The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (2 page)

“You get any bigger yet? You ready to put one of those links back in?”

“I wrote a book,” I said meekly, as I held it out.

“So you have,” he said, squinting down at it for a moment. His hands were shaking and he kept sort of clearing his throat.

“You could read it,” I explained, as I pushed it toward him.

He lifted it up, made a little show of admiring the title and the cover art, and released a familiar fluttery whistle. “I’ll take a look at it as soon as I’m done with my paper. One hour, son. All right?”

I agreed, happy to see him smiling. “A book,” he laughed as he set it down. “Sounds like someone wants to live forever.”

I didn’t know what he meant by this but I didn’t care. I rushed off again through the concourse, giddy with pleasure, and I did not stop running until I reached Emerson Books and snatched three candy bars while Mr. Humnor pretended not to look. I camped out there, beneath the rotating rack of romance novels, watching the little hands on my wristwatch twisting slowly around, the little ticking of the escapement seeming to grow louder and louder.

When an hour had finally passed, I rushed out of the store and followed a crowd of passengers to the other end of the concourse. When I got there I was surprised to see a crowd massed around Mr. Bjorn’s shop. Ms. Barlow and Mrs. De Santos and Mrs. Nederhoffer were all there, but Mr. Bjorn was not. His high chair was on the ground, on its side. His newspaper lay in a heap beside it.

“Old guy’s ticker just stopped,” I heard a rough voice say. It was a policeman—a blue pudgy ball with a buzz cut—and he was holding
my
book in his hand. And he was laughing. Not like Mr. Humnor laughed. Laughing as though he thought something was awful. And all of my daytime minders were just standing there, letting him laugh.

“Was this the old guy’s?” the officer asked, that horrible smile still on his face.

“No,” said Mrs. Nederhoffer. “It’s just this little boy’s. His mother’s one of the flight attendants, and she leaves him here all day like it’s some sort of day-care center.”

“We all sort of look after him,” Mrs. De Santos chimed in. “Honestly, I live in fear every day that some nut will run off with him.”

Ms. Barlow agreed, loudly, that if one ever did, it wouldn’t be on her chest.

The officer laughed—a hacking, barking sort of laugh. “No father?”

This time the ladies laughed—their cackles were high and excited—as if there were nothing they liked to laugh about more. They all began talking at once, and I heard them say bad words before I could hold my watch up to my ears. Soon I couldn’t hear anything but the ticking. I stood there in a dark forest of strangers’ knees, listening to second after second, escaping. Then with one careless motion, the policeman chucked my book into the nearest trash can. None of the ladies even noticed.

I started running away, back down the concourse. At first I meant to hide back at Mr. Humnor’s, but when I got there it still wasn’t far enough. Leaping down the escalators, the concourse rose up around me, and below were the great snakelike conveyor belts that slowly ferried luggage to waiting crowds. I kept on running, out past the big orange car rental sign and through the revolving glass doors. I ran down the sidewalk past the taxicabs and the luggage collectors in their red caps. I didn’t know where I was going or where I wanted to go. I wanted to go wherever my mother was, or wherever Mr. Bjorn had gone. I wanted to go where all the seconds went.

I stopped when I saw a sign pointing inside again.
TERMINAL A
it said. Timidly, I went inside and up some more escalators to the concourse level. Finally, I would see it. Terminal A. And maybe I would find Mr. Bjorn, winding all the timepieces backward, with the same serious smile. The little round tables were the same. The linoleum floor was the same. The skylights high above me were the same. But there was no Emerson Books. There was no Phil’s Coffee. There was no W. W. Gould’s, and there was no Ten-Minute Timepiece Repair. There was no Mr. Bjorn.

Finally, I sat down on the ground under a long row of clocks. There were ten of them—each exactly the same except for a little sign that said the name of a place. Some of these places I’d read about, like Paris, where Xavier and Yvette had come from. And some I’d heard of, like Mexico City, where Mrs. De Santos was born. These were places that were very far away, I knew. And they all had different times from the time on my watch. In Mexico City, it was still an hour earlier. If I were there, I figured, and it was an hour earlier, then Mr. Bjorn would still be around.

I sat there listening to the clocks’ little ticking noises. Inside each were little gears like the ones inside my watch, struggling and turning. I listened to the seconds escaping. And I knew then that each second was just escaping to a different clock, somewhere even farther away, and that the seconds just went on and on escaping like that, forever.

• • •

So. That is the story of how I lost my very first book. I’ve lost three others since—a novel, a novella, and a biography. The first is disintegrating steadily at the bottom of a black lake. The second is in the hands of a woman whom I love and will never see again. The third is in a dusty African landfill, wrapped in the bloody tatters of my tweed coat, my gold watch still in the pocket.

Only fragments remain, which I’ve carried with me around the world and back again. Sitting here in Terminal B, setting them beside one another, I’ve been trying to get them to add up to something true. I’m staring at the margins between them—just an inch on each side—but the distance may as well be the Grand Canyon. Yet I feel certain that somewhere in this empty space, between my lies and fictions, is the truth.

It occurs to me, as I finish writing this, that perhaps these surviving pieces aren’t so different from those clocks in Terminal A. In each of them you can see what the time would be, but only somewhere else. Between them all, you can, if you wish, determine what time it is here.

• • •

These stories are all true, but only somewhere else.

What Was Lost

1

The Debutante

What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

—LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN,
TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS

The autumn of my sixteenth birthday, I worked after school and on Sundays, serving
apfelstrudel
and
einspänners
at Ludwig’s Café in the Raleigh Museum of Art. Sundays were the best days for tips, because all the patrons getting out of church were feeling simultaneously undercaffeinated and overcharitable. Before the bells were done ringing, all the most affluent ladies in North Raleigh were rushing over from Methodist Saints United, wearing hats that my buddy Rodrigo said ought to be in the abstract art exhibits. But the real reason I looked forward to Sundays was that the
Terpsichorean Society held its debutante classes in the event space across the hall, and while the well-heeled mothers lost track of time gossiping at Ludwig’s beneath the golden
Portrait of Colette Marsh
, Rodrigo and I would go back to the storeroom window and stare at the debutantes.

After their class ended, the debutantes would line up in the narrow space between the café’s dumpsters, where their mothers couldn’t see them, and pass Camels carefully, so as not to fleck ash on their white rehearsal dresses. When they saw us looking they tossed cigarette butts at the window, but they couldn’t do anything too loudly or they’d risk blowing their cover. It was the end of 1993, and we knew we’d become adults inside of a new century—and there these girls were, being trained for the last one. Mostly they ignored us until Rodrigo tapped on the window to warn them that the mothers were calling for their checks and that they had better hurry back inside.

Some Sundays Rodrigo just looked and some Sundays he called out to Suzanne White, the tall girl from our school whom he swore he would marry. Together, he claimed, they would breed a superior race of half–Puerto Rican/half–Southern Belle babies. For my part, I slunk down, hoping that none of them would see me in my feathered cap and olive lederhosen, and pretending that I just happened to be passing my break reading
The Woman in White
near the window.

“We were supposed to read that for school or something?” Rodrigo would ask.

“Extra credit,” I’d lie.

The truth was that I liked to read—especially old books about eccentric heiresses and menacing counts and guys with names like Sir Percival Glyde, but I’d learned long ago that this was a preference best kept to myself.

“What is
wrong
with you?” Rodrigo would ask. “Don’t you want to look at these fine ladies?” He gave his cap a stylish slant and let one suspender fall off his shoulder, as if he wore this sort of thing especially for them.

“Sure,” I’d say, “I just don’t want them to look at
me
.”

“Well, how are they ever going to talk to you unless they know you’re looking?”

“I
don’t
want them to talk to me.
They
don’t want to talk to me. They don’t even want to talk to
you
.”

Rodrigo’s eyes would bug as if I’d just tried to convince him that the sun would burn out tomorrow. “Hell
yes
they want to talk to me.”

“We clean tables at an Austrian coffeehouse, in a city whose residents generally think
Austria
is where kangaroos come from. Come on. Your mother is a housekeeper and your father mows lawns.”

“My mom runs a cleaning service. My dad owns a landscaping company. We’re entrepreneurs, jerk.”

“But they’re
debutantes
,” I’d remind him. “They’re going to go to Princeton and Duke and marry inbred trust-funders with yachts who play polo and shoot skeet.”

“That’s pretty funny, coming from Mr. Ten-Under-Par.”

Rodrigo liked to tease me for playing golf on the high school team. In truth, being on the team did my reputation more harm than good. I loved to play, but the other boys on the team all hated me, because I was better than them and because my mother was a flight attendant and didn’t belong to the Briar Creek Country Club like their mothers did. My father was a man she’d met seventeen years ago, during a layover in Newark. Together they’d gotten swept up in the heady, romantic winter of 1976.

“So, they marry Mr. Trust Fund,” Rodrigo would say, cracking open the window so the girls could hear. “But they’ll be home all day making sweet, sweet love to me!”

Suzanne would glare, and as the other girls pretended to be shocked, she’d flip her perfectly manicured middle finger straight up in the air, and smile.

Meanwhile, I’d angle one of the silver baking trays toward the window so that I could catch the reflection of Betsy Littleford, the only other girl there from our school. A silent blonde with ice blue eyes, Betsy Littleford never smiled. Not as far as I could remember. Not even all the way back to the fifth grade when I’d first seen her.

“That’s funny,” she’d say flatly whenever some teacher tried to coax even the slightest giggle from her with a joke in class. “That’s really very funny.”

Rodrigo called her “Stepford Betsy” and liked to theorize that inside she was just all Disney animatronics. He loudly speculated about someday finding out for himself, but I dreamed of simply someday making her smile. Just once.

And I’d never have done it if her brother hadn’t gotten his skull caved in during our match against Asheville late that fall.

It started on the seventh hole, when Mark White had sliced a shot deep into the woods, and both teams wound up shivering for ten minutes in the chilly November air, watching the golden leaves spiraling down from the trees, until the judges went in after him and caught him sipping a little airport bottle of vodka. Our team took a double penalty and Coach Holland angrily sent White to clean everyone’s clubs. When I, then, had the audacity to hit a beautiful two-hundred-and-ten-yard drive on the eighth hole, Mark dumped my golf clubs into a water hazard “by accident.” I didn’t really care. The other boys had Titleists and Mizunos; mine were just an odd mix of yard-sale finds, half rusted already at purchase. But while I quietly fished them out, the real trouble began.

Billy Littleford, our captain, enjoyed putting his friends in their places, especially Mark. Everyone in our school adored Billy—even me. In movies, the king of the school was always a tyrant, taking lunch money and breaking hearts with reckless abandon. But our king, Billy, was as kind as he was suave. He didn’t stand for anyone picking on either the quiet kids, like me, or the loudmouths like Rodrigo. Once, when I was short a dollar at the front of an impatient lunch line, and in front of everyone was about to put my burrito back under the warming lamps, Billy Littleford strolled up suddenly to spot me a five. “Thanks for getting me those cigarettes before the game on Saturday,” he said earnestly, though I’d done no such thing and he did not smoke. “I’ll pay you the rest by tomorrow, I promise.”

If Billy ruled our school, he did so benevolently, and for this he was beloved by teachers and classmates alike. Hence, Billy was forever able to charm his way out of whatever trouble he got himself into. That afternoon on the golf course, he’d seen Mark dump my clubs in the water. He waited until Mark was hovering near a sand trap, and then Billy tackled Mark headfirst into the sand, kissing him, deeply on the mouth.

“Oh, Mark, you’re such a stud!” he shouted. Both teams erupted in laughter.

When Mark began pushing him away, Billy clutched at his broken heart. “But
Mark
!” he cried. “You said we could finally
tell
people!” As Billy minced around in fake tears, even some of the judges were laughing.

Mark spat sand out and wiped at his eyes. Half blind, he grabbed a rake from the edge of the trap. We were supposed to use these rakes to smooth out the sand, like they were little Zen gardens; Mark tried to use his to smooth out Billy’s face. Billy dodged the swinging rake and began to bob and weave around the course like a cartoon boxer. Grinning boyishly at the laughing Asheville players, Billy did not realize he was weaving directly into the backswing of their teammate, who was warming up for the ninth hole. The boy from Asheville brought his 3-iron out of the swing, clean through an imaginary ball, and straight back down into the side of Billy’s head.