The Wonders

by Paddy O’Reilly

  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.

  TWO 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 passen
ger 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.”

  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 sha
de 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.