Kristopher Jansma - The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

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?”