The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel Read online

  As I returned with our beers, I watched Tim slip the photo back into his wallet. Then he folded up the pages of his essay in resignation.

  “I’m going to have to go back to Scotland,” he sighed. “Do you know how goddamn cold it is in Scotland?”

  His student visa was past expired, and his application for dual citizenship had gotten him nowhere fast. He’d been writing freelance, for blogs and other nonpaying entities, and barely getting by. All in the earnest hopes of someday landing a job as a real reporter. Honest work wasn’t easy to come by and Tim had been down every available avenue, twice, and still always wound up right back where he’d begun. There was only one thing I could think of to do to help him. Something I was terribly good at. Something I had not done in far too long.

  I lied.

  “You know, I have a brother-in-law who works for a company that scans all those SATs and GREs and everything,” I said. I didn’t have a brother-in-law. I didn’t even have any siblings.

  “Scantron!” Tim said excitedly.

  “That’s it, Scantron!” I said. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. Anyway, I’d be happy to get in touch with him to see if he knows anything.”

  The rest was easy. With a little help from Google and Photoshop, the twin engines of modern-day con artistry, I produced a perfectly passable letter from an anonymous colleague of my fictitious brother-in-law’s, which suggested that Tim was, indeed, onto something. Nothing damning or concrete. Just enough to give the ring of truth to Tim’s article. Armed with my letter, Tim went on to finish his piece, publish it in Educator’s Monthly, and win the Dunnigan-Pyle Award for Investigative Journalism. Jessina and Deshawn got to shake hands with the mayor, and some philanthropist donated two hundred thousand dollars to their school. Tim moved to a bigger apartment and asked me to take the spare room, free of charge.

  Talk about your win-win situations.

  “It’s all thanks to you,” he’d say whenever I protested—which I made a point to do each month when the bills came. “Your big break is coming any day now, I can feel it.”

  In the mornings we woke and toiled away in the apartment, dreaming of becoming the next Mencken and Dreiser. Tim sent out résumés to newspapers, television studios, and magazine publishers—anyone who might have been looking for a young, eager reporter. Though he kept on calling about his application for dual citizenship, the wheels of government ground slowly. Still worried about deportation, Timothy applied for a job teaching courses in journalism at City University. Just something to fall back on.

  As June came to a close, I heard from the first round of literary agents, who collectively declared my novella “forced,” “unrealistic,” and filled with “less-than-charming characters.” As I drank my way through the dog days of July, Tim began to get offer upon offer for his brilliant journalistic mind. And while everyone loved his work on the standardized-testing piece, citing his “bloodhound’s nose for the truth,” the insults continued to come flying toward me through each mail delivery—my hardly fictional writing was, apparently, also “fantastical,” “emotionally dishonest,” and “frankly, simply not believable.”

  Aside from my appreciation for a little irony, you can imagine my frustration. When Timothy Wallace left in August on a year-long assignment in West Africa for the BBC, I stayed behind in his apartment, still hoping that my luck would soon change.

  Drunk and depressed, I neglected to transfer the lease, or the utilities, to my own name. A few bank statements arrived from a Chase account that Tim had not had time to close, so I just found a refill checkbook and began paying the bills. When the account ran out, I deposited my own money into it. Gradually, I became a little more Tim, and a little less me. My novella, and everything that had inspired it, began to feel like a distant memory—part of someone else’s life. Someone else’s beginnings, not mine.

  Then one day, sifting through the stacks of mail, I found a letter from City University, offering Timothy Wallace four sections of Introduction to Journalism. The semester was slated to begin the following week. Desperate and a little inebriated, I wondered if that maybe I could substitute for Timothy, seeing as how the school probably wouldn’t have time to find another replacement. Tim had left behind his books and syllabi, so I spent the week studying Harrower, and Zinsser, and the AP stylebook, and putting together my own thoughts on these subjects. I stayed up late at night, reinventing myself as an expert on truth telling, and when I woke from bleary half sleep, I was one fraction less of the man I’d been when I’d fallen into bed.

  On the first day of class, I threw on an old corduroy blazer and a button-down shirt and went uptown to the university. Thirty-five eager freshman faces sized me up as I walked into the room. “He seems young,” I heard someone whisper. “Is this a joke?” someone else asked. I began to sweat and flush red as they snickered. Standing there before their doubting eyes, something in me finally snapped. With all the rage only an unappreciated genius could muster, I slammed a stack of syllabi on the table.

  “Who knows how much tuition costs at this school?” I thundered.

  No one raised a hand. Everyone sat up straight, even the jocks in the back.

  “Why am I not surprised?” I muttered. Truth be told: I didn’t know myself. Then I let out a companionable laugh—only two students in the room dared to smile back.

  “If you want to learn about journalism, you’re not going to do it sitting in a classroom,” I barked. “Everybody stand up. You have twenty-five minutes to go out onto the city streets, find someone to interview, and get their life story. In exactly twenty-five minutes, come back here and be prepared to tell me everything there is to know about your subject. I’ll be quizzing you on the details.”

  No one moved. One of the students who had smiled raised her hand. She, at least, was zipping up her bag. “What if you ask us about something that we don’t find out?”

  “Then you make it up,” I said. “But if I don’t believe you, you fail.”

  A few more people began sliding their notebooks into their bags. A boy with a Mets cap on backward raised his hand. “Isn’t that . . . whatchacall . . . inethical? Isn’t that, like, plagiarism?”

  “No,” I said flatly. “Plagiarism is when you steal someone else’s words and pass them off as your own. When you just make them up from nothing, it’s called fiction. We’ll discuss the difference more thoroughly when you all get back. Now you have twenty-four minutes.”

  Five or six people jumped up and bolted for the door.

  “Professor?” one girl called out. “Professor . . . uhm . . . I forget your name.”

  “Tim . . . o-thy . . . Wal . . . lace . . . ” I said as I wrote it on the board in big chalk letters.

  “Yeah. Ain’t you even gonna take attendance?”

  “I’ll take attendance when you come back,” I said coolly, taking off my jacket and slinging it over my chair. Checking my gleaming gold wristwatch, I said, “If you come back. Twenty-three minutes now.”

  With that I sat down and watched the students filing out, looking at me as if I’d lost my mind. Maybe I had. All I knew was that I was someone I did not recognize, but it felt right. I liked me, this way. And twenty-three minutes later, every one of the thirty-five students was back, with pages of scribbled notes, all fighting to read first.

  The rest is the rest. Timothy’s backup plan became mine—and with a little practicing of the scribble he called a signature, I started cashing his paychecks and paying his bills. At one time I suppose I planned to just get a teaching job of my own, with my own name. But a strange thought came back to me, which had first surfaced back in those dark, drunk days in July.

  I’d been pondering my chosen vocation—to write fiction and to slant the truth—to tell lies, for a living. But I wasn’t good enough at it. At least not in writing yet. No one believed me. And then my mind wandered back to little Deshawn, sitting at his desk avoiding the roaches, filling in those little Scantron bubbles with his yellow numb
er-two pencil. He’d said that taking the tests was like evolution in action—only instead of the brightest and most capable students surviving, it seemed that victory fell to those who could scam the test, learn the rhythms of the answers, the tenor of trick questions, take educated guesses, and budget their time. The teachers had stopped teaching science and English and started teaching how to pass the test. Was it gaming the system? Or was it an evolutionary necessity?

  The best novelists make you believe, as you read, that their stories are real. You hold your breath as Raskolnikov approaches his neighbor with a raised ax. You weep when no one comes to Gatsby’s funeral. And when you realize you are being so well fooled, you love the author all the more for it. Up in front of my students each day as Professor Timothy Wallace, I discovered the thrill of getting away with the manufacturing of reality. I had a way not only to pay the bills, but to become a better purveyor of make-believe. I had put myself into an evolutionary situation wherein my failure to deceive would result in disaster. Wherein I’d be forced to risk everything. Where I’d be rewarded for my successes at dishonesty. And the greatest reward was that I barely thought of my old life anymore. Only when I saw a certain novel by Jeffrey Oakes in the bookstore windows, or caught a headline about Luxembourg as I passed by a newsstand.

  Oh, yes, that’s right. You didn’t believe me when I said that part, before. Now you’re not so sure, are you? It’s perfectly fine. I understand. After all, you’re talking to someone who, really, for a time, believed he was Professor Timothy Wallace. So much so that, one day, when I opened the mailbox to discover that the United States of America was proud to accept Timothy Wallace’s credentials for dual citizenship, I felt genuine relief, as if I were the one avoiding deportation. I signed Timothy’s name on the dotted lines as if it were my very own. I tell you, at that time, I’d all but forgotten it wasn’t. A few weeks later, when I went down to Hudson Street and collected a crisp blue passport, it hardly occurred to me that I was committing a federal crime. I bought myself a hot dog, afterward, to celebrate.

  I’d made something of myself. Or someone’s self, anyway. I was actually a wonderful teacher—if I only channeled equal parts Mr. Kotter, Full Metal Jacket, and Professor Keating from Dead Poets Society. At the end of the first semester, my students filled out their Scantron evaluations of my performance, deigning me “Excellent” with unanimity of graphite. Over the holiday break, I dug out the old novella I’d written and, for the first time, it felt more like fiction than fact. When I returned to my post for the spring, I took on four new sections. This time the students were expecting the theatrics—they had heard about me, it seemed. They had heard about the professor who tells it “like it is.”

  The brilliance of teaching for a large university department is that it involves surprisingly little oversight. If I’d tried to be a middle school teacher for little Deshawn and Jessina, I’d have been fired in a heartbeat. Little children still tell their parents what they do at school all day. The Department of Education hands down a curriculum, and textbooks, and any deviation from the prescribed course is noted. But at the university, oversight only ever came once a semester, when a member of the tenured faculty materialized to sit in on my class. And this faculty member was required to give advance notice, so it was simple to merrily plan more mundane and traditional activities for that day. The students played along—happy to help me in damning “the man.”

  In the end, my flaw was that I was really too good. My name came to the chair’s attention when I was overwhelmingly voted Teacher of the Year by the freshman class. This lifted my name out of the crowd of nearly a hundred adjunct professors and, that same night, when the chair saw the real Timothy Wallace on the BBC, reporting on corruption in the UN foreign aid program, he finally put two and two together.

  My little conversation with the chair in the hallway was uninteresting—he called me a sociopath, which, I’ll admit, did sting—but otherwise, he seemed simply flabbergasted that I had so thoroughly charmed the hundreds of university students in my charge. An uninspired dinosaur himself, he asked me, more than a few times, none to my surprise, how I’d done it. I’m sure you’d like to know the same. So here’s the truth:

  Students want you to tell them that everything they’ve learned thus far has been bullshit, served up steaming by people far stupider than themselves. They’ve all made it through high school, where they’re guaranteed to have encountered worthless instructors of all kinds, peddling information that has not even the slightest relevance to their lives at all. So, first things first, you tell them that their suspicions have been correct all along—most of what they avoided learning wasn’t all that important, anyway. But then comes the right hook, now that their guards have been dropped. What is the one thing that is valuable in this world? The ability to lie. That’s right. And they know it well by then, only no one has acknowledged it to their faces before. Language, you go on to explain, is not a boring and worthless system of grammar and spelling, but a tool that can be used to manipulate the weak and the stupid. Students sit up straight in their chairs when they hear this.

  A master of the English language, you go on, can convince and manipulate anyone into doing anything the master pleases. You show them Socrates—they know him as just some ancient dead guy. No. You show them a man who uses his superior wit to convince ordinary people to think exactly the way he wanted them to think. You show them speeches by Stalin and Marx, JFK and FDR. You look at the Gettysburg Address. Don’t quiz them on the year and the date—they know that’s what Wikipedia is for. They can get that on their cell phones.

  My favorite lesson plan involved simply walking over to the TV and turning on CNN for the hour. Any time of day, even in commercial breaks, the students could identify an endless stream of manipulation. The truth is bent constantly into lies—right before our very eyes and ears, every day of our lives, and they are hip to this fact. Change the channel to MTV and they can see their idols doing the same thing: pop singers who reinvent themselves to seem like the girl next door in one interview and little better than porn stars in the video that follows. Or rappers who back their words with claims of rough streets, so we’ll forget their bank account balances are in the triple millions. And the students idolize these frauds. They dress like them and speak like them because they’re frauds. They’re heroes because they’re good frauds. And the students then reinvent themselves as ever-better miniatures of their fraudulent role models.

  Of course, you will occasionally find a young, idealistic kid who believes that art contains truth. This may seem initially to be anathema to your entire being. But these rare souls are even easier to win over. For you will deliver your speeches with amusement, but also with grave concern. Your passion bursts from the heart, which you wear on your corduroy jacket sleeve, and it runs, bloodred, down your jeans and onto your Italian leather shoes. Never take your eyes off these genuine students, for they have not yet been crushed, and you will not crush them. You will nurture this idea that there is truth and beauty behind that veil of lies. Indeed, whenever you draw back that curtain, you will show them that there is Good and there is Right and there is Better Than and there is Best. And if you tell this lie well enough, you may even begin to believe it again yourself. You may even regain a sliver of the innocence and ignorance you treasured once, too. And this is your reward at the end of the day.

  But there I go again. Sometimes I forget I’m not in my classroom anymore. We’re having a nice night in a quiet bar, on the fifty-first floor of one of the finest hotels in Dubai. There’s something about this place. It’s the air, I think. Makes you want to fold stories inside of stories inside of stories. But I’ll get to the end, finally, and explain how I got from there to here.

  The department chair fired off some empty threats about getting the police involved—but I knew he would never do this because it would require him to admit the truth about the university’s lack of oversight to hundreds of parents, perhaps even to real reporters. So
I told him to do what he liked and I walked downstairs. Stepping out onto the rainy streets of New York, I wondered where to go next. A long summer stretched ahead. The downside was, of course, that they wouldn’t let me teach at any of the other city universities now—and I couldn’t exactly put my experience of the past year on a CV. The economy was in the toilet. I was about to turn thirty years old. I was unemployed, friendless, and loveless. My sole possessions were the disaster of my “forced,” “unbelievable,” and “less-than-charming” novella, and the knowledge that I’d spent the better part of a year being someone I actually enjoyed being instead of myself. And I would be damned if I was going to go back.

  Just then, I noticed Saiyid, my favorite student, hovering under the awning, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. The golden tobacco smelled sweet, like dark secrets, and when he saw me looking over, Saiyid happily offered me one.

  “Where did you say you were going next year? Hunter? NYU? Columbia?”

  “The University of Dubai,” Saiyid declared proudly.

  “Ah, good old U-Doob,” I said, though I had never heard a thing about it before.

  “My father knows some people who teach there,” Saiyid explained. “You would like it there. The people in the Middle East, they all want to know . . . what is America, really? You know, Professor. You tell it like it is. You do not pretend this country is perfect and pure and wonderful. You can tell them.”

  “America might not be perfect,” I said, not really thinking, “but I’ve always thought it must be a hell of a lot better than anywhere else.” Truth was I’d never left the country in my life.