Kristopher Jansma - The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

Out the lobby, past the souvenir plates, I head into the Place d’Armes once more. The old men are back at their checkers. One shouts, “Schach matt!” at the other. Out of the corner of my eye I see the Black Panther and again it seems as though he is also watching me. But I make my way to the used-book cart, where the girl we saw the other day is reading from the Luxembourgish edition of Nothing Sacred .

“Do you speak English?” I ask.

“Englesch?” she replies, shaking her head — no.

“Jeffrey Oakes,” I say, pointing to the book.

She nods and grins. “Frënd?” she asks, pointing to me.

“Yes, friend,” I say. “Old friend.” I think about adding “Only friend” but she won’t understand me, anyway. She’s hyperventilating, and though I’ve never really seen anyone swoon before, I’m pretty sure this is what she is doing.

“Léift?” she asks, pointing to me. She puts her hands over her heart and then puts one onto the book. But I do not understand. “Léift! Léift! Léift!” she keeps crying.

“Love?” I say, pointing at the book. “Yes! Léift! Multo … grande léift! ”

Immediately she proceeds to gush in a torrent of Luxembourgish. She shows me her phone, and the photo of Jeffrey that she took. She’s posted it to a website called The Oakes Literary Society International, or TOLSI, for short, and there are 3,479 replies. From “hottentot19” and “GurlyGurl” and “WildeOne” and “echolalia” and “MrSmudgyMan.” They demand that she find out where he’s staying. What he’s doing. If he’s crazy. Some squeal in abbreviations. Some, more erudite, quote his passages. The critics are immediately fired upon by the loyalists. Some girl posts a photo of a tattoo she’s gotten on the small of her back that’s etched with NOTHING SACRED. It’s the ninth circle of Jeffrey’s Inferno, on a four-inch touch screen with 4G speed.

I clap my hands and turn to the girl. “You can meet him. Sunday night.”

“Sonndes?” she confirms. “Owes?”

“Sunday. Night. Tell everyone. Sonndes owes ,” I say, waving my hands out toward the world and then miming typing onto a phone with my thumbs.

“Wou?” she asks, looking about, her fingers already flying over the tiny keys.

“There,” I say, pointing toward the palace. “There.”

• • •

As I enter our suite, the smell of smoke tickles my nostrils and reminds me that I haven’t bought Jeffrey cigarettes as I had promised. But it isn’t tobacco I smell burning. When I push open the door I see Jeffrey, standing in his bathrobe, in front of the roaring fireplace. It takes a moment to connect the open closet door to the open suitcase on the floor to the open wine box on the counter. To the stack of paper in Jeffrey’s arms.

“I thought I’d left a few cigarettes in your suitcase!” he screams, throwing two or three more pages into the fire. “This is supposed to be buried under an avalanche. Blown out of the fucking tower by the Arctic winds and scattered halfway to Greenland by now! Humpback whales should be picking it out of their… their… those things with the… Christ! ” He hurls furious fistfuls of pages into the fire, stopping only when the flames surge up so high that they consume the bottom of the mantel.

“Baleens!” I shout, trying to wrench the papers away from him.

“Yes!” he cries, as he kicks me back. “Thank you! Baleens! Fucking Moby Dick should be flossing with this… this… travesty !”

With that he trips on the edge of the rug and the rest of the pages mushroom up into the air before sinking down. Jeffrey sits up in the middle of the paper sea, his pages settling like cresting waves that threaten to drown him. He just sits there, as if to let them. Wading in, I sit down beside him and help him to catch his breath.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “I’ve lost too many books of my own. I just needed to save it.”

“It’s all just fucking nonsense ,” he sobs.

“It’s not,” I insist. “Not all of it. There’s something in here. Something incredible. For the first hundred pages or so I couldn’t see it. But then I started to notice certain things — repeating. There’s a boy, right? A boy, and he’s very gifted at… I don’t know, there aren’t any c ’s, but you call it—” I riffle through pages, but to find one in the midst of all this would be like reaching into the ocean and grabbing out a fish. If it isn’t ash already. I try to remember it, exactly. “A… a… ‘game of slanted moves’… ‘the oldest game that journeyed from the East, played in the shade of sphinxes… ’” Jeffrey listens, breathing heavily. And then — a snow-in-Atlanta miracle — I lay my hand on the page I am searching for. “Here! Here here here! ‘A game of red and blak, not blak and not-blak’—you meant black , right? And ‘not-blak’ is white , but there were no c or w keys — you’re talking about checkers, and chess, right?… ‘A game of red and blak, not blak and not-blak, for what in this sphere of land and sea is ever all blak or all not, but all is either the dark, dark death or the bold blushing of blood, blue through the skin but underneath it is red, all red, all of ours red, even the bluest blue blood is red, from George to Ferdinand to Louis to Tutankhamen to Buddha to Genghis and every Emperor from the Land of the Rising Sun have been red, red blooded, and all eventually taken by the blak, yes they all played the game, all made their slanted moves over the board, they hopped their rounds, they took them, they arrived at the farthest edge and said, in a thousand tongues, they said, unendingly,

King Me!

Rey Me!

Roy de Moi!

“You wrote that last part in by hand — how do you know these things?… ‘And this, this is the phrase on the lips of the boy as he takes the last round of the man his father has hired to train him… ’ I mean, it’s checkers! Yeah? It’s all about this boy who plays checkers and… well, help me find the next part, why don’t you? It’s got to be here somewhere… ”

Jeffrey’s gone quiet. The fire has died down a bit. The pages lie flat now, all around us, a still white pond. I pick up one page, and then another, and try fitting them together. I wait for Jeffrey to tell me that I’ve gone mad — that he never so much as thought of a single checker in all the time he was in Iceland. But then, slowly, Jeffrey lifts one page and holds it up against the light from the fireplace. He turns it this way, and that, as if not sure which end is up. Then he takes up another and, scanning the end of the first, matches it to the top of the second, and holds them together between his fingertips.

“Page numbers, page numbers,” he mutters. “My kingdom for fucking page numbers.”

• • •

It takes nearly every available hour between that one and Sunday, but we’re not much for sleeping. At first we take breaks only for room service and so Jeffrey can smoke in the window and watch the men playing checkers. The Black Panther barely ever leaves the Place Guillaume II. At all hours we see him there, looking up at us. Watching. Jeffrey makes faces at him from the safety of the room, but only because he has me to send for more cigarettes. But by the third day, Jeffrey has stopped doing even this. His sovereign addiction is replaced by his very first — the steady rush of pen against paper.