Kristopher Jansma - The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

Tina squeaks unhappily and looks awkwardly at the nun, who does not seem to understand anything we’re saying.

“Once,” I say, “but it was the wrong kind.”

Carsten doesn’t know quite what to do with this, and as she puzzles over it, I ask, “And so what do you guys do back in New York?”

“She edits books and stuff. I work in public relations,” Carsten says, leaning forcefully past her friend and — in what I suspect is a well-practiced accident — allows the sleeves of her blouse to fall down so that her bra straps show. A bright, pleasant mango color.

“Really?” I say. “Is that like advertising?”

“No!” Carsten asserts suddenly. She unrolls a speech she has doubtless given before. “Advertising is just, like, when you’re promoting a product, or a company directly, in the media.”

I nod as if I’m interested. Tina flips back to her newspaper. Carsten finishes her sugary drink in an instant and orders a second and a third before the boy can escape our car.

“Public relations is when you’re actually shaping the company’s entire image. Like, you might spend a lot of time online posting, like, positive reviews of the company on different forums, and making sure their Google searches aren’t, like, negative .”

“Wow,” I say, and I guess I don’t sound impressed enough because Carsten redoubles her efforts.

“Or we might lobby for them so that local government stuff works out the way they want it to. Back before I started working for this company, we had this pharmaceutical client that makes — you know Lotosil?”

I know the name quite well. It was one of the many prescriptions that had populated Jeffrey’s medicine cabinet.

“So, like, it’s like awesome at helping people with depression. But — big problem — everyone already knows that if you’re depressed you take Prozac, right? I mean, that’s just branding. So what they did was they lobbied the AMA to create this new diagnosis for ‘societal apprehensiveness disorder’ so, like, Lotosil could be the drug for that .”

I blink two, three times, waiting for her to continue, but she’s reached the punch line. I try not to look aghast, and Tina is now smirking at me .

“That’s… so interesting ,” I manage.

But what I am thinking is that this airhead has just told me that she, or at least her international corporation of airheads, has invented a disease. A disease with the repulsively clever acronym of SAD, all so as to increase sales of a drug, one that Jeffrey took for years. Years during which he, yes, wrote an international bestselling novel, but also years during which his depression, or his “societal apprehensiveness,” was pretty damn high, considering that I was one of two human beings on the planet whom he could halfway stand. It seems unconscionable that Carsten and her PR cronies have perpetrated this falsehood, and that’s coming from a guy who plagiarizes people’s papers for them.

“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.