Kristopher Jansma - The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

The leopard relaxes slightly from its pouncing position and settles down into a crouch. After a long stare in my direction, the cat leans backward and begins to lick at its fur. Working slowly, in little patches, it preens and nuzzles itself. My head throbs in time with my leg. I wait for this rate to slow, or to deepen. I try to count but I lose track. My eyes keep wandering back to the leopard. I keep thinking about how I would describe all this in a story, if I only lived to write it down.

Thinking is all I ever do. Or is it did , now? Wasted weeks and months traveling around. I spent whole days in bars, talking to strange people from strange walks of life. As they told me about their lives, I began to envision them on pages. I began to imagine how I’d capture their voices or describe their noses. In the wee hours, half drowned in the local brew, I’d lie in bed alone, composing magnificent stories whose details would be lost in headaches by morning. When I did sit down to carve them into my blank pages, they inevitably came up flat and lacking. Small people with their small lives, I’d spit; I just haven’t met interesting-enough characters yet. They must be in Stockholm or Damascus or Vancouver. I’d better get moving. And in the back of my mind I wonder if it’s me that I’m dodging. If it’s me who is too small. But it’s this wondering that is growing louder and louder, now, as I lie here dying. All these stories I’ve gathered are going to be lost forever, seeing as how I’m about to be jungle cat food. I’ve wasted them. I’ve wasted everything in my path.

The leopard is really getting into it now. Lifting one ferocious-looking paw and licking its soft white underarm with long, rough swipes of its tongue. The reptilian tail flops back and forth, making a heavy thud against the doorframe as it goes. Can the old man hear this? I can hear him… humming something in the other room as the kettle begins to whistle. Outside, an orchestra of jungle insects plays an endless concerto. I always meant to learn how to listen to classical music. To find themes and know what melodies are. To know the difference between Bach and Brahms and Beethoven. As a child I suspected that the secrets of the universe were hidden away somewhere in classical music. People told me that it was too late for me to learn — that music was a language you had to learn when you were little, and so it was already too late. But now I think I could have cracked it — if I’d only tried. I think I could have learned; I could have changed. But I never did, and so I never will, because this is it.

What kills me the most — pun most definitely not intended — is that I have already read this story. It is one of Hemingway’s better ones, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” About a man who is slowly dying and regretting all the time he wasted in his life. All the stuff he meant to write. It’s all there. The greatest, and last, story of my whole life and it is plagiarized straight out of The Forty-Nine Stories , and written forty years before I was even born. I’ve always suspected that this is a deeply ironic universe. That if there is some sort of God, that this is just how He likes to gets His yuks. Which doesn’t give me much hope about heaven, then — if this is how He likes to play things. To Him, if anyone, there’s nothing sacred.

There’s sort of a circular method to it. The licking. The little pink tongue is covered in snaking black branches. The leopard’s eyes shut, as if it were a monk, deep in a meditative state. It is the distant stare of a lover who is thinking about someone else.

Is it just me, or is the ticking of my watch getting louder? Are my senses coming alive, now that I am nearly dead?

Somewhere, in a bug-infested apartment thirty miles away, a woman is packing her bags. She’s the only person who gives a damn about me for a hundred miles. No, for a thousand, or even three thousand. The only person who gives a damn about me on this continent and even in this hemisphere. I’ve said terrible things to her and I’ve pushed her away at every possible chance, and, given the current circumstances, probably no one in my entire life will love me as much as she does.

Done with its preening, the leopard keeps its eyes half shut and stays tightly curled in the doorway. My heart begins to pound. Is it going to sleep? The pounding of my heart begins to echo in the dull ache of my head, and the pain in my leg gets sharper. I struggle and strain not to move, but suddenly the more I think about it, the more my leg wants to shift. Just a few more minutes, I tell myself. Just until I’m sure it’s really asleep. Just until the old man finishes his tea. Maybe then Henry will come in to see what’s taking me so long. Unless I bleed out before it’s safe to move. I try to keep my eyes open. I gently rub the wiry needles of antelope hair against my cheek. I list all the things I will do differently, if I make it through. I dream up ways of describing how those claws felt tearing through my pant leg and then my flesh. Was it like butter? Too cliché. Like pâté? Too elite. Like a foot stepping into the first mound of freshly fallen snow. Too poetic. Who thinks like that, anyway? It was like exactly what it was. It was like a set of claws tearing through my flesh.

The jungle cat begins to look peaceful. The whole room feels darker than it was a moment ago. The leopard buries its head under its oversized paws. It looks stuffed, except that its whole body swells and falls in gentle rhythm. My leg stops hurting, and the sound of the old man’s humming blends into that immense, insectile orchestra, performing to the metronome of my watch. As I try to move my leg, I wonder what exactly leopards dream about.

And just then there is a thunderclap bang, and the leopard’s body goes limp, right as mine tenses up. Looking up I see myself, bending over me.

“It’s going to be all right,” the other me says.

The old man stands in a haze of gunpowder, a rifle in his hands that is older than I am. Both of them begin yelling for Efua or Akuba to come and help dress my wounds. But they’re both down by the lake, watching old rituals become unforgotten again.

“Here,” the other me says, picking up the bottle of Epiphany. Much of it seems to have spilled out. I want to live. I want to live and let Tina love me. I want to live and find Jeffrey and drag him out of whatever hole he’s crawled down. I want to live and every morning I want to write something that’s worth wrapping my heart in when I die.

“Don’t worry, we’ll get you out of here,” I say to myself.

And then the other me holds the worn glass opening up to my lips and pours.

When I first wake up I usually think I’m still in the hospital, until my eyes come to focus on all the umlauts along the book spines on my nightstand. Someone keeps setting them out there. I might like to read them, if only I could read Icelandic. I find it strange. I find it stranger that I notice the books even before I notice there aren’t tubes coming out of me anymore. I find it strangest of all that I find myself absentmindedly skimming their unreadable pages, wondering what is lost in them. Do they, in their own language, divine the depths of human souls?

The walls here are the same clean white as the walls in my hospital room. Familiar, too, is the ever-present chill; and the small square window, beyond which are rows and rows of great blue pines. I stare at them until I remember that I am in the Laxness-Hallgrímsson Writers’ Colony, in Iceland, and that I have been here for one very cold week already, looking for my old friend, Jeffrey Oakes, who came months ago and has, apparently, disappeared again.