The Wonders (33 page)

Most of the people lining the walkway into the hotel were there to see aLiNa, the music sensation famous for her outrageous costumes, but they clapped politely as Rhona led her
two fading stars down the red carpet. Hap stood guard near the entrance. He had four other men hidden in the crowd just in case. A lone deranged fan was out there. She had made clear that she planned to destroy first Christos, then Leon. In the woman's feverish fantasies, she believed Leon had killed Kathryn to steal her heart of flesh. The madwoman was threatening to cut out Leon's heart and use it to bring Kathryn back to life. The only thing that stood between her and the mechanical man who had stolen Kathryn's heart was Christos, winged guardian demon of the heart thief. Without her heart, Kathryn could not enter paradise, where she and the fan, who would commit suicide to be with her once she had recaptured Kathryn's heart from Leon, could be together at last.

“Valentino!” “Angel!” Only one of the show hosts in the interview arena wanted to speak to them. She waved a thin tanned arm in their direction, the fat microphone in the shape of a giant licorice ice-cream cone at the end of it. Rhona turned and nodded to Christos, who sighed and walked reluctantly to the side, where the anchor was already gushing into the microphone about the bravery of the remaining Wonders and their gradual reentry into society after the tragedy. Leon hung back. It had always been this way. Despite all his media training, he was most interesting with his shirt off, fine with rehearsed pieces but too reserved to master the unscripted interview.

While Leon and Rhona waited, aLiNa's car arrived. A shadow of disappointment passed across the face of the anchor interviewing Christos, who had missed her chance at snapping up the big drawing card of the night, but she carried on gallantly. Leon turned to watch aLiNa sashay down the carpet in a dress made of plastic soft-drink bottles. The outfit had a train of bottles three feet long that made the sound of lightweight trash chittering over the footpath on a windy day. aLiNa walked
along the carpet, smiling and signing a few programs and body parts. She waved at Leon as she passed.

“Hey, Valentino, can I see your heart one day?”

“Sure.”

aLiNa was only nineteen, a child still. Leon hoped she wouldn't fall prey to the disease that brought down so many celebrities who came to it young, the gnawing emptiness that drove them to drugs and rage and a fickle hubris that made them feel alternately invincible and worthless.

Rhona tapped Leon on the shoulder. “Come on, hon, let's go in.”

He saw the woman as he swung around. She stood at the rope directly behind Christos, grinning furiously. That's what caught Leon's eye, the mad grin. He stared at her, at the same time wondering why he felt he needed to stop and do that. The woman's glance shifted to Leon for a moment, and her eyes widened before her focus looped back to Christos. Even as her hand moved to her bag, Leon understood. She was so close to Christos, an arm's length away behind the rope, that there was no time for Leon to call out to Hap or Rhona, or to do anything but lunge toward her.

H
E WOKE TO
the familiarity of rough cotton sheets, antiseptic smells and the beeping of medical equipment. In his confusion and pain, he imagined he was in the basement again.

“Susan,” he called weakly, and an arrow streaked from his belly to alert the vigilant pain homunculus in his brain.

“Darling, it's me, Minh. Can you hear me?”

Knowledge came to him in pinpricks. He was alive, he had been one of the brightest shining stars on the planet, Kathryn was dead, Minh was here beside him.

When he tensed his muscles to move, the pain became impossible, and he cried out.

“Don't move, Leon. You need another few days of healing before you'll be able to move easily.” Minh's warm hand took his.

He opened his eyes and squinted against the cool glare of hospital light. More images came to him. The knife of the would-be assassin emerging gleaming from her handbag. Christos talking to the TV anchor, unaware of the danger behind him.

“Christos?” he croaked.

“In the private waiting room with Yuri and Rhona. You saved him. Got a hole in the belly for your trouble. But you'll be fine.” Minh lifted Leon's hand and held it against her cheek. He felt a twinge of pain as his arm pulled away from his side but he disguised the wince with an attempt at a smile.

“Minh,” he whispered.

“Yes?” She dipped her head so that her ear was close to his mouth. Her hair tickled his lips.

“I'm sorry.”

She pulled back, gazed into his eyes. “Sorry? What for?”

“For not being enough.”

She laughed, that musical laugh that had always made him want to laugh along with her. “You're plenty for me. And a hero too.”

Leon turned his face to the side. So he had saved Christos. At least he had been able to perform one act worthy of a life. But that would never make up for his weakness over Kathryn. One day he would tell Minh. One day soon. Because he had to do everything soon, and he had to tell her why.

C
HRISTOS AND YURI
had booked their flights to Malaysia, where Christos would begin work on his final project.

Minh still wanted to move to Australia, into the house they had commissioned. She needed to get away from America and her family. Her mother in Orange County called every day, begging her to come home and leave the dangerous group of people she had taken up with. Now Kathryn was gone, and since she had died in such a sordid and spectacular fashion, the Wonders had stopped being glamorous. The media were bleeding pity for the two remaining Wonders and their disabilities. They were true freaks now. Freaks in danger of being captured and caged like animals, and in Leon's case, experimented upon. In danger of being seen as less than human, they who had been the überhumans. Were the demonstrators who had haunted Overington for so long pleased that the Wonders had lost their shine? Or did this make it all worse? Had the whole sorry mess dragged them even further down in their struggle for equality?

Christos was frantic to get out of the spotlight and refine his next artwork for a year or two. Once the furor had died down and the Wonders were forgotten, he could emerge in his new form, the Illuminated Human.

Rhona would stay. She would bring in more animals, reestablish the sanctuary, take in abused animals from overseas to fill the space. Circuses with performing animals were becoming rare in North America, but Chinese bears were still being milked for bile, a tube running into a raw wound in their side, the cages that held them rusty and filthy. Bearbaiting was still a pastime that drew thousands in Pakistan to watch clawless tethered bears being set upon by trained attack dogs. Dancing monkeys would be rescued from India. Exotic pets from the wealthy of the first world. She would take in abandoned panthers and snakes and simians that people had bought as illegal pets to add glamour to their homes. Leon listened to her talk about how she would hire trainers to pacify the wild animals and keepers to look after the damaged ones. “Except that they're all damaged,” she said. “I'll get them special care. Like you all had.”

“We're not animals,” Leon said.

“We are all animals.” She pointed her finger at him. “We are all animals.”

Kyle was already working for a US presidential candidate.

Once their decision had been made, it took a month for Leon and Minh to pack and leave Overington. Rhona set up the transfer of the money. They moved into the house they had designed and had built on a property near the Grampians in Victoria. Leon grew a mustache and beard, and they hunkered down in their hideaway until they were sure no one was looking for them anymore. And he told her everything.

“You don't know how long? Susan doesn't know?” she said.

Leon shook his head. “What do you want to do?”

Minh looked out of the window to the land beyond, the sharp morning light cutting tree shadows into the pasture, the feral rabbits feeding before the sun burned away their camouflage.

“This,” she said.

“I want to grow things,” Leon said. “I want to grow plants and animals. Life.”

Six months later, a journalist called. She talked fast and hard about a piece she wanted to write, profiling Leon and Minh. It would be about them after Kathryn's death, what had happened for them, how they had adjusted to life after the Wonders. Her insistent voice was an aural foot wedged in the door. When Leon realized what was happening, that the media had tracked them down, he was convinced his heart skipped a beat. How odd, when of course his heart did not beat at all.

Back during their trip to their new home the same thing had happened. He had been holding his passport and his customs declaration and immigration form. He and Minh were on the last leg of the arduous trip to their new life in the shadows. With Hap's help they had planned a labyrinth of subterfuge to get Leon's heart through private-security screening and lose the media who were trying to track them. They had been through countless hot sheds that served as airports with nothing but a vending machine and a ticket counter. At immigration control in Melbourne, a woman at the desk was examining people's identity documents and deciding whether these people were honest and true enough to enter the country. Leon looked down at his passport in his hand, open at the page with his picture and date of birth. The passport expiration date was five years and four months away, and with what he imagined to be a skip in his chest, he wondered if he would live that long.

The adolescent boy who was once Leon, mired in the world
of facile self-help books, used to look out to the forsaken Canadian Forest beyond his backyard and see only an unkempt wall of nature pocked with burned-out cars and fallen tree limbs. After the age of ten he never set foot in that bushland. “Go and play in the forest till teatime,” his mother would say, but he turned in the opposite direction and headed to his dank room.

He could never see past the wall of trees. If he had gone down the hill and jumped the fence and walked, slowly, between the grass trees and the paperbarks, if he had stopped and bent over to gaze at the leaf litter or stood still long enough for the creatures of the bush to forget he was there, he would have seen the world that existed beyond the wall. Forest dissolving into beetles weaving through the humus, dangling webs of long-gone spiders, the whisper of life traveling through the understory, shocking green spikes sprouting from the ground that years later would pierce the clouds above the trees. The density of his vision would have cleared from a mass of gray and green and brown to florets of orange lichen between strips of peeling bark. A darkening shadow under a tree into the resting place of the brown-faced wallaby. The sky would have become a filtered high blue that stung his eyes. If he had been able to see and smell and hear these things that lived around him, perhaps his heart could have cured itself.

Leon and Minh walked sometimes to the boundary of their property. The cleared paddocks with their neat fences and cropped grass gave way to bush. They would open the gate Leon had specially built and trace their way to a nearby path worn by kangaroos. The path tracked from the boundary line of their property to a small seasonal pool at the foot of Mount Sturgeon, which rose to fill the view, its jagged profile delineating the sky from the land. Around it the land was flat, as though this single mountain had burst through the earth like a fist only
yesterday. Each time Leon looked at it, he could imagine it surging up out of the land at dawn and sinking into the horizon each night.

There were times when he followed the path to where it diverged into many different paths that could probably only be followed by scent or instinct. At that point, where his feeble human senses gave out and he was left staring wide-eyed at a world of which he could only sense a tiny part, the shadows of the bush, the scratchings and rustles, the smells of rotting and renewal, the tickle of invisible skeins of web against his bare calf—all these things caused even his steady mechanical heart to feel as though it had swelled to an enormous size and was full, in the way of a normal joyful human heart of flesh.