The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

7




Outis

“The far east. Lovely spot it must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on, cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like that. Those Cinghalese lobbing around in the sun, in dolce far niente. Not doing a hand’s turn all day. Sleep six months out of twelve. Too hot to quarrel. Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness.”

—JAMES JOYCE, ULYSSES



With only ten minutes left before my train leaves toward Sigiriya, I jam down on the Necto-soda-sticky keys of the Internet café computer. As quickly as possible, I pound out the final lines of a truly ponderous conclusive paragraph:

The essay’s closing image of a young George Orwell laughing with British soldiers and Burmese natives while the man they’ve just executed hangs “a hundred yards away” is surely a haunting vision of the colonial world order: oppressor and oppressed amicably sharing a Lethean drink, while the unnamed voice of dissent swings ominously in the winds.

I hit Save, double-check my PayMeNow account, and then click Send. In a millionth of an instant, my impenetrable thirty-five-page wall of rhetoric is dissembled into hexadecimal electrons and fired off into the stratosphere—bounced down thirty-five hundred miles clockwise around the globe and into the high-tech library of the Shanghai International Students’ School, where an obese and princely little Chinese boy who goes by “simon/” has been waiting eagerly for his midterm assignment. I’ve never met this particular Simon personally, of course, but after teaching for several years at a school in Dubai, attended primarily by the hashish-addled children of the House of Saud, I’ve come to know his type quite well. During my teaching days I had often wondered how my students managed to turn in shining theses that included words like hegemonic and pedagogical, or even agitprop and autarky. It didn’t take long to figure out that most of them had anonymous Internet ghostwriters cranking out every paper they turned in. So when being a teacher finally lost its charm, I decided that taking up professional plagiarism could grant me decent pay, freedom to travel, and unlimited opportunity to lob my own thought-grenades into the halls of academia. In just a year at it, I’d traveled the Mediterranean, been through Singapore and Hong Kong. I’d visited every single European nation (except for Luxembourg)—all while writing somewhere on the order of two thousand pages of literary criticism, disseminated happily into the thesis collections of universities worldwide.

I feel a fleeting sense of pride over the Orwell paper. I’d managed to take his tidy essay “A Hanging,” which clocks in at about five pages, and spin out seven times that length in tedious, diligent analysis. Thinking it may be a personal best for me, I take a long sip at my cold tea in self-congratulation. With what Simon was paying me, I’d have enough money to roam north into the central region of Sri Lanka for at least a week. I could drop into Buddhist temples, get lost in Ceylon tea farms, and enjoy the unique charms of this land: Serendib, the Arabs called it, and from there the British colonialists invented the word serendipity, to explain the magical ways in which the invisible cogs of fate itself seemed to turn against one another in this verdant paradise.

I stretch back. I peer through the glass walls of the café and out into the station. I have always done my best work in crowded transportation hubs. Airports, train stations—a bus stop, one time—these have been like my personal little cafés dotted along the Seine. I’d given up on being a writer, aside from the essays that I sold to my shadowy students around the globe. I’d become accustomed to a certain lifestyle—particularly when it came to traveling through these third-world countries. I’m trying to see the world and as many of its plenty-splendored wonders as I can. I’m trying to stay on the move. I’m not one of these typical Americans, mind you, trying to find myself. No, if anything, it’s just the opposite. I’m trying to get as far away from myself as at all possible.

Typically, my students are the children of the well-to-do; the heirs apparent of the world, who are too busy spending their parents’ money on the beaches of Ibiza and in the shops of Rodeo Drive to learn how to compose a thesis. And why should they? What possible use will it be to them to be able to deconstruct a Dickens novel when they’re merrily employed by some white-collar firm, overseeing the outsourcing of its customer service department to the east side of Bangladesh?

Actually, a lot, probably.

But I digress. Eight minutes left until my train leaves.

The Colombo Fort Railway Station has truly come alive while I’ve been working my way through the wee hours. I can smell cardamom coffee and moong kavun oil cakes being fried up in the shape of diamonds. Somewhere someone is mixing up some fragrant mutton rolls and I wonder if I’ll have time to grab one on my way over to the train. I still have seven minutes. Anxiously, I tap on the keys as if to summon Simon, so he can confirm receipt of his paper and I can enjoy a week off exploring the Buddhist temples of the Matale region.

As I wait, I watch the Sri Lankans lining up along the benches in the lobby. I try to make sense of what appears at first to be a single mass of dark hair and skin and eyes. I try to drown myself in the distilled noise of their chirping chitchat. What I realize quickly is that nearly all of them are reading. Reading books. An old man with a paisley necktie dangling beneath his trimmed white beard is absorbed in what looks like a detective thriller. A gaggle of boys in little purple school blazers and shorts are studying cloth-bound readers, their little heads hunched over and the odd golden epaulets on their uniformed shoulders jutting out. They look like a tiny, scholarly fighting force. An older boy with mini-dreadlocks and a tattered black BAD TO THE BONE T-shirt is flipping through an old Penguin paperback while he tries not to stare at a flock of peacock-patterned flight attendants who are picking out magazines at the newsstand nearby. While nearby India continues to slump behind the world literacy averages, the island-dwelling Sri Lankans read more than most anyone in Asia, though perhaps this is because their seventeen measly television channels are so thoroughly unentertaining. Or perhaps it is because now that—thanks to a tidy mass-slaughtering two years ago—the Sinhalese have finally ended their bloody twenty-six-year civil war with the LTTE, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Sri Lanka has been rated one of the world’s most promising emerging markets by the Dow Jones and has just been named a 3G country by Citigroup, whatever that means. Looking out at the crowds, I can feel their excitement. They don’t know what it all means, either, just that venture capitalism is coming soon to a theater near them. Perhaps it is because of the promise of all this growth that they are reading—boning up for the return of the imperialists. It reminds me of a T-shirt I saw on a kid a year ago when I was weekending in Turkey. GOD IS COMING the front said in bold letters, while the back warned LOOK BUSY! This is what comes to mind: the Sri Lankans look busy. Soon, perhaps, they’ll all be rich as kings, with important-looking cell phones and Louis Vuitton purses clutching custom-sized chihuahuas. I wonder how much they’ll be reading by then.

Finally, the computer blips at me.

simon/: this loks grt!!! Ooooooo shit! U gunna get me an A for sur

Wincing, I crack my fingers, check the time—only six minutes to go—and nimbly tap back a reply.

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: My pleasure, Simon. Do take care now.

simon/: wait wait man i gt anuther papr. is do on nxt Saturday, what yu say, huh?

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: Like I told you earlier, Simon, I will be gone all week.

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: Good-bye, Simon.

simon/: WAIT dammmti! Im going to pay u doble!

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: Double?

simon/: what i said

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: You said “doble” which is neither an amount of money nor an adjective indicating twice the former quantity of something.

simon/: whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat????????

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: Good-bye, Simon.

simon/: WAIT

I’m about to click off the computer screen, satisfied that poor “simon/” more than deserves to fail his next assignment, when suddenly the sweet, high pitch of American English reaches my ear. I glance up and see two female backpackers arguing just outside the door to the Internet café. The first girl is beautiful and tall, with skin that has been methodically browned at the sides of a dozen crystal-clear swimming pools between here and—I’m going to guess—Philadelphia. There’s something self-assured and forlorn about her that reminds me of a Phillies fan. Her long, dark hair has clearly been carefully blow-dried and straightened that morning in one of Colombo’s finer hotels. The way she teeters a little on her cork-platform sandals makes me think that she also kicked back a few minibar items while she was preening.

Her friend is shorter and fairer-skinned—actually, she’s quite pale, white as blank paper—with hair as red as sweet vermouth and eyes so green that I suspect she is only a generation removed from the shores of Galway. While her friend’s clothing is so sheer and sleeveless as to verge on nonexistence, this girl is wearing a high-collared linen dress that looks like it walked off the set of Citizen Kane, and which falls down well past her knees. She must be about a thousand degrees, and she looks miserable and lost, in a hat so ridiculously broad-brimmed that all the flies in the train station seem to think it is a runway strip. They circle around her like landing planes, to her adorable annoyance.

simon/: where r u anywayy? Hello??

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: I’m in Sri Lanka.

simon/: whats that

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: Look it up.

simon/: ur funny. U going to helpme or not, what?

“Come on, Tina. Let up! I just want to get this DVD so I have something to do on the train!” barks the dark-haired girl, as her friend with the hat tries to wrench her out toward the main doors.

“Carsten, we have four minutes to get on the train!”

I check my watch quickly and verify that I, too, have only four minutes to get on my train, which means that their train is probably also my train. I wonder if they, too, are on their way north toward the ancient city of Sigiriya, the Buddhist mountain monastery known as the Fortress in the Sky.

“Just let me grab the DVD!” Carsten begs, snatching one of the cardboard-wrapped packages off the rack, which nearly tips over before the newsstand keeper manages to catch it. A barrel-bellied man with little hair left does not even dare to shout at the girls, though he does look around in astonishment toward the other natives.

Curious, I watch as Tina, the girl in the hat, apologetically hands the man a few hundred rupees more than necessary for the DVD—which I can see from the cover is Surangani, Surangani, currently the country’s most popular Bollywood love story. It’s about a Tamil boy who falls in love with a forbidden Sinhalese girl. There’ve been posters up for it nearly everywhere I’ve been for the past month.

“Jesus, fine. You’ve got the goddamn DVD. So let’s go.”

Tina stalks away as Carsten follows, clutching her prize to her fairly overexposed chest. With about three minutes left to go, I decide to give “simon/” the second-best news of his morning.

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: Send the money to the PayMeNow account. DOUBLE.

simon/: yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy thank you thank you

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: Now, Simon, I’m in a hurry.

simon/: ok ok

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: What’s the assignment anyway?

simon/: Papr for Modrn America Lit.

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: On anything in particular, Simon? Hurry hurry.

simon/: hold on, just chking the books name now I hve in my email smwhere

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: You have one minute, Simon, and then I have to go.

These Simons are all alike. A few months ago, before heading to Sri Lanka from Chennai, I’d been doing some Internet research for one of them about the Tamil Tigers and came across a funny story that stuck with me. Allegedly, back in the late 1980s, some government wildlife official had given a televised interview explaining that, despite the name of the rebel group, the tiger was actually not indigenous to Sri Lanka— in fact there were no tigers there at all. Accidentally, the man misspoke and said that the “,” which was actually the Sinhala word for “leopard,” was not native to the island.

But, of course there are leopards in Sri Lanka—the Sri Lankan leopard, or Panthera pardus , has been a recognized subspecies since the 1950s. And so, the confused English media translated the word as “tiger” anyway. Somehow, some way, this misnomer had actually stuck. Slowly, the Sri Lankan people just began to use “” to mean “tiger.” Nobody wanted to be wrong. They’d seen it on television; it had to be true. Eventually locals began to refer colloquially to the Tamil Tigers as “koti,” the plural of “,” and, another word, had to be reassigned to mean “leopard” in order to end the confusion.

Spots changed into stripes. All it took was just one serendipitous mistake.

When I look back at the screen I see that thirty seconds have gone by. Finally, blip, I see Simon’s money arrive in my PayMeNow account. Enough to keep me quite comfortable on my journey northward—maybe even enough to make it two or three weeks before I need to be on a computer again.

I count off five, ten, then twenty more seconds, but he still hasn’t sent the assignment over.

Outis/ΟΥΤΙΣ: You’re out of time, Simon. Find someone else.

simon/: wait wait! its some book. Nothing Sacred. Jeffrey Oakes? U know it?

The flash of that name on the screen stings me more sharply than Simon’s offensively bad grammar. I don’t know why I’m so surprised—the book’s been everywhere for eight years now: an international bestseller, translated into thirty-seven languages. No matter where I have gone, and I’ve gone far, I find remaindered hardcovers and tattered paperbacks in every used-book bin I’ve peered into. From Eastern Europe to Cambodia. But now, somehow knowing that they’re teaching it in schools is an especially great blow. Isn’t that how it happens? Just one tidy step closer to immortality? I continue staring at the little pixilated letters, and I can hear the ticking of my wristwatch. Suddenly my eyes refocus and I catch my reflection in the screen. Hollow, tired eyes. A beard that hasn’t been trimmed in two weeks, maybe three. It hardly looks like me.

Then, before I quite know what has happened, my fingers have flown to the disconnect button and I am running, running to catch my train.

• • •

Our train prowls slowly up out of Colombo, through the slums and then the suburbs, and eventually into the monsoon-swept rain forests to the north. I’ve paid the extra 1,600 rupees, about 14 dollars, to get a seat in the small first-class observation compartment in the rear, where I also find the lovely Carsten and her friend, Tina. The fourth seat in the compartment is empty for a few minutes, until we are joined by, of all people, an old Italian nun in a crisp black habit.

The girls seem just as tickled as I am to be in the nun’s tiny wizened presence. She is reading a little blue-covered Bible, written in Italian from what I can see. I wonder if she ever reads anything else? Does she just read those same best-stories-ever-told over and over? Does she ever take a quick break and dip into, I don’t know, some Calvino or something? I ponder this singular commitment as I flip lazily through a collection of Hemingway stories that I found in my hotel back in Chennai. I haven’t read most of them since my freshman year of college, and it’s nice, if not a little nostalgia inducing, to look over them again.

Aside from the advantages of comfort, with individual armchairs and air-conditioning, we’ve all more or less wasted our money on the observation car. It has been raining for four weeks, as long as I’ve been off the mainland of India, and there’s not much to observe. Great, god-enraged gusts of wind carry down opaque curtains of gray rain. Beyond it, the dense, dark verdigris of rubber trees has grown back with a vengeance over the old British plantations. Occasionally we pass low stretches of tea trees, which curve and wriggle over the hills like hedge mazes in a Victorian garden or the wormy gyri of a brain. But most of the time the rain hides all but the nearest-reaching branches.

Carsten happily passes the first hour of our journey with her headphones clamped on, watching her movie on a little portable DVD player. Tina, meanwhile, flips through the New York Times International Edition. My heart leaps suddenly, when I see LUXEMBOURG in a headline as she turns the page, but it is only an article about a soccer game. I manage to catch that they lost 0–5, and that there is no photograph with the story of, perhaps, some members of the royal family in attendance—then Tina looks up and catches me looking, and I glance away at the nun as a diversion. To my surprise, the nun has set down her Bible and taken out a cellular telephone—an ancient model roughly the size of a brick—and she is punching buttons on it, trying to get a signal. When I look up at Tina again, I can see she is smirking but trying to pretend not to look at me. Still, I know how this game goes. She’ll crack first; she’s too curious not to.

It happens ten minutes later when, as we roll into a clearing, a far-off mountain range comes into view, and we both look up suddenly to take in the sight.

“They look like white elephants,” Tina says to me smartly.

“I’m sorry?”

“The hills.” She nods at my Hemingway. “‘Hills Like White Elephants’?”

I look down at the book and then skeptically back out the window. “I think those are more like mountains than hills.”

“Semantics,” she scoffs. “You’re from the States?”

“Maybe,” I say with a smile. “And you?”

“I’m from Boston,” she says. Then, thumbing at her friend, she says, “She’s a Philly girl.”

I smile at Carsten, who blinks up at me through heavy lashes and then back down at her DVD player. She hits Pause with a manicured nail and then pulls the headphones delicately away from her carefully straightened hair. She smiles with teeth so perfect that they’re utterly unnatural. There’s not a chance they haven’t been braced and bleached.

“Carsten Chanel,” she says, extending a hand to shake mine lazily. It’s the fakest fake name I’ve ever heard in my life, and the look on Tina’s face confirms my suspicions.

With a much more aggressive shake, Tina introduces herself, “Christina Elizabeth Edgars-Boyleston.”

“My name is Outis,” I say.

“Otis?” Carsten laughs.

“Ow-tis,” I enunciate. I’m about to explain that it’s Greek when Tina says, surprisingly, “That’s an old Greek name. Right?”

Caught off guard, I stare into her great green eyes. Like cat’s eyes, I think. I wonder what she thinks of mine.

“That’s right,” I say.

“We’ve both been living in Manhattan for years now,” Carsten explains with a dramatically bored flip of her hand. Since they are in their late twenties at most, I’m guessing that they were Barnard students who stuck around after graduation.

“Manhattan! I’ve never been,” I lie.

“You’d love it, Outis,” Carsten says.

“If it’s so great then why aren’t you there now?” I ask.

Carsten smiles and attempts to look mysterious. “We thought we’d take some time off from our careers and, you know, find ourselves.”

“Any leads so far?” I ask.

Carsten looks confused; Tina snorts and hides a smirk behind a pale hand.

“Is that supposed to be funny?” Carsten asks.

I back down graciously. “My apologies. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a real conversation with anybody but myself.”

Carsten seems to consider this, but fortunately we are interrupted by a knock at the door and a tall Sri Lankan boy enters pushing a cart. He is maybe sixteen and wears a golden traditional-looking uniform. “Excuse me, please. Stuffed fig? Bibikkan? Pastry?”

“Drinks?” Carsten asks immediately. The boy nods his head.

“Portello soda and vodka?” Carsten orders.

I like the lovely little lilt of her “vah-kah?” though I immediately gag at the mention of the purple, hypersugary berry-and-cream-flavored soda brought over long ago by the Brits and gleefully sold now by the Coca-Cola corporation. I think I can see the guy gag, too, as he bends down to prepare the drinks. There’s something about the way he moves, actually. Cocky, smooth motions that belie the somewhat nervous look in his eyes. He reminds me of a boy I used to know, when I was his age, when I strung rackets at a Carolina country club.

“Arrack and ginger beer,” Tina orders. The boy nods approvingly, and I must concur. It is an excellent combination.

I see that the boy is drinking a thick, milky syrup from a small glass on the edge of the cart.

“Toddy for me,” I say, pointing to his glass.

The boy balks. “No, no, man. You don’t want toddy.”

“I do,” I say. “I’m sure. Don’t worry.”

“Outis, do you mind if I ask . . . what’s a toddy?” Tina is eager eyed.

“It’s kind of like the arrack but not as refined. Basically it’s a wine made fresh from palm sap. Sort of local swill. Usually they don’t have it on the trains, but our friend here has some stashed down there, I can see it.”

“Two of those then,” Tina says.

“No no no no,” the boy laughs. “Not for ladies!”

Tina takes direct affront to this. “Yes, for ladies. Come on! You think I can’t handle it? Let’s go. You and me, kid!”

The boy, delighted, reaches down for a repurposed soda bottle and pours out three glasses. The nun has stopped playing with her cellular phone and is now watching us with very curious amusement from behind her round-rimmed glasses.

“That looks foul,” Carsten weighs in as the boy passes the cups. The liquid inside vaguely resembles detergent.

“The Tamil people have this book of little parables in couplets,” I say to Tina, “called the Thirukkural . . . ”

“Thirukkural,” the boy whispers happily. “You have read?”

“Parts,” I say, pinching my fingers together to indicate a small amount. Then, back to Tina, I explain, “There’s a whole chapter called ‘The Abhorrence of Toddy.’”

Tina’s great green eyes are fixed wide, with curiosity befitting a jungle cat. I certainly do like a girl who appreciates a forbidden drink. Meanwhile, Carsten has begun holding her nose against the smell.

Our glasses in hand, the boy whispers, “Cheers!” We toss back the toddy. It is coconut sour and yeasty sweet, and it chills and burns like liquid nitrogen going down our throats. The kid is pouring out three more before Tina has stopped coughing. There is a wide smile on the little nun’s face, and it just about makes me want to ask her to join us.

“Grrr-oss,” Carsten pronounces as she sips her drink. The purple seems to stick to her teeth just slightly.

“So you two have been, what? Eating, praying, loving?”

“Something like that,” Tina answers with a smirk, and is about to say more but, predictably, Carsten has become tired of not being the center of attention.

“Have you ever been in a threesome, Outis?” she asks daringly.

Tina squeaks unhappily and looks awkwardly at the nun, who does not seem to understand anything we’re saying.

“Once,” I say, “but it was the wrong kind.”

Carsten doesn’t know quite what to do with this, and as she puzzles over it, I ask, “And so what do you guys do back in New York?”

“She edits books and stuff. I work in public relations,” Carsten says, leaning forcefully past her friend and—in what I suspect is a well-practiced accident—allows the sleeves of her blouse to fall down so that her bra straps show. A bright, pleasant mango color.

“Really?” I say. “Is that like advertising?”

“No!” Carsten asserts suddenly. She unrolls a speech she has doubtless given before. “Advertising is just, like, when you’re promoting a product, or a company directly, in the media.”

I nod as if I’m interested. Tina flips back to her newspaper. Carsten finishes her sugary drink in an instant and orders a second and a third before the boy can escape our car.

“Public relations is when you’re actually shaping the company’s entire image. Like, you might spend a lot of time online posting, like, positive reviews of the company on different forums, and making sure their Google searches aren’t, like, negative.”

“Wow,” I say, and I guess I don’t sound impressed enough because Carsten redoubles her efforts.

“Or we might lobby for them so that local government stuff works out the way they want it to. Back before I started working for this company, we had this pharmaceutical client that makes—you know Lotosil?”

I know the name quite well. It was one of the many prescriptions that had populated Jeffrey’s medicine cabinet.

“So, like, it’s like awesome at helping people with depression. But—big problem—everyone already knows that if you’re depressed you take Prozac, right? I mean, that’s just branding. So what they did was they lobbied the AMA to create this new diagnosis for ‘societal apprehensiveness disorder’ so, like, Lotosil could be the drug for that.”

I blink two, three times, waiting for her to continue, but she’s reached the punch line. I try not to look aghast, and Tina is now smirking at me.

“That’s . . . so interesting,” I manage.

But what I am thinking is that this airhead has just told me that she, or at least her international corporation of airheads, has invented a disease. A disease with the repulsively clever acronym of SAD, all so as to increase sales of a drug, one that Jeffrey took for years. Years during which he, yes, wrote an international bestselling novel, but also years during which his depression, or his “societal apprehensiveness,” was pretty damn high, considering that I was one of two human beings on the planet whom he could halfway stand. It seems unconscionable that Carsten and her PR cronies have perpetrated this falsehood, and that’s coming from a guy who plagiarizes people’s papers for them.

“Plus, like, you call other businesses and try to, like, promote whatever your client is doing and, like, build some buzz around it. One of my first projects was this book—”

And then, before I can quite catch up to what’s happened, she reaches into Tina’s bag and pulls out a paperback copy of Nothing Sacred.

“That’s mine,” Tina snaps, though she does not stop Carsten from handing it to me. I run my hands over the familiar title; note the immense number of dog-eared pages. Many pages are also half blue with underlining, with notes in the margins.

“It’s actually how Carsten and I met,” Tina explains. “I worked on the book right when I started at Haslett and Grouse.”

I stare awkwardly at the author photo on the back. There is Jeffrey, frozen in black-and-white, looking somehow warmer and friendlier and happier than I’ve ever seen him look in his entire life. He looks like he’d just love to be your best friend, with invitingly big eyes and a half smile, as if he’s just now thought of something amusing and wants to share it with you and only you.

Right after the book had come out, he’d stopped giving interviews, quit his teaching job at Iowa after three days, and effectively disappeared. Christ, the thought of Jeffrey in Iowa! A story about him would sometimes catch my eye as I hopped around the Internet researching students’ papers. Someone would snap a photograph of Jeffrey exiting a Bavarian coffee shop, or walking a strange dog in a park in Portugal. Someone would have snuck onto the property his parents owned in Surrey, where he was alleged to be staying—writing his Ulysses, they all hoped—and the mystery would suddenly be reignited. It hadn’t taken long before websites emerged, dedicated to his whereabouts, great Wiki-landscapes of facts and fictions and, worst of all, fantasies—tales told by lovers of both genders, of their torrid evenings in Jeffrey’s embrace. The one I’d glanced at was so rife with un-Jeffrey-like details that there was no doubt in my mind it was utter nonsense. But always I had the creeping worry of how horrified Jeffrey would be if he ever read a word of it. I was grateful that he’d never been very good with computers.

“You edited this?” I ask.

“Sort of,” Tina says, almost a little embarrassed. “Officially it was my boss’s book, you know? Russell Haslett? He’s like the main big-shot editor in chief. But I did a lot of the actual work.”

Carsten doesn’t care. “Right, yeah, and I used to work for this supersmall company that, like, took on the publicity once it started getting kind of big. Of course this was before he went totally f*cking bonkers.”

“He didn’t go bonkers,” Tina says defensively. “I used to talk to him on the phone—”

She breaks off again and looks down at the book. I wonder if she’s gotten her hands on anything as good in all the years since she began. I wonder if this is why she’s here, now, on an extended leave from Mr. Haslett’s offices, only to “find herself” stuck in Sri Lanka in a monsoon with Carsten “Chanel.”

Carsten is happy to have someone new to gossip with. “I heard he turned into like a Buddhist-Scientologist. And that he, like, saves his used pen nibs in jars. And that this one time he actually got in a fistfight with this Olympic runner, what was his name . . . Mitchell-something . . . ”

Just as I am about to slip up and snap that they had never actually come to blows, Tina turns to Carsten and says, “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”

Not aware that her friend is once again plagiarizing “Hills Like White Elephants,” Carsten snaps, “Fine!” and puts her headphones back on.

“You did a hell of a job,” I say quietly to Tina. I turn Jeffrey’s book over in my hands. “Editing it, I mean.”

“How would you know?” she says, sipping on her second toddy.

Because, I want to say, I’m probably the only other person in the whole world who read every tattered, tangled draft—more drafts than even you read, probably. Talk about serendipity. Jeffrey wrote it in our kitchen, drinking the booze that I’d picked up when he couldn’t bear to go outside, wearing the slippers he thought were his except that I bought them the weekend we drove down to Delaware—only I don’t get to say any of this, because before I can decide if I should admit to being who I am, the train suddenly and sharply stops moving.

Carsten screams as she tumbles out of her seat, tangled in her headphone wires, her third drink spilling all over her blouse.

Tina doesn’t even scream as she flies from her seat, but she clutches Nothing Sacred to her chest as if she might shield it from harm.

And I? I grab the nun. I don’t know why, but I throw my arms in front of her little old holy bones and keep her from hitting the seat in front of us. She screams, “Gesù Cristo! Madre di Dio! Maria! Maria!”

When the world has gone still again, I let her go. She looks completely frightened, and so completely relieved that she has not died. And though my own head missed the pole of the luggage rack by only an inch, maybe two, I never felt scared and I don’t, now, feel any relief. I can’t remember the last time I felt truly scared for my life—or relieved to be alive, for that matter. Here I am, a man with no faith in any afterlife, who makes his living by helping others cheat, and who last saw his soul on the other side of the Atlantic. And here she is, frantic tears wetting the insides of her glasses, a woman who has dedicated her life to God and who has lived accordingly. But she loves this life and does not want to see it go. And I?

“Holy shit!” Carsten coughs; the headphone cord has half strangled her.

“Is everyone OK?” I ask.

“I’m OK,” Tina says softly, and checks the book to ensure that it is, too.

“Bless you, bless you, bless you,” the nun praises between breaths, rubbing my face with her wrinkled, soft hands.

“No problem,” I say, pulling away from her. I don’t know why.

She immediately begins crossing herself vigorously and clasping her hands together, praying in Latin, if I’m not mistaken. “Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem, Creatorem caeli et terrae, et in Iesum Christum, Filium Eius unicum, Dominum nostrum . . . ”

Carsten suddenly looks down at the purple that covers her blouse and wails, “Look at my shirt!” She grabs her bag and runs away to change in a huff.

As I help Tina to her feet, she tries to uncrush her hat. I take it from her and fold it back into shape with my hands, and she seems grateful.

Then, suddenly, she says, “Your name’s not really Outis, is it?”

I think about denying it, but the look in her eyes tells me that she’s already guessed where I stole it from. Then she explains my own reference to me.

“Odysseus, after he rescues his men from the Land of the Lotus Eaters, is captured by Polyphemus the Cyclops. And Polyphemus says that if Odysseus tells him his name then he’ll eat him last. So Odysseus says—”

“Outis,” I interject. “That’s my name—Outis. So my mother and father call me, and all my friends.”

“Outis,” she says with a grin. “Which means, ‘Nobody.’ And so later when Odysseus blinds him, Polyphemus wails out to the other Cyclopses—”

“‘Outis! Outis is killing me!’” I interrupt with a chuckle. “And so they think that he must be being killed by the gods, and so they don’t even attempt to help him.”

Tina claps her hands happily.

“And you must know all about Poe, then, right?”

I shrug. Her green eyes, again, grow wide with delight. I find myself thinking that I would never grow tired of watching them. “So Poe had this big problem with Longfellow,” she said. “He thought he was a terrible poet, even though he sold, like, one hundred times the number of books of poetry that Poe was selling at the time. Poe didn’t like that Longfellow had basically married into money and gotten a cushy Harvard professorship—”

“While Poe was broke and . . . trying to marry his fourteen-year-old cousin?”

“This is before that, I think. But yes, very broke. So, Poe wrote this article claiming that Longfellow had ripped off Tennyson in this poem about the end of the year being like a dying old man. He called it ‘bare-faced and barbarous plagiarism.’ And Longfellow doesn’t really care. He’s, like, ‘I’m Longfellow. Nobody’s ever heard of you, Poe.’”

Despite everything, I’m laughing. Her Poe imitation winds up sounding like Groucho Marx, while her Longfellow sounds vaguely like Charlton Heston.

“So Poe keeps going on and on about this. And pretty much nobody cares. And then he publishes The Raven and still nobody really cares, until this mysterious guy named ‘Outis’ starts to publish these articles defending Longfellow against Poe’s plagiarism charges . . . by analyzing The Raven and showing how Poe does the same thing . . . takes ideas and images from other poets. And suddenly, because there’s this controversy, people start to read The Raven and Poe starts to get famous, finally.”

“So who was Outis?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she teases. “Who are you?”

Suddenly I’m somewhere between telling her everything and kissing her. Troubled by this rush of confessional impulses, I clear my throat and glance awkwardly over at the nun, who is now done praying and back on her cellular brick, speaking in anxious Italian to whoever is on the other end. I look down at the DVD screen. There is a riotous dance number going on around an elephant, and a Sinhalese woman is dramatically being tossed to-and-fro between a prince and her Tamil suitor. Looking back into Tina’s green eyes, I feel my heart begin to pound in a rhythm it hasn’t known for some time now.

Tina acquiesces. “They think it may have been Poe himself, drumming up a little good PR for The Raven.”

Just as I am about to kiss Tina, she turns away from me and looks toward the window. I follow her emerald gaze and see that just a little ways away, to the left of the train, a camouflage-painted Jeep has parked on a little dirt road that leads back into the rain forest. Several official-looking men wearing dark rain ponchos, with what appear to be military uniforms underneath, have hopped out of the Jeep. Some have bushy black mustaches and others are barely grown boys, but they all have guns that glisten wickedly in the rain.

Before Tina or I know quite what to say, the door to our car opens. We turn, thinking that maybe it is Carsten coming back from changing her blouse. But instead we see the young man who served us our drinks. I assume he’s come to ensure that we are all right, but once he comes in, he yanks off his golden uniform and looks anxiously at me.

“Please please. Can you give me your jacket?”

“My jacket?” I say, looking down at the brown tweed Brooks Brothers coat that I’ve been wearing for so long that I fear it’s begun to grow fur.

“Please. Please. My friend. Please.”

With the nun looking at me, and not entirely sure what else to do, I take off my jacket and hand it to the boy. He throws it on and then looks desperately at Tina. “Your book, please. Can I hold your book?”

Tina looks unhappy about this but hands the boy the book and then, her hat. He accepts it with a flood of Tamil that we cannot quite translate but which feels like thank-yous—and then he quickly sits down in the right-hand corner of the observation car and tries to take up as little room as possible. He hides his head behind the open book so that he seems like an innocuous student, trying to study. It’s not much of a disguise, I think.

“What’s he doing?” Tina hisses.

“Hiding,” I say quietly. “I’m not really sure why. Except that I think our friend is Tamil.”

“But I thought the civil war ended.”

“They never end,” I say, thinking back on my relatively civilized area of Charlotte, in North Carolina, where my neighbors had Confederate-flag bumper stickers and our landlord had DON’T TREAD ON ME tattooed between his shoulder blades. We learned about “The War of Northern Aggression” in school, and instead of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we had off from school in honor of Robert E. Lee. I’m about to tell Tina all this, but it’s been so long since I told anyone anything resembling the truth. The last time I can remember is a story I told a couple in a Dubai bar, and then it was only because I’d had three more cocktails than I ought to have had.

Slowly Tina and I take our seats and pretend to be watching Carsten’s DVD—which seems like the most unassumingly American thing to be doing.

“She loves this stupid movie,” Tina mutters.

“She’s seen it before?” I say in surprise.

“It was on television in the hotel the other night when she was too hungover to go out. The main guy is Tamil. He’s very poor but he’s been sent to the big city full of Sinhalese, so he can learn to be a painter. Have you seen this thing they do here where they highlight the frescoes in their temples with gold leaf?”

I cough in surprise and then study the little screen closely, watching as the Tamil boy paints gold onto the horns of a strange minor deity on the wall of a Buddhist temple. There is a crack in the wall, and he suddenly notices a great brown eye staring through it at him. The music swells so loudly that we can hear it through the headphones on the floor.

“And there’s the girl he’s in love with. She’s Sinhalese, from a very rich family. And she’s supposed to marry this member of the former royal family in Anuradhapura, of course, but she’s in love with painter boy.”

I watch closely as they sing to each other through the hole in the wall. Once, long ago, I wrote a novel with this exact moment in it. The only copy I had had been destroyed, though this moment and some surrounding fragments survived as part of the only story I’d ever published, in a tiny literary review. Was it possible that somehow my story had made its way into the hands of some Bollywood writer, halfway around the world? Had someone plagiarized me? Or had my original idea been so hackneyed and cliché that it had simply resurfaced? Could I have plagiarized it myself, from some book of myths I’d read or some film I’d seen when I was growing up? Was it still plagiarism if I’d done it unknowingly? Does it sting like this because I’ve been robbed or because it was never mine to steal? I watch their eyes trying to catch each other’s through the tiny crack in the wall. Maybe an idea, like love, cannot ever be stolen away, just as it cannot ever have belonged to me and only me.

Just then the door opens loudly. The observation car fills quickly with mustachioed Sri Lankan soldiers. Two of them begin barking at Tina and me, “Passport, ma’am! Passport, sir! We need to see identification.”

Another soldier storms over to the nun and demands she hang up her phone, which results in more frantic screeching in Italian, this time it sounds more like curses than blessings.

Still more soldiers are bringing the Tamil boy to his feet. Can he be even eighteen? He looks at me suddenly, with those same cocksure eyes, and as the men are pulling at him to remove my jacket, the boy does an astonishing thing. He looks away from me and back at the book in his left hand and he reads. His hazel eyes move left to right across the page. I watch his dark lips part as he sounds out the words in front of him. Given how rough his English had been earlier, I have to guess that he can understand only a fraction of what he is reading. It seems a completely insane thing to do, and the men grab him roughly for not coming easily. Why would he do it? I barely have a second to process it before the book and my coat are being thrown roughly to the floor. The soldiers rush the boy back through the open doors and then they’re gone.

“What. The hell. Was that?” Tina says in complete disbelief.

“I’m . . . I’m sure it’s nothing serious. These guys, they just act really blustery probably to scare everyone into respecting them.”

“Where’s Carsten?” Tina says suddenly.

“Carsten’s fine,” I say. “These people. Even if these are bad people, they’re not going to hurt—”

Americans is about to be the next word out of my mouth, but it dies on the way up my throat.

“He looked very young,” Tina says.

“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” I lie.

Just before the end of the civil war, when skirmishes were breaking out everywhere, the Sinhalese government rounded up native Tamil civilians into “no-fire” zones, where they were promised protection from the fighting. The concerned government then proceeded to shell the no-fire zones until they looked like the surface of the moon. Soldiers chased the survivors to the beaches and slaughtered them in the rocky surf until the water had gone red. The leaders of the Tigers turned themselves in, hoping to save the few Tamil civilians who had been captured. The Sinhalese executed every last one of these leaders and then they killed every single captured civilian.

I want to tell Tina this. Then I think maybe it’s better if she doesn’t know it. I wish that I could un-know it. I’d give all the money in my PayMeNow account to un-know it. The nun is praying again, crying more than she had when she thought she had nearly died. I wonder again why she felt something and I didn’t. I wonder if, even believing in a better world after this one, she loves this place more than I have ever loved anything in my life. I don’t know.

All I really know is that I feel something now. I feel a sinking horror as I watch the soldiers, out in the rain, shove the boy roughly into the back of the Jeep and begin to drive away. Happy music plays out of the headphones on the floor as, I presume, the Tamil boy in the movie has at last run off into the sunset with his one true love. Tina clenches at my hand and I grip her like a life raft. I tell myself that it’s going to be fine, but I can’t shake this horrible feeling. There was something about the way that the boy’s lips were moving as he read the book. Something that made me think that he knew he was about to die. And that he wanted one of Jeffrey’s lines to be the very last to pass his lips.

There is a long, long nothing, and then the train begins to move again.