The Wonders (14 page)

“Howard?”

“The engineer who made it. Designed it, built it himself. She told me that my heart would be nothing like that piece of rubber. That was what she used in her teaching at the university. I asked if I could go to a lecture, but she refused. ‘I don't want you to be seen with me, Leon. We mustn't be associated. If this works and you get to go out and live a life, no one can know that Howard and I were the ones who did it.' I begged her to tell me why. I'd asked her a million times already but I couldn't believe her reasons were as simple as she made out. If it worked, surely they'd win the Nobel Prize. Surely no one would care how it had happened.”

Minh finally dropped her pencil and pad to the side of the chair and swung her legs over so she sat facing him. “That's what everyone has been saying. What kind of crazy person would bring someone back to life the way they did with you and not want to boast about it? You'd already had an organic heart transplant that failed, right? And you were going to die. Who wouldn't claim you as their very own miracle?”

“Susan said it was illegal. She'd contacted me after somehow getting hold of the transplant waiting list. She'd started from the bottom. She explained that they weren't working in
a registered hospital. It was an experimental procedure that hadn't been authorized. Howard had been refused funding and trials of his artificial heart time and time again. He'd go to jail if they were caught. They were married, did I tell you that? Susan and Howard were husband and wife.”

Minh drummed her fingers on her knees. “But, Leon, why couldn't they wait until he got the heart approved? I understand that for you it was urgent. But, no offense, there are plenty of people on the last-chance transplant list. They could have held off and found another patient. Because what did they get out of it? If they weren't ever going to tell anyone it was them?”

“It was more complicated than I first realized. Susan threatened once to let me die. She was tired of my questions. I'd hinted that I wanted to call my family and let them know what was going on. Susan said, ‘Fine, call them. We'll shut down the operation, clean up, move. But much worse, Leon, you will die. I am a doctor. I am distressed when my patients die. But people do die all the time and we both know you will die very soon if we do nothing. Legally, we are supposed to do nothing.' ”

He had already come close to dying in that basement several times. Susan went part-time at the hospital and cut her teaching down to one lecture a week. She nursed him night after night when infections tore through his bloodstream, she carried his pans of vomit and piss and shit to the basement toilet and changed his sheets twice a week, or twice a night when he was feverish. He had been in preparation for sixteen weeks, swallowing a cupful of colored pills each day, doing exercises to strengthen his abdominal and back musculature, lying under the sunlamp for vitamin D and to keep his sanity, growing weaker and more breathless as the weeks passed. Dying. In pain. Without hope.

Susan and Howard argued about Leon in angry whispers
behind the screen. One night, he'd heard Howard say to let him go. The heart Howard had built was malfunctioning. It would kill Leon. They had moved too early. Howard needed another couple of months.

Susan made a sound of derision, a high disbelieving squeak. “Let him go? And he leaves and tells everyone where we are, what we're doing, and we end up front-page news and on trial? My god, Howard, how did I agree to this? How can I love you so much I would do this for you? I used to think I was a rational woman.” She exhaled loudly and from his cot Leon could picture how she would be rubbing her cheeks with both hands, the way she did when she was exhausted.

“No, I mean let him go,” Howard said quietly. “It might be kinder anyway. What if I die before he does? It will all have been for nothing. He could have a gentle passage, palliative care.”

Whenever the basement was quiet, as it was at that moment with the machines turned off and no one speaking, Leon could feel the rumble of the world beneath the university. Sewage and wastewater gushing through pipes, the thump of generators, underground passages from building to building shifting and their stone walls cracking and sighing.

Finally he spoke. “I can hear, you know.”

Susan poked her small head with its neat gray hair around the screen. “Oh god. He didn't mean it, Leon. It was—”

“I don't care.” He was sick and tired and lonely. Hope was a small rainbow-sheened bubble hovering near the ceiling, out of his reach. “I don't care. Let me die.”

He had no will to die, merely the absence of a will to live. Even the lowest animal has a will to live. Perhaps he was dead already. Perhaps, like Dr. Frankenstein, Howard and Susan truly were attempting to bring a corpse to life.

“No.” Susan pushed aside the screen behind which
Howard, the small, hunched, greasy-haired mad scientist Leon knew she adored more than anything, more than her career, more than her whole life, was manipulating a 3-D model of the heart on a computer screen. Leon watched her align herself so that both men were in her eye line before she spoke. “You will not die yet, Leon. If you're going to die, it's going to be us who will have killed you through trying to save you.”

Howard raised his gaunt yellow head from staring at the computer screen and nodded. He pushed himself up from the bench with stick arms and a shirt that hung on him in folds of useless excess material. Only two days before, Leon had learned that he was not the only one dying in the room. Susan's devotion, her willingness to take the risk of losing her license to practice medicine, Howard's doggedness that kept him working even when he was so tired his speech became burbling and incomprehensible were all because he had no time. Howard had only a few months left, and he was determined to get his artificial heart into a body and keep the body alive, to make all his years of research worthwhile. While he would die of cancer that had metastasized to his liver, Leon might live. Perhaps Howard lay in bed at night wishing it was an artificial liver he had designed.

In the following days, Leon's withered second heart, which was killing him, was replaced with two temporary mechanical pumps to keep him alive, with luck, until Howard's heart was ready. From that day forward, Leon carried an automaton instead of a heart.

“Wow.” Minh slumped onto the chaise longue and sighed. “No wonder Rhona wants you to keep that story quiet. That'll be a movie one day.”

“We'll all be in a movie one day.” Leon gestured around,
indicating Overington and everyone inside. “I just hope they make us out to be better people than we actually are.”

“I guess poor Howard died. He was a hero, really, wasn't he? And what happened to Susan?”

“She disappeared.” Leon had felt for a while as though he had lost a mother. A mother who had told him to forget her. He grieved her absence even as he hoped she was all right, living somewhere quietly, celebrating Howard's triumph in her own way. “I hope she's seen us on the news. Maybe she'll turn up one day.”

“Will you search for her?”

Susan had forbidden him to search for her. It was the last thing she'd said to him as she dropped him at the station.

“Leave me and Howard with this time together,” she said. “I want to nurse him now. I want us to enjoy some peace. He's achieved his dream. We haven't much time left and I couldn't bear it to be wrecked by charges and courts and the threat of prison.”

He had obeyed her. He had sent the updates she requested, heard the electronic whoosh as they zapped into the ether, and never attempted to see her. When he discovered she was gone from the university where she had worked it was as though she had died without his having the opportunity to say good-bye.

“She said not to. And I haven't. It's hard to explain how things were. I'd been taken apart and put back together. I hardly knew who I was by the end of that time. For the year afterward when I was recovering I had searing flashbacks, nights when I couldn't move for fear I would break apart, and others when I walked around my apartment for hour after hour to keep from sleeping and dreaming. In the end, all I wanted was to drive the memories out of my mind.”

“Oh, Leon, that's a response to severe trauma. It must have been hell.”

“I don't feel that way now though. I want to talk about it. It's such a relief speaking to you like this.”

“I'm happy to listen anytime. Anytime at all.”

He had felt no desire to contact Susan before. It was too much to even think about. But that was before his third life. Of course he should search for her. He was famous. Everything had changed. He was famous and he could do things normal people could not. It had taken no time at all for him to realize that people with true fame have no limits on their behavior. Violence, rape, murder—celebrities never had to pay anything but a fine, or a few hours working at a community center. So what did it mean to break a few medical rules if the result was a lifesaving breakthrough?

Susan couldn't have known that the power of the world he would join overrode medical rules and regulations, overrode the courts and the state, overrode everything.

He must find her and thank her. Give her some of the money that Rhona said was rolling in faster than even she had anticipated. Fund whatever project Susan wanted. She probably still had all the specifications for the heart. He could pay for Howard's heart design to be analyzed, manufactured, mass-produced for all those other people on the waiting lists who had little hope of receiving a live heart in time.

He turned to Minh. “I should. I will. Yes, I will.”

Minh wriggled to the edge of her seat and placed a hand on his forearm. “I can help if you want. I mean, I don't want to intrude. But I think she deserves to see you, to see the heart in a healthy man.”

He wouldn't tell Rhona. She might object in case finding
Susan stole the limelight from the Wonders. But it was the right thing to do.

“Thank you,” he said. Their gaze snagged briefly before Minh swung around to adjust the back of her chaise. He felt a tremor, a tic, as if that moment of their trapped gaze had slipped under his skin.

R
HONA HAD CALLED
them all to the projection room, even the house and garden staff, who stood in a row at the back. Christos grumbled his way to his seat, and Kathryn brought a book, as she always did in case she was bored. Minh sat beside her flicking through a collection of images by a contemporary watercolorist on her tablet. Leon hoped it wasn't another series of footage the Wonders were supposed to watch while Rhona and Kyle pointed out faults in their performances and harangued them on technique, although he couldn't imagine why the animal keeper would need to hear that.

“I want you all to see this from me before you run into it somewhere else.” Rhona looked off to the side for a moment before continuing, as if someone over there was forcing her into this action. “And we might as well see it in its full glory because it went online an hour ago and half the world is looking at it right now. It's not pretty.”

She switched on the projector. The screen wall opposite filled with an image of Leon's body. As he watched, the air
around him metamorphosed to unbreathable lead. He felt his sphincter clench and the shit inside him turn to liquid. Yuri leaned over from the seat behind to pat his back. The warm hand soothed Leon into blinking and bracing himself for more.

“Like I said, not pretty.” Rhona switched to another image, even worse.

Everyone in the room was silent as she flipped through three more grotesque images. In the three months since the launch, Leon had become accustomed to the flattering photos, the airbrushed stills and the strictly managed video appearances. He'd half-convinced himself his long mournful countenance was not too bad looking. He'd worked hard on his body, exercising and eating well. His teeth had been straightened and capped, and he'd even had a small operation to pin his ears back. All that work was moot when he was confronted with these images.

Leon bending over behind the changing screen at the pool pulling off his swimming trunks. Skinny buttocks pocked and scarred from the massive injections Susan used to give him in the basement. A pathetic wrinkled hairy crack, and the shadow of the sad sac between his thighs. Four similar shots as he stepped out of the trunks and pulled on dry shorts, then a fifth of him poolside in a chair. Puffy, red-faced, mouth as wide as a laughing clown. Obviously blind drunk.

The photos were from Kathryn's birthday celebration, back in the late summer. Christos and Yuri had been in New York at an exhibition opening. Leon, Kathryn, Rhona, Kyle and Minh drank daiquiris after lunch and Leon floated in the pool until his skin wrinkled. Minh suggested they give the daiquiris a rest before she headed to her room. Kyle lasted another half hour before retiring. Later Leon and Kathryn fell asleep in the deck chairs. Staff came while they were dozing and moved big striped umbrellas around with the sun to protect them from burning.