Sleight

  The pair had pulled into the parking lot that first afternoon, beat. They’d walked up to the dented steel door, the back entrance Byrne knew would be unbolted. Entering, covered in the film of a twelve-hour drive begun before dawn, they immediately sensed it—the multiple, nearly constant wicking. Though they could see nothing from the lounge, the air was charged, popping. They couldn’t look at each other. Making contact in that air would have been, Byrne thought, intolerable.

  When Lark dropped her bag and keys onto the loud couch, he’d looked at her, but not into her face. Although the lounge was well heated—a blast of warmth had hit them when they’d come in—she’d grabbed herself, maybe to confirm she was still there. The air was fanatical. It was like the air at book burnings perhaps, or cockfights, maybe prisons. The air had color the way Lark’s Souls had it—erratic and palpable. It was how the air must have been at Marvel’s studio in Kenosha, when he was still making rent. His brother had asked him, more than once, but Byrne could never bring himself to go.

  She’d stood, shaken her body from its cold pose, and moved toward the closest door—the door to chamber two. When Byrne didn’t follow, she walked over and took his hand, to lead him. Her fingers were articulate; whenever she spoke, they went to her head or fluttered and tapped one another, as if counting. He had imagined their touch: abrasive—a fine sandpaper. But they were water. She took his rock hand and together they entered the chamber. They’d stayed that way, watching the menagerie unfold. For an afternoon, they were statued witness—two hands enveloping stone. Flesh, grown around a pit.

  Each day since, when the sleightists separated to work on the creatural links, Lark went to chamber four, kept open for her use. And after Jersey’s, Byrne went into the office to watch her. West was often there, laughing at him.

  “T’s been missing you, Byrne.”

  “T still has you, at least occasionally. She told me. She also has a husband.”

  “As do many of the women who spark your interest, it would seem.”

  “Screw you.”

  “Screw whomever you like, as long as you’re writing.”

  “I’m writing.”

  “Good. It’s why I keep you around.”

  West spent some of these weeks on the phone, putting the tour in order, doubling hotel arrangements and bus rentals to accommodate two troupes instead of one—they were to leave seven days into the new year. With the rest of the time, he observed the links, occasionally entering a chamber to suggest a different entrance into a structure, a different path through a manipulation. Byrne had known West was talented, but in these weeks he saw just how. West would walk into the room, take a sleightist aside, quietly conferring for a minute or two. Invariably the sleightist would nod, or her eyes would light up and she’d excitedly move to rejoin the link, explaining West’s insight to the others as she did so. It was fine-tuning, but without West’s eye, these novel configurations wouldn’t blossom. They would startle, yes, so full of promise. But seeds—they would not, without him, become something beyond themselves. West was chef, gardener, alchemist. He would harvest.

  Meanwhile, Monk’s director roamed at the level of the chambers, bumbling. And then suddenly, he’d needed to be gone. He told West, who told the troupes. There were familial matters, he’d be back before tour. Byrne thought, probably not. He might have felt sorry for the man. He didn’t. For one thing, Monk seemed more at ease; not everyone liked West, but they didn’t doubt him. Only Kitchen seemed sad. He sometimes ran rehearsal from his customary perch atop a stool in the corner. He liked a balconist’s perspective, he’d explained to Byrne—the cheaper seats. He mentioned Monk’s missing director whenever there was a question of line. The man had an eye, it couldn’t be denied, for the organics. How to prepare the shell for immolation. Lark noted none of the troupe politics, or didn’t care to speak of it. She rarely spoke at all—a little, if prompted, over late dinners. They ordered in, or she cooked, and at her suggestion he bought a case of wine. He liked vodka better, but drank as he was asked. She was a good, quick cook, and Byrne ate better than he could remember. She talked to Drew and Nene over the phone each evening, but about day-to-day stuff. Filler. Lark asked questions while stirring a white sauce or chopping scallions; she didn’t mention her own work. Byrne’s apartment was dim, and her forced cheer fluorescent. Of course she both loved and missed them, but the way the telephone coerced language was simply wrong. Byrne cringed at the bright, heavy assurances. Though it was done with rocks, not electric, not wireless, he was reminded of the medieval torture used on witches and during the Inquisition—called what? Pressing.

  It didn’t surprise Byrne then, the way Lark worked alone in chamber four during the day. As if coming out from under something. She hadn’t yet the stamina of the rest of them, but she moved her sphinx-like musculature with vicious will. The other sleightists worked steadily for hours, repeating links eighty or ninety times before letting up, but Lark rarely repeated anything. She would go through a whole series of gestures with an architecture, twenty minutes worth, then hurl the thing across the room and fall to the floor, heaving. Byrne, the first few days, thought she was frustrated, that it had been too long since she’d been in a chamber. Soon, however, he realized what she was doing: not wicking. If she left her manipulations rough, threw down the architectures when she felt it coming on, she could keep from going out.

  She worked that way, in fits, getting to know each of Clef’s seventeen architectures. Sometimes she’d go get Clef. They would bundle up—Lark in the parka Byrne had loaned her, Clef with her ridiculous scarf—and walk out into the bleak, perpetual threat of snow that hung over York. In the chambers, Lark kept mostly to herself. A few times she left to grab a sandwich or a second coffee with Yael and Manny, two sleightists she knew from before. And when she and Kitchen passed by one another, they exchanged a strained nod. Byrne was beginning to find Kitchen’s style of sleight irritatingly cerebral.

  Lark had been up four nights in a row, sketching. It made Byrne’s sleep fitful, the light and the scratching sound from the living room/kitchen. His bedroom was small and at the back of the second-floor apartment he rented. He thought of blocking the large gap beneath the door with a pillow, but that would have impeded the heat from the one working radiator, the one that clanked and spat. Many tenants previous, that radiator had been painted, like the room, the color of clotted cream. Now, the paint was chipping in flakes so heavy they must contain lead. Still, the place had charm: a high ceiling with crown molding and French windows, and in the corner next to the fire escape—cobwebs, safely out of reach, alive in the rising heat.

  Dirt was usually a comfort to Byrne; he’d been shocked when Drew and Lark’s house, in its cleanliness, had failed to make him uneasy. In fact, he’d admired how they combined a poverty of goods with deep care: dishes, mismatched but hand-washed and dried immediately following each meal; dustless, secondhand books; open windows and the freshly laundered, repurposed bedsheets that graced them. In his own apartment, Byrne had no broom nor any desire to knock the friendly wisps down, and he refused to spray. Oversanitation hid things more sinister than germs. Ammonia, turpentine, bleach, paint: chemicals made his eyes water, made his meager chest tense and knit together across the sternum.

  After half an hour of covering and uncovering his head with a pillow, he walked out. Lark was sitting at the poker table where they ate, leaning into her paler left hand. Her right was held poised above the graph-paper notebook she’d bought on their way up from Georgia but had only begun using in the past few days. Her bluish hand swept back and forth above the windshield of blank page. Suddenly, she stabbed the grid. Then dropped the pencil and looked at Byrne.

  “I have one. Inside of me right now.”

  “What?” He thought he knew what she meant, but he hadn’t been prepared to hear it, and it sounded … mad.

  “Since we saw the new links that first day. I’ve had a Need inside of me. But it’s different, it doesn’t know what it wants.�
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  “Lark, what are you talking about?”

  She rifled one-handedly back through the notebook. She must have gone through twenty sheets, maybe more. Byrne was shocked to see so much work, all of it crawling with detail. Strings of ink not quite adhering to the pages.

  “Look. Look here. She pointed to one. He moved closer, walked around to her side of the table. It was swingsets or seesaws, catapults or trebuchets. There was a transfer between the playground equipment and siege weaponry. This wasn’t ambiguity, like the drawings he knew from her book—it was actual movement. A trick picture, like the two silhouetted faces that became a goblet or vice versa, only it wasn’t about positive and negative space. He couldn’t control how he was seeing it, couldn’t force one image over to another. Each time the catapult shifted into seesaw, it shifted itself. And there was something else. On the way, the drawing passed through gallows. Byrne followed the lack: missing pitch, missing condemned, missing child. And back again, and repeat. Pitch, again. Child. Condemned, and … Repeat. It was chilling.

  “I don’t. I don’t know what this is.”

  “Here, look at this one.”

  She was sweating, he noticed. There was an acrid smell; it was a caffeinated sweat. Her ring finger scratched rhythmically at her scalp. She had not raised herself from her slumped position, only pushed the book toward him and turned the page. There. An exhaustive analysis of a human eye was also a veined egg, swollen, with a tic in what was sometimes the cornea, sometimes not. Looking at the transmuting form, Byrne knew whatever was undeveloped, inside, would not have the strength to tear through. This depiction of unachieved birth was also a representation of vision. Byrne thought, This is how she sees.

  She closed the notebook. Byrne listed toward the fire escape for a hit of cold air and the vodka he kept there. He quickly let in then shut out the night—the palpitating bass from a passing Buick, a siren moving away. He walked over, put the vodka on the stove, and reached up to the cabinet above for two mugs. He poured them each a fair helping, four fingers. Lark was shoving the book into the duffel at her feet. “No,” he said. “No. I need to see them all.”

  26 Each sleightist has a unique method of training, distilled from endless hours with multiple instructors. The classes taken prior to rehearsal and performance are, strictly speaking, not for the individual, but indispensable to forging a troupe identity. Without practice flocking and schooling, without a unified sense of what constitutes foray, absolution, swarm, and congress, the members of a troupe would be suspended and then dissolved. Prey in their own webs.

  NOVEMBER.

  On Lark’s first evening inYork, after the episode in the chambers, the sisters had hugged and exchanged a few sentences about Lark’s family, Clef’s recovery. Lark had remembered pictures of Nene this time, three of them. A reading Nene on the porch swing, Drew beside her. Ankle-deep Nene in the lake. A Halloween Nene, her tinman a wrapped-in-foil, heart-in-hand affair. The child was arresting. In each picture, the day reflected in her eyes starkly, but not vacant. It wasn’t their color but something else, something in another register, that marked her unmistakably as Lark’s. Clef made noises, ahhs and cooings, noises she supposed one made about an only niece. The sisters had been uncomfortable, too, during the couple of weeks Lark had spent in NewYork. When they’d spoken at all, it had been about Lark’s Needs. They had avoided the personal, or at least the frictional. After the photographs, a long silence played between them. They said goodnight. Lark left with Byrne, Clef with Kitchen.

  Lark’s second day in York, she’d asked Clef outside. Clef had stepped into her tall boots, zippered them up the length of her calves, and swung a multicolored scarf three times around her neck. Kitchen had given it to her the previous Christmas; he’d had it made in purples, oranges, and magentas to clash irreverently with her hair. Kitchen loved that about Clef. Her hair. How it moved. “On its own,” he’d say, “like an animal.” And of course the color. In Tokyo, he told her, the girls were always trying to get to red, and that they shouldn’t.

  After walking the first quarter mile in silence, Clef, impatient—determined not to let nothing happen again—turned to her older sister.

  “Lark, when did you stop loving me?”

  “Don’t do this.” Lark was cold. She hadn’t brought clothes worthy of the weather. Maybe Byrne would lend her something.

  “Well, when?”

  “You were my touchstone, Clef. My rosary, my worry doll, my abacus. How could I stop loving you?” Lark was teasing only the tiniest bit. She looked at the fingers on her left hand, tapped the thumb against each of the others in turn. In the gray afternoon, they were a vibrant, quaint blue: five faded virgins. “I just … I learned to stop counting on you.” That was funny; she would remember that.

  “Lark, what are we doing?”

  “I don’t know. I’m here because nothing else has worked.”

  “And me? Why am I here?”

  “Because this does?” Lark was guessing.

  “It doesn’t. It promises to, and then …”

  “What about Kitchen? Does he work?” Lark didn’t expect an answer. This was the first jab. It was small, a swipe at the side, and she expected Clef to block.

  “Why, does Drew?” Clef paused, then softened. “He … he looks kind—I mean, with Nene, in the picture.” They were stopped at a crosswalk. Finding herself suddenly shy, Clef studied the red palm’s blinking DON’T. DON’T. She asked, “What is marriage … like?” DON’T. The red hand became a white body and shone frozenly at them: STEP.

  Lark and Clef started across. Before the far curb, a pothole floating diseased yellow leaves gaped; they leapt across it in tandem. Lark hadn’t anticipated this question, her and Drew. It pleased her—also, hurt. That morning she had felt his absence in pangs. When she’d woken in Byrne’s bed. When he’d called to her from the kitchen. His offer of weak coffee. Stupid.

  How long had it been since she’d talked with another woman? This was Clef, her sister. But a lifetime had grown up between them—her daughter’s. Lark would try to describe her marriage honestly.

  “Every day, someone asks you for a piece of yourself. So you, I, I cut it off and hand it over. Partly because Drew, he has the only balm that works on the wound.” Lark thought for a moment. “The one he’s continually asking me to self-inflict.”

  “Why are you like that?” Clef’s timidity was gone. She looked disgusted. Lark remembered the look.

  “Like what?”

  Clef started walking a little faster, as if to distance herself from Lark’s influence. Her sister could pollute anything with description.

  “So narcissistic, so focused on your own darkness. You’re incapable of letting anything be … simple.”

  “Something’s simple?” Lark felt like taunting. It was one of the minor brutalities once expected of her. They used to do this banter with humor. No more.

  “Love is supposed to be.”

  “And you’ve found that to be true?” Unspoken was their overlap: Kitchen. Don’t go messing ’round another woman’s Kitchen—Drew had made that joke once. Clef must’ve thought it was why they hadn’t spoken. Hell, it had been Clef’s reason. Was she still ashamed? Probably. What had Lark felt? Undeserving. Of fidelity, love—all of it. It was she who should apologize, for underplaying her part in Clef’s defining drama. No. Another lie. Lark could easily work up anger at Clef. Her little sister had always dismissed the damage she caused as warranted; Kitchen just wasn’t the worst she’d done. Lark pushed. “Well, how about it Clef, is love simple?”

  “Yeah. No. Some days.” Clef slowed again and tossed her unruly scarf back over her shoulder. “But you don’t have those days.”

  They were walking beside an old townhouse. Lark remembered the style—Federal—from one of Fern’s lectures. The house was well-preserved: two rows of windows evenly divided a plain brick façade, five on top, four below; a fan-light spanned the central door; slatted shutters; white trim; simple wrought-iron f
ence. Civility. Restraint. Graciousness. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

  “You didn’t call, Clef. Not once in six years. You didn’t come to clean up after Mom. You haven’t met my husband or my daughter. How can you presume to know what kinds of days I’ve had?”

  And there it was.

  Two months after Lark had left Monk, their mother hanged herself. Their father had passed away four years earlier, while the sisters had still been at the academy. Heart attack. They’d gone home for a week, worn navy. Their mother insisted: no black for them. The day after his funeral, they received casseroles at the front door and invited the elderly and middle-aged neighbors who carried them to come into the dining room for ever-brewing Darjeeling. Relieved of their red beans and rice, their thrice-baked macaroni, their green bean almondine, the women who had spent years scowling at the girls weeding the front yard in their Sunday denim had taken their hands and patted them. They’d said, “Take care of your poor, poor mother.” Some of them said pawh. Pawh muthah. Lark mocked them once they’d gone. She was good at “the Southern,” and had done it since grade school to make Newton howl. Clef’s laughter was, after a few seconds, mildly hysterical. That night, Lark had brushed and braided her sister’s hair as if they were little. They were not: Clef was fifteen, Lark nineteen. And they were on their own—their mother, after the cemetery, had tucked herself away in her room. Very away. The girls had headed back to Boston that Wednesday, although not before bagging, labeling, and freezing all the womanly kindness in meal-sized portions.