Recently, cancer had made his grandmother maudlin. Fern—out saving prostitutes, and native ones. West wouldn’t have been surprised if this new, sick grandmother had tried to contact Moaning. But maybe his mother was beyond contact. A junkie now—a barfly. Or maybe she actually was on a Midwestern reservation, piloting a small boat through the reeds with West’s half brother and two nephews, or dealing blackjack. He sometimes dreamt her on a corner in Chelsea with arms outstretched, filthy and deranged, waiting for her child to be returned. West didn’t care that she’d let go. Money used in that way—to pry children out of darker arms—was no sale. It was pure and driven and one-dimensionally purchase. A clean, white thing.
West phoned the director of Monk. He set up a meeting. West had ideas about appropriation, about how stillness works, about pendulums, about the beauty of the obstacle. West was roused: he was going to break another rule and not think twice. The first hands (or one dear, mad hand) had been out to unveil physics. The bride. Like everyone, they’d been hunting primes, hungry for the irreducible. West viewed sleight’s architectures as approximations that—combined with current culture (the words of the precursor), the anima of the human form, and the performers’ will—create displacement. Escape, yes. Smallish death, yes. Latchless mind, yes. But also. Also. To West, the first sleights were the gunning-down-a-fast-road-through-salt-air to the bad but unimpeachable song from last decade that would become anthem for the next.
West had decided it was time for a new anthem.
The other director would be reticent, but West could call upon Clef and Kitchen. The most gifted sleightists in Monk would have pull with their mediocre leader. They didn’t much like West, he knew, but he was recovering Lark—they’d be indebted.
West drove early the next week to Bucks County, Pennsylvania—farm country not far from Philadelphia. It was nearing winter. Still, the place was green with hills and ripe with cows, although sadly it had also come to boast espresso and beds, breakfasts, wine. He drove fast in his eighteen-year-old off-white Citröen—the last personal gift he’d accepted from Fern, a graduation present. He saw a billboard beside a barn adorned with a huge hex sign: you ARE LIVING ON THE SITE OF AN ATROCITY—. Yes, he smiled. Try to protect yourselves.
For two hours he listened to the pauses in the conversation he was having in his head. The wet grays and greens rolled by too slowly. Color, West thought, is so often an act of revenge. That’s why it’s so frequently done with blood. Red pools of light. He could do that—and when sleightists passed through, if they were painted red, it would be like a half-wicking. A wicking that is truly illusion: color disappearing them.20 They would eventually understand. Sleightists were brightly lit people. Invisibility achieved through something other than artistry would become to them something other than desirable. This would be an invisibility removed from talent, from choice. Yes—having them experience a different trajectory to nothingness would be first in West’s order of operations.
He’d arranged to meet with the other director halfway between York and New York, inside the first hand sanctuary—the rural commune Antonia Bugliesi had created over a century before for her retiring male sleightists, to keep them in the family. Busying them with art that wasn’t introspection.
He pulled up the long gravel driveway to the gray stone farmhouse. A low maple, hoarding the last of the season’s blotched flame, hung a branch over the front of the car. West ducked beneath it to make his way to the side door—the one that led through the mud-cum-laundry room and into the original kitchen. A scrawny post-adolescent came to and cracked open the door. Recognizing West, he flung open both the inner and the screen doors and gestured, disciple-ish, toward a kitchen lit yellow against lengthening evenings.
West said, “Thanks, we should only be a few hours.” And then, remembering, he asked, “How many will that displace for dinner?”
The boy, looking threadbare in an undersized indie-rock T-shirt, frowned before answering. “In July we were eight, but now there’s only the three of us.”
“Look”—West’s tone was sympathetic—“the same happened to my crew right out of the academy. I was one who eventually left, wasn’t made for it—believe me, it’s better to drop the untalented quickly.” West put up a hand, stifling protest. “Here, take this.” He held out a fistful of cash. “Is the Shot Clock still open? Go get some real food. I know how they keep this place stocked. Have a cheeseburger.”
Monk’s director was anxious. He didn’t know what West wanted with him. West was legend. He was not. He sat unnaturally erect on a salvaged pew across the thick kitchen table from West. He nodded smartly, tried to ask the relevant question, but he was distracted. His eyes darted the room in a weak effort to stitch sense to what he saw: dozens of drawings on sheets of graph and legal paper scotch-taped to darkened oak in inscrutable systems. Arrows, grids, fountains of ink: the beginnings of sleights. Some of the structures, he noted, lacked what he would call verve; others were beyond ambitious, unnavigable. He felt uncomfortable passing judgment, however. Monk’s director had never before been inside a commune; he hadn’t been a hand. An ex-sleightist, he was insecure about his background—maybe it made his navigations too predictable, maybe he catered too much to the performers, maybe shortchanged the forms. That was, at any rate, what critics said of Monk. He tried to tune back into West, who was offering up a detailed plan for the collaboration but no reasons for it. In front of the dead kitchen hearth, its limestone maw blackened with over two hundred years of soot, West crackled like kindling—this was the impression the nervous man had.
“Why color?”
“Why not?”
“Their skin, you say? What about the webs?”
“We’ll glue mirrors to the skin itself, maybe even tint the reflections.”
“Why two companies?”
“Size.”
“Obviously, but why?”
“It isn’t a massacre with twelve.”
“Massacre?”
“Numbers. I need numbers. Twenty-four is barely adequate, but I think I can make it work.”
“Make what work?”
“Look, I need your company. This is big. You have some of the strongest sleightists the academy has ever produced. Wouldn’t you like to offer them something worthy of their talents?”
“Now hold on a second, West—”
“I’m not insulting only you. My own company has maybe two sleights worth its breath. We need this. Sleight needs it. It’ll mean something.”
“Mean something?”
“I’m not saying it’ll have a story, at least not one to articulate.21 No worries there. But it will have something for the sleightists to commit to other than their own vanity.”
“Now you’re insulting the—”
“No, I’m not. Why do they wick? Tell me. I mean, aside from proving their own techniques.”
“I don’t know … for the pleasure of the audience? A sense of community?”
“The audience can screw themselves and get just as much pleasure, for just about as much time. No. No sleightist wicks for the audience. And what did you say—a community? Of what, themselves? Working toward what?”
“I don’t know. What would you have them work toward?”
“Exactly. Exactly. That, friend, is the first worthy question you’ve asked.”
Clef was deep in practice with Kitchen when the director entered the studio. She was standing, heels in her lover’s hands, her head nearly skimming the ceiling tiles, trembling with balance. The couple had skyscrapered two new architectures, linking them from Kitchen’s ankles to her wrists.22 Clef was trying to figure out how to add a next link, and then, how to bring the thing down kindly. She glanced over, saw killjoy in the doorway, and nearly lost it before regaining her focus in the mirror. She waited for his commentary. It usually upset Monk’s leader—to catch Clef working with her own designs. Not today.
“You know, you should ask Haley in, if you need another body. She’d love to be pa
rt of this sort of thing.”
“I’m sure she would, but no, that’s okay.” Clef tried not to show shock at the unexpected helpfulness. She smiled, maintaining her frozen posture. “Kitchen and I manage. How was your trip, by the way? How was West?”
Clef had knocked the wind from his sails—she saw it in his reflection. When she made a sudden jump down, the architectures clattered to the floor in dull violence. She hadn’t meant to reduce him.
“I know him a little, West. It was me he called to get your number.” Clef smiled apologetically.
“He’s not trying to …”
Kitchen stepped forward to assure the man, whose ankles, like a girl’s in patent leather, were starting to roll over his loafers. “No, he’s not. He’s interested in Lark.”
“Clef’s sister Lark?” The director took in a breath. “Why?”
“We aren’t exactly sure.”
“Hmm. He told me he wants to work with Monk. I’ll be honest … I don’t know what he’s planning—but I’d be a fool, wouldn’t I? I would. So I said yes. He wants to use your architectures, Clef. Says he’ll get approval. I’ll be anxious to see how he does that. But he gets what he wants, doesn’t he? I wonder if that’s his grandmother. The thing is, we need to start quick. He wants us in York Monday.”
“What about tour?” Clef had been looking forward to South Africa.
“We’ll be combining our schedules. West is handling it. Along with pretty much everything else, actually.” The man grinned, as if he’d put something over.
Clef and Kitchen looked at each other. West was certainly adept. Their director was adrift in self-congratulation. Disconcerting—to watch him twitch like a glue-sniffing schoolgirl. West must have convinced him that he could be part of a singularity simply by surrendering control. Clef suppressed a smirk. But Kitchen, embarrassed for the man, looked away and down at the floor. At the long, taut tendons of his bare feet.
Kitchen and Clef were the only couple in Monk. A few of the other girls had boyfriends or fiancés, but these alliances wouldn’t last, or the girls would quit. Elisa, Latisha, and Joan were dating brokers. Gretchen was about to marry a man named Hollis who had never seen her perform. Mikaela and Yael had split up years before and were now devoted friends. Haley was always happily severing from some man, attaching herself to another. Montserrat was a virgin.
Kitchen and Clef, a sleight couple, weren’t typical of the art form. And Kitchen, because of his long meander toward sleight, and because he wasn’t a graduate of the academy, qualified as curiosity solo.
Doug Terry’s story was the more usual. Of Monk’s men, he had begun sleight earliest because of four older, profoundly untalented sisters. Doug had talent, and even if he hadn’t, he had been a boy and therefore would’ve been told that he had until he developed a certain self-confidence, enough to substitute for true aptitude. Manny—Emmanuel Vega—was the other of Monk’s men. His case was also not abnormal. He’d started sleight as a teenager because his best girl friend was a serious but shy student who brought him along for comfort. She never made it—not with Manny, and not into a troupe. But Manny had.
Kitchen’s experience didn’t correlate. As a consequence, he spent little time with Doug or Manny, aside from drinking. He was older than them, knew more, was angrier. Drinking, he found he could stand them, and during tour each spring they watched the college basketball playoffs together. They were all American males enough to have been provided with that comfort.
Kitchen had come to sleight after butoh. Un-dance. To have un-danced he had trained in ballet for years—his mother had taught dance in San Francisco, his grandmother as well—first in San Francisco, then at the internment camp at Tule Lake. Kitchen had excelled, and ballet grew quickly intolerable. He abandoned it for postmodern modern. The German expressionist Mary Wigman, before embracing fascism, had taught—among others—a small cadre of Asian dancers at the commune at Monte Verità. Kitchen moved to Japan to study under not them but their disciples. During the late fifties a few dancers of this generation had moved beyond both Eastern and Western roots to create butoh, and in the late eighties, under their aging tutelage, Kitchen was carefully led to discover the correct questions: What is a dancer? What is it to dance? In his improvisational solo, Pitted, he spent time with each question—snaking vines of one around his calf, tight-fisting another inside his pelvis, dragging them along the floor like dead chickens guided by twine. This is where Kitchen got into trouble. “Butoh,” Masaka had said to him one day after a particularly compelling performance, “is not dada.” Kitchen knew then to stop. He wasn’t interested in these particular questions, just in his own body’s ability to ask. In fact, the less correct the question, the further his body could travel to it—the more and more various the dead animals he could pull along the floor. He could explore their weight, the quality of feather or scale as it pertained to drag. Kitchen crossed over to sleight and never once attributed a mechanical nature to the architectures. They were, for him, skeletal.
Since converting, Kitchen had come to understand that most male sleightists, although their physical skill might be comparable to his own, weren’t dedicated to their craft. Male, they didn’t have to be. They ate and drank sleight, but they didn’t think it. That, originally, was how Kitchen had fallen in with the Scrye sisters, who also tended recklessly toward thought—an odd, unfruitful preoccupation for a sleightist.
Kitchen was in love with Clef, how Clef’s mind worked. Once, he had wanted to be in love with Lark, and years ago had tried that. But Lark’s thoughts were excruciating. Huge thorns. And cactuses, un-animal, would go unloved by Kitchen. He guessed he had been afraid of her, though it wasn’t true. Now he lived with Clef’s convolutions, no pale imitations of her sister’s. The way Clef thought was feelable. She was angry like Kitchen, difficult, a bit of a crazy. She asked more of him than Lark had. Lark had asked for nothing but had been a chasm. Still, it would be a mistake to say that Clef these past years had been easier. Kitchen and she were together working and away from work. They kept separate apartments for this reason and because they didn’t want commitment. Commitment murdered: this tenet they shared. But lately commitment had been in the room. Since Lark had shown up. No. Since the accident—no, call it a pregnancy, Kitchen. Since that.
Kitchen thought he must love her more now, and wanted to go away. She kept pretending. Clef’s body, like her face, was a bad liar. In bed, that was when—or just after. The last time they’d made love she left the room the moment they—he—was done. She’d given a reason: wanted water or forgot her vitamins. Maybe she’d said she needed a shower. Whatever it had been, it had been a lie. She left the room to keep from breaking. When they had first gotten together, often after sex she’d collapse into his chest, crying. Her tears were quiet and thicket-like, and his torso those nights—above and below—had been slick with her. Now, with these new architectures, something was being channeled. Grief? Love? Kitchen wondered why he’d never known women with other hobbies. He wanted her to say it: that she wanted the child they hadn’t. Lately, Kitchen couldn’t keep himself from thinking about the rain. How good it could sometimes feel. How it felt all the other times.
And now, Monk’s director had informed him that he’d bartered Kitchen’s energies, his sweat and inquiry, to West—someone Kitchen didn’t know, didn’t trust, someone who had ideas about what things meant. Clef, invested as she was in private loss, seemed to find the maneuver unimportant, even droll. Kitchen, however, was beginning to feel a bit dragged. A bit along the floor.
Clef walked into chamber one. All of Kepler was there—and all of Monk filed in behind her. Regally she moved her diminutive frame through the loose gathering of sleightists, sleightists about to welcome her troupe into their space. She headed toward West, his back up against a mirror. As she got close, she said his name. And because he had already been looking in her direction—her red braid swinging angrily between the shoulders of the crowd—all he could do was say, “Clef?” A
t which point she kneed him in the groin with considerable force, having not, during the approach, slowed her imperial pace.
Gasps, and West doubled over. Kitchen ran up to grab her arm, but Clef was done. She pivoted and on her way out parted the silenced company. There was nowhere to go but back to the bus or toward town. She chose the walk. She left Kitchen there to speak with West. She had thought maybe her director would chase her down, beg her to apologize. Damage control. But his cowardice had predictably won out over appeasement—he wasn’t after her. She turned down a residential street: brick ranch houses with carports and not much landscaping. She wanted to be alone for a while. Some shrubbery was all.
In the office, West nursed his testicles with a bag of frozen peas kept in the troupe refrigerator for muscle and joint injuries. Kitchen was with him. After the blindside, West had limped over to the office to speak quietly with an intern, who took a book of accounts and vacated. Kitchen had followed West and pointed through the open doorway. West let him in. But when Monk’s director made a similar gesture from a few feet back, West offered only a puzzled stare and closed the door behind them.
“So. Your woman is insane.”
“More furious. She thinks you’re about to hurt her sister.”
“Why? Because I’ve … well, not me personally … but because Lark’s coming here?” West coughed, and grimaced. “I thought Clef would be pleased. No, ecstatic. In fact isn’t that precisely what she asked me to do?”
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