The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

8




The Doppelgänger

[He] met his own image walking in the garden. / That apparition, sole of men, he saw. / For know there are two worlds of life and death: / One that which thou beholdest; but the other / Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit / The shadows of all forms that think and live, / Till death unite them and they part no more . . .

—PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, PROMETHEUS UNBOUND



Down one lane of the bustling Kumasi Central Market I see him. Or, rather, I see me. In the swirl of surly northern grocers and Ashanti women with baskets on their heads and a boy who juggles for ten pesewa pieces—there I am. Or there he is. An obruni. A white man. My age, in Brooks herringbone tweed, despite the fact that in August, it is 82 degrees in Ghana. We have the same haircut. His mouth twists in the same puzzled amusement that mine does as he inspects a smooth teak carving of a jungle cat. I’ve been in Africa five weeks, which is five weeks too long. It’s the heat, surely. Or something in the food. Or whatever it is that Tina has been rolling in her cigarettes. And last week I drank gin with ice in it—why? Just frozen cubes of salmonella, no doubt! It is not just that this other man is white—though there are rarely white men in the marketplace. The tubby British tourists, the unwashed backpackers, the dreadlocked college dropouts—they all generally avoid this place. This is the real Kumasi. The man takes a notebook out of his left breast pocket. It is the same leather-bound notebook that I keep in my left breast pocket. He scribbles onto it with the same nib-point pen. This is it, I think, the parasites have wormed their way into your brain, you phenomenal fool. Christ, even our shoes are identical—weathered buck-leather tennis shoes. I haven’t replaced mine in fifteen years. I’ve tried; they don’t sell them anymore. The only difference I can seem to find is that his wristwatch is silver and mine is gold. As I’m standing there, holding a melon or something in my left hand, he turns and catches my eye. He sees me. Then he quietly turns down a side alley and disappears.

For an hour I search the endless maze of stalls, hoping to catch another glance of him. There are thousands of men and women in all directions, buying raw chicken, salted fish, shoe polish, kente fabrics, bubble gum, Oxo soap, Highlife and Gospel CDs, eggs, gasoline, and sandals printed with American flags. They’re calling out in Twi and Fante. They’re selling ivory crosses and Muslim headscarves and soccer balls and bags of loose tea. The marketplace is grotesque; it is enormous. Soon all I see are blurs of ebony and teak and sunbursts of textiles and I need to escape it. Somewhere there is a fair-skinned woman with a cold drink waiting for me.

• • •

Tina waits at O’Bryan’s, an Irish pub not far from the market. There is something patently ridiculous about an Irish pub in the middle of Africa, and so we have made it our main base of operations. Trading in our cedis for mincemeat pies and warm Guinness, we stretch out in a dark, cool corner beneath a rotating fan and a framed blurry photograph of James Joyce, taken during his rocking-the-eye-patch period. He still wore glasses, though. There’s something about that clean little lens over his blind, covered eye.

“Did you get the old man his yams?” she asks me as I stumble in and order two beers from the bar. Both are for me; Tina’s on her second already.

“I didn’t,” I confess.

“What is the matter with you?” she sighs, planting a kiss on my cheek before I can wipe it clean. “We’ve been here five weeks and I’m about ready to die.”

Tina and I are technically here on business. She, on behalf of Haslett & Grouse, international booksellers extraordinaire, wants me to write a definitive insider’s biography of my former best friend, the perpetually enigmatic and bestselling novelist Jeffrey Oakes. After she and I met in Sri Lanka and spent some time touring its holy places, the lovely Ms. Tina had persuaded me—by all means at her disposal—that as the former roommate, confidant, and classmate of the brilliant and secretive Oakes, I had a perspective that was sorely needed. Jeffrey, sadly, had finally, completely, tragically, cracked up, and it was up to me now to tell his story.

“I’m sorry. I went to the market for them and then . . . this’ll sound crazy, but I saw myself,” I say, pausing to drink half of the first beer before continuing. “I saw a man who looked exactly like me. I mean exactly like me.” Over the remainder of the first beer I go into detail—the haircut, the pen, the tennis shoes.

“Why do you wear those torn-up things, anyway?” she asks.

“I bought these shoes with the money I made at my first job,” I say. “Restringing rackets at the West Charlotte Country Club. Growing up, I thought I’d be a tennis pro.”

“I knew you hadn’t always wanted to be a writer. How’s your backhand these days?”

She burrows constantly—what were my parents like? what are my earliest childhood memories?—I suppose it’s this inquisitive side that makes her such a good editor, but it has made her an increasingly tiresome travel companion.

“Can’t malaria give you delusions? We had the last of those pills days ago. Either that or it’s worms,” I speculate.

“You haven’t got worms,” she sighs, fanning herself with the newspaper, the New York Times “Theater” section, in particular. I grab it from her and she grins. The American papers come only once every week or so. She watches me coyly as she rolls a fresh cigarette. She waits a minute for me to offer to light it; when I don’t look up from the paper, she lights it herself.

“Well, has she got any new reviews or not?” she asks.

“She hasn’t performed since—. She hasn’t performed in nine years,” I remind her.

“Well, she’s busy with her billionaire,” Tina sighs. “What is he, the prince of Yugoslavia or something?”

“Or something.”

I could tell her that it’s Luxembourg, actually—what would the harm be? Would it perhaps get her off my case for a few more hours? But something keeps holding me back from telling her my past. If I tell her one detail, she’ll just want another—one about Jeffrey, or our college, or my mother. I still have not even told Tina my real name. A part of me wants to trust her, but I haven’t trusted anyone with these things in nearly a decade. I barely trust myself with that information anymore.

She goes on. “Isn’t Yugoslavia not even a country anymore? How can you be the prince of a country that no longer exists? I expect it must take a good deal of effort, lording over an imaginary country.”

Tina stares at me with those bewitching green eyes. “She could have done better,” she tells me, placing a desert-roughened hand on mine. She thinks she means me, but she doesn’t know me. She weaves her fingers in between mine and grips like a vise.

“No doubt,” I say, pulling my hand away. “There must be all kinds of real countries with princes still out there.”

She laughs. “So. Tell me about wanting to be a tennis pro.”

I scrunch up my face for a minute, for I feel that the memories are deeply buried somewhere and it will take time to unearth them. To my surprise, they’re not—they’re still right there at the forefront of my mind.

“There was this kid, in my hometown, named Henry Waterford. Everybody loved him. He was funny, and his family was rich. I guess you could say he was sort of the de facto king of our school. But he was nice about it. He’d charm all the teachers, beat up the bullies, and tell you if your underwear was showing or something, but quietly. Nicely, you know? And his sister was this beautiful . . . ”

Tina’s eyes glow like jade, and I have to swallow a lot of beer in order to change directions. She’s already read the story I wrote about this, a long time ago. She found the whole damned novella in my luggage one night. I woke to find her there, half dressed in the African moonlight, poring over the pages, chewing on her hair. Now she always tries to get me to tell her how true those stories really are. She likes to see if she can trick me into forgetting the little details I changed.

“Anyway, he was the big man around town. Around all of West Charlotte, really. And I wanted to be just like him. I took a job stringing rackets so I could buy clothes as nice as Henry’s. Then I joined the school team. I wanted to do everything he did.”

“That’s adorable,” Tina laughs, as if she thinks it’s silly. But she feels she is making progress. She thinks she is coming closer to figuring me out. “Whatever happened to Henry Waterford, then? I bet he’s not a globe-trotting writer like you.”

“He got slammed in the head with a tennis racket. Some brain damage. Never was the same after that,” I say.

“Just like in your novella?” she asks softly. “You said you made that up?”

I don’t remember what I said. She doesn’t understand that the things I’ve made up are more real to me now than whatever used to be true.

We drink in silence. Time passes strangely in Africa. When we arrived, in our safari gear, we thought we’d be like Bogey and Hepburn; she’d be irascible and I’d be thick-skinned, and we’d play games with each other for a while before falling madly in love during a vulnerable moment on a steamboat ride down the Nile. Instead, we’re here talking about what I keep trying to forget.

“So a doppelgänger?” she asks, finally changing the subject. “Or a vardøger . . . ”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, if you were Norwegian, you’d believe in vardøgers—a sort of glimpse of yourself in the future, doing everything you’re going to do in advance. Are you Norwegian?”

Oh, how she pries! Like a little insect, trying to find some purchase—some hole that she can nestle into.

“If you were German then it’d be a sign of bad luck.”

“Not Norwegian or German,” I snap. “And we can hardly have more bad luck.”

“You could,” she says drily. “It’s supposed to be a portent of your own death. Elizabeth I saw herself lying on her own bed. Later that night she died in her sleep. And then Donne? John Donne? He saw his wife’s right before she had a miscarriage.”

“‘Mark but this flea, and mark in this . . . ’” I proclaim, the words coming back to me from a freshman seminar, long ago. Rising up from our booth with beer mug in hand, I wave it out to the room. “‘How little that which thou deny’st me is; Me it suck’d first, and now sucks thee. And in this flea our two bloods mingled be . . . ’”

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 low-lying 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 low-lying 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.”

“You don’t believe in spirits or ghosts then?”

He clicks his tongue a few times and looks around, as if worried that someone else will overhear him. “My grandmother tells me you have your thought-soul and your life-soul. When you die, the life-soul goes away. But your thought-soul sometimes it stays here for a few years. But sooner or later it goes away, too.”

I chew this over. It is growing darker and the city is still some distance away.

“Can the two ever split up while you’re still alive?”

“If you are in danger,” he says, nodding, “your life-soul may go away and hide. And if then, you are hurt or wounded, you will still not be killed. And then, when you are better, it will come back again.”

“That sounds like a good system,” I say.

“Well,” he laughs again. “It is all just nonsense. Whatever.”

• • •

The tiny Kumasi hotel room that Tina and I have been inhabiting is home to bugs both crawling and winged, and we pass the evening as usual, under the sanctuary of the heavy gauze mosquito netting that hangs over the bed. We eat; we make love. I drink; she smokes. We watch the black oblong shapes hum across the transparent curtain. It is too hot to sleep, but we pretend for a while that we will.

“So, what happened to Shelley?” I ask. “You were starting to tell me before.”

“Percy?” She smiles to think that I’ve been mulling it over all day.

“I didn’t realize you two were on a first-name basis.”

“Well, he wrote in his diaries that he kept seeing himself through the windows, walking around on this high terrace garden outside his house in Italy. Once or twice he chased his double through the garden, but always lost him at a low wall, which dropped hundreds of yards on the other side, down into the town. He decided never to tell Mary about it, but then one day, when she was sure Percy had gone into town, Mary thought she saw him out in the garden. She went after him—wondering what he was doing back—and chased him all the way to the wall, where he vanished.”

“Poof,” I say.

“She screams out,” Tina says, gesturing with her hands as if it is she who is doing this screaming. “And the gardener or somebody comes rushing over and says, ‘Mrs. Shelley, Mrs. Shelley. What is the matter?’”

Tina’s gardener sounds like Charlton Heston, which is to say, he sounds like every impression she does.

“And she says she’s sure her husband has just leaped over the wall to his death. And the gardener or whoever says, ‘But, no, that’s not possible. Mr. Shelley has gone into town.’ When Percy finally gets home, Mary is a wreck. Relieved to see him all right, but a wreck. And so he finally tells her that he’s seen this reflection of himself as well. And a year later, he is dead.”

“That’s quite a story,” I say. “I wonder if it’s true.”

“Oh, what does that matter?” she groans

“It’d just be nicer if it was, I think. They’re both writers, you know. Between the two of them, they could have made it all up.”

“You’re no fun.” Tina pouts, then blows a smoke ring at me.

“You like the Shelleys?”

Tina chews on her lip a moment, as if she cannot decide if she should talk to me anymore. “When Percy died,” she says at last, “they burned him on a pyre by the sea. Only a disturbed fan came rushing up and into the fire. People thought he was insane—trying to die with him, or something. But then he rolled away, all burned and on fire, with Percy’s heart in his hand. He rushed off before anyone could stop him.”

“Crazy,” I say.

“That’s not even the crazy part. Because years later, when Mary died, they found a little parcel in her desk. One of his original drafts of Adonaïs, his elegy for Keats, and wrapped up in it, this withered, burned-up lump of Percy’s heart.”

“I’ve heard that before. It’s just a myth,” I laugh.

“I think it’s the most tremendously romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Would you have my heart stolen from my funeral pyre?” I ask.

“I would,” she says. “Would you have mine?”

“Of course,” I say. It is a lie—but oh, it is a great lie—one I’d love to be true. I feel bad, but not too bad, considering she’s lying as well. Jeffrey’s heart, maybe, she’d steal, but not mine. A great buzzing scarab thing goes by the netting so quickly that it makes me jump.

“Come on,” I say. “It’s too hot. Let’s go out.”

• • •

We had not known it was Saturday; O’Bryan’s has jazz on Saturday nights. We walk in and it is dark but cool, despite the crowds of people that clog the place. Someone else is in our usual booth, but we hover nearby in the hope the interlopers may leave. News of the world flashes on the muted televisions. A few men stare vacantly, waiting for the sports scores to float by at the bottom. Up on the stage, all the way across the room, a little Ghanaian ensemble is playing something all horns and bluesy, while a large dark woman moans like she’s never seen things so bad in her life. Tina gets two beers for herself and two beers for me, and we set about drinking them down.

“Get anything straight out of the old man?” she asks hopefully. “True tales of the early oeuvre of Jeffrey Oakes?”

“We only got about ten questions in before he pointed a knife at me.”

And as I say this, I see myself again, all the way across the room, leaning up against the wall in another dark corner. He—me—is listening to the singer, who is going from moan to howl now, as the song circles up and up out of the blues.

“That’s him,” I say before I can stop myself. “That’s the guy.”

He is standing with another white man, about our same age, not paying attention to me at all. He and this other man are standing very close. In the dim light I see him whispering in the other’s ear.

“He does look like you,” Tina gasps when she sees whom I mean. It takes her a moment to realize what he is doing, exactly. “Oh, dear. Darling. I think your doppelgänger is gay.”

She thinks this is very funny. I’m mostly just glad that she can see him, too.

“He was by the house today. The old man thought it was Jeffrey.”

Tina squints and tries to look through the dark throngs, rippling in time to a saxophone solo. “It’s not Jeffrey, is it?”

There’s an excited squeak in her voice, as if it were Mick Jagger or Leonardo DiCaprio standing across the bar from us. For Tina, maybe Jeffrey is of that same caliber; after all, her copy of Nothing Sacred has more dog-ears than the Westminster Kennel Club.

After a long, long pause, I say, “It’s not Jeffrey. But I think that I might know who it actually is.” As I start to cross the dark floor, Tina moves to follow me and I stop. “I need to do this alone, if that’s all right.”

“You’re joking!” she laughs. “Come on, seriously. I want to find out who he is!” I can see it in her eye—this predatory feline glint—sure that she is about to unearth some big secret.

“I’m not joking,” I say firmly. “I need to talk to him alone. Can I meet you back at the apartment?”

“Why don’t you want me to meet him?” she says, and she seems upset at my change in tone.

“It’s personal,” I say. “He’s someone I knew a long time ago and . . . ”

She stares at me for a while, finishes her drink, and starts in on mine.

“Why are you like this?” she asks.

It is the question—the real question—she’s been trying to ask me for weeks. Since I met her, I’d been asking myself the same thing. Watching my double at the end of the bar I begin to worry I’ll lose him again, as the people in the bar keep swelling with the sad songs coming from the stage and sighing with the sadder songs that they alone know.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I say.

“I’d believe anything you told me,” she says. There are suddenly tears in her eyes, and I can’t look at them. But she turns away, thinking she’s robbing me of the satisfaction of seeing them.

“Well, that’s just the problem,” I snap. “You would believe anything. And I’m a liar! That’s just what I am. I lie like I’m breathing. I lie to everyone, myself most of all. But with you it’s just too easy. I can’t even stop myself, because you’ll believe anything.”

It’s a mean thing to say and it stings her, I can tell. And it’s difficult to get out straight, because to be honest it’s the opposite that’s become true. I can hardly stop myself from telling her the truth. I feel it seeping out of me faster than my sweat. What’s truly too easy is forgetting all the lies that I’ve been believing for years.

But she buys my lie, and so I follow it with one more, without even realizing that it will be the last one I’ll ever get to tell her.

“I’ll be back in an hour, I promise.”

She gives me a look—a pitiful, pitying look—and then I think she really would grab my heart from a funeral pyre. For a second I think I would grab hers, too, but then she moves off into a darker part of the bar and is gone.

The trumpets tremble while the bass guitar aches, and I cross over to the bar and begin to work my way down toward my double through the crowd. My double looks up at me and realizes he’s standing in a corner and there’s nowhere to go. As I work my way across the room, I see him telling the man he’s with to give him a few minutes. The other guy sees me coming and begins talking very fast in French. Then suddenly it is only my double and me, standing face-to-face.

“Henry Waterford,” he says with a smile, reaching out a hand to shake. The blue lights above the jazz group gleam off our watches and now they look the same. Then gesturing to my clothing, he says, “They say great minds think alike.”

And now I see. My double doesn’t look like me; I look like my double. This is the boy I grew up wanting to be. And, twenty years later, I’ve become him.

“But fools seldom differ,” I say. “You followed me out to the lake today.”

“I’m sorry for that,” he says, reaching for a cigarette—a new affectation for Henry. He offers me one but I decline. “But you’ll know what I mean when I say that it’s not every day you meet a twin you didn’t know you had. My driver followed you out to the lake. I’m afraid my snooping skills leave a lot to be desired.”

“You don’t remember me, then?” I ask.

“From the accent I’d say you’re from around West Charlotte,” he says with a shrug. “If you know me from there, then you know there’s a lot I can’t remember about those days.”

He’s right—my Southern drawl has crept back in, despite a decade of firm repression.

“Billy,” I lie, shaking his hand. “We were on the high school tennis team together.”

He laughs and studies me carefully, as if trying to remember me. “Of course!” he lies finally. “Billy. It’s so good to see you again.”

“What brings you to Ghana of all places?”

“Business,” he replies vaguely, finishing his cigarette after three shaky drags. He’s looking around to see if his friend is still nearby. “You remember my family was involved in telecom?”

I don’t remember ever knowing this, but I nod.

“Well, Africa’s the new frontier in the market,” he says. “Fiber-optic cables. Cell towers. Wireless hot spots. They’ve sent me out like some kind of a scout. Boring.”

“Didn’t you have a sister?” I ask, a little breathless.

“Married. Kids,” he says, as if this is all there is to say. I suppose that it is. Still, it makes me wince, just a little, and while Henry can’t quite place me, he looks just a tiny bit uncomfortable at my reaction. Perhaps I am not the first man to ask after his sister in a dark bar somewhere. He fidgets a little. “Anyway, what brings you to Ghana, Billy?”

“I’m a writer, Henry,” I say, gesturing toward the bar. The singer is burning up a rough imitation of Ella. As the bartender sets two whiskeys down in front of us, I feel Tina coming up behind me. I turn to look at her and so does Henry.

“Another American!” he cries. “This really is the spot tonight. Do you two know each other?”

Tina catches my eye, daringly. She lets a moment go by. This is your last chance, her eye tells me. This is it, right here.

“No,” I say. “We’ve never met.”

“Well, I’m Henry! Henry Waterford! Come on and join us for a whiskey! And this is Billy. Billy . . . ”

He pauses, not sure what my last name is. I am about to supply it, when Tina does.

“Littleford.”

“Oh, so you do know each other!” Henry says.

“No,” Tina says. “I suppose we don’t, really. I’m just a great fan of his work.”

I can’t even look at her. Henry doesn’t let the beat drop, though, bless him.

“He was just telling me all about it! Join us, join us!”

I hazard a glimpse and know immediately that for years after, I’ll wish I hadn’t. She looks so incredibly sad. Not for herself, but for me.

“Christina Elizabeth Edgars-Boyleston,” she says, shaking Henry’s hand. “Thank you so much but I’m afraid I’m leaving.”

“Tomorrow, then?” Henry says cheerfully.

“No,” Tina replies, “I’m taking off tonight. There’s a red-eye at six AM. Got to get back home. Got to hurry—there’s a lot to pack.”

She gives me a defiant look. I’ll do it, she seems to say. I’ll really do it.

Henry gives her a pleasant smile. “Next time,” he says.

“Yes, next time,” I echo.

Tina looks as though she’s about to say something, but she just fakes a smile and turns away.

Henry shrugs and sips his whiskey thoughtfully. “What might have been, eh? Makes you wonder, sometimes. You know a friend told me I ought to write a novel someday. About everything that’s happened to me.”

“But you don’t remember anything that’s happened to you,” I say. I wonder what would happen if I showed him that story I wrote twenty years ago. Would he even know it was about him?

Henry laughs and sips his whiskey. “So, then I’ll make it up! Who’s going to know? Anyway, tell me. Is it exciting, being a writer? I’m so bored with my whole existence, I can’t even tell you.”

I smile at Henry. At last I can see my way out of this place.

“Well, I’ll tell you all about it. But if you’ve got some time tonight, you may actually be able to help me out.”

• • •

I convince Kojo to come back with the Hyundai by promising him all the money I have left. He was off happily cavorting somewhere with one of his many lady friends, and he is not all that pleased when he arrives in the car, nor is he all that sober. When I introduce him to Henry, Kojo blinks two or three times, as if to make sure the drinking has not left him seeing double. When Henry calls me Billy, Kojo blinks again, at least until I pat him on the back and ask him if we shouldn’t get going.

Driving out to the lake after dark is “not advisable” according to Kojo, but I insist that it is important. The old man never sleeps; I am sure that he will be up. As Kojo guides us along the dark and winding nighttime roads, I catch up with Henry about our hometown. Everyone we ever knew is married now; half of them have released some tiny versions of themselves out into the world—a world no larger than the city limits. Everyone we used to know is exactly where we left them, only now they have doubles and triples.

“Tell me more about being a writer,” Henry says. He is thrilled. This is more fun than he’s had in months, clearly. “Truth is, I really like the idea of being a writer.”

For years I wanted to be everything he was. Now that it seems he wants to be what I am, I’m not quite sure what to make of it.

“The idea of it’s great,” I explain. “But then there’s the actual thing of it.”

He nods and looks wistfully off into the blackness. Tina told me once that, in her line, you come to realize that just about everyone is a part-time writer. Even people who never wrote a full page in their lives think that they might, soon, sit down and churn out a masterpiece. The really good ones, I suppose, make it seem like anyone could do it.

“Thing is, I actually wrote, like, a chapter already,” Henry laughs. “But I’d never show it to anyone. It’s so terrible.”

“I’m sure it isn’t,” I lie. This is how it starts—in an hour or so he’ll be asking me to take a look. In another hour, he’ll be asking if my editor might be interested. Tina knew what Jeffrey, and Jeremiah, and I know. The real thing—the true thing—takes more time and effort than most people would ever imagine. Whole productive lifetimes for a few hundred pages that most assuredly won’t outlive us.

“Hey, now. What’s happening out on the lake?” Henry asks.

Clusters of torchlight surround the wide lake, though it is hard to see through the dense rain forest. The wooden plank boats carry more flickering flames.

“The Asantehene arrived,” Kojo explains. “He is the king of the Ashanti.”

“They still have a king?” Henry laughs. “In this day and age?”

“England still has a queen,” I counter.

Kojo shrugs. “Whatever. They will bring the cow out to the rock in the middle of the lake. They will leave his intestines and guts and whatever out there for the gods, and there will be a feast made out of the rest.”

Kojo won’t stop the car, for fear of what may jump out at us, but through bouncing binoculars I am able to see one highly confused cow, tied up on joined planks, surrounded by men with ceremonial swords. At first it seems to me completely absurd: the men shout and try to avoid the scrambling of the cow, which is either unhappy to be profoundly out of its element or somehow aware of what will become of it out on the approaching rock. But then I wonder how many times, in how many hundreds of years, they have done this. The people on the neighboring boats are jubilant. Soon there will be food, and drums, and dancing—and in a few weeks maybe things will begin to get better. The gods will bring them fish, and they can survive another season. Another year of dry heat followed by rains that will wash their village away. Nothing to worry about—they will build another. And another.

As I suspected, the light in the study is on when we approach the long driveway. I duck so that the old man won’t see me, and then pull Henry down, too, just in case he has decided to do a little night shooting. Henry grins widely. Probably he thinks I’ll mention this in my book, or more probably that I’ll know someone who can get him a book of his own so he can mention it himself.

“Just keep asking him questions,” I say. “And jot it all down in your notebook. Don’t worry if he says things that don’t make sense. He might call you Jeffrey. Just go with it.”

“Finally, some fun,” Henry says with a boyish grin.

I hesitate. “And if he starts playing with his guns, keep an eye on him.”

Henry’s smile shrinks slightly, but I give him a quick laugh and he thinks that I am joking. Guilt begins to creep into my gut, but the idea of sitting on an airplane bound for America by daybreak squeezes it away again. Kojo says nothing but stays with the car, listening to the distant sounds of the ceremony. Not that I have any money left, but if I did, I’d wager that the moment we leave, he’ll head out there to find Efua and Akuba.

I stay in the shadows as Henry enters the lighted kitchen.

“Jeffrey!” the old man’s voice booms. “Come in! I was just packing for my trip.”

It is not difficult at all, walking through the shadows along the side of the house, to get to the back, where the French doors, as always, are wide open. By the time I slip inside I can hear the old man putting a kettle on in the kitchen, and Henry dragging a chair backward across the uneven wooden floor—taking his seat at the table. We are both so close to, finally, taking our seats at the table.

It is even less difficult to find an ornamental knife to pop the drawer open. I’ve seen one often, resting on a bookshelf containing an odd assortment of Great Depression–era plays. Careful not to make too much noise, I slip the knife out of a golden sheath and press it between the drawer and its frame. It slides open with barely a sound.

Inside are a dozen little jars—once containing baby food, according to the labels. Each one is filled with used pen nibs. Jeremiah’s used pen nibs. There must be hundreds of them. Decades’ worth of cracked metal. I lift one up to the moonlight and examine them, like tiny arrowheads. Stained with the inky blood of stories ripped from nothingness and into somethingness.

Reaching behind these, I feel around in the shadows for a sheaf of papers, but my hand closes instead on something hard and smooth. Out comes a bottle, still half filled with liquid, bearing a handmade label—the sort that went out of style thirty years before I was even born. The faded lettering spelled out EPIPHANY BROS. DISTILLERY. GENUINE IRISH WHISKEY. FOUNDED IN 1900. Gently I cradle the bottle in my hand, and I think about the first story of Jeffrey’s that I had ever read. In it, a man on his thirty-third birthday drinks a bottle of Epiphany whiskey out on an Irish moor. It seems like two lifetimes ago. Just two and a half pages. Just nine hundred perfectly chosen words. It had all started there.

For a long time I stand there, staring down at the bottle. In the kitchen I can hear the old man laughing. Henry is doing a bang-up job. I wonder what tall tales the old man is conjuring out of his addled brain now. Slowly I draw the tough knot of cork out of the bottle. I’ve always wondered what it would taste like.

Just as I am about to lift the bottle to my lips, I catch sight of something in the far back of the drawer. It shines in the faint moonlight—a lump of gold about the size of half a human heart. I reach for it, mesmerized.

And then something slams into my leg. And the bottle falls to the floor and I fall to the floor and for a few long minutes I have absolutely no idea what is going on.

• • •

Lying on the floor of the old man’s study, I can feel the wiry hairs of an antelope rug like little needles against my cheek. The antelope is quite dead. It’s been dead for years. Unlike the tense, speculative leopard that crouches in the space between those open French doors, halfway between the jungle outside and the jungle in here. I’m half in and half out, too: not dead yet, but I see no way of living through the next ten minutes. The leopard has gotten a good swipe at the back of my left leg, and I know it must be bleeding all over the floor. And the dead antelope. Though my vision is a little blurry, I seem to be thinking clearly for the first time in weeks, maybe months. Maybe ever.

I don’t dare move, let alone scream. The old man is just in the next room having tea, but if I yelled, I’m sure the leopard could chew my throat out before the old guy even took a step in my direction. The leopard growls, low but lightly. The same sort of inquisitive purring that a housecat might make. Though it is massive, and all muscle, something makes me think that it is just a child. Probably an adult would have killed me outright. Children just want to play and learn how this whole “killing” thing works.

I can’t feel my left arm but it must be just behind my head. I can hear my wristwatch ticking.

All around me are stacks upon stacks: of oft-reread books, of newspaper cuttings, of typewritten pages. None of them are mine. The old man writes in here every morning; sometimes all night long, too. When I first came all the way out to Africa, I hoped that the old man might teach me whatever he had taught Jeffrey. Whatever it was that he had—that he’d always had—that I had always not had. But all the old man ever told me was to write every day. And to read whenever I had the chance. I could have gotten the same advice from a one-hundred-dollar Saturday workshop at the New School. Instead I’ll die out here in the middle of nowhere, my thirty-three years amounting to a useless education, a few pages no one will ever read, and a few girls I loved and who left. Mine turns out to be just a brief, supporting role. A few lines, but nothing memorable.

The leopard relaxes slightly from its pouncing position and settles down into a crouch. After a long stare in my direction, the cat leans backward and begins to lick at its fur. Working slowly, in little patches, it preens and nuzzles itself. My head throbs in time with my leg. I wait for this rate to slow, or to deepen. I try to count but I lose track. My eyes keep wandering back to the leopard. I keep thinking about how I would describe all this in a story, if I only lived to write it down.

Thinking is all I ever do. Or is it did, now? Wasted weeks and months traveling around. I spent whole days in bars, talking to strange people from strange walks of life. As they told me about their lives, I began to envision them on pages. I began to imagine how I’d capture their voices or describe their noses. In the wee hours, half drowned in the local brew, I’d lie in bed alone, composing magnificent stories whose details would be lost in headaches by morning. When I did sit down to carve them into my blank pages, they inevitably came up flat and lacking. Small people with their small lives, I’d spit; I just haven’t met interesting-enough characters yet. They must be in Stockholm or Damascus or Vancouver. I’d better get moving. And in the back of my mind I wonder if it’s me that I’m dodging. If it’s me who is too small. But it’s this wondering that is growing louder and louder, now, as I lie here dying. All these stories I’ve gathered are going to be lost forever, seeing as how I’m about to be jungle cat food. I’ve wasted them. I’ve wasted everything in my path.

The leopard is really getting into it now. Lifting one ferocious-looking paw and licking its soft white underarm with long, rough swipes of its tongue. The reptilian tail flops back and forth, making a heavy thud against the doorframe as it goes. Can the old man hear this? I can hear him . . . humming something in the other room as the kettle begins to whistle. Outside, an orchestra of jungle insects plays an endless concerto. I always meant to learn how to listen to classical music. To find themes and know what melodies are. To know the difference between Bach and Brahms and Beethoven. As a child I suspected that the secrets of the universe were hidden away somewhere in classical music. People told me that it was too late for me to learn—that music was a language you had to learn when you were little, and so it was already too late. But now I think I could have cracked it—if I’d only tried. I think I could have learned; I could have changed. But I never did, and so I never will, because this is it.

What kills me the most—pun most definitely not intended—is that I have already read this story. It is one of Hemingway’s better ones, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” About a man who is slowly dying and regretting all the time he wasted in his life. All the stuff he meant to write. It’s all there. The greatest, and last, story of my whole life and it is plagiarized straight out of The Forty-Nine Stories, and written forty years before I was even born. I’ve always suspected that this is a deeply ironic universe. That if there is some sort of God, that this is just how He likes to gets His yuks. Which doesn’t give me much hope about heaven, then—if this is how He likes to play things. To Him, if anyone, there’s nothing sacred.

There’s sort of a circular method to it. The licking. The little pink tongue is covered in snaking black branches. The leopard’s eyes shut, as if it were a monk, deep in a meditative state. It is the distant stare of a lover who is thinking about someone else.

Is it just me, or is the ticking of my watch getting louder? Are my senses coming alive, now that I am nearly dead?

Somewhere, in a bug-infested apartment thirty miles away, a woman is packing her bags. She’s the only person who gives a damn about me for a hundred miles. No, for a thousand, or even three thousand. The only person who gives a damn about me on this continent and even in this hemisphere. I’ve said terrible things to her and I’ve pushed her away at every possible chance, and, given the current circumstances, probably no one in my entire life will love me as much as she does.

Done with its preening, the leopard keeps its eyes half shut and stays tightly curled in the doorway. My heart begins to pound. Is it going to sleep? The pounding of my heart begins to echo in the dull ache of my head, and the pain in my leg gets sharper. I struggle and strain not to move, but suddenly the more I think about it, the more my leg wants to shift. Just a few more minutes, I tell myself. Just until I’m sure it’s really asleep. Just until the old man finishes his tea. Maybe then Henry will come in to see what’s taking me so long. Unless I bleed out before it’s safe to move. I try to keep my eyes open. I gently rub the wiry needles of antelope hair against my cheek. I list all the things I will do differently, if I make it through. I dream up ways of describing how those claws felt tearing through my pant leg and then my flesh. Was it like butter? Too cliché. Like pâté? Too elite. Like a foot stepping into the first mound of freshly fallen snow. Too poetic. Who thinks like that, anyway? It was like exactly what it was. It was like a set of claws tearing through my flesh.

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.