh with it. “I didn't mean that! Only the face, Leon, your lovely, long, melancholy face. Oh . . . sorry, I didn't mean so be so, um . . . Anyway, yes.” She cleared her throat as she took his wrist in her hand and pulled a watch from her pocket.

As she moved her two fingers around the thin blue skin of his inner wrist, searching for the pulse, he waited for it to dawn on her.

“Oh.” She sat down quickly on the stool behind her, as if she had no control of her legs.

“Please, doctor, don't make a zombie joke.” The last physician who had discovered his lack of pulse had gone a little haywire.

“So it doesn't beat.”

“If we turned off the machines in the room you would be able to hear a very faint whirring. Spooky, everyone says. It took me a long time to get used to not having a heartbeat.”

After she had caught her breath, she drew blood into four small vials that she labeled for testing and placed in a rack on
the bench. She took photos of the heart and the cavity from different angles. Next she rolled the sphygmomanometer stand to Leon's side. Leon watched her face as she wrapped the cuff around his arm and started the machine. The cuff swelled and squeaked against his skin. She released the valve and listened. A moment later she laughed and tore apart the Velcro panels to release his arm.

“I'm an idiot. Of course, your arterial pressure isn't like anyone else's. I have nothing to measure it against. That, together with no pulse. They certainly didn't teach us any of this in med school.”

Susan had warned him about how he would have to learn to live with a new pitch of silence. “I can't imagine what it will be like,” she'd said. “You will not hear the life beating inside you. I wonder how it will feel.” She'd rested her hand on his head for a moment before turning her focus to her workbench, where she was screwing miniature titanium pins into fine silver branches.