The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (29 page)

The jungle cat begins to look peaceful. The whole room feels darker than it was a moment ago. The leopard buries its head under its oversized paws. It looks stuffed, except that its whole body swells and falls in gentle rhythm. My leg stops hurting, and the sound of the old man’s humming blends into that immense, insectile orchestra, performing to the metronome of my watch. As I try to move my leg, I wonder what exactly leopards dream about.

And just then there is a thunderclap bang, and the leopard’s body goes limp, right as mine tenses up. Looking up I see myself, bending over me.

“It’s going to be all right,” the other me says.

The old man stands in a haze of gunpowder, a rifle in his hands that is older than I am. Both of them begin yelling for Efua or Akuba to come and help dress my wounds. But they’re both down by the lake, watching old rituals become unforgotten again.

“Here,” the other me says, picking up the bottle of Epiphany. Much of it seems to have spilled out. I want to live. I want to live and let Tina love me. I want to live and find Jeffrey and drag him out of whatever hole he’s crawled down. I want to live and every morning I want to write something that’s worth wrapping my heart in when I die.

“Don’t worry, we’ll get you out of here,” I say to myself.

And then the other me holds the worn glass opening up to my lips and pours.

9

In the Writers’ Colony

It is entirely conceivable that life’s splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come. This is the essence of magic, which does not create but summons.

—FRANZ KAFKA,
DIARIES

When I first wake up I usually think I’m still in the hospital, until my eyes come to focus on all the umlauts along the book spines on my nightstand. Someone keeps setting them out there. I might like to read them, if only I could read Icelandic. I find it strange. I find it stranger that I notice the books even before I notice there aren’t tubes coming out of me anymore. I find it strangest of all that I find myself absentmindedly skimming their unreadable pages, wondering what is lost in them. Do they, in their own language, divine the depths of human souls?

The walls here are the same clean white as the walls in my hospital room. Familiar, too, is the ever-present chill; and the small square window, beyond which are rows and rows of great blue pines. I stare at them until I remember that I am in the Laxness-Hallgrímsson Writers’ Colony, in Iceland, and that I have been here for one very cold week already, looking for my old friend, Jeffrey Oakes, who came months ago and has, apparently, disappeared again.

When I kick off the down comforter my leg aches. The last, dull reminder of my accident. I roll across the cold, far side of the bed and think of Tina. The nights we spent hiding out under that zippered African netting. She’s gone now, along with my watch, my jacket, and my almost-finished biography of Jeffrey. It’s gone, all gone, but I try to remember that I’m lucky not to be all gone myself. I limp over to the door, where a pot of dark coffee and two bilberry muffins have been left for me—by whom I do not really know. Probably by whoever keeps putting the books on my nightstand. According to the few writers here who will speak to me, the caretaker is a man named Franklin W. Zaff, but it’s been a week and I’ve yet to meet him. I’m told he tries to keep out of our way.

I limp over to a desk that is too high and feed some paper that is too thin into a typewriter whose ink is too faint, and I fidget in an Icelandic chair that is too modern, and I begin to write.

This is difficult. The keys on the typewriter are not in the American order; more disturbingly, the letters
c
,
q
,
w
, and
z
are nowhere to be found. The ropey-haired gentleman in the next room told me that pens are in very short supply, and that the letter
z
was legally eliminated from the Icelandic language, back in the seventies—for crimes I can only imagine. So I have been making substitutions with the odd new letters:
á
,
þ
,
æ
, and
ö
. These, I find, give my writing a bold, decidedly old-world flair: “Noæ, hours later, I am alone again, sitting þuietly in front of the dressing-table mirror, áaking æhite poæder onto my faáe.”

I type these words, as I have each morning that week—only harder and faster than I had typed them the morning before. With minimal variations, I describe a woman sitting in front of a mirror, applying makeup on her wedding day. Then I hit the same spot as always and I freeze up completely. I cannot seem to get inside her head. Anything I imagine seems completely wrong. I do not know what she is thinking.

So I sit. And I sip my coffee. And I try not to think about my leg. I backspace a few times and then space quickly forward, as if pouncing upon the next sentence, but I pause again. So I wind the paper up and down a little. And I pop open the door on the side where the ribbon goes in. And I wish I had a laptop. And I stare out the window at the pines in the dark. The sun never rises and the sun never sets. It is just dark all the time. When I arrived, I noticed a crooked, stone bell tower, but I have yet to hear any bells to mark the passing of time. Without my wristwatch, the only indication of a day’s passing is that periodically there is an odd piercing column of light visible through the window. It comes up from way beyond the woods, for maybe two or three hours, and vanishes again. Whenever it appears, I give up on writing and I go about making a few cautious inquiries about my missing friend.

The Laxness-Hallgrímsson Writers’ Colony is a labyrinth of ancient hallways and rooms that are mostly empty. It was once a medieval church, built into the foot of the Akrafjall Mountain for the fishermen of Akranes. Because timber is scarce in Iceland, when the writers took over they removed hundreds of stones from the walls and used the hollows to shelve books. There must be thousands in every room—all written by Icelanders, in their native language.

Lazily I make my way down to the “chapel,” which has been converted into a gathering space for the various writers residing at the colony. Its three crucifixes have been draped with black cloth, and the pews were long ago ripped out of the long, narrow transept and replaced with long stone tables, where those of us with writer’s block or an urge to stretch our legs can engage in a little social activity—or try to, in our socially stunted, introverted, writerly ways. When I arrive, a small cadre of playwrights is busily painting with watercolors. I sit down with a smile, grab a brush, and dip it into a golden-colored paint, waiting for someone to pass me a sheet of paper. A quick look around the table shows that I am not welcome.

“Private session,” a woman with thinning gray hair says, grabbing the brush away from me. “For dramatists only.”

I have no clue if she is someone in charge or another of the writers. She does not look like a Franklin, though. Upon arrival, I was greeted by a toothless man who did not correct me when I addressed him as Mr. Zaff, and when I handed him my bags, he began combing through them. I thought perhaps this was just heightened security, until he rushed off with all my pens.

Down at the other end of the table, two old men with leonine manes of shock-white hair are having a discussion in some strange tongue, jabbing at a thick stack of pages between them. Hoping they are fiction writers, like me, I walk toward them, but they quickly lean into a huddle and lower their voices. All week I have been trying to pal up with someone who might have seen Jeffrey around, but writers tend to be the least extroverted people in the universe, even in Iceland.

My teeth begin to chatter and I decide to try to find something warming to eat in the kitchen. On the way down the hallway I hear a woman’s voice, yelling fitfully in a nails-on-chalkboard brogue. “Na, na, na,” she insists. “That’s’nt how is’posed to be! That’s’nt it at all!” When I come upon her, I find that she is completely alone.

She is quite pretty, not much younger than myself, and stares bluntly at me, as if she’s expecting a reply. So I say, “I know the feeling.” She blinks twice and steps closer. “Writing not quite going as you want it to?” I add. She tugs at the neckline of her loose, black sweater-coat, and for a second she seems about to pull it off. Then, without warning, she vomits all over the stone floor. I barely leap back in time to avoid the spew, and when I do, pain sparks like a string of firecrackers up my leg and my spine and all out from there, and I crumble to the ground, just a foot or so away from the puddle. Steam rises up through the chill of the hallway.

“Is there a nurse or a doctor anywhere?” I yell into the empty corridor. In the distance I hear hurried footsteps, but as soon as the girl hears them she goes flying down the hallway, swooping her arms around, batlike. My leg is hurting too much to chase after her, so I wait there for whoever is coming the other way. It turns out to be not a nurse but a gigantic man with spiked black hair and a bull’s ring through his septum.

“You all right?” he asks gruffly, reaching to help me up. All the nails on his right hand are polished black. He seems to be wearing mascara. The sound of atonal jazz is coming from a set of bulky headphones around his neck. “You tossed up?”

“No,” I insist, a little too firmly. “There was this girl. Talking to herself in here. And then she tossed . . .
er
. . . threw up and ran off that way.”

The man stares at me as if I am crazy, and for a moment I’m not so sure he’s wrong. Not for the first time I wonder if I have, in fact, arrived at a madhouse by mistake. As if reading my mind, the tall man slowly bends down and takes a long sniff of the acrid puddle on the floor.

“Black death,” he says ominously.

“Excuse me?” I ask. I did not spend an entire month alone in a hospital bed only to come to Iceland to catch the
plague
.

“Brennivín. It’s our national liquor.
Svarti dauði—
or ‘Black Death’—what we call it here,” he says. “It ought to have a skull and crossbones on the label. Smells of caraway seeds, yeah?”

Without getting too close, I inhale sharply. I get a whiff of bile and beneath it, the faint anise scent of caraway, indeed.

“Sounds like you ran into Molly Collins. Loves the stuff. Says it’s inspiring. Iceland’s answer to absinthe, only twice as disgusting.” He takes a giant step over the puddle and grips my hand in his icy one. “Einar Thorlac.”

Einar leads me to the kitchen, where I wash myself off. Then, in the large clean fridge, he locates some
skyr
—a local dairy product that is somewhere between cheese and yogurt—and hands it to me. He grabs some greenish blood sausage for himself. Einar soon proves to be, by far, the friendliest person I have met in the colony since I arrived.

“Everyone in Iceland wants to be a writer,” he explains to me smugly while we eat. “Like in America how you all want to eat slug poops on TV for money.”

“Hey,” I interrupt, thinking of the daytime sociological atrocities I’d seen on the hospital television. “Some of us actually draw the line at the slugs themselves.”

“We here in Iceland have just three hundred thousand people, and each year we publish one thousand new novels.”

This number seems astounding for any populace, but I have a harder time believing there can be so much to say about this place—which from my window appears to be just an endless, frozen expanse of cold blue trees and snow.

“One book for every three hundred people, every year? That puts even Brooklyn to shame.”

Einar lets out a deep belly laugh and asks me some questions about living in New York City, where I haven’t really lived in years—mostly how I can live there, what with the many heroin addicts and muggings. And I tell him that it isn’t like that so much anymore, and he seems a bit let down. Eventually, the inevitable question comes.

“So how is your writing coming along?” he asks me.

“Quite well,” I lie. How can you confess writer’s block to someone whose countrymen crank out a Library of Alexandria each year? “And you?”

“I wrote seventeen words this morning,” he says proudly. “But I’m a poet. For me that’s very good.”

We share a laugh and then stare out the window and wonder if the weather will ever clear up. The strange light is on again, cutting through the darkness.

“What is that?” I ask, gesturing to it.

“The Friðarsúlan,” he says. “Meaning ‘Imagine Peace Column.’ Yoko Ono built it out on the island of Viðey in memory of John.”

He pauses while I look confused, then adds, “Lennon?”

“Yes, I’m familiar with his work,” I say quickly. “Just didn’t know his crazy widow had built a giant spotlight in the middle of a frozen ocean for him.”

Einar is shocked that this news has not reached America, particularly in the great city where Lennon was shot by one of the many crazies who no longer overrun the place. We’re preoccupied, I explain—what with all the slug poops.

“It runs entirely off of geothermal energy,” he says proudly. “On the side is written
‘Hugsa Sér Frið’
—that’s ‘Imagine Peace’—in twenty-four languages.”

Both of us stare out at the light, which glows bright and steady. It has been snowing ceaselessly for the whole week that I have been here and, even for Iceland, it is apparently untenable. All the roads are closed—the taxi that took me here from the airport ferry drove a snowplow ahead of it and charged me a small fortune. I’m praying the Oakeses will reimburse me, should I locate their son. My mind drifts back to my hospital stay, weeks ago.

One morning I had opened my eyes to find a beautiful older woman in a dark pantsuit sitting by my side. For a moment I’d thought it was my mother, but soon I realized that it was someone else’s mother—Mrs. Pauline Oakes. Not entirely certain that she was not a by-product of my morphine drip, I ventured a hello. Glad to see me awake, she skipped the pleasantries and got straight to the point.