The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (30 page)

“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.

Einar shrugs. “Most Icelanders don’t believe, really. We just don’t
not
believe. Some of us think of them as a mischievous force, not little things with pointy ears.”

I scoff and mutter, “Say what you want about reality TV, but at least in America we don’t believe in elves.”

“Oh,” Einar says wryly. “Well. You win.”

Figuring I may as well take my chance, I lean in closely and ask Einar if he knows another American, my age, staying at the colony, named Jeffrey Oakes.

He arches his pieced eyebrows and leans in. “Jeffrey Oakes?” He whispers even though there is no one else in the room—except perhaps the elves. “He’s
here
?”

I nod. “At least he was here. I’m sort of looking for him.”

Einar shakes his head. “I haven’t seen him. But the caretaker’s office is over at the carriage house. Zaff’ll tell you what room to find your friend in.”

I wince, looking out the window. The dark carriage house appears to be a half mile away, up a snowy hill that I’m not sure I can climb, given my leg.

Einar invites me to stop by his room later to try a little Brennivín. The lining of my throat prickles at the thought of some new, strange nectar of the writing gods. But even as I promise to join him, the smell of Molly’s caraway-tainted puke rises in my nostrils again, and I have second thoughts. Einar goes back to round his word count up to an even twenty for the day, and I return to my own room. There are six more books on my nightstand and my sheets have been changed. My typewriter has been reloaded with paper and my morning’s stalled draft has been placed on a pile with the dozens of similar drafts from previous mornings. I begin to put on every warm item of clothing I own. I decide I am going to make it out to the carriage house and find the man in charge of this exceedingly strange colony—and perhaps, even, Jeffrey. If I die in the attempt at least I won’t have to finish my novel.

Reaching the carriage house seems even more impossible as soon as I am outside in the brutal elements. Even bundled in two coats, I feel the glacial cold freezing the marrow inside my bones. It is still dark out and the air carries the faint smell of a distant icy sea. My injury forces my steps to be deliberate as I traverse the waist-high snowbanks that cover the path. As I tunnel up the hill, I wonder how Franklin W. Zaff could possibly be doing any caretaking without maintaining a better path through these mounds of ice. The edges are so high that I can’t see the cabin after a while. But I keep a bearing on that strange light in the sky, as it reflects off snow that is falling steadily, many miles away.

My leg is throbbing and I think I am barely halfway there. I turn around and see that the walls of my path have collapsed in places, and it will be hardly easier to get back down again. There is a new, duller pain in my fingertips and toes that I suspect vaguely as probably frostbite. I wonder what would happen if I lost my fingers. Screw the toes. I could live without toes. But without fingers I couldn’t hit the keys on the typewriter or grip a pen. At first I think this may be some sort of sweet relief—a reprieve from writing the same scene over and over. But the writing over and over isn’t really a sign of madness. It’s the only thing letting the madness out. With grim certainty I decide that if I feel a finger snapping off I’ll do the only sensible thing and lie down and die. I wonder if they’d find me—in six months or so—after the thaw. I wonder if they’d understand why I’d given up.

After a few minutes I carve my way into a small rocky outcropping. Just as I’m about to go around it, I see that I can get on top of it. And this gets my head above the drifts. Then I can see it—off to what I think is the southeast—a pillar of white light rising out of the choppy sea, just past the horizon. I forget my pain in moments. There is something absolutely insane yet incredible about it—a memorial built in the middle of nowhere at all, crying “Imagine Peace” to the descendants of last millennium’s Vikings. It is the sort of singular, absurd devotional that only great love can inspire. This is what I am trying to build each morning with my steam train of words. Something everlasting for a love that didn’t last. When I have my breath back, I press on, carving my way steadily to the door of the old carriage house.

I let myself in and find, to my extreme disappointment, that the lights are out and no one is there. As I enter I stumble roughly over a wooden mailing crate that has been set just beside the door, and nearly fly headlong toward a sleekly modern desk. I catch myself on its edge, and though my leg flares angrily in pain and I knock over quite a few papers, I manage to avoid smashing my head. The room is lit only by the faint glow of Yoko’s distant light.

“Is anyone here?” I shout, but there is no answer. “Anyone at all?”

Looking for something—a guest book, maybe, or even a sign-in sheet—I carefully stack up the papers I have knocked over. All of them are written in indecipherable Icelandic, except for the return addresses on two unopened letters, which lie in a pile of unopened mail by the door—all several weeks old from the postmarks. One of them is a crisp, clean envelope from the offices of Emmetz, Moscowitz, and Bing. With only slight trepidation, I open it and find inside a strongly worded threat of pending legal action, on the behalf of one Mrs. Pauline Oakes, that her son be produced immediately. Slowly I begin to suspect that no one has been in this office for some time.

The second letter confirms these fears. Franklin W. Zaff, of 28 Bistlethwaite Court, Herefordshire, UK, writes the following:

To Whom It May Concern at the Laxness-Hallgrímsson Writers’ Colony:

Unfortunately I will be unable to take over the position of winter curator, due to the unexpected moving-up of the publication date of my new novel, THE FINDER’S KEEPER, which as you know was not due out until the coming summer. My editor at Haslett & Grouse requires me suddenly for book signings, readings, guest lectures, etc., and I feel it would be in my best interests, professionally, to make myself available. I do realize, naturally, that this is on somewhat short notice, and I hope that a suitable replacement can be found before the current curator departs.

With heavy heart,

Franklin W. Zaff

Crumpling the letter and tossing it aside, I wonder if I might be able somehow to gather every existing copy of
The Finder’s Keeper
and burn Franklin W. Zaff on a pyre built out of them. If the postmarks are to be believed, there has been no one in these offices for three weeks at least. The bulk of the writers remaining have been either too self-absorbed to notice that they’ve been utterly abandoned or too terrified to face this possibility.

Not sure how to proceed, I sit there for a few more minutes, and soon my eye wanders to the packing slip on the large wooden crate that I nearly somersaulted over upon my entry. In the dim light I can just make out the familiar logo of Oakes International. I turn the box and see, to my delight, that the shipment is for “Mr. Anton Prishibeyev. The Suite at the Top of the Bell Tower. Laxness-Hallgrímsson Writers’ Colony, Akranes, Iceland.”

I stare down at the name for a moment even before I recognize the alias I gave to Jeffrey once, in a piece of fiction written a lifetime ago, but once I do, it brings a very warming smile.

The problem now, however, is that the Bell Tower is all the way back down the hill. And my leg already feels like someone has been sawing it against a pine tree for an hour. My eyes fall onto the thin, wooden desk and suddenly I have an idea. Clearing it off with wild swipes of my arms, I invert the desk and lay it on the snow outside the door. It sinks into the snow only a little; it is of such light, modern construction. Unfortunately, when I throw my emaciated weight onto my makeshift sled, it is not enough to propel us down the path. For a moment I lie there, feeling the falling snow covering me, and I ponder the end. If this is it, I think, then I’m at least breaking into Jeffrey’s wine. I reach down to pry off the lid, and then—inspiration.

With my last bit of strength, I lift the box of wine onto the sled and prepare to make a special delivery. This time when I leap into the sled, it inches forward, and I gain a little momentum, and then a little more, and soon I am speeding downhill through a sheet of white spray like an eager child. I can’t think of the last time I was so happy.

At the bottom finally, I crane my neck to the top of the old bell tower, peering through the falling snow. Are there faint signs of flickering light in the small dark cutaways? I can’t tell if it is a trick of the darkness.

As I climb the stairs slowly, propping the box of wine up against the handrail, I wonder what I will find at the top. I try not to make assumptions based on the empty Brennivín bottles that I keep stumbling upon, which go skipping off down the spiral staircase and shatter fantastically on the flagstone below. But I brace myself for the increasing likelihood that Jeffrey is soaked through like a ladyfinger in a caraway tiramisu. He could be rocking gently in a corner, talking to himself—the result of months without any medication. Or, considering how it gets colder and colder with every foot that I raise, will I find only a Jeffrey Oakes–flavored Popsicle? With each step my leg throbs harder and the sound of typing grows louder.

The staircase seems never ending, and after what feels like a mile, I collapse onto one of the frigid steps. I feel the sweat on my pants’ seat freezing to the stone. Not for the first time, I think about what little I’d be leaving behind, if I was to give up and let myself pass out in the cold, cold tower. Hypothermia has me in its grip—all that remains is for me to let it take me. What did anyone really leave behind, I wonder. A family? A home? All I’d ever wanted to remain in my wake was a book. A simple, stupid mass of words. And I’d failed, even at that.

The hammering of typewriter arms against an inky strip echoes down the tower. I seize the box of wine and force myself up against the wall. The typing stops. I feel the fabric rip out of my pants. It remains, iced to the step. A roller is rolled; a sheet extracted and replaced. I command one leg, and then the other, to lift. The typing begins anew.