The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (26 page)

The bartender shouts something like “Oi!” at me and tells me to sit. The yellowed eyes of four dusty Ghanaian guys all level at me. They are trying to watch a soccer match, can’t I see that? Tina gives me a small sarcastic clap as I sit back down.

“Did you and Jeffrey used to recite poetry together?” she asks, relentless. “Was that how you used to get the princess into bed?”

I ding an imaginary bell on the bar table. “Check, please.”

“Oh, quit it. Just a joke. I’d have held out longer, is all I’m saying, if I knew you recited poetry.”

I give her a skeptical look. Tina and I had leaped into bed together the first night we’d known each other, after a train ride that had left us both on edge. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe it had just been too easy. Maybe she was still simply
too
available.

“Oh! I almost forgot! Wilkie Collins!”

“Everyone always forgets Wilkie Collins,” I quip.

“No, I mean for
doppelgängers
. Supposedly he kept seeing a ‘Ghost Wilkie’ running around London for ten years, on and off.”

“Well, that was probably on account of all of the laudanum.”

“And wasn’t there a story about Shelley . . . ”

“Stop it,” I groan. “I don’t want to hear about Shelley. I’m
dying
.”

She pats my hand again. “You’re not going to die. Not unless I kill you for making me stay here another week. Now let’s find the old man some yams.”

And with an apologetic clink of our glasses, we exit O’Bryan’s and venture back to the dreaded marketplace. All the while I am scanning the strangers around me for some sign of myself.

• • •

Jeffrey Oakes, author of the luminous
Nothing Sacred
, has made no media appearances, given not a single interview—even to Oprah—and has accepted not a single prize or honor in nine years, though he’s won several. For those somehow unfamiliar,
Nothing Sacred
had the rare quality of seeming like a classic on the day it was first printed, with a clever consortium of lowlying postmodern puzzles to occupy the highbrow and heartfelt hijinks to captivate the lowbrow. It is the rare sort of book that resembles nothing else and yet somehow seems intensely familiar. From the first line you feel your own heart begin to beat differently. Once it’s over you want to begin it again. It is a love letter; it is an atom bomb; it is literature we’d forgotten could be written.

Only now, after eight years with no follow-up, eager critics have begun to claim that Jeffrey’s relentless dedication to his art must have pushed him over the brink—that the pressure to measure up to
Nothing Sacred
has undone its creator. Certain loyal factions speculate that he is, actually, hiding away only to create more of a frenzy about his next novel. If he is, it certainly appears to be working: the latté-shop gossip rages on. Some believe Oakes is merely doing research and that he is furiously crafting his next masterpiece in a padded room somewhere. Others believe that it is all a stunt. Some believe that he’s gone full-Salinger; that he will never resurface, not even if they give him the Booker Prize for the next book—which most everyone agrees it was a
crime
that he did not win last time, despite the fact that he has not lived in England for nearly twenty-five years, and though he was born there, even his parents have now officially relocated to France. I wonder if I’ll dash his chances when I verify, in the tenth chapter of his biography, that he once flung his EU passport into the Hudson, to protest the cancellation of his favorite BBC children’s television program. Still, each month
Nothing Sacred
remains on the bestseller lists and the flames are fueled further.

This is why my editor has brought me here to the Gold Coast—to the “White Man’s Grave”—to the “least-failed state” in Africa: the Republic of Ghana, where the oldest of the Oakes still resides. Jeremiah Oakes, Jeffrey’s beloved grandfather, lives thirty miles outside of Kumasi, near the sacred Lake Bosumtwi, where Jeffrey spent his childhood summers playing around in the catacomb of Ghanaian gold mines, which had been in his family’s possession since colonial days.

Now the mines are run by the KMS Mining Corporation, and Jeremiah Oakes remains only because he refuses to go. He has lived in Africa nearly all his life, and I imagine he’d prefer to die there than leave. As Jeffrey’s first exposure to the literary dimensions, the old man is all I need to fill in the last remaining sections of my illuminating biography—for which the world waits impatiently. This has unfortunately proved more difficult than I anticipated.

As I come up the long driveway to the Oakes Mines & Estate, my driver, Kojo, swerves his rusty Hyundai to avoid an incoming rifle shot. A hundred yards away, on his sagging porch, Jeremiah Oakes wobbles from the blowback of his ancient firearm. Fortunately, he is almost as blind as he is senile. Before he can regain his footing and reload the rifle, I am out of the car rushing at him with the yams raised.

“It’s me!” I shout, as the dust from the car settles. From somewhere around the house, his two housekeepers, Efua and Akuba, come running. When they see it is I, they are only slightly less annoyed. They glare at me as they call out to Kojo in singsong Twi. All three speak English quite well; they converse in Twi only when I’m around if they don’t want me to know that they think I am a liar and a thief. Which I am.

“Jeffrey!” shouts the old man. “Come on inside! I’ve been traveling! There’s so much I need to show you.”

The old man has no more been traveling than I am his grandson, but I do not dissuade him of either delusion. Lowering my yams, I once more trudge up the creaking steps that lead into the crumbling House of Oakes.

Inside, the air is full of flies, and Jeremiah leads the way back to the room he calls his “study.” A room where he wrote six or seven novels, back in the late seventies, none of which is still in print. I have tracked them all down and read them all cover to cover. They remind me a bit of my own efforts: not bad, but not Jeffrey.

A gigantic fan revolves lazily above our heads, sending just enough cool air down to bristle the photographs and scraps of newspaper he has pinned on every walled surface: old illustrations from books of World War II submarines, articles in Spanish about boys killed during the running of the bulls, and tattered letters handwritten in Hebrew. On a long, narrow desk sits a typewriter—the same faint-inked thing that Jeffrey typed his first stories on—and beside it, thin bundles of monogrammed paper, stolen from hotels worldwide, some of which haven’t existed since the 1950s. There are guns everywhere—some antique showpieces and some roadside finds. Some loaded; some not. The floor is covered with skins: a warthog, a zebra, a lioness, and an antelope—most of which, according to Jeremiah, escaped from the preserve and came waltzing right in through the wide set of French doors, which he leaves open, day or night, to the terrace outside. The jungle is a hundred yards away.

Checking my watch as if I have somewhere else to be, I say, “So, I think we’re
nearly
done. I’d love to ask if you have
any
other memories of teaching me to write here, when I was young?”

He settles into a leather reading chair and lifts a glass of something dirty, brown, and surely intoxicating off a stack of books piled to serve as a side table.

“Oh, sure, sure,” he says. “You used to sit right here in this chair and write. Every morning. That’s how you make progress. Every morning. You write. Even if your leg is being chewed off by a hyena. You keep writing.”

“How old was I when I first came to visit?”

“Oh, maybe about twenty-two,” he says, staring at the ceiling fan as it drowsily completed a revolution.

“Wasn’t I maybe six or seven?”

“Yes, six or seven. And you’d sit right over there banging away on the keys.”

“So, I sat there at the desk?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Because a minute ago you said I was in the
chair
.”

The old man frowned. “Well, sometimes we’d do it that way.”

Whipping out my nib pen, I add this note to my calfskin book—along with hundreds of other similar, contradictory statements. The truth is, Jeremiah says something different every time we speak. My notebook is a garden of forking paths. Jeffrey came to Ghana because of early childhood asthma, or because his great-aunt became ill. Jeffrey’s favorite childhood book was
Moby-Dick
, and the next hour it was
The Iliad.
His first work of fiction was about an ogre named Claude
.
Unless it was about a Swiss chocolatier named PJ. One day certainly the former, and the next certainly the latter. The man is in his eighties and his brain is worn through, like a shirt loved too well. When his daughter calls to make sure everything is well, and he tells them, “Jeffrey’s here talking with me,” they don’t even question it.

“You mentioned yesterday that I wanted to be a librarian, as a child,” I lie, just to see if he’ll notice.

He furrows his narrow brow, which is speckled with brown spots that I’m sure must be melanomas. Will he remember? That he actually told me Jeffrey wanted to be a scuba diver? The spots swim in the fleshy wrinkles for a moment and then flatten again.

He laughs. “You liked the idea of climbing all those ladders, I think. You said you’d want to be a librarian only if they had really tall bookshelves, and ladders, with wheels.”

The fictions that Jeremiah sparked like furious flints in his neurons for decades have now caught fire and consumed the remainder of the truth. Does he really believe these things? Or does he fill in the blanks with his best guesses and hope that he’s right? Most times he’ll run with whatever I suggest, like a freshman writing student eagerly jumping into a story after being given an opening line as a prompt.

With a long sigh I stare out into the darkened jungle. Tina is right. If anything, Jeremiah is a plagiarist’s wet dream. I can put words into his mouth and he’ll never remember they weren’t there to begin with. All day I feed him fictions and listen to them echo back as truths. But still, this hollow feeling grows.

“Do you have any of my early stories?” I ask, as I do every day.

“No,” he says firmly. “Definitely not.”

It is the only answer he gives the same each time, so I am sure it is a lie.

Jeremiah takes out a knife and expertly plunges it deep into one of the yams I have given him. He works the blade through the flesh and divides it neatly in two. He stares inside of it with a childlike curiosity. I wonder if he knows that you cannot eat them raw. I wonder if I would stop him. I think that I would.

Looking back at the gentle undulations of the palm fronds, I exhale and try to think of how I could get a look around without his stopping me. Occasionally he naps or uses the restroom, and I sneak in and dig around—but I’ve yet to find anything of use. There is only one drawer in the desk that he keeps locked. If I am ever going to get it open, I’ll need to buy myself more time. Then, out on the edge of the jungle I see something moving. Jeremiah sees it, too, and he points, the knife outstretched.

“What is that?” I ask, straining my young eyes in the glare of the light.

“Is that Jeffrey?” he asks with a laugh. “What’s he doing out there?”

Blinking twice to be sure it is no mirage, I look again. There I am, creeping through the lowlying brush. My doppelgänger has ditched the tweed jacket, as I have—the heat is simply too intense. His silver wristwatch glints in the light.

“What’s Jeffrey doing out there?” he asks again. Suddenly I wonder if it
is
Jeffrey—the
real
Jeffrey—and my heart leaps into my throat. But it can’t be; Jeffrey would sooner roll around in his own feces than crouch in scrub brush.

My double is perhaps a hundred yards away, and he ducks out of sight. When I turn back to Jeremiah, he is standing with his knife pointing at me.

“If that’s Jeffrey, then who the hell are you?”

• • •

It takes an hour to talk him back down again. By the time I’m done avoiding being stabbed, I’ve gotten absolutely nothing factual or firm, and the sun is going down, so once again I return empty-handed to the Hyundai, and Kojo takes me back to Kumasi.

“How much longer will you and whatever the beautiful editor stay?” he asks me. Kojo thinks that he will sound more American if he says “whatever” as often as possible.

“Not much longer,” I say.

“The old man whatever, he is crazy, yes?”

“Yes. He is crazy.”

“I think maybe that you are crazy, too.”

“I think that maybe you are right.”

The sun has become enormous and red against the rippling surface of Lake Bosumtwi. The locals are gliding home again, having fished all day off of long wooden planks. Huge dead trees line the distant shores. The guidebook tells me that it was created by a meteorite that struck the rain forest a million years ago. There are thirty or so tiny villages around it, but no one knows exactly which are where because the lake floods whenever it rains too much and swallows any villages that are too close. Some of them have names like Pipie Number Two, because Pipie Number One was swallowed up the year before and rebuilt later. Others have no names at all.

Kojo told me once that the locals will not allow any metal-bottomed boats to touch the surface of the water, because the lake is considered sacred. The souls of the dead gather there before departing for the spirit world and say their farewells to the gods.

Now Kojo sees me staring out at the lake and purses his lips. “Whatever the fishing has not been at all good this season. Efua tells me that tonight the locals are preparing a sacrifice to whatever appease the gods.”

“What do they sacrifice?” I ask.

“A cow,” he says, making little horns with his fingers to demonstrate. “They take it out to the rock in the center and chop it all up and throw it in the water, whatever.”

“Seems like a fair trade. One cow for a good season of fish?”

Kojo shrugs. “These village peoples still believe in that whatever.”