AT THE HUDSON VALLEY MANSION
In the living room of the estate. A stylish fellow
with ice-blue eyes, a beautiful young black woman with
snow white hair, and the slight man who still has his
back to us, sit around on couches, listening as the
bald-headed man reads A Christmas Carol aloud. Two
others, the red-haired woman and a tall, slim,
handsome young man, dance to Nat King Cole. A log fire
roars in the fireplace. A short, extremely thick-set
young man--almost freakishly so--comes in, looking
abstracted but worried. He hands a sheet of paper to
the bald man, who reads it, looking grave. Hands the
paper it to the slim man who has by now stopped
dancing. The slim man looks up, puzzled.
"Wolverine?"
IN THE ROCKIES
The slashed bodies of six wolves litter the ground.
The naked man, his body covered in his own blood and
that of his victims, pants, wavers, clearly at the
limit of his strength. He and the last wolf lock eyes,
animal to animal. The wolf growls. The naked man
growls back. It's truly an inhuman sound. At last the
wolf turns tail and runs. The man stands triumphant a
moment, then collapses into the snow.
IN THE DESERT RAT'S TRAILER
The sound of helicopters and sirens drowns out the
old midwife's chanting. Outside, the ambulance scrapes
to a halt, as familiar-looking attack helicopters,
ghostly white, fill the air overhead. Inside the
trailer, panic--all except for the old woman, intent
on her work. Sound of automatic gunfire outside. A
newborn wails. The door is kicked in. Men dressed in
white body armor fill the doorway, pour in. On their
left breast plates, in small Bodoni type, the motto,
BREEDING AND FORM. "Step away from the child.
Now." The father rushes for the men, is shot
down. The lead assassin takes careful aim with a
pistol and kills all the adults except for the
midwife. He steps over to her, indicating that he
wants the child. "It won't be harmed." She
gives it, reluctantly. He kills her. Carefully, with a
weird tenderness, he passes the baby to a second
assassin, who swaddles it and slips a bottle of
formula into its mouth. As it begins blindly to suck
we see that it has two small curved horns protruding
from its brow.
AT THE LEES'
Mr. Lee breaks down the door, rushes in. Almost a
parody of a teenage girl's room, frilly and pink--and
half destroyed. A young Asian girl lies on her bed,
curled into a fetal ball, hands clutching her forehead
with one hand, a stuffed monkey with the other. Sparks
and colored balls of light flow from her and float
like bubbles. Most pop harmlessly but every so often
one burns a hole in the wall, or blows the leg off a
chair, or melts a lamp. Mr. Lee runs to her and grabs
her. His manner is not tender at all. He tosses the
monkey aside and we see it's missing one button eye.
Mrs. Lee hurries in with a medikit, takes out a
syringe. The girl screams, and struggles, "No,
no!" PAF! A glob of energy hits the monkey; it
vanishes in a sizzle. A smaller one hits Mr. Lee's
head. He cries out, and his face wavers weirdly, like
a flickering TV image, and in its place, for a
fraction of a second, we see a blond man with a hard
face. The girl begins to grow hysterical; the needle
goes in.
IN THE ROCKIES
The naked man lies where he fell, unconscious,
dusted with snow. The wounds on his face have healed.
An armored blue boot hits the snow just beside his
slumbering head. Other boots appear around him, until
he is surrounded by six pairs of armored blue boots.
Twelve hands reach down to hoist him into the air.
FADE TO:
THE HUDSON VALLEY ESTATE
The man wakes up. He has no idea who or where he
is, or how he got there. He bears a barcoded implant
bonded to his skull (his body would 'heal' a tattoo):
the name Logan, a serial number, the rest encrypted.
He finds himself surrounded by friendly, if slightly
wary faces. Curious about his surroundings, he asks a
few questions. The answers are friendly but evasive.
He seems like a pleasant fellow, a little shellshocked,
perhaps. There's a spark between him and Jean Grey,
our redhead, though something about him clearly
troubles her. Her fiancÈe, Scott Summers, seems to
dislike him at once. We sense from the first that his
arrival has a troubling effect on all of the students
of Professor Xavier, on the world they have made for
themselves.
IN MISSION VIEJO
Jubilation Lee wakes in her own room, her parents
at her bedside looking worried and relieved. Her room
is undamaged. It was all a bad fever dream. She is
confused and suspicious but tries to hide it, unable
to shake the memory of her father's wavering features.
Her parents tell her not to worry. A specialist is
coming. This has a chilling sound. They leave. She
gets out of bed. Holds up a finger, stares at it. It
begins to glow, then sparkle. She panics, shakes it
out like a match. Picks up her stuffed monkey, rocks,
trying to think what to do. Looks at the monkey's
face. It has two button eyes. She throws it down. Goes
to door and opens it. Hears her parents talking in low
ominous whispers. Goes back into her room and makes up
her mind; she stuffs some clothes and a few belongings
into a knapsack, grabs her rollerblades, and goes out
the window. As she skates away, her parents lean out
of the window. Her father touches a place on his neck,
and his benevolent face wavers and disappears. He is a
hard-looking blond man. The mother touches her neck,
and her sweet face is supplanted by the face of a pale
blond woman. The man looks disgusted. "I'd better
call Mr. Montclair."
* * *
From this point we follow two separate stories
until they merge. The first story is about how the
damaged man with claws and metal bones enters the
world of Professor's Xavier's School for Gifted
Youngsters and tries to puzzle out its mystery. The X-Men
conceal their true natures from him, as they do from
the rest of the world. Logan's manner is mild,
baffled, tentative. He gives flashes of his true self
(and there is a small matter of those admantium
claws). Logan resists all efforts to recover his
memory, unconsciously afraid of what he will find, and
tries to ingratiate himself, with uneven results, with
the X-Men. Henry runs a series of medical and genetic
tests on him, and comes to realize that somehow Logan
has been horribly altered.
Life at the Xavier school seems idyllic and sweet
but Logan senses something is amiss. Something odd
about these people. We meet and get to know the other
"Gifted Youngsters" as people, not as
superpowered mutants. Then Logan catches a glimpse of
Kurt Wagner with his "image inducer" turned
off, and the smiling blond German he has befriended
turns out to be a blue-skinned, pointy-eared,
six-fingered elf-man. He starts spying and when he
sees the team training in the Danger Room, their
powers fully unleashed, he learns the truth, but
doesn't let on.
One night he sneaks into the Danger Room, activates
it. His reactions are impaired however--the trauma he
has suffered, whatever it was, has caused him to lose
touch with his killer self. He is about to be crushed
when the Room shuts down. Logan looks up at the
observation window. Professor X is there, then gone.
The next day no one else seems to know that Logan
knows their secret.
The X-Men leave to attend a secret conclave of
mutants, held in a private club in NYC, Mendel's, that
caters to mutants. The US Congress is debating
implementation of a Mutant Registration and Control
Act, and the loosely associated, fractious mutant
leadership has come to debate policy. Logan,
uninvited, trails his friends. This is a visually rich
scene, a feast of mutants, half Godfather, half Star
Wars. It is proposed that a representative group of
mutants appear before the Mutant Affairs Committee to
testify on behalf of mutants, but as this would
involve revealing their identities, and seems chancy
at best, the proposal is rejected. Recent operations
by the X-Men and other groups attempting to rescue,
protect and assist mutants have backfired or gone
wrong, resulting in increased hostility toward
mutants. Therefore it is furthermore agreed, not
without rancor, that with anti-mutant sentiment at a
fever pitch, the various groups cease all activities
that might attract public notice and disfavor, in the
greater long-term interest of mutant welfare. At this
point the meeting is disrupted by a Breeding and Form
Comittee, a death squad of the mysterous League of
Gentlemen. Logan, hoping to prove himself, reveals
himself and repels the attack. But in so doing he is
injured--he is not himself, can't generate a beserker
rage--and his blood sprays several people, among them
Jean.
When they get back to the mansion, Logan, healing,
asks to be allowed to join them. They're about to
accept him, when Henry McCoy enters, and announces
that his study of Logan shows that he is carrying a
virus that breaks down the DNA of mutants; and that
Jean, and possibly others, has now been infected. As
far as Hank can tell, they may have a week before Jean
starts to die. Logan's healing factor seems to be
protecting him, and in fact the virus in his body is
far weaker than that in Jean's or in a petri dish; it
was so weakened in his body that only by direct
contact with his blood could anyone have been
infected. Jean, on the other hand, can spread the
disease through casual bodily contact. She must
quarantine herself, and when this is not practical,
encase herself in a telekinetic body-shield. Only
Logan will be able to have close contact with her.
Logan is disbelieving; the others regard him with
more mistrust than ever, except for Jean--much to
Scott's disgust. Suddenly they are interrupted by
Kurt, who tells them to come watch a report on CNN
about strange happenings in Southern
California--amateur video footage of Jubilation Lee,
on skates, tearing through a parking lot outside South
Coast Plaza mall, trailing involuntary bursts of
plasma. The footage, says Henry, has clearly been
tampered with. The name stirs something in Logan's
memory. "Legacy," he says. "The name of
the virus is Legacy." "How do you
know?" "I'm not sure. But that girl has
something to do with it." Henry recalls that his
old teacher, Harry Lee, who sent him the e-mail
message that alerted them to the whereabouts of Logan
in the first place, had a daughter of this name. No
idea where to find them. and the e-mail was sent via
anonymous remailer. Think, they tell Logan. Try to
remember. But he's still afraid to probe his past.
Nonetheless he tries to persuade them to go after
the girl. Now it's their turn for reluctance. They
don't want to violate the pact, in itself a milestone
for the hitherto fractious mutant community, break
their word, or have another "successful"
exploit backfire. Logan berates them for helping to
perpetuate the very conditions they claim to want to
combat, for being "in the closet". He
reminds them how it was when their own powers
emerged--how frightened and alone they felt. At last
Xavier agrees.
Meanwhile, Jubilation Lee is running. In these
scenes with her, we see her horror at what is
happening to her, the repulsion that mutants inspire
in her. She falls in briefly with a gang of girls who
are then all wiped out by a Breeding and Form
Committee. Jubilation escapes, and keeps running. She
has a recurring memory of being a little girl, dragged
by the hand through a teeming street in a Chinatown.
She can almost make out the face of the woman pulling
her along.
A big white moving van arrives at the house in
Mission Viejo. It's the Tidiness Committee, come to
deal with the mess that the League operatives,
Jubilation's false parents, have made of things. The
house is emptied, cleaned, and put up for sale. False
Mom and Dad are permanently tidied up.
Wandering the streets of LA's Chinatown, Jubilation
is picked up by the police. Tells her story to them,
is brought in for psychiatric observation. Learns
there are no records of her existence prior to a year
before. We see a rage begin to possess her, at the
growing realization that her past, her true parents,
have been stolen from her. She uses her
powers--learning to control them, in spite of
herself--to escape, and flees. Returns to her
"house." It's abandoned, cleaned out. In
despair she ends up at the Mall, where she runs across
a parking lot, trailing plasma--with a Breeding and
Form Committee in hot pursuit (the latter to be edited
out for television, of course).
Professor Xavier, channelling remotely through Jean
(encased in her psi-cordon) and using his cybernetic
psionic enhancement device, Cerebro, guides the X-Men
to Jubilation. They interrupt a nearly successful
recapture attempt. Jubilation watches in fascinated
horror as these mutants go to work. Logan, weakened by
the virus, his reactions dulled, is severely injured
while saving her. In the end, though, thanks to him,
the rescue succeeds, although there is an eyewitness.
This is a problem, given the pact. Jean wipes the
memory from the witness's mind, but the strain causes
her psi-cordon to lapse, and Bobby Drake is
inadvertently infected. He may be condemned to remain
in his Iceman form (in which he is not infectious and
the virus is slowed) for the remainder of his life.
Jubilation, viewing the X-Men as a means to find out
what has been done to her and who is responsible,
agrees to go back with them to the Xavier Mansion.
Jubilation, seeing a kind of paternal figure in
Logan, is unwilling to leave his side, and nurses him
through a difficult healing. Storm takes a
big-sisterly interest in Jubilation and shows her the
ropes. Meanwhile Jean Gray is starting to show signs
of genetic degradation. At last, recovered, Logan
decides to let Professor X help him break the
"preconscious block" that is preventing him
from accessing his natural identity constructs, and
work past or around the "security wipe" that
has been performed on his memories.
In the meantime, Henry McCoy is feverishly working
on a cure of his own.
Logan is horrified by uncovering memories not only
of what was done to him at a facility called the White
Farm, but what he did to others, before his "metaforming"
and after. He has been a killer all his life, in the
service of a world-dominating organization whose
existence Professor X has long suspected, the League
of Gentleman (see Appendix). He was developed to be a
mutant-hunting superagent, codenamed Wolverine, under
the Weapon X project. The other X-Men, who had been on
the verge of accepting Logan, are repelled. Jubilation
learns from Logan that a woman named Dr. Lee worked at
the facility, and helped with his programming. He can
vaguely remember hearing her voice, saying, "The
only salvation is in Jubilation."
Professor X duly scans Jubilation's memory, helping
her recover a few more tiny memories of her parents,
but finds nothing helpful about the Legacy virus.
Logan, still reeling from revelations about himself
and wanting to atone for all he has done, steals the
Blackbird and heads for the White Farm. Discovers that
Jubilation has tagged along. Unlike him, she wants to
learn the truth about herself, and find out who did
this to her.
They arrive at the Institute for Modern Animal
Husbandry Research in the Canadian Rockies, better
known as the White Farm. Operating as a team, they
sneak in, but soon afterward Jubilation is captured.
She is told by the eminently calm Mr. Montclair,
"manager" of the Farm, that her real father,
who invented Legacy, and her mother, who worked on the
Weapon X project, were both killed for treachery: when
they began to suspect that their daughter might be a
mutant, they repented of their work, and arranged for
her escape. Naturally the attempt failed, and after
they were "tidied up," Jubilation was
programmed (using techniques her own mother invented)
and placed in a setting where her development, if she
truly was a mutant, could be monitored.
Wolverine, attempting to rescue Jubilation, is also
captured, and returned to his former state--in a
stasis tank, hooked by tubes and cables to elaborate
machinery. In order to resume his programming, his
"preconscious blocks" are completely removed
and a few memories return--three specific images of
tenderness and love. Maybe he's not a killer after
all.
Back at the X-mansion, the team discovers that
Logan and Jubilation are gone. Jean and Bobby argue
that they should not violate the pact again. The
Mutant Liberation Front is threatening to take action
against Senator Kelly, sponsor of the Act. Better to
let them die than give the MLF an excuse to violate
the pact also. Henry will eventually isolate an
antigen. They take a vote, and decide to fight. Scott,
the great advocate of the pact, casts the deciding
vote. Before they can leave, they discover that Henry
has tested his antigen formula on himself, and the
result has been to turn him into a true, furred
Beast--but true to character he conceals his horror at
this result by pretending to be merely amused.
They go after Jubilation and Logan, and in a
pitched battle penetrate the heavily guarded compound.
They liberate Logan. Searching for information about
Jubilation's whereabouts and her role in the Legacy
mystery, they come upon incontrovertible evidence that
all the tender memories that have started to flood
back are false, mere implants and virtual
constructions. Nothing can be said for sure about him.
He has no idea who he really is.
At this the animal in Logan, so long repressed,
that aspect of himself he so feared and resisted,
bursts to the fore. He goes into a magnificent,
terrible, pure beserker rage, mowing down armored
Committeemen, leading the X-Men to free Jubilation,
who is being held in another part of the complex. The X-Men
are stunned by the change in Logan. Jubilation is
rescued, and at the sight of her, free, in his arms,
the awful rage in Logan subsides (though without
disappearing). The two severed parts of his nature are
reintegrating themselves.
Hank accesses Harry Lee's secret files and
discovers that the antigen formula is coded right into
Jubilation's DNA. It also emerges that it was
Jubilation's mother who implanted the deep memory of
Jubilation in Logan's mind, just before she was
killed, and that she sabotaged his programming,
eventually enabling him to escape. It was Montclair's
genius to take advantage of this potential disaster,
infecting Wolverine (from the air) with the Legacy
virus and then sending the false e-mail message to
Beast, alerting him and his fellows to Wolverine's
presence.
They come upon the Nursery, where a small number of
kidnapped mutant and pre-mutant children were being
raised and trained to become Sports of Nature,
antimutant mutant agents of whom Wolverine was to be
the first. After a battle with the armored Nannies,
they are able to save the children, among them an
infant with a pair of small, beautiful horns.
In the end, Jubilation is presented with a chance
to kill Mr. Montclair--but right in front of his own
children, who live with him and his wife in the
Manager's Lodge. Logan, his self reintegrated now by
his accepting of the "Wolverine" component
of his nature, tempered with the love and comradeship
he has learned fom the X-Men, is able to articulate a
true expression of himself and of the existential
adventurer's code by which, prior to his mutilation
and brainwashing by the League, he had always lived.
He persuades Jubilation to let Montclair live; her
true parents gave their own lives to keep her from
being trained to become a killer like him; she should
honor their sacrifice.
They return to the X-mansion. Henry synthesizes the
antigen from Lee's formula, and treats Jean and Bobby,
who can finally revert to normal form. Jubilation,
having surrendered her anger, is now beginning to
accept herself as a mutant, to revel in her powers, to
live up to her name. Ororo gives Jubilee something she
found in the compound: a photo album of Jubilation
with her true parents. Logan eyes it enviously. He
prepares to leave, to go in search of his true
history. Scott tries to persuade him to stay. Maybe he
has no idea of where he came from, or what his real
name is, or how old he is, but he knows, on a deeper
level, who he is--he is Wolverine, a mutant, and an
X-man. Logan says he can't live in secrecy, hiding
what he is, especially now that he has found himself
again. "Yes" says Xavier. "It's time
for us to come out of the shadows."
THE SENATE COMMITTEE CHAMBERS
The X-Men are there, openly--even Nightcrawler.
They have come to testify on behalf of mutants
everywhere in opposition to the Mutant Registration
Act.
About the
League of Gentleman...
Michael
Chabon's Website
Discuss
this article on the Slush Forums!
