The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (25 page)

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, which 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.

“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
vardøger
s—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 . . . ’”