The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel Read online

  Curious, I watch as Tina, the girl in the hat, apologetically hands the man a few hundred rupees more than necessary for the DVD—which I can see from the cover is Surangani, Surangani, currently the country’s most popular Bollywood love story. It’s about a Tamil boy who falls in love with a forbidden Sinhalese girl. There’ve been posters up for it nearly everywhere I’ve been for the past month.

  “Jesus, fine. You’ve got the goddamn DVD. So let’s go.”

  Tina stalks away as Carsten follows, clutching her prize to her fairly overexposed chest. With about three minutes left to go, I decide to give “simon/” the second-best news of his morning.

  Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: Send the money to the PayMeNow account. DOUBLE.

  simon/: yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy thank you thank you

  Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: Now, Simon, I’m in a hurry.

  simon/: ok ok

  Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: What’s the assignment anyway?

  simon/: Papr for Modrn America Lit.

  Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: On anything in particular, Simon? Hurry hurry.

  simon/: hold on, just chking the books name now I hve in my email smwhere

  Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: You have one minute, Simon, and then I have to go.

  These Simons are all alike. A few months ago, before heading to Sri Lanka from Chennai, I’d been doing some Internet research for one of them about the Tamil Tigers and came across a funny story that stuck with me. Allegedly, back in the late 1980s, some government wildlife official had given a televised interview explaining that, despite the name of the rebel group, the tiger was actually not indigenous to Sri Lanka— in fact there were no tigers there at all. Accidentally, the man misspoke and said that the “,” which was actually the Sinhala word for “leopard,” was not native to the island.

  But, of course there are leopards in Sri Lanka—the Sri Lankan leopard, or Panthera pardus , has been a recognized subspecies since the 1950s. And so, the confused English media translated the word as “tiger” anyway. Somehow, some way, this misnomer had actually stuck. Slowly, the Sri Lankan people just began to use “” to mean “tiger.” Nobody wanted to be wrong. They’d seen it on television; it had to be true. Eventually locals began to refer colloquially to the Tamil Tigers as “koti,” the plural of “,” and, another word, had to be reassigned to mean “leopard” in order to end the confusion.

  Spots changed into stripes. All it took was just one serendipitous mistake.

  When I look back at the screen I see that thirty seconds have gone by. Finally, blip, I see Simon’s money arrive in my PayMeNow account. Enough to keep me quite comfortable on my journey northward—maybe even enough to make it two or three weeks before I need to be on a computer again.

  I count off five, ten, then twenty more seconds, but he still hasn’t sent the assignment over.

  Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: You’re out of time, Simon. Find someone else.

  simon/: wait wait! its some book. Nothing Sacred. Jeffrey Oakes? U know it?

  The flash of that name on the screen stings me more sharply than Simon’s offensively bad grammar. I don’t know why I’m so surprised—the book’s been everywhere for eight years now: an international bestseller, translated into thirty-seven languages. No matter where I have gone, and I’ve gone far, I find remaindered hardcovers and tattered paperbacks in every used-book bin I’ve peered into. From Eastern Europe to Cambodia. But now, somehow knowing that they’re teaching it in schools is an especially great blow. Isn’t that how it happens? Just one tidy step closer to immortality? I continue staring at the little pixilated letters, and I can hear the ticking of my wristwatch. Suddenly my eyes refocus and I catch my reflection in the screen. Hollow, tired eyes. A beard that hasn’t been trimmed in two weeks, maybe three. It hardly looks like me.

  Then, before I quite know what has happened, my fingers have flown to the disconnect button and I am running, running to catch my train.

  • • •

  Our train prowls slowly up out of Colombo, through the slums and then the suburbs, and eventually into the monsoon-swept rain forests to the north. I’ve paid the extra 1,600 rupees, about 14 dollars, to get a seat in the small first-class observation compartment in the rear, where I also find the lovely Carsten and her friend, Tina. The fourth seat in the compartment is empty for a few minutes, until we are joined by, of all people, an old Italian nun in a crisp black habit.

  The girls seem just as tickled as I am to be in the nun’s tiny wizened presence. She is reading a little blue-covered Bible, written in Italian from what I can see. I wonder if she ever reads anything else? Does she just read those same best-stories-ever-told over and over? Does she ever take a quick break and dip into, I don’t know, some Calvino or something? I ponder this singular commitment as I flip lazily through a collection of Hemingway stories that I found in my hotel back in Chennai. I haven’t read most of them since my freshman year of college, and it’s nice, if not a little nostalgia inducing, to look over them again.

  Aside from the advantages of comfort, with individual armchairs and air-conditioning, we’ve all more or less wasted our money on the observation car. It has been raining for four weeks, as long as I’ve been off the mainland of India, and there’s not much to observe. Great, god-enraged gusts of wind carry down opaque curtains of gray rain. Beyond it, the dense, dark verdigris of rubber trees has grown back with a vengeance over the old British plantations. Occasionally we pass low stretches of tea trees, which curve and wriggle over the hills like hedge mazes in a Victorian garden or the wormy gyri of a brain. But most of the time the rain hides all but the nearest-reaching branches.

  Carsten happily passes the first hour of our journey with her headphones clamped on, watching her movie on a little portable DVD player. Tina, meanwhile, flips through the New York Times International Edition. My heart leaps suddenly, when I see LUXEMBOURG in a headline as she turns the page, but it is only an article about a soccer game. I manage to catch that they lost 0–5, and that there is no photograph with the story of, perhaps, some members of the royal family in attendance—then Tina looks up and catches me looking, and I glance away at the nun as a diversion. To my surprise, the nun has set down her Bible and taken out a cellular telephone—an ancient model roughly the size of a brick—and she is punching buttons on it, trying to get a signal. When I look up at Tina again, I can see she is smirking but trying to pretend not to look at me. Still, I know how this game goes. She’ll crack first; she’s too curious not to.

  It happens ten minutes later when, as we roll into a clearing, a far-off mountain range comes into view, and we both look up suddenly to take in the sight.

  “They look like white elephants,” Tina says to me smartly.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The hills.” She nods at my Hemingway. “‘Hills Like White Elephants’?”

  I look down at the book and then skeptically back out the window. “I think those are more like mountains than hills.”

  “Semantics,” she scoffs. “You’re from the States?”

  “Maybe,” I say with a smile. “And you?”

  “I’m from Boston,” she says. Then, thumbing at her friend, she says, “She’s a Philly girl.”

  I smile at Carsten, who blinks up at me through heavy lashes and then back down at her DVD player. She hits Pause with a manicured nail and then pulls the headphones delicately away from her carefully straightened hair. She smiles with teeth so perfect that they’re utterly unnatural. There’s not a chance they haven’t been braced and bleached.

  “Carsten Chanel,” she says, extending a hand to shake mine lazily. It’s the fakest fake name I’ve ever heard in my life, and the look on Tina’s face confirms my suspicions.

  With a much more aggressive shake, Tina introduces herself, “Christina Elizabeth Edgars-Boyleston.”

  “My name is Outis,” I say.

  “Otis?” Carsten laughs.

  “Ow-tis,” I enunciate. I’m about to explain that it’s Greek when Tina says, surprisingly, “That’s
an old Greek name. Right?”

  Caught off guard, I stare into her great green eyes. Like cat’s eyes, I think. I wonder what she thinks of mine.

  “That’s right,” I say.

  “We’ve both been living in Manhattan for years now,” Carsten explains with a dramatically bored flip of her hand. Since they are in their late twenties at most, I’m guessing that they were Barnard students who stuck around after graduation.

  “Manhattan! I’ve never been,” I lie.

  “You’d love it, Outis,” Carsten says.

  “If it’s so great then why aren’t you there now?” I ask.

  Carsten smiles and attempts to look mysterious. “We thought we’d take some time off from our careers and, you know, find ourselves.”

  “Any leads so far?” I ask.

  Carsten looks confused; Tina snorts and hides a smirk behind a pale hand.

  “Is that supposed to be funny?” Carsten asks.

  I back down graciously. “My apologies. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a real conversation with anybody but myself.”

  Carsten seems to consider this, but fortunately we are interrupted by a knock at the door and a tall Sri Lankan boy enters pushing a cart. He is maybe sixteen and wears a golden traditional-looking uniform. “Excuse me, please. Stuffed fig? Bibikkan? Pastry?”

  “Drinks?” Carsten asks immediately. The boy nods his head.

  “Portello soda and vodka?” Carsten orders.

  I like the lovely little lilt of her “vah-kah?” though I immediately gag at the mention of the purple, hypersugary berry-and-cream-flavored soda brought over long ago by the Brits and gleefully sold now by the Coca-Cola corporation. I think I can see the guy gag, too, as he bends down to prepare the drinks. There’s something about the way he moves, actually. Cocky, smooth motions that belie the somewhat nervous look in his eyes. He reminds me of a boy I used to know, when I was his age, when I strung rackets at a Carolina country club.

  “Arrack and ginger beer,” Tina orders. The boy nods approvingly, and I must concur. It is an excellent combination.

  I see that the boy is drinking a thick, milky syrup from a small glass on the edge of the cart.

  “Toddy for me,” I say, pointing to his glass.

  The boy balks. “No, no, man. You don’t want toddy.”

  “I do,” I say. “I’m sure. Don’t worry.”

  “Outis, do you mind if I ask . . . what’s a toddy?” Tina is eager eyed.

  “It’s kind of like the arrack but not as refined. Basically it’s a wine made fresh from palm sap. Sort of local swill. Usually they don’t have it on the trains, but our friend here has some stashed down there, I can see it.”

  “Two of those then,” Tina says.

  “No no no no,” the boy laughs. “Not for ladies!”

  Tina takes direct affront to this. “Yes, for ladies. Come on! You think I can’t handle it? Let’s go. You and me, kid!”

  The boy, delighted, reaches down for a repurposed soda bottle and pours out three glasses. The nun has stopped playing with her cellular phone and is now watching us with very curious amusement from behind her round-rimmed glasses.

  “That looks foul,” Carsten weighs in as the boy passes the cups. The liquid inside vaguely resembles detergent.

  “The Tamil people have this book of little parables in couplets,” I say to Tina, “called the Thirukkural . . . ”

  “Thirukkural,” the boy whispers happily. “You have read?”

  “Parts,” I say, pinching my fingers together to indicate a small amount. Then, back to Tina, I explain, “There’s a whole chapter called ‘The Abhorrence of Toddy.’”

  Tina’s great green eyes are fixed wide, with curiosity befitting a jungle cat. I certainly do like a girl who appreciates a forbidden drink. Meanwhile, Carsten has begun holding her nose against the smell.

  Our glasses in hand, the boy whispers, “Cheers!” We toss back the toddy. It is coconut sour and yeasty sweet, and it chills and burns like liquid nitrogen going down our throats. The kid is pouring out three more before Tina has stopped coughing. There is a wide smile on the little nun’s face, and it just about makes me want to ask her to join us.

  “Grrr-oss,” Carsten pronounces as she sips her drink. The purple seems to stick to her teeth just slightly.

  “So you two have been, what? Eating, praying, loving?”

  “Something like that,” Tina answers with a smirk, and is about to say more but, predictably, Carsten has become tired of not being the center of attention.

  “Have you ever been in a threesome, Outis?” she asks daringly.

  Tina squeaks unhappily and looks awkwardly at the nun, who does not seem to understand anything we’re saying.

  “Once,” I say, “but it was the wrong kind.”

  Carsten doesn’t know quite what to do with this, and as she puzzles over it, I ask, “And so what do you guys do back in New York?”

  “She edits books and stuff. I work in public relations,” Carsten says, leaning forcefully past her friend and—in what I suspect is a well-practiced accident—allows the sleeves of her blouse to fall down so that her bra straps show. A bright, pleasant mango color.

  “Really?” I say. “Is that like advertising?”

  “No!” Carsten asserts suddenly. She unrolls a speech she has doubtless given before. “Advertising is just, like, when you’re promoting a product, or a company directly, in the media.”

  I nod as if I’m interested. Tina flips back to her newspaper. Carsten finishes her sugary drink in an instant and orders a second and a third before the boy can escape our car.

  “Public relations is when you’re actually shaping the company’s entire image. Like, you might spend a lot of time online posting, like, positive reviews of the company on different forums, and making sure their Google searches aren’t, like, negative.”

  “Wow,” I say, and I guess I don’t sound impressed enough because Carsten redoubles her efforts.

  “Or we might lobby for them so that local government stuff works out the way they want it to. Back before I started working for this company, we had this pharmaceutical client that makes—you know Lotosil?”

  I know the name quite well. It was one of the many prescriptions that had populated Jeffrey’s medicine cabinet.

  “So, like, it’s like awesome at helping people with depression. But—big problem—everyone already knows that if you’re depressed you take Prozac, right? I mean, that’s just branding. So what they did was they lobbied the AMA to create this new diagnosis for ‘societal apprehensiveness disorder’ so, like, Lotosil could be the drug for that.”

  I blink two, three times, waiting for her to continue, but she’s reached the punch line. I try not to look aghast, and Tina is now smirking at me.

  “That’s . . . so interesting,” I manage.

  But what I am thinking is that this airhead has just told me that she, or at least her international corporation of airheads, has invented a disease. A disease with the repulsively clever acronym of SAD, all so as to increase sales of a drug, one that Jeffrey took for years. Years during which he, yes, wrote an international bestselling novel, but also years during which his depression, or his “societal apprehensiveness,” was pretty damn high, considering that I was one of two human beings on the planet whom he could halfway stand. It seems unconscionable that Carsten and her PR cronies have perpetrated this falsehood, and that’s coming from a guy who plagiarizes people’s papers for them.

  “Plus, like, you call other businesses and try to, like, promote whatever your client is doing and, like, build some buzz around it. One of my first projects was this book—”

  And then, before I can quite catch up to what’s happened, she reaches into Tina’s bag and pulls out a paperback copy of Nothing Sacred.

  “That’s mine,” Tina snaps, though she does not stop Carsten from handing it to me. I run my hands over the familiar title; note the immense number of dog-eared pages. Many pages are also half bl
ue with underlining, with notes in the margins.

  “It’s actually how Carsten and I met,” Tina explains. “I worked on the book right when I started at Haslett and Grouse.”

  I stare awkwardly at the author photo on the back. There is Jeffrey, frozen in black-and-white, looking somehow warmer and friendlier and happier than I’ve ever seen him look in his entire life. He looks like he’d just love to be your best friend, with invitingly big eyes and a half smile, as if he’s just now thought of something amusing and wants to share it with you and only you.

  Right after the book had come out, he’d stopped giving interviews, quit his teaching job at Iowa after three days, and effectively disappeared. Christ, the thought of Jeffrey in Iowa! A story about him would sometimes catch my eye as I hopped around the Internet researching students’ papers. Someone would snap a photograph of Jeffrey exiting a Bavarian coffee shop, or walking a strange dog in a park in Portugal. Someone would have snuck onto the property his parents owned in Surrey, where he was alleged to be staying—writing his Ulysses, they all hoped—and the mystery would suddenly be reignited. It hadn’t taken long before websites emerged, dedicated to his whereabouts, great Wiki-landscapes of facts and fictions and, worst of all, fantasies—tales told by lovers of both genders, of their torrid evenings in Jeffrey’s embrace. The one I’d glanced at was so rife with un-Jeffrey-like details that there was no doubt in my mind it was utter nonsense. But always I had the creeping worry of how horrified Jeffrey would be if he ever read a word of it. I was grateful that he’d never been very good with computers.

  “You edited this?” I ask.

  “Sort of,” Tina says, almost a little embarrassed. “Officially it was my boss’s book, you know? Russell Haslett? He’s like the main big-shot editor in chief. But I did a lot of the actual work.”

  Carsten doesn’t care. “Right, yeah, and I used to work for this supersmall company that, like, took on the publicity once it started getting kind of big. Of course this was before he went totally fucking bonkers.”

  “He didn’t go bonkers,” Tina says defensively. “I used to talk to him on the phone—”