The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel

by Kristopher Jansma

  “Is anyone here?” I shout, but there is no answer. “Anyone at all?”

  Looking for something—a guest book, maybe, or even a sign-in sheet—I carefully stack up the papers I have knocked over. All of them are written in indecipherable Icelandic, except for the return addresses on two unopened letters, which lie in a pile of unopened mail by the door—all several weeks old from the postmarks. One of them is a crisp, clean envelope from the offices of Emmetz, Moscowitz, and Bing. With only slight trepidation, I open it and find inside a strongly worded threat of pending legal action, on the behalf of one Mrs. Pauline Oakes, that her son be produced immediately. Slowly I begin to suspect that no one has been in this office for some time.

  The second letter confirms these fears. Franklin W. Zaff, of 28 Bistlethwaite Court, Herefordshire, UK, writes the following:

  To Whom It May Concern at the Laxness-Hallgrímsson Writers’ Colony:

  Unfortunately I will be unable to take over the position of winter curator, due to the unexpected moving-up of the publication date of my new novel, THE FINDER’S KEEPER, which as you know was not due out until the coming summer. My editor at Haslett & Grouse requires me suddenly for book signings, readings, guest lectures, etc., and I feel it would be in my best interests, professionally, to make myself available. I do realize, naturally, that this is on somewhat short notice, and I hope that a suitable replacement can be found before the current curator departs.

  With heavy heart,

  Franklin W. Zaff

  Crumpling the letter and tossing it aside, I wonder if I might be able somehow to gather every existing copy of The Finder’s Keeper and burn Franklin W. Zaff on a pyre built out of them. If the postmarks are to be believed, there has been no one in these offices for three weeks at least. The bulk of the writers remaining have been either too self-absorbed to notice that they’ve been utterly abandoned or too terrified to face this possibility.

  Not sure how to proceed, I sit there for a few more minutes, and soon my eye wanders to the packing slip on the large wooden crate that I nearly somersaulted over upon my entry. In the dim light I can just make out the familiar logo of Oakes International. I turn the box and see, to my delight, that the shipment is for “Mr. Anton Prishibeyev. The Suite at the Top of the Bell Tower. Laxness-Hallgrímsson Writers’ Colony, Akranes, Iceland.”

  I stare down at the name for a moment even before I recognize the alias I gave to Jeffrey once, in a piece of fiction written a lifetime ago, but once I do, it brings a very warming smile.

  The problem now, however, is that the Bell Tower is all the way back down the hill. And my leg already feels like someone has been sawing it against a pine tree for an hour. My eyes fall onto the thin, wooden desk and suddenly I have an idea. Clearing it off with wild swipes of my arms, I invert the desk and lay it on the snow outside the door. It sinks into the snow only a little; it is of such light, modern construction. Unfortunately, when I throw my emaciated weight onto my makeshift sled, it is not enough to propel us down the path. For a moment I lie there, feeling the falling snow covering me, and I ponder the end. If this is it, I think, then I’m at least breaking into Jeffrey’s wine. I reach down to pry off the lid, and then—inspiration.

  With my last bit of strength, I lift the box of wine onto the sled and prepare to make a special delivery. This time when I leap into the sled, it inches forward, and I gain a little momentum, and then a little more, and soon I am speeding downhill through a sheet of white spray like an eager child. I can’t think of the last time I was so happy.

  At the bottom finally, I crane my neck to the top of the old bell tower, peering through the falling snow. Are there faint signs of flickering light in the small dark cutaways? I can’t tell if it is a trick of the darkness.

  As I climb the stairs slowly, propping the box of wine up against the handrail, I wonder what I will find at the top. I try not to make assumptions based on the empty Brennivín bottles that I keep stumbling upon, which go skipping off down the spiral staircase and shatter fantastically on the flagstone below. But I brace myself for the increasing likelihood that Jeffrey is soaked through like a ladyfinger in a caraway tiramisu. He could be rocking gently in a corner, talking to himself—the result of months without any medication. Or, considering how it gets colder and colder with every foot that I raise, will I find only a Jeffrey Oakes–flavored Popsicle? With each step my leg throbs harder and the sound of typing grows louder.

  The staircase seems never ending, and after what feels like a mile, I collapse onto one of the frigid steps. I feel the sweat on my pants’ seat freezing to the stone. Not for the first time, I think about what little I’d be leaving behind, if I was to give up and let myself pass out in the cold, cold tower. Hypothermia has me in its grip—all that remains is for me to let it take me. What did anyone really leave behind, I wonder. A family? A home? All I’d ever wanted to remain in my wake was a book. A simple, stupid mass of words. And I’d failed, even at that.

  The hammering of typewriter arms against an inky strip echoes down the tower. I seize the box of wine and force myself up against the wall. The typing stops. I feel the fabric rip out of my pants. It remains, iced to the step. A roller is rolled; a sheet extracted and replaced. I command one leg, and then the other, to lift. The typing begins anew.

  And for this imperfect immortality, what prices have been paid? How many livers, lungs, and veins? Shredded, polluted, shot? How many children deserted, family secrets betrayed, sordid trysts laid out for strangers to see? How many wives and husbands shoved to the side? How many ovens scorched with our hair? Gun barrels slid between our lips? Bathtubs slowly reddened by our blood and twisting rivers that drowned us? How many flawed pages burned in disgust and reduced to ashes? How many flawless moments observed from just a slight distance so that, later, we might reduce them to words? All with an unspoken prayer that these hard-won truths might outlast the brief years of our lies.

  At last I arrive at the top. As I catch what breath I have left, I think back to the last time I saw Jeffrey. I told him he was insane. He called me a fantasist. Neither accusation had been untrue, and yet I wondered if he had injured me half as much as I had injured him. After all, my hopeless cause was only love; his was everything. His entire mind. Over the years, I’d wondered once or twice if he’d seen his breakdown coming. Surely, he must have; Jeffrey was never unobservant, and there was little he was more absorbed by than himself. He must have known the day he signed the contracts that he was signing away his only life preserver—the book that had buoyed him up while all else whirled him down and down in spirals that grew with each passing month. With every milligram of Lotosil that had worked just a little less well than the milligram before. With every substitution he’d tried to make that only came up short. What sort of courage had it taken to let go of the last thing keeping him afloat?

  Leaning against the door, I wonder if maybe I’ve been clinging to a life preserver all my own. I wonder if he can show me how to let it go.

  At last I push open the door to find Jeffrey, typing away at a little desk, on the same little Icelandic typewriter I have back in my room. Beside him is a stack of paper, perhaps a foot high—it looks like almost a thousand pages—weighted down with a half-empty Brennivín bottle. As I step in, he catches sight of my reflection in a tarnished mirror on the wall, but still the typing doesn’t stop.

  “Just leave the box by the door, thank you,” he says, without breaking eye contact with his page.

  I set the box down and my leg spasms so badly I can’t walk another step. The click-clack of the keys echoes through the room, bouncing off the stone. I come around behind him so that he will see me clearly, and in the process I pass the mirror and get the first good look at myself that I’ve had in weeks. No wonder why the others in the colony have been shrinking away from me. Even by the low standards of writers, I look deranged. Beard shaggy in some places and patchy in others. My eyes bloodshot and underlined in inky purple rings. Skin so pale that I swea
r I can see my skull through it.

  “I was told that no tips were required,” Jeffrey says loudly, the typing slowing but not stopping, his eyes drifting up but not breaking his stare. “But if you insist, there should be some kronor or something in my bag. Front pocket.”

  Stepping forward so he can see me better, I smile wanly at my old friend, and at last, his eyes lock onto mine. The typing stops suddenly.

  “Good God,” Jeffrey says, jumping up from the desk. He winces and immediately collapses back into his chair. He looks nearly as terrible as I do.

  “I haven’t stood up in a while,” he admits. From the intensity of his face, I am guessing that “a while” is on the order of a magnitude of days, not hours. From the smell of the place I guess he’s been relieving himself in empty bottles and subsisting only on the full ones. He keeps glancing back at his reflection, as if worried it might run away from him while he’s looking the other way. I’ve seen him like this before.

  “Your mother asked me to come,” I explain. “She wants you to go home.”

  Jeffrey stares at the typewriter in the mirror for a few minutes. “I haven’t quite finished. Just another chapter or two. Should be done by morning. Tomorrow we’ll go.”

  “There’s nobody running this place,” I say. “And the snow’s starting to let up. We should go while we can. Tomorrow might be too late.”

  “Have a drink,” he says, offering the bottle of Brennivín. As he lifts it, the top pages of his stack blow off and I catch one in the air.

  “That’s not finished yet!” he shouts, struggling to get back to his feet but failing.

  I scan a line from the middle of the page:

  and here, almost against his deadish look at the man; it is life, as it hasn’t been; no promise of redemption visible; in the man others found it that the man had not found; firm lips and eyes open, oh and that self-same expression as in life and it is as it hasn’t been and the looking in is nothing and nothing, through the head goes the point

  There isn’t a period to be found on the page. There aren’t any on the page that tops the stack, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn there weren’t any in the whole manuscript. I wonder if he’s been typing all of this without looking at it—and yet somehow he’s also cleverly avoided any words containing c, q, w, or z. I put the pages back and set the bottle on top of them again.

  Poor bastard. He’d leapfrogged his Ulysses and gone right to his Finnegans Wake. He begins to cough and cough, for a solid minute. While I wait for him to stop, I pry the lid off the box of wine and stack the ’98 Petit Pineaus out on the floor. I have no idea how much they cost, but they can’t be as priceless as a thousand pages of Oakes. So I scoop up the manuscript pages and set them evenly inside the box. By the time I get the lid back on, Jeffrey has propelled himself halfway across the room on his weakened legs. I see blood on the back of his hand when he finally moves it away.

  “Come on,” I say, “we’ve got to get you to a doctor.”

  Jeffrey doesn’t seem particularly enamored of this solution, and he argues loudly even as he lets me get an arm around him and we hoist each other up. When had we become old men?

  “You’d better not try to steal any of it,” he warns. “Those damned elves keep coming in here, changing things. Well, I told them—Jeffrey Oakes doesn’t write by committee. This isn’t some Hollywood screenplay here. You don’t get producers credits just for bringing me weak coffee and filthy muffins every morning.”

  I smile a little wider at the familiar, pleasant sound of his babbling. As much as it concerns me, I know that he has been this way before, and that he is not always this way. If he can get better then we both can.

  And, now that he mentions it, I wonder who has been bringing the muffins and coffee. Not Franklin W. Zaff—that much I am sure of. Maybe Einar wasn’t so wrong about that mischievous force.

  Soon we’ll be lodged in a French château, surrounded by withered grapevines that will be green in good time. And I keep thinking I’d like to go home myself.

  “Time to return to the lands of mothers and slug poops,” I say.

  “I don’t mean to alarm you,” Jeffrey says, “but you’re speaking gibberish.”

  Jeffrey and I brace against each other, and we head for the doorway, tripping over empty bottles and still more stacks of Icelandic books, which I swear weren’t there moments before.

  I ask, “Why is it that these people can’t stop writing all these books? You’d think they’d run out of things to say about this place.”

  What I mean to ask is, how it is that they can write so many and I can’t seem to manage even one?

  “‘A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us,’” Jeffrey says sagely.

  “That’s lovely,” I say. And I mean it.

  “Kafka,” he says proudly.

  “You wouldn’t really expect that. From him.”

  “No,” Jeffrey agrees, looking rather blissed all of a sudden.

  Through the window, beyond the mirrors, I can still see the warm glow of Yoko’s light. It really is a magnificent thing. A pillar that climbs to the clouds, in honor of a great love lost. Now it seems like the only thing that could possibly have been built. And that it could have been built only here, in this void, where nothingness was waiting to be made into something.

  As we slowly descend the stairs, words begin ordering themselves in my head. I can see—clearly—that which is not there at all. A woman, sitting in front of an array of mirrors on her wedding day, thinking about waking in darkness that morning and not knowing just yet where she is. And not wanting to know, at first. And then suddenly it is as if I can hear her voice in my own head, and it takes all I have to not run back up to Jeffrey’s typewriter and let it out. It’s a voice I haven’t heard in a long, long time, but I feel sure that it isn’t going away now. I hobble a little faster toward the exit. I think that I know how to proceed.

  10

  King Me

  Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change.

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN

  Jeffrey sits in the window wearing a white waffle-woven bathrobe embroidered with the elegant logo of the Hotel Luxembourg. His left hand moves lazily out in the fifth-story air, as if conducting an invisible orchestra. His right hand pinches a cigarette, which he smokes fiercely while staring down at the statue of Grand Duke Guillaume II in the square below. Then Jeffrey looks back into the kitchenette, where I lean over a newspaper written in Luxembourgish, a language I frankly did not even know existed before we arrived.

  “It’s just too . . . I mean, honestly. You know what I mean? Does it have to be quite so . . . ? Just look at them all down there . . . ‘Oh . . . I’m blah blah blah. Don’t you think blah blah is so blah?’ ‘Yes, quite blah.’ God! You know what I’m saying?”

  He tosses the lit cigarette across the hotel room, and it lands in the large empty fireplace, amid the butts of yesterday’s pack. His right hand traces a route through his gray hairs, down the freckled ridge of his ear, and then along the shoulder slope of robe to his pocket, where he fishes out his aluminum pack of Chancellor Treasurer cigarettes. He is hardly ever without one for more than a minute. He calls it his “sovereign addiction”—the only one remaining after obliterating pills, booze, and sex from his diet.

  “What is it about this place? I don’t even know what we’re doing here.”

  “You wanted to come,” I remind him. “You could have stayed with Pauline.”

  An electric shudder runs through Jeffrey, and I know he is thinking back on the recuperative months we spent at the Oakes Reserve Vineyard in the Loire Valley—being ruthlessly picked over by his mother while doctors from all over Europe hemmed and hawed in the hallway.

  “I keep having this nightmare,” he’d confessed as we’d strolled aimlessly down the still-frosted rows of vines. “They cut me up in my sleep and build a new Jeffrey out
of aggregate parts. I come out half my size, with one lung, no liver, and a bird heart.”

  In truth, they’d stuck him with acupuncture needles and fed him kale. They’d injected him with vitamin C and had him drink a gallon of raw milk daily. With each week that passed, Jeffrey did, indeed, appear a bit smaller and shorter of breath, but his antic scratching and midnight outbursts slowly diminished as well. His eyes no longer danced after things that no one else could see. This is when the gray came into his hair. This is when he began staring at his typewriter, never pressing a key.

  I wasn’t surprised that, when my leg was finally fully healed and I told Jeffrey I was going to head into Luxembourg, he had his bags in the back of his father’s Renault before I’d even downloaded the maps. But that was days ago, and by now Jeffrey’s mood has swung right around again.

  “I’m just saying,” he gripes, lighting the new cigarette. “Who goes to Luxembourg? Everything about this place . . . is so . . . so perfectly . . . uhm . . . humph.”

  That Jeffrey can’t quite put a finger on his issue with Luxembourg cannot, entirely, be blamed on writer’s block. I feel it, too. The trouble with Luxembourg is that you can’t quite figure out what it is trying to be exactly. Everywhere I look there are soaring parapets and medieval coats of arms. There are old men playing checkers on a folding table in the park below us and stone gargoyles on the ramparts above us. But even they seem a bit bored by it all. In Paris you could complain the Eiffel Tower was not as striking as you’d hoped. In Berlin the beer wouldn’t be worth the crowds. In London the fog could be thick but not hiding-Jack-the-Ripper thick. In all these places there were expectations, but in Luxembourg there were none. One might ask how, without any expectations, could anything be a letdown? But that was the thing—there was a delight in being let down that Jeffrey thrived on. Here it all just was, no better or worse than what we’d never imagined. And Jeffrey was floundering like a saltwater fish dropped into a pond. Everything looked right and yet he was steadily suffocating; all the poisons he’d long ago adapted to withstand were suddenly nowhere to be found.