The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel Read online

  “Did you get the old man his yams?” she asks me as I stumble in and order two beers from the bar. Both are for me; Tina’s on her second already.

  “I didn’t,” I confess.

  “What is the matter with you?” she sighs, planting a kiss on my cheek before I can wipe it clean. “We’ve been here five weeks and I’m about ready to die.”

  Tina and I are technically here on business. She, on behalf of Haslett & Grouse, international booksellers extraordinaire, wants me to write a definitive insider’s biography of my former best friend, the perpetually enigmatic and bestselling novelist Jeffrey Oakes. After she and I met in Sri Lanka and spent some time touring its holy places, the lovely Ms. Tina had persuaded me—by all means at her disposal—that as the former roommate, confidant, and classmate of the brilliant and secretive Oakes, I had a perspective that was sorely needed. Jeffrey, sadly, had finally, completely, tragically, cracked up, and it was up to me now to tell his story.

  “I’m sorry. I went to the market for them and then . . . this’ll sound crazy, but I saw myself,” I say, pausing to drink half of the first beer before continuing. “I saw a man who looked exactly like me. I mean exactly like me.” Over the remainder of the first beer I go into detail—the haircut, the pen, the tennis shoes.

  “Why do you wear those torn-up things, anyway?” she asks.

  “I bought these shoes with the money I made at my first job,” I say. “Restringing rackets at the West Charlotte Country Club. Growing up, I thought I’d be a tennis pro.”

  “I knew you hadn’t always wanted to be a writer. How’s your backhand these days?”

  She burrows constantly—what were my parents like? what are my earliest childhood memories?—I suppose it’s this inquisitive side that makes her such a good editor, but it has made her an increasingly tiresome travel companion.

  “Can’t malaria give you delusions? We had the last of those pills days ago. Either that or it’s worms,” I speculate.

  “You haven’t got worms,” she sighs, fanning herself with the newspaper, the New York Times “Theater” section, in particular. I grab it from her and she grins. The American papers come only once every week or so. She watches me coyly as she rolls a fresh cigarette. She waits a minute for me to offer to light it; when I don’t look up from the paper, she lights it herself.

  “Well, has she got any new reviews or not?” she asks.

  “She hasn’t performed since—. She hasn’t performed in nine years,” I remind her.

  “Well, she’s busy with her billionaire,” Tina sighs. “What is he, the prince of Yugoslavia or something?”

  “Or something.”

  I could tell her that it’s Luxembourg, actually—what would the harm be? Would it perhaps get her off my case for a few more hours? But something keeps holding me back from telling her my past. If I tell her one detail, she’ll just want another—one about Jeffrey, or our college, or my mother. I still have not even told Tina my real name. A part of me wants to trust her, but I haven’t trusted anyone with these things in nearly a decade. I barely trust myself with that information anymore.

  She goes on. “Isn’t Yugoslavia not even a country anymore? How can you be the prince of a country that no longer exists? I expect it must take a good deal of effort, lording over an imaginary country.”

  Tina stares at me with those bewitching green eyes. “She could have done better,” she tells me, placing a desert-roughened hand on mine. She thinks she means me, but she doesn’t know me. She weaves her fingers in between mine and grips like a vise.

  “No doubt,” I say, pulling my hand away. “There must be all kinds of real countries with princes still out there.”

  She laughs. “So. Tell me about wanting to be a tennis pro.”

  I scrunch up my face for a minute, for I feel that the memories are deeply buried somewhere and it will take time to unearth them. To my surprise, they’re not—they’re still right there at the forefront of my mind.

  “There was this kid, in my hometown, named Henry Waterford. Everybody loved him. He was funny, and his family was rich. I guess you could say he was sort of the de facto king of our school. But he was nice about it. He’d charm all the teachers, beat up the bullies, and tell you if your underwear was showing or something, but quietly. Nicely, you know? And his sister was this beautiful . . . ”

  Tina’s eyes glow like jade, and I have to swallow a lot of beer in order to change directions. She’s already read the story I wrote about this, a long time ago. She found the whole damned novella in my luggage one night. I woke to find her there, half dressed in the African moonlight, poring over the pages, chewing on her hair. Now she always tries to get me to tell her how true those stories really are. She likes to see if she can trick me into forgetting the little details I changed.

  “Anyway, he was the big man around town. Around all of West Charlotte, really. And I wanted to be just like him. I took a job stringing rackets so I could buy clothes as nice as Henry’s. Then I joined the school team. I wanted to do everything he did.”

  “That’s adorable,” Tina laughs, as if she thinks it’s silly. But she feels she is making progress. She thinks she is coming closer to figuring me out. “Whatever happened to Henry Waterford, then? I bet he’s not a globe-trotting writer like you.”

  “He got slammed in the head with a tennis racket. Some brain damage. Never was the same after that,” I say.

  “Just like in your novella?” she asks softly. “You said you made that up?”

  I don’t remember what I said. She doesn’t understand that the things I’ve made up are more real to me now than whatever used to be true.

  We drink in silence. Time passes strangely in Africa. When we arrived, in our safari gear, we thought we’d be like Bogey and Hepburn; she’d be irascible and I’d be thick-skinned, and we’d play games with each other for a while before falling madly in love during a vulnerable moment on a steamboat ride down the Nile. Instead, we’re here talking about what I keep trying to forget.

  “So a doppelgänger?” she asks, finally changing the subject. “Or a vardøger . . . ”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Well, if you were Norwegian, you’d believe in vardøgers—a sort of glimpse of yourself in the future, doing everything you’re going to do in advance. Are you Norwegian?”

  Oh, how she pries! Like a little insect, trying to find some purchase—some hole that she can nestle into.

  “If you were German then it’d be a sign of bad luck.”

  “Not Norwegian or German,” I snap. “And we can hardly have more bad luck.”

  “You could,” she says drily. “It’s supposed to be a portent of your own death. Elizabeth I saw herself lying on her own bed. Later that night she died in her sleep. And then Donne? John Donne? He saw his wife’s right before she had a miscarriage.”

  “‘Mark but this flea, and mark in this . . . ’” I proclaim, the words coming back to me from a freshman seminar, long ago. Rising up from our booth with beer mug in hand, I wave it out to the room. “‘How little that which thou deny’st me is; Me it suck’d first, and now sucks thee. And in this flea our two bloods mingled be . . . ’”

  The bartender shouts something like “Oi!” at me and tells me to sit. The yellowed eyes of four dusty Ghanaian guys all level at me. They are trying to watch a soccer match, can’t I see that? Tina gives me a small sarcastic clap as I sit back down.

  “Did you and Jeffrey used to recite poetry together?” she asks, relentless. “Was that how you used to get the princess into bed?”

  I ding an imaginary bell on the bar table. “Check, please.”

  “Oh, quit it. Just a joke. I’d have held out longer, is all I’m saying, if I knew you recited poetry.”

  I give her a skeptical look. Tina and I had leaped into bed together the first night we’d known each other, after a train ride that had left us both on edge. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe it had just been too easy. Maybe she was still simply too avai
lable.

  “Oh! I almost forgot! Wilkie Collins!”

  “Everyone always forgets Wilkie Collins,” I quip.

  “No, I mean for doppelgängers. Supposedly he kept seeing a ‘Ghost Wilkie’ running around London for ten years, on and off.”

  “Well, that was probably on account of all of the laudanum.”

  “And wasn’t there a story about Shelley . . . ”

  “Stop it,” I groan. “I don’t want to hear about Shelley. I’m dying.”

  She pats my hand again. “You’re not going to die. Not unless I kill you for making me stay here another week. Now let’s find the old man some yams.”

  And with an apologetic clink of our glasses, we exit O’Bryan’s and venture back to the dreaded marketplace. All the while I am scanning the strangers around me for some sign of myself.

  • • •

  Jeffrey Oakes, author of the luminous Nothing Sacred, has made no media appearances, given not a single interview—even to Oprah—and has accepted not a single prize or honor in nine years, though he’s won several. For those somehow unfamiliar, Nothing Sacred had the rare quality of seeming like a classic on the day it was first printed, with a clever consortium of low-lying postmodern puzzles to occupy the highbrow and heartfelt hijinks to captivate the lowbrow. It is the rare sort of book that resembles nothing else and yet somehow seems intensely familiar. From the first line you feel your own heart begin to beat differently. Once it’s over you want to begin it again. It is a love letter; it is an atom bomb; it is literature we’d forgotten could be written.

  Only now, after eight years with no follow-up, eager critics have begun to claim that Jeffrey’s relentless dedication to his art must have pushed him over the brink—that the pressure to measure up to Nothing Sacred has undone its creator. Certain loyal factions speculate that he is, actually, hiding away only to create more of a frenzy about his next novel. If he is, it certainly appears to be working: the latté-shop gossip rages on. Some believe Oakes is merely doing research and that he is furiously crafting his next masterpiece in a padded room somewhere. Others believe that it is all a stunt. Some believe that he’s gone full-Salinger; that he will never resurface, not even if they give him the Booker Prize for the next book—which most everyone agrees it was a crime that he did not win last time, despite the fact that he has not lived in England for nearly twenty-five years, and though he was born there, even his parents have now officially relocated to France. I wonder if I’ll dash his chances when I verify, in the tenth chapter of his biography, that he once flung his EU passport into the Hudson, to protest the cancellation of his favorite BBC children’s television program. Still, each month Nothing Sacred remains on the bestseller lists and the flames are fueled further.

  This is why my editor has brought me here to the Gold Coast—to the “White Man’s Grave”—to the “least-failed state” in Africa: the Republic of Ghana, where the oldest of the Oakes still resides. Jeremiah Oakes, Jeffrey’s beloved grandfather, lives thirty miles outside of Kumasi, near the sacred Lake Bosumtwi, where Jeffrey spent his childhood summers playing around in the catacomb of Ghanaian gold mines, which had been in his family’s possession since colonial days.

  Now the mines are run by the KMS Mining Corporation, and Jeremiah Oakes remains only because he refuses to go. He has lived in Africa nearly all his life, and I imagine he’d prefer to die there than leave. As Jeffrey’s first exposure to the literary dimensions, the old man is all I need to fill in the last remaining sections of my illuminating biography—for which the world waits impatiently. This has unfortunately proved more difficult than I anticipated.

  As I come up the long driveway to the Oakes Mines & Estate, my driver, Kojo, swerves his rusty Hyundai to avoid an incoming rifle shot. A hundred yards away, on his sagging porch, Jeremiah Oakes wobbles from the blowback of his ancient firearm. Fortunately, he is almost as blind as he is senile. Before he can regain his footing and reload the rifle, I am out of the car rushing at him with the yams raised.

  “It’s me!” I shout, as the dust from the car settles. From somewhere around the house, his two housekeepers, Efua and Akuba, come running. When they see it is I, they are only slightly less annoyed. They glare at me as they call out to Kojo in singsong Twi. All three speak English quite well; they converse in Twi only when I’m around if they don’t want me to know that they think I am a liar and a thief. Which I am.

  “Jeffrey!” shouts the old man. “Come on inside! I’ve been traveling! There’s so much I need to show you.”

  The old man has no more been traveling than I am his grandson, but I do not dissuade him of either delusion. Lowering my yams, I once more trudge up the creaking steps that lead into the crumbling House of Oakes.

  Inside, the air is full of flies, and Jeremiah leads the way back to the room he calls his “study.” A room where he wrote six or seven novels, back in the late seventies, none of which is still in print. I have tracked them all down and read them all cover to cover. They remind me a bit of my own efforts: not bad, but not Jeffrey.

  A gigantic fan revolves lazily above our heads, sending just enough cool air down to bristle the photographs and scraps of newspaper he has pinned on every walled surface: old illustrations from books of World War II submarines, articles in Spanish about boys killed during the running of the bulls, and tattered letters handwritten in Hebrew. On a long, narrow desk sits a typewriter—the same faint-inked thing that Jeffrey typed his first stories on—and beside it, thin bundles of monogrammed paper, stolen from hotels worldwide, some of which haven’t existed since the 1950s. There are guns everywhere—some antique showpieces and some roadside finds. Some loaded; some not. The floor is covered with skins: a warthog, a zebra, a lioness, and an antelope—most of which, according to Jeremiah, escaped from the preserve and came waltzing right in through the wide set of French doors, which he leaves open, day or night, to the terrace outside. The jungle is a hundred yards away.

  Checking my watch as if I have somewhere else to be, I say, “So, I think we’re nearly done. I’d love to ask if you have any other memories of teaching me to write here, when I was young?”

  He settles into a leather reading chair and lifts a glass of something dirty, brown, and surely intoxicating off a stack of books piled to serve as a side table.

  “Oh, sure, sure,” he says. “You used to sit right here in this chair and write. Every morning. That’s how you make progress. Every morning. You write. Even if your leg is being chewed off by a hyena. You keep writing.”

  “How old was I when I first came to visit?”

  “Oh, maybe about twenty-two,” he says, staring at the ceiling fan as it drowsily completed a revolution.

  “Wasn’t I maybe six or seven?”

  “Yes, six or seven. And you’d sit right over there banging away on the keys.”

  “So, I sat there at the desk?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Because a minute ago you said I was in the chair.”

  The old man frowned. “Well, sometimes we’d do it that way.”

  Whipping out my nib pen, I add this note to my calfskin book—along with hundreds of other similar, contradictory statements. The truth is, Jeremiah says something different every time we speak. My notebook is a garden of forking paths. Jeffrey came to Ghana because of early childhood asthma, or because his great-aunt became ill. Jeffrey’s favorite childhood book was Moby-Dick, and the next hour it was The Iliad. His first work of fiction was about an ogre named Claude. Unless it was about a Swiss chocolatier named PJ. One day certainly the former, and the next certainly the latter. The man is in his eighties and his brain is worn through, like a shirt loved too well. When his daughter calls to make sure everything is well, and he tells them, “Jeffrey’s here talking with me,” they don’t even question it.

  “You mentioned yesterday that I wanted to be a librarian, as a child,” I lie, just to see if he’ll notice.

  He furrows his narrow brow, which is speckled w
ith brown spots that I’m sure must be melanomas. Will he remember? That he actually told me Jeffrey wanted to be a scuba diver? The spots swim in the fleshy wrinkles for a moment and then flatten again.

  He laughs. “You liked the idea of climbing all those ladders, I think. You said you’d want to be a librarian only if they had really tall bookshelves, and ladders, with wheels.”

  The fictions that Jeremiah sparked like furious flints in his neurons for decades have now caught fire and consumed the remainder of the truth. Does he really believe these things? Or does he fill in the blanks with his best guesses and hope that he’s right? Most times he’ll run with whatever I suggest, like a freshman writing student eagerly jumping into a story after being given an opening line as a prompt.

  With a long sigh I stare out into the darkened jungle. Tina is right. If anything, Jeremiah is a plagiarist’s wet dream. I can put words into his mouth and he’ll never remember they weren’t there to begin with. All day I feed him fictions and listen to them echo back as truths. But still, this hollow feeling grows.

  “Do you have any of my early stories?” I ask, as I do every day.

  “No,” he says firmly. “Definitely not.”

  It is the only answer he gives the same each time, so I am sure it is a lie.

  Jeremiah takes out a knife and expertly plunges it deep into one of the yams I have given him. He works the blade through the flesh and divides it neatly in two. He stares inside of it with a childlike curiosity. I wonder if he knows that you cannot eat them raw. I wonder if I would stop him. I think that I would.

  Looking back at the gentle undulations of the palm fronds, I exhale and try to think of how I could get a look around without his stopping me. Occasionally he naps or uses the restroom, and I sneak in and dig around—but I’ve yet to find anything of use. There is only one drawer in the desk that he keeps locked. If I am ever going to get it open, I’ll need to buy myself more time. Then, out on the edge of the jungle I see something moving. Jeremiah sees it, too, and he points, the knife outstretched.