The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (24 page)

“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 blue 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,
fantasie
s—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—”

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 Delawar
e—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.