The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (37 page)

The sun is rising fast in the east behind us, but we are faster. Everything stays dark, as if the night itself were trying to take longer, so I can finish. I write until the instructions come to put my table in the upright position. Then, as we descend, I keep on going, pressing hard against the back of the seat in front of me. Just before our wheels touch the ground, I, at last, am finished.

Careful not to crease the folds of my white
shiromuku
wedding robes, I sit down again and reach into my bag one last time. From inside a silk-lined cavity I withdraw a small painting, about the size of a page in a book, of a woman rendered entirely in gold. The fluid lines, the precise strokes, can only have been painted by someone imbued with a great and unabating passion. In the glint of the woman’s breasts I can trace the serene gaze of its unknown artist. And just to the left of this there is a small smudge—a faint oily spot left behind by the pressing of a single finger.

It took me some time to find the portrait, on loan to a private collection at a North Carolina art museum. When the owners noticed the finger smudge, they were aghast, and offered to lower the price or have it professionally restored. But I would not allow it. I want the smudge, I’d said. Get rid of everything else if you want. It’s the smudge I want.

I stare at this single, oily spot as I have every night before going on stage. And after a few moments I am prepared. I rise from my seat by the dressing mirrors and adjust my wedding robes one last time. I pass through the doors of the dressing room and I am on a stage. The curtain has fallen and I can hear the roar of the crowd building, steadily, like a madness. The snow is still drifting down in the dark space before me. Up in the catwalks, some stagehands scurry with last-minute tasks. I am my role. The curtain stirs gently in the draft. And when it goes up, I will feel that one face—those two eyes—that gaze I must avoid all night. But I will feel those eyes watching, every moment, knowing I can never look back into them, because they would undo me.

The wait is over now. The curtain begins to rise.

Terminus

“Lowly faithful, banish fear, / Right onward drive unharmed; / The port, well worth the cruise, is near / And every wave is charmed.”

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “TERMINUS”

Here again,
she tells herself. She reaches the top of the escalator, yanking her suitcase by its taped handle to keep it from catching in the mechanism. The sides of her case are freshly smudged with red sub-Saharan dust. This same dust is caught in the lengths of her auburn hair and pressed into the pale swirls of her fingertips. Just as it had been the last time she’d passed through this very same airport terminal.
Here again,
she tells herself,
and again empty-handed.

Through a barrage of static, the speakers above her head announce, “Boarding will . . . in just a moment for . . . two thirty-seven to New York City.”

She peers quickly around Terminal B for a clock but cannot locate one anywhere. She certainly does not notice him, over at the farthest table—the man fussing about with stacks of pages: dividing them into parts, ordering, reordering, deleting, stetting. Hesitatingly he scribbles question marks onto the wide, clean margins, branding them with each of his infinite doubts. She doesn’t see how aggravated and nervous he is, or how completely exhausted. Everything that was inside of him has been emptied except the overwhelming fear that what’s been emptied is nothing special. He thought that he would be much surer by this point. He knows that there is so much missing—so much that he’s lost and will never be able to find. He worries that perhaps they are all the wrong words. He thinks that perhaps they are all in the wrong order. He wonders if perhaps those who read them won’t be able to see all that they should.

But really he is lying only to himself, again. Really, his fear is just the opposite. Really, he’s worried that maybe they
will
see—all the terrible things that he has done and has been. He’s thinks that he has changed his spots—he’s sure he has—but now everything is in there: the lies he’s told and the truths he’s invented.

But she doesn’t notice him. She’s still pacing up and down the terminal, looking for a clock, but there are none to be found. Not near the Emerson Books. Not across the corridor by Phil’s Coffee Hub, or W. W. Gould’s Good Eats, or the Jewels, Jewels, Jewels! kiosk. She knows only that it is far too early in the morning, but that to her it feels like the depth of night. She hates taking the red-eye back to the city. She hates arriving into its jubilant, awakening arms feeling so deeply burned out. She continues, legs cramped and stiff, the little wheel on her bag squealing incessantly.

The bag’s wheel had a bad encounter with a busted step at the old man’s house—the axis knocked a few degrees off balance when she was racing inside to try to catch the end of his estate auction. She’d been so sad to hear he’d passed. She’d never even gotten to meet the great Jeremiah; she’d never been allowed. And after so much anticipation, she’d shown up very, very late. Kojo’s rusted Hyundai had blown a tire, hours earlier, and she had been forced to wait out there in the miserable heat while he walked to the nearest village to scrounge up a replacement. By the time she’d gotten inside the old man’s house, nearly everything had already been sold. She’d soon spotted an editor from Sandford Books, locking up a briefcase filled with yellowed pages. Early stories? Diaries? Letters? She still doesn’t know. Like the rest of the world, she will have to wait and wonder and see.

She continues to scour the walls of Terminal B—she thinks,
What sort of backwoods airport has no goddamn clocks?
There had been ten of them, all in a shiny row, back in the far-nicer Terminal A.
You’ll be back in true civilization soon,
she reminds herself. But then a second thought hits her.
By lunchtime you’ll be sitting in Haslett’s office, trying to explain how you—the only one who had been out to the damned Oakes Mines & Estate before—got scooped for the literary find of the decade.
She dreams about rolling herself a perfect little cigarette, but she does not want to go back outside and risk missing her flight. People are already piling up at the gate, though the attendants are not letting anyone board yet. She thinks she might have a tall glass of gin instead, with parasite-free ice cubes in it. It’s early, sure, but she is still on Africa time.

She stops in her tracks and reaches for the side pocket of her purse. From inside it she removes a watch. It is bright gold and quite elegant—but far too big for her wrist. It belonged to the man who broke her heart. She’d found it deep in the pocket of his jacket, which had been auctioned at the estate sale; she’d gotten it for practically nothing. She checks the watch and sees that she has at least twenty minutes before her flight should leave. Just then, a modest sign halfway across the terminal catches her eye.
TEN-MINUTE TIMEPIECE REPAIR
.
Ten minutes to get the watch taken in,
she thinks,
ten minutes to get my drink.
Wristwatch in hand, she moves swiftly toward the kiosk—closer and closer. She startles a slim man behind the counter. He sits on a high chair, reading a newspaper.

“I’ll need some links removed from this, please,” she says.

The static comes on again. “. . . flight two thirty-seven to New York . . . now begin boarding.”

The slim man sets the newspaper down and, with a genial smile, turns the watch twice in his hands. “They sure don’t make them like this anymore.”

She does not particularly care. She is staring across the way, at the disorganized line of passengers beginning to move, then over at a turquoise blue gin bottle, which glints behind the bar at W. W. Gould’s. If she would just look
ten
degrees further to her left she would see him, lifting the pages up by their edges and hefting them lightly in his fingertips as if, by weight alone, he can estimate their value. Like so many a long-gone prospector he is worried that what remains after his patient sifting may not be enough. But its millesimal fineness cannot be weighed, only determined beneath a careful squint through an eyepiece. He thumbs through the pages. What percentage of its parts is pure?

She looks back at the watch man, holding the timepiece up close to his work lamp and studying it under his extendable magnifying glass for a moment.

“You from around here?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “I’m an editor in New York City.”

He gives the requisite impressed look. “Where’d you get this, anyway?”

She certainly does not feel like explaining the whole sordid story to an oddball watch repairman in the middle of a tiny, time-forgotten airport.

“Could we just hurry this along? I have a plane to catch.”

The man smiles and swiftly begins his work. She watches out of the corner of her eye as, to his credit, his delicate fingers wield the tools of his trade with precision. As the watch man works away she wonders that there are still people in this world who learn a skill from their fathers and then apply it, day in and day out. If Mr. Haslett fires her, she decides, she’ll go back to Chicago and make her father teach her how to be an electrician. Wouldn’t there be something satisfying in that? Tearing open walls and tracing lines of copper and plastic from switch to bulb? People need lights. People always need light. She could bring light to the world. Plus she thought it might be nice to be in a union. Gripe about taxes, worry over pensions—that sort of thing.

Then, suddenly—finally—the thumbing of pages stops. The uncapped pen falls from his paralyzed fingers and leaves a jagged squiggle on the title page. He has noticed her,
at last.
There, fifty yards away from him, is the woman he left in Africa many months ago. With the same luggage. Talking to the man at Ten-Minute Timepiece Repair—of all places to have stopped!—and they are examining
his
watch.

The sheer coincidental madness of it all sends a primeval panic up his spine and he lurches back, looking for some way to escape.
But wait!
he tells himself.
No more running away. We’ve put that all behind us now. We’ve changed our spots, haven’t we?
He doesn’t even know why he’s referring to himself in the plural—the “royal” we—he doesn’t know it is because he’s speaking to the pages now, too.

Just as the woman is about to apologize for having been so short with the watch man, she hears the rough vibrations of his chair being pushed backward against the linoleum. She squints toward the origin of the noise—the small round table beside W. W. Gould’s. Early morning sunlight blinds her, but through its golden shining she can
just
make out the man whom she has hated, and loved. A man whose real name she doesn’t even know. He looks once into her green eyes and then, with a smile so faint she nearly misses it, he glances down at the table. At the pages. Then, before she can even react, he rushes away. He has a slight limp, but he is quick as a jungle cat. As the man steps onto the escalators, he looks back over his shoulder—just for a moment, directly at her, and again at the pages—and then he is gone.

She twists and takes a quick step, as if she might rush after him, but then she remembers the watch. She remembers the gin. And her flight.

She tells herself that it is obviously just the jet lag, playing tricks.
Must be his dopplegänger,
she jokes to herself.
Why would he leave all his papers behind like that?

“. . . all rows, all rows . . . flight two thirty-seven . . . ”

The slim repairman slips the watch onto her narrow, pale wrist. It fits perfectly and she smiles appreciatively. Then he hands her a small plastic bag containing the links that he’s removed. She fumbles in her purse to find dollars amid all the cedis she’d forgotten to exchange back in Terminal A.
What on earth can I do with those now?
she thinks. Then, as she turns to leave—as she begins to move toward the abandoned pages—the young man jabs his thin, pink fingertip at a small mark on the golden edge of the watch. “That’s our stamp right there.”

“You stamped it?” she asks, studying the near-microscopic insignia.

He shakes his head. “Was stamped already. You must have had work done on it here once before.”

“I sincerely doubt it,” she says, thinking,
I have just ten minutes.

The man shrugs. “Bring it back anytime. If your wrist ever gets any bigger.”

“I’ll be sure to do that,” she says. Then, at last, she tugs her broken suitcase behind her over to the bar at W. W. Gould’s. She is so close now.

It takes only a minute to get the bartender’s attention, and another two for him to pour the drink. As she pays, she watches the line of passengers moving slowly through her gate. The watch feels heavy and good on her wrist. It says she has eight minutes left, so she sits down at the closest table and drains the glass in four long, slow gulps. She shuts her eyes and breathes out deeply. She thinks that now she will be able to sleep on the way back to the city, and that her impending execution in the Haslett & Grouse offices will not sting quite so badly. She thinks maybe she can run over to Emerson Books and find some sort of
For Dummies Guide to Electrical Wiring.
She’d at least like to have
something
to read—

And then her eyes fall onto an untidy stack of papers at the next table. Now that she has a better view, she knows exactly what it is. She knows a manuscript when she sees one. Manuscripts are her roommates and best friends. They live on the floors of her apartment and the spare chairs of her office. Stacks and stacks of stories and words.

She looks around but there is no one else sitting anywhere nearby.

It sits patiently on the table. It is all it can do. She checks her watch again. Slowly she stands up and, still starting, checks the watch—
her
watch—again.