“What is a Soul exactly?”
“Is this to be an interview then?” Lark mocked, slipping into a coy drawl she’d learned young. Though inexcusably tardy, Byrne was growing on her. It helped he had a deformity; a rock in the hand meant fewer available fingers.
“I guess. Sure.”
“Then I’ll say that a Soul is a vessel comprised of a unique combination of Needs. And that a Soul is a useless thing to buy. In fact, the idea of purchasing a Soul should disturb you. A person should earn a Soul, don’t you think? Or grow one?”
Byrne laughed without noise, the sobbed chuckle convulsing him. “You’re hysterical.”
“Yes. A century ago, I’m certain that would have been the diagnosis.” Lark’s tone had gone from taunting to arch in one sentence. As had her posture.
Byrne straightened up. She was confusing him. “Right. So … why do you think people buy Souls from you?”
“Why is God lazy?” Lark’s voice was a belle’s again.
“Is God lazy?”
“Do you believe in God?”
“No.”
“I submit that as proof of his laziness.”
Lark was massaging color into the small wooden bowl. She didn’t look up at Byrne when she spoke, but he watched a crooked smile walk across her face. She was playing him.
“You say Souls are made of Needs. I saw the Needs you drew. They weren’t color, they were form. And they were plural.”
“A Need …” Lark didn’t want to answer though there was no question. She pushed herself. “A Need is what makes you … you … anything … do anything.” She was losing control of her whimsy. She was embarrassed to find herself sounding sincere.
“It’s desire then?”
“No. A Need is … let me think.” She looked up at Byrne. “How’s your grammar?”
“It’s good.”
“Good. Then a Need is like an infinitive, a passive infinitive: to be impelled, to be induced. Or no, that’s not it.” Lark thought, then spoke her thinking, which was wrong—vulnerable—of her. “Desire is what I do. A Need does desire to me.”
“A Need is divine then? External?”
“I thought you didn’t believe in God.” Lark had found her way back inside the banter. Was she perspiring? She touched her forehead with the back of her hand.
“But you do.”
“I most certainly do not.” Her hand came down. She wasn’t perspiring.
Lark held out the newly painted Soul for Byrne’s inspection. Its hurricane of greens. Byrne remembered a punchline from preadolescence, a frog in a blender—but this was bloodless. She was. He looked into Lark’s eyes, Irish with wrinkles, laughing and counting him. She made him feel young, like a young man. As if his skin were angry.
“Why is it you renounce them then?”
“Excuse me?” Lark, stunned. He’d hit something. She grew even taller in her chair, her vertebrae repelling one another. She tried to be scathing, fumbled it, seemed wounded. “Renounce—now there’s a religious word. And I’m not. I don’t. If anything, I announce the Needs. Announcing them fixes them, and they die for it.”
“‘Fixes them’?”
“I never wanted them to define me. And now, now I seem to be nothing but refusal.”
“There’s no escape for you then?” Byrne felt the need to catch her, pin her to some utterance. She irritated him—so few did. It was, he thought, her way of mocking herself, which mocked him better.
“I never tried to escape. I tried not to imprison them, but Needs die outside of incarceration. Outside of my body.” Lark passed her hand sadly over the Soul, as if it were a small grave or a black hat. She looked up. “Only their color doesn’t.”
She wasn’t hurting him, not really. And she looked like a bird now: sharp averted eyes, taut neck, instinct, arrow. Byrne tried to rescind. To be kind.
“The drawings you made look like sleight, you know. Like structures.”
“I do know.”
“Is that why you quit?”
“You mean, having found a way to rid myself of my Needs, did I then refuse to spend time inside their bodies writ large?”
“I guess that’s what I’m asking.”
“No. I quit because I was good, and when you’re good and a girl at something, you should be suspicious.”
“Of what?”
“Of what part of yourself you didn’t know you were selling.”18
Lark read it. A dozen pages spilled over with words. She had asked Byrne to write her a precursor. She hadn’t thought. It was what he did and she wouldn’t. She’d never articulated the Needs like that. She had known that it wasn’t possible, but also—that there was too much power in it.
When Byrne returned from his walk, Lark’s daughter Nene was sitting cross-legged on his bed. A petite shaman. “Do you want to play cards again?” he asked her. And when she didn’t answer: “How about I teach you Egyptian Ratscrew?”
She shook her head. “What I want to know,” she spoke quietly, “is what you did to my mommy.” Nene leaned forward then and placed her head into her hands. She was so old, and her head such a sad gift. When she completed the fold, she was the size of a large turtle he’d seen across the lake an hour before. Byrne didn’t think she was about to cry—maybe because he couldn’t picture it. He sat down next to her but kept his hand and his rock to himself. She wasn’t the type of child one touched easily. She was the type of child who made one reconsider natural inclinations. As Byrne had come to know her over the past ten days, he’d started learning himself differently.
He tried to comfort her with an explanation.
“I just gave her some words.”
“Why would you do that?” Nene’s voice was muffled, spoken into her lap.
“She asked me to.”
The little girl’s head popped up. Hopefully. “She did?”
“Yes.”
“I want to see them then.”
“I don’t think they’ll make any sense to you.” Byrne knew Nene could read, better than any four-year-old he’d ever known. When he’d first arrived, she had been in the middle of the World Book Encyclopedia Yearbook: 1972. They had briefly conversed about ecology and the fourth estate. Her grasp of the concepts was rudimentary—no better than if she had been twelve.
“Newt’ll help.”
“Your grandfather?”
“He helps when things are hard for me.”
Byrne knew an adult shouldn’t encourage this type of delusion, but Nene talked about Newt guilelessly. And the stories were enchanted.
“But isn’t Newt a scientist?”
“He will be, when he’s older, before he died.”
“I see.”
“But he likes words too. And he knows a lot about Mommy. He calls her Checkers.”
“Why Checkers?”
“Because she doesn’t have red hair.”
“I see.”
“You always say that when there’s nothing to see. You can’t see Newt. You can’t see Mommy brushing Aunt Clef’s hair in the bathroom. You can’t even see the inside of your own rock.”
Byrne stilled himself, tried to breathe evenly. If he didn’t move too suddenly, or at all, maybe this creature would keep speaking.
“So will you let me see them too? The words?”
“Yes.” Byrne breathed it. “Nene?”
“No. I can’t tell you. But you didn’t hurt him. Neither one of you did.”
“Nene, who are you talking about?”
“You and Marvel didn’t hurt your daddy. That’s stupid to think that. Your rock is very tired of it all the time.”
“Nene, how do you know my brother’s name?”
“I have his Soul on my dresser. Do you want to see? I love that one. It’s red and orange and it breathes.”
17 This page is reprinted with permission from The Pathologies of Performance, an anthology compiled by the California psychoanalyst A. D. Statt, PhD. All texts within the book are the works of musicians, actors
, dancers, painters, etc. This list was composed by a patient of Statt’s, case number 33.2, a hand, as part of a decades-long treatment both during and after a semidistinguished career in sleight.
18 Antonia Bugliesi chose her students and then trained them in a manner that made their questioning of the underlying properties of sleight unlikely. Most were prostitutes, or at the very least destitute, without education or prospects. She offered them a living that required both unrelieved physical focus and obedience. In the few cases where a sleightist seems to have questioned Antonia, if that sleightist were a woman—she became pregnant (possibly by Bugliesi’s lover, the lewd puppet-figure Dodd). If a man—he was asked to study the documents and eventually produce an original sleight: these were the first hands. In essence, when Antonia felt her charges were too close to the source, she shuttled them into acts of creation far from the well.
LARK’S BOOK.
[On pages 17 and 18, fragments of graph paper pasted into the journal. The resulting pages are warped but the drawings—precise and depth-bearing.]
Sketch thirty-four: Bowel. A meander with searching
inner filaments. And among the morass: unnamable occlusions.
Sketch thirty-five: A perfect and thickening spiral pitted
against a cube. High, pornographic discourse.
Sketch thirty-six: A shutter.
Sketch thirty-seven: A tilled field, could all of its rows—
its whole—be viewed simultaneously from within. Or below.
[On page 19, Lark’s handwriting.]
It took me too long to figure out the things to hate. The word “plantation.” Quiet boys who told me how I should. All my alien-withins: pity stones, unending suck, the impossible entrances into another, silver strangles—crotch to throat. After I had them figured, I killed them. I couldn’t take how I couldn’t take. How I was, am, girl. At twenty-five.
The first time, I was fifteen. They were drunk, some tripping. Eight of us. They made me drive Space Highway out to the res. I didn’t drop that night, so even though the wine made the headlights talk so sad—white cryings, spider brides—I was the choice. We piled into a rusted-out Impala and some kindness took us ten miles to the spot above the river.
Got undressed. Claudia was the other girl, the one who’d dragged me in. My body, newly sprung, was still caving its chest into a sort of grotto: airtight, godtight. The boys were a year older, smart. They ranted about the breathing dark between stars, howled how willows swayed out essential seduction. Remember “essential” was all I could think. I tried to see it and the trying made me bold. That night I brought my body out—it, me, verging. Ready for shame.
Sleight had made my walking and standing better suited to intoxication. I had some balance. I half-tightroped, half-cakewalked along the lip of the dam. Spun a lopsided polyhedron. That night my limbs were limbs of hoary gods waltzing on the sea. That night, the boy I hurt for most begged a kiss—and I, naked, began it. But only seconds in, he stopped me. Grabbed my arms and wrenched them down. Off him. Said acid confused our lips, made it hard for him to keep us separate. “Besides,” he said, “you’re a pure and perfect child and I am a goat.”
That night I learned what it was—a muse. A muse is to be relegated.
What I wanted didn’t need to be taken from me. Was kept instead as if just above, not admitting my reach. I do not admit. So I, still throbbing with the silt-feel of muck between my toes, thighs slick and woken, started to kill the thing, the Need, that made me hope I was for something intended.
That was my first.
[On page 22, a clipping from a tabloid. The headline: HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS OPPOSE BAPTISM—MORMONS CLAIM DEAD JEWS AS THEIR OWN]
Two days after West’s invasion, Kitchen found the note in Clef’s apartment. She was off to Iowa for the last week of her recovery. She wanted to visit a friend of hers, an ex-sleightist who’d married an oral surgeon. They hadn’t seen one another in years. Bea had three children under the age of six. Kitchen tried not to laugh at Clef’s lack of self-preservation, but he did. Until two tears.
She called the next night. “They’re beautiful.”
“I’ve seen the Christmas cards.”
“I mean, they’re insane, all over the place, and Bea’s a mother, but they’re beautiful.”
“Have you held the baby?”
“Emmy. Yes. But hardly a baby anymore. She’s beautiful. She has such perfect …”
“Fingers?”
“Yes, and …”
“Feet?”
“Yes, and Clara Bow lips. Red. Her mouth is a bud.”
“Rosebud. Of course—the mute enigma crying out. Unless … does this beautiful child not cry?”
“She only cries when she needs something, Kitchen.”
“And how often is that?”
“I know. I do. I can’t stay the week, I’m getting no rest. The toddler came into my room in the middle of the night last night.”
“He’s a bad sleeper?”
“Not really. It was six, but Bea and I’d stayed up.”
“Drinking?”
“Stop it. She needed to talk—you wouldn’t recognize her. Bea was always the gone one, remember? And now she’s just so … there. She covers her tattoos, all except the asp and that’s because it’s around her neck. Jesus. Bea was the last person I expected to …”
“To what? Settle down? Settle for settling down?”
“You know, Kitchen, it’s not always about us. Bea—she seems … well, she can’t be happy. Can’t be. But …”
“What?”
“She swears she is.”
Clef changed her ticket. Two days later Bea was driving her to the Des Moines airport. A few miles from the entrance, Clef saw the billboard for the first time: YOU ARE LIVING ON THE SITE OF AN ATROCITY. She made Bea pull over. Bea started to protest, but Clef assured her an hour was plenty of time for a domestic flight. Bea pulled onto the gravel.
“Clef, you can’t not have seen one of these.”
“I’ve heard of them, of course. But yes, this is the first one I’ve actually seen.”
“They’re not in New York?”
“There’s one right outside the Holland Tunnel. Also on the BQE, the LIE, two on 95. I just haven’t seen them.” Clef was weirdly ashamed.
“I think this one’s about pesticides.”
“Pesticides?”
“That or the groundwater. The agricultural runoff around here is frightening. Especially what it can do to children.”
“I bet.” Clef had her own ideas, very few of which involved children. She got out of the car and walked closer. The yellow grass was tall there, just off the shoulder, and she bent to scratch her nonbandaged ankle. Bea had gotten out too—to follow her? Clef wondered. She turned quickly to her friend, to catch her in the act of mothering. But Bea was squinting up at the dark sign.
Clef asked, “Who do you think is putting them up?”
“I never really thought about it.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Seems like a legitimate warning. Why be suspicious?”
“A warning? But according to this”—suddenly annoyed, Clef thrust her arm toward the black rectangle—“the atrocity has already happened. There’s nothing left to do.”
“Or is already happening. And there’s always something left to do, trust me.” Bea’s hand went through her hair, worrying it, before it reached her neck and lingered there—covering the head of the snake like a cowl. She looked over at Clef. “Come to the car. I’ve got to get home before Jay’s soccer game, and you’re missing Kitchen.”
After they were back on the highway, Clef spoke.
“Why did you say that? I told you how awful he’s been. I just need to get into the city, into the chamber. Back into my body.”
“Okay, you don’t miss Kitchen.” They were quiet together for a while. Then Bea reached across the front seat and laid her hand on Clef’s stomach. She let it rest there. Clef did not think herself easily s
haken, and not by so small a thing, the weight of a woman’s palm. But—she hadn’t expected it.
After a minute or so, Bea withdrew her hand and returned it to the wheel. Clef watched it go. Bea was by this time saying something—about finding a lost key in a spider plant, about potting.
“Do me a favor, would you Clef? You know that pep-squad twit they hired to replace me?”
“Haley.”
“Could you be mean to her for a few days? In my memory?”
“Done.”
“And give Kitchen my love.”
Clef stared out across a blear of flatland. Nodded.
Clef made her way up the five flights to the chamber. The paint was coming off the pipe banister in large red flakes. On the way back down, sweaty from class or rehearsal, she often came out of the stairwell looking as if she’d just murdered some vagrant clown. Some balloonman. Today she wasn’t winded when she reached the top, but she was no longer used to the climb. It had been over a month. She took out her keys and undid the deadbolt. No one would be there this early—she would have a chance to regroup.
Clef undressed in the cramped anteroom and slipped her shoes, coat, and sweats into one of the cubbies against the wall. She dropped her bag onto the floor, unzipped it, and pulled out an architecture she’d designed during her recovery. She’d adapted it from one of the more involved structures in Lark’s book. The shape was an inversion: its center could rotate to the periphery and vice versa. The mechanics had kept Clef up nights, but she’d finally wrought it. She thought its novelty might help her ignore the unavoidable pain of reentry.
In the chamber, mirrors lined three walls. There was a small diamond-shaped window on the fourth, and two structural beams interrupted the room’s flow. It was small for a sleight chamber, but that was because Monk, unlike so many other troupes, had maintained its urban presence, with chambers on Avenue A since the forties. Clef had been to other troupes’ larger, more welcoming spaces, but there was something about grit and obstacle and a low ceiling that felt true to her field. Her art wasn’t about expanse or breath. It had irritated Kitchen when she’d said it aloud, but she had come to see sleight as a death practice.
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