The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel

by Kristopher Jansma

  “Tell me more about being a writer,” Henry says. He is thrilled. This is more fun than he’s had in months, clearly. “Truth is, I really like the idea of being a writer.”

  For years I wanted to be everything he was. Now that it seems he wants to be what I am, I’m not quite sure what to make of it.

  “The idea of it’s great,” I explain. “But then there’s the actual thing of it.”

  He nods and looks wistfully off into the blackness. Tina told me once that, in her line, you come to realize that just about everyone is a part-time writer. Even people who never wrote a full page in their lives think that they might, soon, sit down and churn out a masterpiece. The really good ones, I suppose, make it seem like anyone could do it.

  “Thing is, I actually wrote, like, a chapter already,” Henry laughs. “But I’d never show it to anyone. It’s so terrible.”

  “I’m sure it isn’t,” I lie. This is how it starts—in an hour or so he’ll be asking me to take a look. In another hour, he’ll be asking if my editor might be interested. Tina knew what Jeffrey, and Jeremiah, and I know. The real thing—the true thing—takes more time and effort than most people would ever imagine. Whole productive lifetimes for a few hundred pages that most assuredly won’t outlive us.

  “Hey, now. What’s happening out on the lake?” Henry asks.

  Clusters of torchlight surround the wide lake, though it is hard to see through the dense rain forest. The wooden plank boats carry more flickering flames.

  “The Asantehene arrived,” Kojo explains. “He is the king of the Ashanti.”

  “They still have a king?” Henry laughs. “In this day and age?”

  “England still has a queen,” I counter.

  Kojo shrugs. “Whatever. They will bring the cow out to the rock in the middle of the lake. They will leave his intestines and guts and whatever out there for the gods, and there will be a feast made out of the rest.”

  Kojo won’t stop the car, for fear of what may jump out at us, but through bouncing binoculars I am able to see one highly confused cow, tied up on joined planks, surrounded by men with ceremonial swords. At first it seems to me completely absurd: the men shout and try to avoid the scrambling of the cow, which is either unhappy to be profoundly out of its element or somehow aware of what will become of it out on the approaching rock. But then I wonder how many times, in how many hundreds of years, they have done this. The people on the neighboring boats are jubilant. Soon there will be food, and drums, and dancing—and in a few weeks maybe things will begin to get better. The gods will bring them fish, and they can survive another season. Another year of dry heat followed by rains that will wash their village away. Nothing to worry about—they will build another. And another.

  As I suspected, the light in the study is on when we approach the long driveway. I duck so that the old man won’t see me, and then pull Henry down, too, just in case he has decided to do a little night shooting. Henry grins widely. Probably he thinks I’ll mention this in my book, or more probably that I’ll know someone who can get him a book of his own so he can mention it himself.

  “Just keep asking him questions,” I say. “And jot it all down in your notebook. Don’t worry if he says things that don’t make sense. He might call you Jeffrey. Just go with it.”

  “Finally, some fun,” Henry says with a boyish grin.

  I hesitate. “And if he starts playing with his guns, keep an eye on him.”

  Henry’s smile shrinks slightly, but I give him a quick laugh and he thinks that I am joking. Guilt begins to creep into my gut, but the idea of sitting on an airplane bound for America by daybreak squeezes it away again. Kojo says nothing but stays with the car, listening to the distant sounds of the ceremony. Not that I have any money left, but if I did, I’d wager that the moment we leave, he’ll head out there to find Efua and Akuba.

  I stay in the shadows as Henry enters the lighted kitchen.

  “Jeffrey!” the old man’s voice booms. “Come in! I was just packing for my trip.”

  It is not difficult at all, walking through the shadows along the side of the house, to get to the back, where the French doors, as always, are wide open. By the time I slip inside I can hear the old man putting a kettle on in the kitchen, and Henry dragging a chair backward across the uneven wooden floor—taking his seat at the table. We are both so close to, finally, taking our seats at the table.

  It is even less difficult to find an ornamental knife to pop the drawer open. I’ve seen one often, resting on a bookshelf containing an odd assortment of Great Depression–era plays. Careful not to make too much noise, I slip the knife out of a golden sheath and press it between the drawer and its frame. It slides open with barely a sound.

  Inside are a dozen little jars—once containing baby food, according to the labels. Each one is filled with used pen nibs. Jeremiah’s used pen nibs. There must be hundreds of them. Decades’ worth of cracked metal. I lift one up to the moonlight and examine them, like tiny arrowheads. Stained with the inky blood of stories ripped from nothingness and into somethingness.

  Reaching behind these, I feel around in the shadows for a sheaf of papers, but my hand closes instead on something hard and smooth. Out comes a bottle, still half filled with liquid, bearing a handmade label—the sort that went out of style thirty years before I was even born. The faded lettering spelled out EPIPHANY BROS. DISTILLERY. GENUINE IRISH WHISKEY. FOUNDED IN 1900. Gently I cradle the bottle in my hand, and I think about the first story of Jeffrey’s that I had ever read. In it, a man on his thirty-third birthday drinks a bottle of Epiphany whiskey out on an Irish moor. It seems like two lifetimes ago. Just two and a half pages. Just nine hundred perfectly chosen words. It had all started there.

  For a long time I stand there, staring down at the bottle. In the kitchen I can hear the old man laughing. Henry is doing a bang-up job. I wonder what tall tales the old man is conjuring out of his addled brain now. Slowly I draw the tough knot of cork out of the bottle. I’ve always wondered what it would taste like.

  Just as I am about to lift the bottle to my lips, I catch sight of something in the far back of the drawer. It shines in the faint moonlight—a lump of gold about the size of half a human heart. I reach for it, mesmerized.

  And then something slams into my leg. And the bottle falls to the floor and I fall to the floor and for a few long minutes I have absolutely no idea what is going on.

  • • •

  Lying on the floor of the old man’s study, I can feel the wiry hairs of an antelope rug like little needles against my cheek. The antelope is quite dead. It’s been dead for years. Unlike the tense, speculative leopard that crouches in the space between those open French doors, halfway between the jungle outside and the jungle in here. I’m half in and half out, too: not dead yet, but I see no way of living through the next ten minutes. The leopard has gotten a good swipe at the back of my left leg, and I know it must be bleeding all over the floor. And the dead antelope. Though my vision is a little blurry, I seem to be thinking clearly for the first time in weeks, maybe months. Maybe ever.

  I don’t dare move, let alone scream. The old man is just in the next room having tea, but if I yelled, I’m sure the leopard could chew my throat out before the old guy even took a step in my direction. The leopard growls, low but lightly. The same sort of inquisitive purring that a housecat might make. Though it is massive, and all muscle, something makes me think that it is just a child. Probably an adult would have killed me outright. Children just want to play and learn how this whole “killing” thing works.

  I can’t feel my left arm but it must be just behind my head. I can hear my wristwatch ticking.

  All around me are stacks upon stacks: of oft-reread books, of newspaper cuttings, of typewritten pages. None of them are mine. The old man writes in here every morning; sometimes all night long, too. When I first came all the way out to Africa, I hoped that the old man might teach me whatever he had taught Jeffrey. Whatever it was that he had—that
he’d always had—that I had always not had. But all the old man ever told me was to write every day. And to read whenever I had the chance. I could have gotten the same advice from a one-hundred-dollar Saturday workshop at the New School. Instead I’ll die out here in the middle of nowhere, my thirty-three years amounting to a useless education, a few pages no one will ever read, and a few girls I loved and who left. Mine turns out to be just a brief, supporting role. A few lines, but nothing memorable.

  The leopard relaxes slightly from its pouncing position and settles down into a crouch. After a long stare in my direction, the cat leans backward and begins to lick at its fur. Working slowly, in little patches, it preens and nuzzles itself. My head throbs in time with my leg. I wait for this rate to slow, or to deepen. I try to count but I lose track. My eyes keep wandering back to the leopard. I keep thinking about how I would describe all this in a story, if I only lived to write it down.

  Thinking is all I ever do. Or is it did, now? Wasted weeks and months traveling around. I spent whole days in bars, talking to strange people from strange walks of life. As they told me about their lives, I began to envision them on pages. I began to imagine how I’d capture their voices or describe their noses. In the wee hours, half drowned in the local brew, I’d lie in bed alone, composing magnificent stories whose details would be lost in headaches by morning. When I did sit down to carve them into my blank pages, they inevitably came up flat and lacking. Small people with their small lives, I’d spit; I just haven’t met interesting-enough characters yet. They must be in Stockholm or Damascus or Vancouver. I’d better get moving. And in the back of my mind I wonder if it’s me that I’m dodging. If it’s me who is too small. But it’s this wondering that is growing louder and louder, now, as I lie here dying. All these stories I’ve gathered are going to be lost forever, seeing as how I’m about to be jungle cat food. I’ve wasted them. I’ve wasted everything in my path.

  The leopard is really getting into it now. Lifting one ferocious-looking paw and licking its soft white underarm with long, rough swipes of its tongue. The reptilian tail flops back and forth, making a heavy thud against the doorframe as it goes. Can the old man hear this? I can hear him . . . humming something in the other room as the kettle begins to whistle. Outside, an orchestra of jungle insects plays an endless concerto. I always meant to learn how to listen to classical music. To find themes and know what melodies are. To know the difference between Bach and Brahms and Beethoven. As a child I suspected that the secrets of the universe were hidden away somewhere in classical music. People told me that it was too late for me to learn—that music was a language you had to learn when you were little, and so it was already too late. But now I think I could have cracked it—if I’d only tried. I think I could have learned; I could have changed. But I never did, and so I never will, because this is it.

  What kills me the most—pun most definitely not intended—is that I have already read this story. It is one of Hemingway’s better ones, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” About a man who is slowly dying and regretting all the time he wasted in his life. All the stuff he meant to write. It’s all there. The greatest, and last, story of my whole life and it is plagiarized straight out of The Forty-Nine Stories, and written forty years before I was even born. I’ve always suspected that this is a deeply ironic universe. That if there is some sort of God, that this is just how He likes to gets His yuks. Which doesn’t give me much hope about heaven, then—if this is how He likes to play things. To Him, if anyone, there’s nothing sacred.

  There’s sort of a circular method to it. The licking. The little pink tongue is covered in snaking black branches. The leopard’s eyes shut, as if it were a monk, deep in a meditative state. It is the distant stare of a lover who is thinking about someone else.

  Is it just me, or is the ticking of my watch getting louder? Are my senses coming alive, now that I am nearly dead?

  Somewhere, in a bug-infested apartment thirty miles away, a woman is packing her bags. She’s the only person who gives a damn about me for a hundred miles. No, for a thousand, or even three thousand. The only person who gives a damn about me on this continent and even in this hemisphere. I’ve said terrible things to her and I’ve pushed her away at every possible chance, and, given the current circumstances, probably no one in my entire life will love me as much as she does.

  Done with its preening, the leopard keeps its eyes half shut and stays tightly curled in the doorway. My heart begins to pound. Is it going to sleep? The pounding of my heart begins to echo in the dull ache of my head, and the pain in my leg gets sharper. I struggle and strain not to move, but suddenly the more I think about it, the more my leg wants to shift. Just a few more minutes, I tell myself. Just until I’m sure it’s really asleep. Just until the old man finishes his tea. Maybe then Henry will come in to see what’s taking me so long. Unless I bleed out before it’s safe to move. I try to keep my eyes open. I gently rub the wiry needles of antelope hair against my cheek. I list all the things I will do differently, if I make it through. I dream up ways of describing how those claws felt tearing through my pant leg and then my flesh. Was it like butter? Too cliché. Like pâté? Too elite. Like a foot stepping into the first mound of freshly fallen snow. Too poetic. Who thinks like that, anyway? It was like exactly what it was. It was like a set of claws tearing through my flesh.

  The jungle cat begins to look peaceful. The whole room feels darker than it was a moment ago. The leopard buries its head under its oversized paws. It looks stuffed, except that its whole body swells and falls in gentle rhythm. My leg stops hurting, and the sound of the old man’s humming blends into that immense, insectile orchestra, performing to the metronome of my watch. As I try to move my leg, I wonder what exactly leopards dream about.

  And just then there is a thunderclap bang, and the leopard’s body goes limp, right as mine tenses up. Looking up I see myself, bending over me.

  “It’s going to be all right,” the other me says.

  The old man stands in a haze of gunpowder, a rifle in his hands that is older than I am. Both of them begin yelling for Efua or Akuba to come and help dress my wounds. But they’re both down by the lake, watching old rituals become unforgotten again.

  “Here,” the other me says, picking up the bottle of Epiphany. Much of it seems to have spilled out. I want to live. I want to live and let Tina love me. I want to live and find Jeffrey and drag him out of whatever hole he’s crawled down. I want to live and every morning I want to write something that’s worth wrapping my heart in when I die.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll get you out of here,” I say to myself.

  And then the other me holds the worn glass opening up to my lips and pours.

  9

  In the Writers’ Colony

  It is entirely conceivable that life’s splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come. This is the essence of magic, which does not create but summons.

  —FRANZ KAFKA, DIARIES

  When I first wake up I usually think I’m still in the hospital, until my eyes come to focus on all the umlauts along the book spines on my nightstand. Someone keeps setting them out there. I might like to read them, if only I could read Icelandic. I find it strange. I find it stranger that I notice the books even before I notice there aren’t tubes coming out of me anymore. I find it strangest of all that I find myself absentmindedly skimming their unreadable pages, wondering what is lost in them. Do they, in their own language, divine the depths of human souls?

  The walls here are the same clean white as the walls in my hospital room. Familiar, too, is the ever-present chill; and the small square window, beyond which are rows and rows of great blue pines. I stare at them until I remember that I am in the Laxness-Hallgrímsson Writers’ Colony, in Iceland, and that I have been here for one very cold week already, l
ooking for my old friend, Jeffrey Oakes, who came months ago and has, apparently, disappeared again.

  When I kick off the down comforter my leg aches. The last, dull reminder of my accident. I roll across the cold, far side of the bed and think of Tina. The nights we spent hiding out under that zippered African netting. She’s gone now, along with my watch, my jacket, and my almost-finished biography of Jeffrey. It’s gone, all gone, but I try to remember that I’m lucky not to be all gone myself. I limp over to the door, where a pot of dark coffee and two bilberry muffins have been left for me—by whom I do not really know. Probably by whoever keeps putting the books on my nightstand. According to the few writers here who will speak to me, the caretaker is a man named Franklin W. Zaff, but it’s been a week and I’ve yet to meet him. I’m told he tries to keep out of our way.

  I limp over to a desk that is too high and feed some paper that is too thin into a typewriter whose ink is too faint, and I fidget in an Icelandic chair that is too modern, and I begin to write.

  This is difficult. The keys on the typewriter are not in the American order; more disturbingly, the letters c, q, w, and z are nowhere to be found. The ropey-haired gentleman in the next room told me that pens are in very short supply, and that the letter z was legally eliminated from the Icelandic language, back in the seventies—for crimes I can only imagine. So I have been making substitutions with the odd new letters: á, þ, æ, and ö. These, I find, give my writing a bold, decidedly old-world flair: “Noæ, hours later, I am alone again, sitting þuietly in front of the dressing-table mirror, áaking æhite poæder onto my faáe.”