Since the eleven o’clock news the night before, parts of the macabre video had played too many times in a row on the local stations, as if there were no children left but these. The couple, the Vogelsongs, had created a theatrical hive in their basement. A pageant. Voluminous curtains of pomegranate, tangerine, and honey hung around the room on six boxed frames just over five feet in height. The boxes faced into the center of the hexagon with a gap of perhaps eighteen inches at each corner. Each box had a different inner backdrop—detailed dioramas of the Serengeti, a rural Midwestern landscape replete with silos and combines, a mountain-pierced night sky, the mottled floor of a rainforest, Appalachian-style woodlands littered with birch, a thriving and technicolor coral reef. While giving the grisly tour, the eerily childlike and bearded Mr. Vogelsong floated in bust form as he passed behind the theaters, naming them as he circled—Safari, Farm, Stars, Jungle, Trees, and Sea.
Ray Vogelsong or his wife Melanie would have sat in a rolling office chair on the outer edge of the boxes to work the strings. The alternating puppeteers could have moved around the room with ease, while the interior audience—a bound, gagged child on a bar stool—would have been rotated from setting to setting, world to world. Her new surroundings. Maybe the child had been allowed to speak after the hours-long performance, to choose a habitat. Or two. Or all six. “Where would you like to live, dear? If you could swim or fly or gallop faster than the nighttime, which would you choose? Pick your pets. Pick the colors and shapes of your future. Such pretty homes we’ve built for you. Do you see?”
The news showed segments of the documentary-style footage: the camera scanned the basement shelves lined with plain brown shoe-boxes—each labeled with a Polaroid of its contents, a date of completion, and a list of initials. The media had decided, in this case, to relinquish all but the most vestigial decency. So it was only in these cataloguing pictures that the Vogelsong’s works were offered to the general public: in photo after photo, from the deft fingers of the couple were suspended their exquisite miniatures. Animal marionettes. Petite beasts fashioned from the boiled and bleached bones of past audiences: each one masterfully rendered—carved and polished but unpainted, as exemplary specimens of driftwood remain unpainted in the hands of discerning craftspeople.
It was impossible for a sleightist to stare at the television and not wonder—how had they configured the tiny rhinoceros skull, the bat wing? Could the horse trot? The monkey mouth swing open? It was this aesthetic curiosity that caused them to shrink bodily away from the television while their eyes remained, riveted in shame. The morbid fascination that other citizens could suppress or deny was, for the sleightists, much more compelling. It was professional interest.25
But it wasn’t only the dozens of strung toys and the couple’s workbench, with its precise divisions of unused bones and fine, clean tools, that impressed them. The very character of the space demanded admiration. The killers had reversed the concept of theater-in-the-round. Like many brilliant ideas, it was simple and elegant and it borrowed—wrenching function from an earlier model. The victims, had they not been too frightened by the kidnapping, might have at first delighted. In how just-for-them it was. Eventually, the spinning would have disoriented them. Some might have gotten sick on themselves. And if they weren’t too tightly bound already, their accumulating complaints and struggling to be undone would have earned them more rope: a cocooning. The transformation from child into animal would have begun long before the Vogelsongs picked up their long knives for the reincarnation. It was all there—in the space. Any good sleightist could read it.
“Listen. I know it’s gotten to you. But Clef graciously decided to put aside our differences to come in today and help with her architectures, and Byrne and Lark are on their way. We don’t have much time before tour.” West was looking around at the two dozen faces, polling their expressions.
“I’m not feeling that hot, West.”
“I wasn’t feeling so hot yesterday, Clef. And that had something to do with you.”
A couple members of Kepler sniggered and immediately fell silent, embarrassed to have found humor in this climate.
“What do you want us to do? Create links about this? Improv on the dismemberment of children?” Clef’s voice, though caustic, was not up to its usual fire.
“Actually, yes. I think yes.”
“You’re a sick fuck. I can’t believe I put you in touch with my sister.”
“Maybe. But you all know that it’ll feel good to move. Better, even, to wick—though with the new forms, you probably won’t get that release. And if you work with some sense of purpose—for these children …”
“All … the … pret-ty, lit-tle hor … ses.” T mumble-sang this with her face hidden in her hands. Then she bought them down, folded them in her lap. She lifted her head. “I agree with West. Action is preferable to nonaction. If we don’t practice, I’ll just go home and chop wood all afternoon. Oh.” She put her face back into her hands. “Jesus.”
“I just can’t.” Haley shook her white-blonde tresses in a no.
“It’s beyond exploitative.” Kitchen said this.
“What else are we going to do?” One of Kepler’s women stood up. “I don’t want to go home, I don’t want to see it anymore. Do you?”
This was what it took. They slowly stood: one, and then another, and then a few. They dropped their forks and knives in front of West, who sat cross-legged in the middle of the space. With each piece of plastic, his look of satisfaction grew and his presence faded. Cheshire. The sleightists migrated to the edges of the chamber to pick up the various architectures. They decided quietly among themselves who would work where. Some resisted and went to sit in the lounge, but eventually, even for Haley, the idleness became suffocating, and those few reentered the chambers.
After nearly half an hour spent watching Clef, brutally numb, Kitchen pulled her to her feet. “West’s right about this,” he said.
Drained of heat, her voice atonal, still she attempted a refusal—“You said it was exploitation.”
Kitchen kissed her damp forehead. “Yes, Clef. It’s art.”
West knew it was wrong to see this as a stroke of luck. But he wrestled with the moral dilemma not at all. This was what they needed. Impetus. Emotion they couldn’t rid themselves of as they worked, and imagery. He’d thought he would have to dredge up something historical—Dachau, Nagasaki, Kibuye. But today was history, closer and more vivid than anything he could bring them in a book. He would not have to work to have them haunted—and not merely by the children. The details would catalyze them: the painted fantasies of place and those pale animals, and the idea of each child alone in the midst of it—alone in the center of his own disappearance, watching milky creatures court his bones to soaring horn and bullfrog tones. It seemed the Vogelsongs, at least on their basement hi-fi system, had been partial to early recordings of Satchmo.
The husband had gone to the police station to confess. The wife, simultaneously, to York’s Channel 8 with their homemade footage—a sympathetically filmed and narrated journey into the couple’s world. There was no reason. No one had found them out; not one had escaped or nearly escaped. They were tired of their work going unremarked upon perhaps. His eyes were no longer attentive enough, hers no longer admiring. They were obsessives who had honed their skills while craving difference. They hungered for a wild-type reaction. It wasn’t possible to switch up the victim profile or method, everything having been perfected. So they varied the response the only way they could: they went public.
West understood their quandary. The scales had tipped. The pride in their work had finally won out over their need to continue performing: it had come time for fame. He wondered who had been the first to fall. He didn’t assume it had been the man.
For West, horror was a natural throe of childhood. These children had just escaped a longer set of convulsions. They’d gone off like honored guests—wined and dined and performed for. All children were slaughtered into a
dulthood; these ones had been thrown a party. West was unable to stop analyzing—disavowing their pain with analogy, swerving it into commonplace, an American cliché. In the media, the Vogelsongs would be called monsters, but he knew better.
Although his mind might be fringed in a bitter light, that light allowed West a pitiless clarity. At the edges of his worldview the cowboy had always stood: a pure looming, a reversal of gypsy, tinker, the Goodguy who swept all dark children up and away. That’s who the Vogelsongs were. Sweet wranglers who had saved these unwanteds from future treachery. That’s how the couple saw it. That’s how much of the country would see it soon, after repeating to one another, with far too little embarrassment, soundbytes from Melanie Vogelsong’s oddly poetic monologue:
Each one of our animals was an adoption. They were lost. They call it a system—my Ray worked in that system. That system, it didn’t work. We took them in, gave them spirits. Now they are strong. Proud. Beautiful. Free. They belong to Christ. Christ was the lamb. They are what they wanted to be: Christ’s. Ray asked them. Ray gave them choices not many animals get. They didn’t want to be what they were. Their hair, for example. I couldn’t use the hair of all but two. Those two had to do for every mane, every tail. We have eight lions and five horses. And now the bones are clean. You can’t tell anything at all from the bones. I’m very happy about how clean they came.
—transcripted from the Vogelsong tape as it aired on Channel 8 News
The links were breathtaking. In all four chambers, members of Monk and Kepler were speaking with the architectures—invocations of animals that didn’t exist. A calling forth of alien life: sky-whale and tree-elk and earth-sparrow. Montserrat, Doug, Manny, and Yael joined a member of Kepler in a low structure. They alternated taking two small stutter-steps with a quick carving motion to make the floor swarm with skittering fish, then shot the structure overhead so that mice seemed to spiral along the architectures before moving up into the rafters. Strange mice, smooth as icing. Haley and a pair of Kepler’s men were lumbering gracefully—a two-trunked elephant clearing ground and air as if in preparation for the planting or burial of thought. Latisha and T were bound by their architectures in what seemed a vegetative embrace, until the link began to rotate, arcing them across the floor in a velvet bestial waltz. And they were all wicking. All of them—flashing in and out like the evening news in a July thunderstorm. There was an overpowering static to it, a haze in the chambers that lasted hours.
Kitchen and Clef weren’t themselves inside of it. They walked slowly, slowly between the chambers, disengaging each foot with care each time it left the floor. Mute. It was Kitchen silently crying. Clef, reaching for his hand. The second time they entered chamber two, they saw across the field of sleightists a man and a woman holding hands at the other entrance. This was not a mirror. This was Lark, but the man was white, not Drew. Between the couples, sleight was giving birth. Creature after creature tumbled forth in a discontinuous river of forms. A dumb show. Eden unnamed.
West watched, rotating through each of the four chambers from the office. A door and small tinted window on the fifth wall of each chamber led into the small gray room: file cabinet and telephone. There he had gone, to sit in the dark like a child, choosing the fauna of his next life.
20 The illusion of distance—the illusion of illusion—is created and maintained in sleight by the very theaters in which it is performed. Distance is necessary to transform what is terrifying into what is pleasurable. For the audience, wicking is an illusion. They cannot explain it; they adore not being able to, but they do not believe for one moment that the figures onstage actually flash out of existence. No, the location of sleight—the familiar, deceitful stage—assures them that they are being happily duped. The eventual reappearance of the sleightists similarly pacifies them. Any misgivings someone may have while watching her first sleight vanishes when she witnesses the habitual complacency of fellow theatergoers.
21 Sleight is stringently antinarrative. Hands have been summarily dismissed from the academy for storying up their precursors, subconsciously or otherwise. Called the mathematics of performance and visual music, sleight forges its content from the medium itself. Whatever the original reason for its abstraction, by remaining nonreferential, sleight is able to be universally interpreted by its audience. Directors know that the moment meaning is attached to intent (the hands’ or the sleightists’) is the exact moment the audience begins to feel inadequate—and withdraws. The form is all. Sleight’s function has always and only been the breeding, the perfection, the care and feeding of the form.
22 In the syntax of sleight, an architecture is a word. A manipulation is a single definition of an architecture; an architecture can be moved through several different manipulations—anywhere from three to thirty. A link is the method by which one architecture attaches to another. Links are phrases. A structure is a group of links that works together coherently: a sentence. When hands draw sleights, the structure is the most minute level they work with. Thus it is the director, not the hand, who chooses the architectures that best correspond to the structure on the page and then links them to create an approximation. The director is interpreter—wielding as much power as an interpreter chooses to wield. More. The product—the poem or the essay or the diatribe the director lifts out of the blueprint—is sleight. A hand, then, could be likened to a womb-deaf composer, arranging his notes not for instruments but solely in terms of color. It is the director and not the hand who transports prism to symphony.
23 Bugliesi began sleight with just under fifty architectures. Currently, there are sixty-odd institutionalized designs; preexisting ones are rarely altered—new ones are added to the official list at a rate of less than two per decade by a process both arduous and spuriously bureaucratic.
24 Unlike the system of rules provided for the structures and even the naming of sleights, the writing of precursors is a fairly unfettered practice. A hand must not create narrative, but no word is off limits, and there are no guidelines to suggest how a precursor might match language with form. Precursors are the intuition of sleight, its curve. Hands who fall into formula with their precursors inevitably effect redundant sleights.
25 Sleight is not routinely perceived as grotesque, despite its recorded adrenal effect: a heightened sense of threat. In a study done by Dr. G. T. Theva of the Hookings Medical Institute, puzzling chemical phenomena were documented in a third of the study’s participants—all seated audience members. Indeed, the number of heart incidents occurring in sleight theaters prompted managers to equip them with defibrillators far before it was fashionable. Beyond the effect Theva noted in its spectators, sleight has also been described as “a carnival of self-annihilation” and “a compulsive reenactment of the death-wish.” This is to say that, despite its continuing success with the general public, there are a minority who find sleight theoretically abhorrent.
NOVEMBER.
The first night back in York, Lark had joined Byrne in his bed—a simple platform with a thin, hard mattress, no springs—large enough for two people, if they made a concerted effort, not to touch. Byrne had fallen in love with her little girl. He liked Drew. And Lark loved Drew: they had a little girl. So Byrne and Lark had not slept together. Other than to sleep.
The second night, after a grueling day in the chambers, they came back and she, wordlessly, grabbed a flannel blanket from his one closet and curled into the sunken sofa Byrne had inherited from the landlord. The next morning, he took the top sheet from his bed and set it on the already-folded blanket. Lark spent the next four weeks, ten hours a day, working in the chambers. Twice, she’d said for him to go home without her, and she’d slept at the studio. A large, zebra-striped sectional dominated the Kepler lounge. Dizzying pattern—sleek, retro lines. He’d passed out there often enough during rehearsals. Daymares.
On several occasions he overheard Lark tell West she didn’t know how to begin drawing a sleight. She said it defiantly. And each time West answered, “
Whatever you need.” So she trained. Byrne had been watching sleightists all his life, closely now for three months, and he had not seen anyone go at the practice—go at themselves—so ruthlessly.
Monk and Kepler would begin each day in chamber one, warming up. Some arrived a half hour before class, to prime their bodies for priming. Others came into the chamber only when called. Lark was among the former. In her unrelieved intensity, she stood out. Although the other sleightists worked through class in seeming unison, each focused on his or her unique body. Kitchen began his exercises loose and small, at a lower level and with eyes closed, for balance. Clef was nursing an ankle, lifting and circling her foot until the joint cracked or, alternately, bending her knee to elongate a powerfully articulated calf. T, easily the most flexible sleightist in Kepler, maybe Monk too, spent the mornings testing the outermost limits of her contortions. Byrne had noticed, previously, that although sleightists spent a great deal of time on the weak areas of their technique, they invested even more in pushing their strengths to summation. In this regard, Lark’s practice was different. Her effort nondiscriminatory. She applied equal energy to each exercise, each body part, each quality of movement. To watch her was to be exhausted. She might not be as talented as the others, he couldn’t tell, and certainly she was out of practice—but she saved nothing.
Sometimes Byrne would stand in the back first thing in his sweats, doing what he could, which wasn’t much. Spine articulations, grounding exercises, some joint release. Once they began the larger motor movements—stridings or redemptions or flailings26—he’d slip out the back, into his shoes, and head to Jersey’s for breakfast and to think, write. Lark didn’t eat breakfast, and she didn’t like his coffee. On the way in each day they stopped to get her something stronger. His hosting abilities were lacking, he wasn’t reciprocating her family’s generosity—but how could he? He wasn’t a family. He didn’t have the depth of bench for graciousness. He kept thinking she’d leave to stay with her sister, but Clef only had the motel room she shared with Kitchen, and Lark said Byrne’s was fine. When he came back from his Denver omelet each day, the sleightists were separated into three chambers, perfecting the animal work they’d begun just before he and Lark had arrived in York.
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