Kristopher Jansma - The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

Einar leads me to the kitchen, where I wash myself off. Then, in the large clean fridge, he locates some skyr —a local dairy product that is somewhere between cheese and yogurt — and hands it to me. He grabs some greenish blood sausage for himself. Einar soon proves to be, by far, the friendliest person I have met in the colony since I arrived.

“Everyone in Iceland wants to be a writer,” he explains to me smugly while we eat. “Like in America how you all want to eat slug poops on TV for money.”

“Hey,” I interrupt, thinking of the daytime sociological atrocities I’d seen on the hospital television. “Some of us actually draw the line at the slugs themselves.”

“We here in Iceland have just three hundred thousand people, and each year we publish one thousand new novels.”

This number seems astounding for any populace, but I have a harder time believing there can be so much to say about this place — which from my window appears to be just an endless, frozen expanse of cold blue trees and snow.

“One book for every three hundred people, every year? That puts even Brooklyn to shame.”

Einar lets out a deep belly laugh and asks me some questions about living in New York City, where I haven’t really lived in years — mostly how I can live there, what with the many heroin addicts and muggings. And I tell him that it isn’t like that so much anymore, and he seems a bit let down. Eventually, the inevitable question comes.

“So how is your writing coming along?” he asks me.

“Quite well,” I lie. How can you confess writer’s block to someone whose countrymen crank out a Library of Alexandria each year? “And you?”

“I wrote seventeen words this morning,” he says proudly. “But I’m a poet. For me that’s very good.”

We share a laugh and then stare out the window and wonder if the weather will ever clear up. The strange light is on again, cutting through the darkness.

“What is that?” I ask, gesturing to it.

“The Friðarsúlan,” he says. “Meaning ‘Imagine Peace Column.’ Yoko Ono built it out on the island of Viðey in memory of John.”

He pauses while I look confused, then adds, “Lennon?”

“Yes, I’m familiar with his work,” I say quickly. “Just didn’t know his crazy widow had built a giant spotlight in the middle of a frozen ocean for him.”

Einar is shocked that this news has not reached America, particularly in the great city where Lennon was shot by one of the many crazies who no longer overrun the place. We’re preoccupied, I explain — what with all the slug poops.

“It runs entirely off of geothermal energy,” he says proudly. “On the side is written ‘Hugsa Sér Frið’ —that’s ‘Imagine Peace’—in twenty-four languages.”

Both of us stare out at the light, which glows bright and steady. It has been snowing ceaselessly for the whole week that I have been here and, even for Iceland, it is apparently untenable. All the roads are closed — the taxi that took me here from the airport ferry drove a snowplow ahead of it and charged me a small fortune. I’m praying the Oakeses will reimburse me, should I locate their son. My mind drifts back to my hospital stay, weeks ago.

One morning I had opened my eyes to find a beautiful older woman in a dark pantsuit sitting by my side. For a moment I’d thought it was my mother, but soon I realized that it was someone else’s mother — Mrs. Pauline Oakes. Not entirely certain that she was not a by-product of my morphine drip, I ventured a hello. Glad to see me awake, she skipped the pleasantries and got straight to the point.

“My father called from Africa, about your… accident. At first we thought he was completely out of his mind. He kept saying Jeffrey had been hurt. But then a nice young man from North Carolina whose family is well known in the telecom business was there, and he confirmed that you were actually just a friend of Jeffrey’s and, well—. Look, let’s just take all that nonsense from the past and leave it there. Close the book, as it were.”

I must have nodded groggily. I barely remembered who I was, let alone who Jeffrey was. Let alone why I’d been in Africa.

“Jeffrey has checked himself in to some writers’ colony in Iceland, and he hasn’t called or written in two months. And, despite the threat of a lawsuit, the caretaker there has refused to respond to me.”

Mr. and Mrs. Oakes were the owners of Oakes International, which imported and exported wines and other luxury foods around the globe, and they had more or less raised Jeffrey in the vineyards of the Loire Valley, the caviar farms of the Black Sea, the Merino sheep pastures of Norwich, and in the finest real estate in all of Manhattan.

“How do you know he’s still there?” I asked.

“ Someone just ordered twelve bottles of the Petit Pineau to the colony,” she said. “The 1998. That’s Jeffrey’s favorite.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” I asked. Maybe she didn’t know that Jeffrey and I hadn’t been on speaking terms in more than ten years, though we’d been quite close before his worldwide success had settled in, and unsettled him.

Mrs. Oakes made a face. “You’re a writer, too, aren’t you?” She said “writer” as if it were approximately one rung beneath sanitation engineer. “I’ll pay you to go there and find my son. If you can persuade Jeffrey to come home, I’ll be quite grateful.”

She said “grateful” in a way that made me feel that there would be even more money involved if I succeeded. When I stared blankly at my swollen, bandaged leg, she coughed and added, “And, seeing as you have no health insurance to speak of, as a sign of good faith, and on the condition you won’t sue my father for any involvement in your injury, my husband has already settled your sizeable hospital bill.”

She got up and gave me a smile that was almost kind, and then she left. For a long time I lay in bed, jamming the buttons on the TV remote that was built into the side rail, scanning endless airwaves. Feisty judges hollered at civil court plaintiffs about unpaid child support. “Real” housewives who appeared to be 90 percent silicone drank and squabbled over their marital troubles. Parents herded their eight, twelve, possibly thirty-seven children about like goats. I thought about Mrs. Oakes, worrying after her son. I thought about my own mother, to whom I hadn’t spoken in years. She did not even know that I had nearly died. She might even be dead herself. How would I know?

Shaking off these sobering thoughts, I half consider asking Einar for a bottle of Brennivín.

When I look back at the table, I notice that both Einar’s plate and mine have been cleared. He is flipping through a small book of poems that he has pulled down from a nearby shelf — even the kitchenette has perhaps a hundred books tucked into its walls.

“Did you clear that? Was someone else in here just now?” I ask, thinking that the elusive Franklin W. Zaff must be close by at last.

Einar shrugs, nonplussed. “The caretaker tries not to distract us. Unless of course it was the elves.”

He smirks slightly at this last statement, and I cannot tell if he is serious. According to the brochure I found, Icelanders are extremely superstitious about what they call “hidden people”—rumored to live underground and inside of rocks. Superstitious to the point where Reykjavik’s new state-of-the-art opera house was carefully constructed so as not to disturb the surrounding bedrock and features a crystalline upper floor resembling the mythical dwellings of the hidden people. Perhaps they hoped to entice a few to come up and check out Le Nozze di Figaro .

“Don’t tell me you believe in that stuff,” I say.