The Wonders (21 page)

Suddenly Minh sat up. “Can I do something peculiar?” she said softly in the darkness of the bedroom.

A multitude of possibilities occurred to him in a second. “What?”

“Maybe it's silly,” she said, “but I've wanted to do it since I first met you.”

“Okay.” Leon found himself holding his breath. Since they had gotten together it had all seemed so perfect, too perfect perhaps. Was she going to turn out to have some kinky sexual peccadillo?

“Take off your vest.”

He pushed himself up in bed with his elbows, unzipped the tight vinyl-ribbed sleeping vest that kept his heart contained in the night and slipped it off. Felt the familiar trace of cool air passing through his cavity.

Leon reached across and let his hand rest on Minh's back as she lowered her face to his chest. The vertebrae in her spine rose like an arching cat under his fingers. He felt her hair brush his shoulder, then her cheek, warm, pressing against the center of his chest beside the cavity inside which his heart whirred,
faint but audible in the quiet of the dark bedroom. His cock stirred, and he moved his hand to cup her breast.

“I love you, Leon.” Minh's whisper entered the cavity where Leon's heart rested. Her warm breath tickled the edges of the cavity, and he shivered with pleasure.

“I love you, Leon, your mind and your body and even this metal heart inside you, but I don't love your money. When we're done with this, if we're still together, I'd like to give some of it away. And I want to work for the rest of my life, and make art. I don't ever want to behave as if money gives us value.”

She straightened up, and her mouth found his in the darkness. Their lips held together for a moment before pulling apart.

“Whatever you want.” He clasped her closer and she swung her leg over until she was astride him. He bent his head to her breasts, but Minh took his chin in her hand and lifted his face. In the darkness her pale face hovered glowing above him.

T
HROUGH THE TALL
windows of Overington, Leon had watched the passage of a year's seasons: trees shimmering with budding leaves in the raw air of spring, flowers splashed across summer beds, the whole garden bowing to autumn winds, and the bare white limbs of winter. Now, in his second summer on the estate, he walked with Minh through the gardens instead of alone. He never wanted to be alone again. He had considered dropping to one knee to propose when they reached the fir tree forest where they had once made love in the twilight, but he couldn't wait. As soon as they had passed out of view of the house he took her hand.

“Marry me, Minh?”

“Oh, Leon, I had no idea you were going to . . . You know I love you. But we're just getting to know each other. And anyway, I've never understood the whole marriage thing. Isn't it enough that we've chosen each other?”

“Please, Minh. A wedding and a ring. It's a pledge for life. I want you for life.”

“I thought Rhona said you can't wear a ring. That it's bad for your image in the show.”

“I'll have it though. I'll have that symbol. From you.”

He asked again and again until she relented, because she did love him. She had one condition for the wedding: no one from outside would be invited. “Make it a simple party and I'll do it. I have never had a party in my honor, ever. Not even a birthday party.” Her parents were migrants working in their cousin's dry-cleaning business in the heat of Orange County. They spent all day in the pungent perchloroethylene mist of the spot-cleaning bench. Minh said she was lucky she hadn't been born with two heads. She had been a runner for the shop before and after school, delivering freshly pressed suits and coats and dresses around the neighborhood, wheeling a clothing stand along the footpath and heaving it over the lip of the road at crossings, pushing receipts into the bag around her waist. Neighborhood kids followed her, teasing. “Stinky bin. Stinky Minh, stinky bin.”

“Now all those white kids are working in shops and driving cabs, while we stinkies are lawyers and accountants and doctors. Doesn't take away the sting when I remember it though. Stinky Minh. I'll never forget.”

“No wonder Maisie and Maximus love you. You have the memory of an elephant.”

“It's hard to forget being the freak of the school. You don't have to have a hole in your chest to feel like a monster. I'm sure that's part of the reason you Wonders have been such a sensation. You're tapping into the way we all feel sometimes—as if we're different, wrong, imperfect. And yet you're doing fine. You make being weird seem okay.”

On the day of the wedding the summer wind blew streamers everywhere and the firecrackers were soaked in a surprise
morning shower and wouldn't light. With the wind making the trees sway and the furniture for the wedding feast having to be moved indoors after the tablecloths began to flap wildly, it seemed as if the whole event might up and fly away, and Leon's dream of happiness with it.

“Probably a good thing those firecrackers got wet,” Rhona remarked. “I'm not sure Maisie and Maximus have ever heard firecrackers. Stampeding elephants would make for an eventful wedding.”

The celebrant waited with Leon at the rose bower Rhona had bought for the occasion. He clutched his papers to his breast against the gusts of wind, and Leon stared at the grass crushed by his polished black shoes, half afraid that Minh had changed her mind. He was the see-through man, and Minh had seen that he was a pathetic, weak, unwell man and she could do much better. She was probably on a plane to Orange County to marry some employee of her cousin's business or the son of a family friend who had made a name for himself in orthodontics.

As he pushed the flattened grass around with the toe of his shoe, imagining the gleeful pity that would be showered on him by the media when they found out he had been stood up at the altar, Kathryn clicked along the path toward them. Minh would be out in a minute, she said.

On the lawn, bracing themselves against the wind, the household members stood beside their chairs in their best fripperies. Wandering around the ceremony, and once through it, were Maisie and Maximus, decked out in flower garlands and painted with the symbols for health, happiness and longevity. Rosa the chimp rode Yuri's shoulders, pulling at his ears and hair to tease him as he batted at her with both hands like a man trying to swat away a fly. To the side of the garden the pony nibbled
on her special wedding-day nose bag of mash. The garden was the domain of the animals, and everyone had agreed that they should be a part of whatever happened there.

Earlier in the day Kathryn and Rhona had prepared a special surprise for Maximus. When the participants first came out into the warm windy garden, after the staff had set up the white plastic chairs wrapped in ribbon for the ceremony, they each wore a hat and walked nonchalantly past Maximus. He never tired of the hat trick. One by one, their hats were lifted gently off their heads and tossed into the trees. Maisie trumpeted her delight and reared up on her hind legs.

The only outsiders were a friend of Christos and her three children who happened to be visiting Overington. Now the children were racing after the hats as the wind made them cartwheel across the grass. The little girl, eight years old and full of so much energy she seemed to radiate electricity, kept running after she caught up a bowler hat in her left hand. She ran with her left arm outstretched and the black bowler clamped to her head with her right hand. On and on she ran, joy embodied, her thin legs pumping and her dress flying out behind her.

“She can't run onto the road?” Her mother put her hand on Christos's arm.

“No, no, she is safe, there is a very high fence.”

“Hello.” A gentle voice behind Leon. The voice of his soon-to-be wife.

He spun around and grasped her to him.

“You'll ruin the dress.” Her muffled voice into his shoulder.

He held her at arm's length, taking in the oyster satin dress, the pale high heels. Pulled her close again. “I was afraid you'd chickened out.”

Minh laughed. “Come on. Let's do it.”

It was only after they had made their vows and run into the
house under a shower of rice that the little girl raced back from the fence. The bowler hat was gone.

“The wind blew the hat over the fence and a lady on the road called out that she couldn't throw it back because she was in a wheelchair.”

Rhona heard and hurried over. “Did she say anything else to you?” she asked the girl.

“I told her there was a wedding and she said to tell you congratulations.”

They came at random times to camp outside the fence. The vigil of the disabled. The early groups of demonstrators had been moved away from the gate by security, but one or two people appeared every now and then, somewhere along the perimeter of the grounds. The press wouldn't come anymore so they were only performing for the Wonders. A woman in a wheelchair, a man with stubby arms and half-formed hands, the acid-attack victim they saw sometimes on TV current affairs shows after another reconstruction attempt on her face. They left messages in the mail or painted on the footpath or sprayed onto the hedge. The latest message, painted in blue on the timber struts of the first gate, said:

YOU ARE CANNIBALS, FEEDING OFF OUR DISABILITY. WITHOUT US, YOUR SHADOW FREAKS, YOU WOULD ONLY BE HALF THE HUMANS YOU ARE.

A
FTER THE WEDDING
the Wonders took a three-week break from performances so Leon and Minh could hide away on an island in the Pacific for their honeymoon. They swam at the private beach and rinsed the sand off each other at the outdoor shower on the side of the cabin facing the sea. They lay on the bed with the sea rushing outside and traveled the continents of each other's bodies, limb by limb, expanse by expanse. When they returned to Overington, skin caramel from the sun, a new looseness in their walk, Christos took one look at Leon and declared him a new man.

“In fact, I would say that at last you have become a man.” He turned to Yuri. “You see? I told you all he needed was a woman.”

The performance work resumed at an even greater pace. Dinners, media interviews, private showings. In January the Wonders flew into Dubai for a commissioned exhibition. They drove through Dubai streets as wide as rivers. White cars slipped along soundlessly in sedate tides of traffic heading from one skyscraper to another. The limousine driver wore an arrangement of
a peaked cap over a cloth ghutra that seemed to straddle the two worlds with equal discomfort.

Their latest employer, a dealer in finance, owned hundreds of thousands of square miles of desert in the region. His schedule for the performance, as laid out in the contract, took the Wonders on a short flight out of the city and a desert drive to a camp that would be the stage for the performance. The site had been set up with tents, carpets and cushions, cooking and serving equipment, and a chef to prepare a feast for the guests. There would be music and dancers, and as a finale, the Wonders would perform.

When the booking had come in, Rhona had showed the Wonders pictures of Dubai's bizarre program of construction. Snow slopes in a climate of hundred-degree heat. Artificial islands in the shape of palm trees large enough to be seen from the moon. Seven-star hotels with empty seven-star rooms. And Dubailand, the most immense leisure complex on the planet, abandoned half-built, its debt almost crippling lender nations, a monument to greed and hubris. “I think their freakish country might even out-freak the Wonders,” she'd said.

Their tiny plane out of the city touched down on a strip of concrete flanked on either side by a small army of men shoveling sand out of the path of the wheels. Leon and the others hopped down from the wobbly aircraft steps and looked around. The desert was searingly bright. Yellow sand burned under the soles of their shoes. Dunes with no distinguishing features swelled and sank to the billowing horizon.

While they struggled through deep sand to the luxury four-wheel-drive van parked at the edge of the runway, behind them the plane slewed around on the sandy strip until it faced the way they had come, then took off in a sandstorm of yellow grit. There was no building in sight. Nothing but the undulating dunes, bleached sky, gassy sun. Leon's eyes were already watering from
the glare. He pulled his sunglasses from his shirt pocket and hooked them on, took off his hat and perched it on Minh's head.