Kristopher Jansma - The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

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.