Kristopher Jansma - The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

Immediately upon checking in to the hotel, we’d walked down through the sunny Old City to the flamboyantly spired Grand Ducal Palace and introduced ourselves to the guards. They wore olive green coats with red-and-blue braided regalia and snug black berets. With the machine guns strapped across their chests, they vaguely resembled a pair of militant parking attendants.

“Jo!” Jeffrey had said. “Gudde Moien! Ech hu grad een immensen Huttkar!”

The guards had stared at Jeffrey’s head curiously until I discovered in the phrase book that he’d just informed them he’d bought an incredible hat.

“You are tourists?” one had asked.

“Tourists!” Jeffrey had laughed. “Good God, no! We’re actually very old friends of Her Highness, the Princess. If you would just buzz on up and see if she’s available… ”

One of the guards had lifted his bulky black walkie-talkie and spoken in clipped Luxembourgish. Jeffrey had appeared satisfied, until seven more parking attendants arrived to remove us.

“You don’t understand! I’ve known her since she was thirteen years old! We went to school together! In America? Ah-MER-Ik-KAH . For chrissakes, this one’s slept with her more times than you all have been invaded by Germany.”

I thanked any and all available gods — including the one who had toppled the Tower of Babel — that this last bit seemed to get lost in translation.

“We demand an audience with the princess!” Jeffrey had insisted angrily.

“You are… ”—the guard had begun, communing quickly with his brethren to be sure he had the English correct—“… not expected.”

“I’m Jeffrey Oakes!” he had cried as we were escorted away. “I’ve never been expected in my entire life!”

Our attempt to storm the palace had not exactly gone swimmingly.

Finally, Jeffrey slides off the windowsill and announces, “I’m going to shower.”

“You’ve showered twice today,” I say as I move to the corner desk, where I have a stack of hotel stationery and a bundle of pens. “Why don’t you try writing something?”

He laughs until it turns into coughing — fainter, but still with an echo of Iceland. I listen to him bang about inside, under the crackle of the news on Radio Télévision Luxembourg. I sit down to write. Each day I write out all that I’ve already written and try to gain enough momentum to push through.

Her Imperial Majesty Mrs. J-- and the other ladies leave the room and I am alone for the first time since early this morning. It was still dark out, when I first opened my eyes. Those first few seconds, I did not even remember my own name. My whole universe was simply snowflakes falling lightly onto the evergreens, the yellow rock of moon, high above the encroaching clouds. When I was eight, it snowed on Christmas morning while we were in Atlanta with Grandmother. It was the only time I ever heard my mother call anything a miracle.

Seconds passed and I remembered that I was in Chiyoda, in Tokyo, at the Fukiage Palace. That today would be my wedding day. That I was about to marry Haru, my prince. Literally. That my grandmother is dead and that Christmases are over and there are no miracles and that Atlanta is on the other side of this great sphere of rock.

Now, hours later, I am alone, sitting in front of the dressing-table mirror, caking white powder onto my face. The ladies have shown me how to cover my face with the bintsuke-abura , an oily wax mask that holds the powder — used by geishas and Imperial Princesses of the Yamato Dynasty alike for centuries upon centuries. With each dab the excess powder explodes and drifts off slowly through the dead air.

I stop where I’ve been stopping for weeks. I can’t manage another word. I flip through the book on Japan and the copy of An Actor Prepares that I borrowed from the Oakes family library; I push down on the French press that room service has brought me. I pick at the flaking spirals of a croissant; I chew on the only white sliver of fingernail I have left. But I am still stuck. No amount of caffeine seems able to push me past that powder, drifting slowly in the dead air.

What goes on inside her head?

For a while I listen to the quiet of the sleepy medieval city outside. Then, finally hearing the sound of shower water running, I push my chair back and cross to the front hall. There, in the bottom of the hall closet, in the bottom of my heaviest suitcase, I withdraw a wooden box, filled with manuscript pages that do not belong to me.

• • •

After his third shower of the day, I manage to coax Jeffrey down into the neighboring Place d’Armes for a stroll. He’s run low on cigarettes, anyway. Charming blue umbrellas extend out from a few cafés and beer halls, frequented by Luxembourgers at all hours. Rippling in an ever-present breeze, pleasant flags hang along the medieval archways. Men in puffy shirts sell flowers and used books out of wheeled carts, which they push over wobbly cobblestones. One imagines there must be a dedicated Office of Quaintness, dispatching pudgy burghers in velvet tunics all around town to keep covering the bricks with moss.

The travel sites all describe Luxembourg as a fairy tale come to life, but it feels less like a Grimm land of trolls and big bad wolves, and more like Disneyland Paris. Luxembourg is the wealthiest country in all of Europe, and the Old City is overrun by the tax-sheltered children of eBay and Skype executives, moving in Pied Piper phalanxes with their phones out and thumbs flying — casting spells out into the ethernet. Jeffrey and I dodge them as they trample by in their hiply untied sneakers, their ironic and yet inaccurate THIS IS NOT A T-SHIRT T-shirts. They buzz like flies around the McDonald’s and the Pizza Hut, although we have learned in time that they favor the Chi-Chi’s Mexican restaurant. Meanwhile, their fathers bark madly on Bluetooths at Brasserie Plëss and stuff themselves full of Grillwurscht sausages and plum quetschentaarts at La Cristallerie. Which fairy tale these characters feature in I cannot recall.

Jeffrey lingers a moment by some men playing checkers. He pretends to be fiddling with his watch and not examining the boards, but I can see his eyes jumping along with a red checker in zigzags, all the way across the board to the edge.

“Schachmatt!” one old man says smugly. Jeffrey smiles as the other spits on the ground and neatly places a second piece atop the first, transforming it into a king.

“You used to have a board but no pieces,” I remind Jeffrey.

“I played when I was a kid,” he answers. I wait for him to go on. “Of course, chess is supposed to be the better game, but I always found it too… ”

He trails off, searching for the right finish.

“Want to play a round?” I ask, taking a seat at an empty table. Jeffrey tries to pretend he’s not interested.

“There aren’t any pieces,” he complains.

“Here,” I say, reaching over to a neighboring café table and grabbing a little bowl full of sugar packets. “You can be the white packets and I’ll be the pink.”

Jeffrey snorts, even as he sits down and begins to fluidly set up the board. “Supposed to be red and black pieces. That’s why I liked it as a kid. Chess was all black and white. I always got stuck being the bad guys. I’m going to cream you, by the way.”

I smile and, as promised, he proceeds to cream me. He guides his packets in effortless slanted motions, crossing the board with ease and then, once his packets had been kinged, bringing them zigzagging back across the board again.