The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (34 page)

Where are the critics when you need them?

I’ve gotten bad press before. Lifeless. Mechanical. Heartless. You shake it off. You prepare for the next role of a lifetime. Mrs. Haru J----, Imperial Princess of Japan. All my life I have only ever been trying to be anyone other than who I am. But each role ends. I can only be Ranevskaya, or Lady Macbeth, or Miss Julie for a few hours before the mystery and elegance slide away and I am only myself again.

There are twice as many people outside now. Why do I keep scanning their tiny faces—half hidden behind scarves? He is not out there.

Stanislavsky suggests using “affective memories”—meaning that the actress should try to recall times when she felt as the character does—to better re-create that emotion upon the stage. And so I think about him—as I do each night before I take the stage. Each night I try to imagine what it was that he wanted from me. What it was that he felt. Some sort of peace. Something I’ve never really felt, myself—except on stage. Maybe on a Christmas morning, twenty years ago. Maybe in those moments before the day begins, when I haven’t yet remembered who I am.

Outside there is a loud cheer. The Imperial Guards are skirting the perimeter. There are cameras and lights now—the cyborg arms of television crews, coming to record this moment, when the people of an island nation are taking a stand. They are angry because their world keeps on shrinking, bound up in fiber-optic nooses, and the more things change, the more they all become the same. In Tokyo as in Manhattan. In Kumasi as in Dubai. In Colombo as in Williamstown. To them I am a corruption. A toxic invader into a once-sacred bloodline. They see it plainly enough— this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a cancer.

Careful not to crease the folds of my white
shiromuku
wedding robes, I sit again and reach into my bag. From inside a silk-lined cavity I withdraw

I wake in the morning to find my face plastered to the paper on my desk. I peel this off and bits of words stick to my cheek. I stopped midsentence, it appears. And as I stumble to the sink to wash my face I realize that I cannot, for the life of me, remember what I had intended her to withdraw. I sit staring at the half-finished line for hours, until I hear the sound of the shower going in the next room.

Out of habit, I wander past the closet where I’ve hidden Jeffrey’s manuscript, and, as he sings French opera in the shower, I extract a few pages and read on from where I left off the day before. I’m nearly finished. While it remains devoid of all periods,
c
’s,
q
’s,
w
’s, and
z
’s, and it is definitely gibberish, I cannot get past the feeling that it is distinctly Jeffrey’s gibberish. Am
I
crazy? Or, mixed into this mountain of verbiage, are there specks of gold?

It has crossed my mind, of course, to sell it—surely some collector would pay handsomely for an unfinished manuscript of Jeffrey Oakes’s. It has even crossed my mind to keep it for myself. If I could sift out the gold inside, could I then claim it as my own? But now another idea crosses my mind. I slip the pages back into the wine box where I’ve kept them and put the box into my suitcase and the suitcase back into the closet. Then I lift another sheet of stationery off the top of the pile and write
“Jeffrey—Be right back. I’ll get cigarettes. Don’t worry.”

Out the lobby, past the souvenir plates, I head into the Place d’Armes once more. The old men are back at their checkers. One shouts,
“Schach matt!”
at the other. Out of the corner of my eye I see the Black Panther and again it seems as though he is also watching me. But I make my way to the used-book cart, where the girl we saw the other day is reading from the Luxembourgish edition of
Nothing Sacred
.

“Do you speak English?” I ask.

“Englesch?”
she replies, shaking her head—no.

“Jeffrey Oakes,” I say, pointing to the book.

She nods and grins.
“Frënd?”
she asks, pointing to me.

“Yes, friend,” I say. “Old friend.” I think about adding “Only friend” but she won’t understand me, anyway. She’s hyperventilating, and though I’ve never really seen anyone swoon before, I’m pretty sure this is what she is doing.

“Léift?”
she asks, pointing to me. She puts her hands over her heart and then puts one onto the book. But I do not understand.
“Léift! Léift! Léift!”
she keeps crying.

“Love?” I say, pointing at the book. “Yes!
Léift! Multo
. . . grande
léift!
”

Immediately she proceeds to gush in a torrent of Luxembourgish. She shows me her phone, and the photo of Jeffrey that she took. She’s posted it to a website called The Oakes Literary Society International, or TOLSI, for short, and there are 3,479 replies. From “hottentot19” and “GurlyGurl” and “WildeOne” and “echolalia” and “MrSmudgyMan.” They demand that she find out where he’s staying. What he’s doing. If he’s crazy. Some squeal in abbreviations. Some, more erudite, quote his passages. The critics are immediately fired upon by the loyalists. Some girl posts a photo of a tattoo she’s gotten on the small of her back that’s etched with
NOTHING SACRED
. It’s the ninth circle of Jeffrey’s Inferno, on a four-inch touch screen with 4G speed.

I clap my hands and turn to the girl. “You can meet him. Sunday night.”

“Sonndes?”
she confirms.
“Owes?”

“Sunday. Night. Tell everyone.
Sonndes owes
,” I say, waving my hands out toward the world and then miming typing onto a phone with my thumbs.

“Wou?”
she asks, looking about, her fingers already flying over the tiny keys.

“There,” I say, pointing toward the palace. “There.”

• • •

As I enter our suite, the smell of smoke tickles my nostrils and reminds me that I haven’t bought Jeffrey cigarettes as I had promised. But it isn’t tobacco I smell burning. When I push open the door I see Jeffrey, standing in his bathrobe, in front of the roaring fireplace. It takes a moment to connect the open closet door to the open suitcase on the floor to the open wine box on the counter. To the stack of paper in Jeffrey’s arms.

“I thought I’d left a few cigarettes in your suitcase!” he screams, throwing two or three more pages into the fire. “This is supposed to be buried under an avalanche. Blown out of the fucking tower by the Arctic winds and scattered halfway to Greenland by now! Humpback whales should be picking it out of their . . . their . . . those things with the . . .
Christ!
” He hurls furious fistfuls of pages into the fire, stopping only when the flames surge up so high that they consume the bottom of the mantel.

“Baleens!” I shout, trying to wrench the papers away from him.

“Yes!” he cries, as he kicks me back. “Thank you! Baleens! Fucking Moby Dick should be flossing with this . . . this . . .
travesty
!”

With that he trips on the edge of the rug and the rest of the pages mushroom up into the air before sinking down. Jeffrey sits up in the middle of the paper sea, his pages settling like cresting waves that threaten to drown him. He just sits there, as if to let them. Wading in, I sit down beside him and help him to catch his breath.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “I’ve lost too many books of my own. I just needed to save it.”

“It’s all just fucking
nonsense
,” he sobs.

“It’s not,” I insist. “Not all of it. There’s something in here. Something incredible. For the first hundred pages or so I couldn’t see it. But then I started to notice certain things—repeating. There’s a boy, right? A boy, and he’s very gifted at . . . I don’t know, there aren’t any
c
’s, but you call it—” I riffle through pages, but to find one in the midst of all this would be like reaching into the ocean and grabbing out a fish. If it isn’t ash already. I try to remember it, exactly. “A . . . a . . . ‘game of slanted moves’ . . . ‘the oldest game that journeyed from the East, played in the shade of sphinxes . . . ’” Jeffrey listens, breathing heavily. And then—a snow-in-Atlanta miracle—I lay my hand on the page I am searching for. “Here! Here here here! ‘A game of red and blak, not blak and not-blak’—you meant
black
, right? And ‘not-blak’ is
white
, but there were no
c
or
w
keys—you’re talking about checkers, and chess, right? . . . ‘A game of red and blak, not blak and not-blak, for what in this sphere of land and sea is ever all blak or all not, but all is either the dark, dark death or the bold blushing of blood, blue through the skin but underneath it is red, all red, all of ours red, even the bluest blue blood is red, from George to Ferdinand to Louis to Tutankhamen to Buddha to Genghis and every Emperor from the Land of the Rising Sun have been red, red blooded, and all eventually taken by the blak, yes they all played the game, all made their slanted moves over the board, they hopped their rounds, they took them, they arrived at the farthest edge and said, in a thousand tongues, they said, unendingly,

King Me!

Rey Me!

Roy de Moi!

“You wrote that last part in by hand—how do you know these things? . . . ‘And this, this is the phrase on the lips of the boy as he takes the last round of the man his father has hired to train him . . . ’ I mean, it’s checkers! Yeah? It’s all about this boy who plays checkers and . . . well, help me find the next part, why don’t you? It’s got to be here somewhere . . . ”

Jeffrey’s gone quiet. The fire has died down a bit. The pages lie flat now, all around us, a still white pond. I pick up one page, and then another, and try fitting them together. I wait for Jeffrey to tell me that
I’ve
gone mad—that he never so much as thought of a single checker in all the time he was in Iceland. But then, slowly, Jeffrey lifts one page and holds it up against the light from the fireplace. He turns it this way, and that, as if not sure which end is up. Then he takes up another and, scanning the end of the first, matches it to the top of the second, and holds them together between his fingertips.