The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel Page 17

  She breaks off again and looks down at the book. I wonder if she’s gotten her hands on anything as good in all the years since she began. I wonder if this is why she’s here, now, on an extended leave from Mr. Haslett’s offices, only to “find herself” stuck in Sri Lanka in a monsoon with Carsten “Chanel.”

  Carsten is happy to have someone new to gossip with. “I heard he turned into like a Buddhist-Scientologist. And that he, like, saves his used pen nibs in jars. And that this one time he actually got in a fistfight with this Olympic runner, what was his name . . . Mitchell-something . . . ”

  Just as I am about to slip up and snap that they had never actually come to blows, Tina turns to Carsten and says, “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”

  Not aware that her friend is once again plagiarizing “Hills Like White Elephants,” Carsten snaps, “Fine!” and puts her headphones back on.

  “You did a hell of a job,” I say quietly to Tina. I turn Jeffrey’s book over in my hands. “Editing it, I mean.”

  “How would you know?” she says, sipping on her second toddy.

  Because, I want to say, I’m probably the only other person in the whole world who read every tattered, tangled draft—more drafts than even you read, probably. Talk about serendipity. Jeffrey wrote it in our kitchen, drinking the booze that I’d picked up when he couldn’t bear to go outside, wearing the slippers he thought were his except that I bought them the weekend we drove down to Delaware—only I don’t get to say any of this, because before I can decide if I should admit to being who I am, the train suddenly and sharply stops moving.

  Carsten screams as she tumbles out of her seat, tangled in her headphone wires, her third drink spilling all over her blouse.

  Tina doesn’t even scream as she flies from her seat, but she clutches Nothing Sacred to her chest as if she might shield it from harm.

  And I? I grab the nun. I don’t know why, but I throw my arms in front of her little old holy bones and keep her from hitting the seat in front of us. She screams, “Gesù Cristo! Madre di Dio! Maria! Maria!”

  When the world has gone still again, I let her go. She looks completely frightened, and so completely relieved that she has not died. And though my own head missed the pole of the luggage rack by only an inch, maybe two, I never felt scared and I don’t, now, feel any relief. I can’t remember the last time I felt truly scared for my life—or relieved to be alive, for that matter. Here I am, a man with no faith in any afterlife, who makes his living by helping others cheat, and who last saw his soul on the other side of the Atlantic. And here she is, frantic tears wetting the insides of her glasses, a woman who has dedicated her life to God and who has lived accordingly. But she loves this life and does not want to see it go. And I?

  “Holy shit!” Carsten coughs; the headphone cord has half strangled her.

  “Is everyone OK?” I ask.

  “I’m OK,” Tina says softly, and checks the book to ensure that it is, too.

  “Bless you, bless you, bless you,” the nun praises between breaths, rubbing my face with her wrinkled, soft hands.

  “No problem,” I say, pulling away from her. I don’t know why.

  She immediately begins crossing herself vigorously and clasping her hands together, praying in Latin, if I’m not mistaken. “Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem, Creatorem caeli et terrae, et in Iesum Christum, Filium Eius unicum, Dominum nostrum . . . ”

  Carsten suddenly looks down at the purple that covers her blouse and wails, “Look at my shirt!” She grabs her bag and runs away to change in a huff.

  As I help Tina to her feet, she tries to uncrush her hat. I take it from her and fold it back into shape with my hands, and she seems grateful.

  Then, suddenly, she says, “Your name’s not really Outis, is it?”

  I think about denying it, but the look in her eyes tells me that she’s already guessed where I stole it from. Then she explains my own reference to me.

  “Odysseus, after he rescues his men from the Land of the Lotus Eaters, is captured by Polyphemus the Cyclops. And Polyphemus says that if Odysseus tells him his name then he’ll eat him last. So Odysseus says—”

  “Outis,” I interject. “That’s my name—Outis. So my mother and father call me, and all my friends.”

  “Outis,” she says with a grin. “Which means, ‘Nobody.’ And so later when Odysseus blinds him, Polyphemus wails out to the other Cyclopses—”

  “‘Outis! Outis is killing me!’” I interrupt with a chuckle. “And so they think that he must be being killed by the gods, and so they don’t even attempt to help him.”

  Tina claps her hands happily.

  “And you must know all about Poe, then, right?”

  I shrug. Her green eyes, again, grow wide with delight. I find myself thinking that I would never grow tired of watching them. “So Poe had this big problem with Longfellow,” she said. “He thought he was a terrible poet, even though he sold, like, one hundred times the number of books of poetry that Poe was selling at the time. Poe didn’t like that Longfellow had basically married into money and gotten a cushy Harvard professorship—”

  “While Poe was broke and . . . trying to marry his fourteen-year-old cousin?”

  “This is before that, I think. But yes, very broke. So, Poe wrote this article claiming that Longfellow had ripped off Tennyson in this poem about the end of the year being like a dying old man. He called it ‘bare-faced and barbarous plagiarism.’ And Longfellow doesn’t really care. He’s, like, ‘I’m Longfellow. Nobody’s ever heard of you, Poe.’”

  Despite everything, I’m laughing. Her Poe imitation winds up sounding like Groucho Marx, while her Longfellow sounds vaguely like Charlton Heston.

  “So Poe keeps going on and on about this. And pretty much nobody cares. And then he publishes The Raven and still nobody really cares, until this mysterious guy named ‘Outis’ starts to publish these articles defending Longfellow against Poe’s plagiarism charges . . . by analyzing The Raven and showing how Poe does the same thing . . . takes ideas and images from other poets. And suddenly, because there’s this controversy, people start to read The Raven and Poe starts to get famous, finally.”

  “So who was Outis?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” she teases. “Who are you?”

  Suddenly I’m somewhere between telling her everything and kissing her. Troubled by this rush of confessional impulses, I clear my throat and glance awkwardly over at the nun, who is now done praying and back on her cellular brick, speaking in anxious Italian to whoever is on the other end. I look down at the DVD screen. There is a riotous dance number going on around an elephant, and a Sinhalese woman is dramatically being tossed to-and-fro between a prince and her Tamil suitor. Looking back into Tina’s green eyes, I feel my heart begin to pound in a rhythm it hasn’t known for some time now.

  Tina acquiesces. “They think it may have been Poe himself, drumming up a little good PR for The Raven.”

  Just as I am about to kiss Tina, she turns away from me and looks toward the window. I follow her emerald gaze and see that just a little ways away, to the left of the train, a camouflage-painted Jeep has parked on a little dirt road that leads back into the rain forest. Several official-looking men wearing dark rain ponchos, with what appear to be military uniforms underneath, have hopped out of the Jeep. Some have bushy black mustaches and others are barely grown boys, but they all have guns that glisten wickedly in the rain.

  Before Tina or I know quite what to say, the door to our car opens. We turn, thinking that maybe it is Carsten coming back from changing her blouse. But instead we see the young man who served us our drinks. I assume he’s come to ensure that we are all right, but once he comes in, he yanks off his golden uniform and looks anxiously at me.

  “Please please. Can you give me your jacket?”

  “My jacket?” I say, looking down at the brown tweed Brooks Brothers coat that I’ve been wearing for so long that I fear it’s begun to
grow fur.

  “Please. Please. My friend. Please.”

  With the nun looking at me, and not entirely sure what else to do, I take off my jacket and hand it to the boy. He throws it on and then looks desperately at Tina. “Your book, please. Can I hold your book?”

  Tina looks unhappy about this but hands the boy the book and then, her hat. He accepts it with a flood of Tamil that we cannot quite translate but which feels like thank-yous—and then he quickly sits down in the right-hand corner of the observation car and tries to take up as little room as possible. He hides his head behind the open book so that he seems like an innocuous student, trying to study. It’s not much of a disguise, I think.

  “What’s he doing?” Tina hisses.

  “Hiding,” I say quietly. “I’m not really sure why. Except that I think our friend is Tamil.”

  “But I thought the civil war ended.”

  “They never end,” I say, thinking back on my relatively civilized area of Charlotte, in North Carolina, where my neighbors had Confederate-flag bumper stickers and our landlord had DON’T TREAD ON ME tattooed between his shoulder blades. We learned about “The War of Northern Aggression” in school, and instead of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we had off from school in honor of Robert E. Lee. I’m about to tell Tina all this, but it’s been so long since I told anyone anything resembling the truth. The last time I can remember is a story I told a couple in a Dubai bar, and then it was only because I’d had three more cocktails than I ought to have had.

  Slowly Tina and I take our seats and pretend to be watching Carsten’s DVD—which seems like the most unassumingly American thing to be doing.

  “She loves this stupid movie,” Tina mutters.

  “She’s seen it before?” I say in surprise.

  “It was on television in the hotel the other night when she was too hungover to go out. The main guy is Tamil. He’s very poor but he’s been sent to the big city full of Sinhalese, so he can learn to be a painter. Have you seen this thing they do here where they highlight the frescoes in their temples with gold leaf?”

  I cough in surprise and then study the little screen closely, watching as the Tamil boy paints gold onto the horns of a strange minor deity on the wall of a Buddhist temple. There is a crack in the wall, and he suddenly notices a great brown eye staring through it at him. The music swells so loudly that we can hear it through the headphones on the floor.

  “And there’s the girl he’s in love with. She’s Sinhalese, from a very rich family. And she’s supposed to marry this member of the former royal family in Anuradhapura, of course, but she’s in love with painter boy.”

  I watch closely as they sing to each other through the hole in the wall. Once, long ago, I wrote a novel with this exact moment in it. The only copy I had had been destroyed, though this moment and some surrounding fragments survived as part of the only story I’d ever published, in a tiny literary review. Was it possible that somehow my story had made its way into the hands of some Bollywood writer, halfway around the world? Had someone plagiarized me? Or had my original idea been so hackneyed and cliché that it had simply resurfaced? Could I have plagiarized it myself, from some book of myths I’d read or some film I’d seen when I was growing up? Was it still plagiarism if I’d done it unknowingly? Does it sting like this because I’ve been robbed or because it was never mine to steal? I watch their eyes trying to catch each other’s through the tiny crack in the wall. Maybe an idea, like love, cannot ever be stolen away, just as it cannot ever have belonged to me and only me.

  Just then the door opens loudly. The observation car fills quickly with mustachioed Sri Lankan soldiers. Two of them begin barking at Tina and me, “Passport, ma’am! Passport, sir! We need to see identification.”

  Another soldier storms over to the nun and demands she hang up her phone, which results in more frantic screeching in Italian, this time it sounds more like curses than blessings.

  Still more soldiers are bringing the Tamil boy to his feet. Can he be even eighteen? He looks at me suddenly, with those same cocksure eyes, and as the men are pulling at him to remove my jacket, the boy does an astonishing thing. He looks away from me and back at the book in his left hand and he reads. His hazel eyes move left to right across the page. I watch his dark lips part as he sounds out the words in front of him. Given how rough his English had been earlier, I have to guess that he can understand only a fraction of what he is reading. It seems a completely insane thing to do, and the men grab him roughly for not coming easily. Why would he do it? I barely have a second to process it before the book and my coat are being thrown roughly to the floor. The soldiers rush the boy back through the open doors and then they’re gone.

  “What. The hell. Was that?” Tina says in complete disbelief.

  “I’m . . . I’m sure it’s nothing serious. These guys, they just act really blustery probably to scare everyone into respecting them.”

  “Where’s Carsten?” Tina says suddenly.

  “Carsten’s fine,” I say. “These people. Even if these are bad people, they’re not going to hurt—”

  Americans is about to be the next word out of my mouth, but it dies on the way up my throat.

  “He looked very young,” Tina says.

  “I’m sure he’ll be fine,” I lie.

  Just before the end of the civil war, when skirmishes were breaking out everywhere, the Sinhalese government rounded up native Tamil civilians into “no-fire” zones, where they were promised protection from the fighting. The concerned government then proceeded to shell the no-fire zones until they looked like the surface of the moon. Soldiers chased the survivors to the beaches and slaughtered them in the rocky surf until the water had gone red. The leaders of the Tigers turned themselves in, hoping to save the few Tamil civilians who had been captured. The Sinhalese executed every last one of these leaders and then they killed every single captured civilian.

  I want to tell Tina this. Then I think maybe it’s better if she doesn’t know it. I wish that I could un-know it. I’d give all the money in my PayMeNow account to un-know it. The nun is praying again, crying more than she had when she thought she had nearly died. I wonder again why she felt something and I didn’t. I wonder if, even believing in a better world after this one, she loves this place more than I have ever loved anything in my life. I don’t know.

  All I really know is that I feel something now. I feel a sinking horror as I watch the soldiers, out in the rain, shove the boy roughly into the back of the Jeep and begin to drive away. Happy music plays out of the headphones on the floor as, I presume, the Tamil boy in the movie has at last run off into the sunset with his one true love. Tina clenches at my hand and I grip her like a life raft. I tell myself that it’s going to be fine, but I can’t shake this horrible feeling. There was something about the way that the boy’s lips were moving as he read the book. Something that made me think that he knew he was about to die. And that he wanted one of Jeffrey’s lines to be the very last to pass his lips.

  There is a long, long nothing, and then the train begins to move again.

  8

  The Doppelgänger

  [He] met his own image walking in the garden. / That apparition, sole of men, he saw. / For know there are two worlds of life and death: / One that which thou beholdest; but the other / Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit / The shadows of all forms that think and live, / Till death unite them and they part no more . . .

  —PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, PROMETHEUS UNBOUND

  Down one lane of the bustling Kumasi Central Market I see him. Or, rather, I see me. In the swirl of surly northern grocers and Ashanti women with baskets on their heads and a boy who juggles for ten pesewa pieces—there I am. Or there he is. An obruni. A white man. My age, in Brooks herringbone tweed, despite the fact that in August, it is 82 degrees in Ghana. We have the same haircut. His mouth twists in the same puzzled amusement that mine does as he inspects a smooth teak carving of a jungle cat. I’ve been in Africa five weeks, whic
h is five weeks too long. It’s the heat, surely. Or something in the food. Or whatever it is that Tina has been rolling in her cigarettes. And last week I drank gin with ice in it—why? Just frozen cubes of salmonella, no doubt! It is not just that this other man is white—though there are rarely white men in the marketplace. The tubby British tourists, the unwashed backpackers, the dreadlocked college dropouts—they all generally avoid this place. This is the real Kumasi. The man takes a notebook out of his left breast pocket. It is the same leather-bound notebook that I keep in my left breast pocket. He scribbles onto it with the same nib-point pen. This is it, I think, the parasites have wormed their way into your brain, you phenomenal fool. Christ, even our shoes are identical—weathered buck-leather tennis shoes. I haven’t replaced mine in fifteen years. I’ve tried; they don’t sell them anymore. The only difference I can seem to find is that his wristwatch is silver and mine is gold. As I’m standing there, holding a melon or something in my left hand, he turns and catches my eye. He sees me. Then he quietly turns down a side alley and disappears.

  For an hour I search the endless maze of stalls, hoping to catch another glance of him. There are thousands of men and women in all directions, buying raw chicken, salted fish, shoe polish, kente fabrics, bubble gum, Oxo soap, Highlife and Gospel CDs, eggs, gasoline, and sandals printed with American flags. They’re calling out in Twi and Fante. They’re selling ivory crosses and Muslim headscarves and soccer balls and bags of loose tea. The marketplace is grotesque; it is enormous. Soon all I see are blurs of ebony and teak and sunbursts of textiles and I need to escape it. Somewhere there is a fair-skinned woman with a cold drink waiting for me.

  • • •

  Tina waits at O’Bryan’s, an Irish pub not far from the market. There is something patently ridiculous about an Irish pub in the middle of Africa, and so we have made it our main base of operations. Trading in our cedis for mincemeat pies and warm Guinness, we stretch out in a dark, cool corner beneath a rotating fan and a framed blurry photograph of James Joyce, taken during his rocking-the-eye-patch period. He still wore glasses, though. There’s something about that clean little lens over his blind, covered eye.