The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma Page B

spirit was Anton’s favorite reminder of his homeland.
    “And you’re brilliant,” she purred. “It’s absolutely masterful.”
    I came over next to her and set my glass down. “You’re not just saying that?”
    “Would I lie?” she teased. Behind her dark eyes, folded up inside Rose’s imagination, my characters were still alive, just as I’d described them. She scraped her ring gently against the back of my arm; liquor pulsed in my veins. Her head slowly moved into the orbit of my own. I kept my eyes open so I could see the gentle shake that comes when she’s fighting herself and losing. And then an inhuman rasping sound burst forth from Anton’s room, shattering the moment and all subsequent moments.
    The sound grew louder, and soon the door pushed open and Anton half collapsed into the room, his bathrobe opened and his eyes red as beets.
    “I’m dying,” he announced.
    “Anton, dear, you have the flu,” Rose said for the hundredth time that week. She got up to look after him. She’d been mothering him since long before I knew either of them, since they were thirteen and both sent to live a continent away from their families at St. Alban’s Preparatory School. Quickly I shuffled the remaining pages together and slipped them back into the hatbox before Anton could see them. “Do you want us to order you more wonton soup?”
    “Damn the soup!” Anton bellowed, tossing a checkerboard sans pieces over the divan and against the window. “Damn all the soup!”
    “He’s delirious,” Rose said, chasing after him to try to tie his robe together.
    “Melodramatic, you mean,” I said, and we both knew it was more likely that he was drunk.
    Anton seemed to be offended by this. “There isn’t a melodramatic bone in my body,” he coughed. “And you ought to know the difference.” He seemed eager to go on, but he erupted into another coughing fit that he covered only barely with his sleeve. When he pulled the sleeve away, we could both see that it was specked with blood.
    “How long have you been coughing up blood?” Rose asked.
    Anton lifted one cupped hand high in the air. “It will have blood! They say, blood will have blood!”
    “What the hell is he saying?”
    “He’s doing Macbeth,” Rose said calmly, finding her phone in a voluminous handbag. “Anton, dear, sit down. I’m going to call your parents.”
    “But they’re out on the Crimean Peninsula somewhere,” I said. “We’ve got to call an ambulance. We should have called one a week ago.”
    I’d let it slide this long because Anton’s nocturnal schedule wasn’t all that unusual. We had always gone through long stretches when we were each so engrossed in our writing that we barely spoke. I worked best during the harsh light of the morning, when my dreams from the night before still danced in my mind. Anton preferred to wake in blackness from nightmares and push them away slowly with sips of and taps of his Remington hammers on ink-soaked ribbons. Now, I felt that it was little wonder he’d gotten so sick; every day he waged new campaigns in the war against his own body.
    Rose ignored me and dialed twelve digits from memory. A moment later she was connected to a palatial mansion on the Sea of Azov that I’d heard about many times but had never seen.
    “Dobroye ootro, Gospodin Prishibeyev. Eto Rose. Vash syn, Anton, bolyen . . . ” she spoke in flawless Russian. As the one-sided conversation continued, Anton led me in a waltz around the room, pausing only briefly to mist his other sleeve with airborne blood. I wondered how contagious tuberculosis was, or if he might have gotten some kind of STD from one of his gentlemen callers.
    Rose looked up, holding her hand over the receiver. “Mr. Prishibeyev says we should take him to see a Dr. Ivanych. He’s a friend of the family’s.”
    Anton shouted, “Pasha! Pasha Pasha Pasha!”
    I didn’t know what “Pasha” meant, but Dr. Ivan Ivanych’s name I knew from the many bottles