Sleight

  Within six months, their mother had committed herself to an expensive institution in the mountains of North Georgia—a spa for the inconsolable. Twice, they’d borrowed a car to make the sixteen-hour trip. Twice, she’d refused to see them.

  Clef and Lark’s parents were perhaps enigmatic. Lark didn’t know. They’d transplanted themselves from Pittsburgh when Newton had gotten his professorship. Jillian Scrye had been hired as a research assistant by a friend in his department a year later. She had a PhD, but it was the seventies, the South, she wanted a family. There were limits. They were solid people, and good. They loved their work. They loved each other. They found, after two successful attempts at procreation and one unsuccessful, that there was a finite amount of love to be parceled out. After the miscarriage of their third child, the boy tried for three times, they scratched up what was left for their two daughters, who grew every day more unlike them. But that it was scratch was evident. The girls tended, as the Scryes had imagined they would, toward art—and as artists, they were uninterested in the finite.

  Jillian had tried. She’d faded in and out as a mother, occasionally spending a summer canoeing, helping to chart moon and stars on the attic walls, catching fireflies and smearing their luminous abdomens onto her daughters’ faces like war paint, only to follow with a fall of missed performances and unsigned report cards. Newton would’ve done better, but wasn’t expected to. Their mother regularly disappeared inside her research, and if Newton was putting together a publication, she spent nights for a month working up his figures with him, leaving the girls to themselves. She seemed relieved when sleight took to her daughters. Even appreciated it, to a point. She always said she’d like to see it all on paper—how interesting it would be without the bodies.

  When she swung, Clef was on tour. Lark had been still in New York, newly unemployed. She didn’t go to the institution; Jillian had prepaid her death, Lark wasn’t needed. So she bought a Greyhound ticket to Atlanta. She arrived, reeking of the gin-drunk beside her, with a bag of clothes and a small boxful of dead Needs. The house of her childhood was unlivable. She didn’t waste what little money she had reinstating utilities. For weeks, she combed through the dark house for things to sell. Furniture. Her mother’s piano, her violin. The good china. Her parents’ microscopes. The telescope. Books. She swam laps across the lake in the evenings to allay her sweat, stench, a coagulating depression. It took four months to clear away the debris of her mother’s loss. She’d lived there ever since.

  “You gave me your book.” Clef was defending herself. She hadn’t called in six years, it was true. But neither had Lark. Four years ago her sister had sent that—that Soul—with a card alerting her to Nene’s birth. But Clef, who hadn’t been aware of Lark’s pregnancy or her marriage, read in the Soul’s hollowness an accusation, and had sent it back. Then, in August, Lark had shown up in New York, ostensibly to take care of her, and had left the book, setting off this slow-motion detonation, or whatever it was. West’s interest. Her own architectures. Lark, always wanting attention. Getting it.

  “And you got rid of it the f-first chance you got. Okay, Clef, I admit it. Love isn’t simple for me, no. I get sad.”

  “Are we talking about sadness?” If so, Clef would refuse. Lark had been doing sad for a long time, it was clearly not a worthwhile endeavor. She pulled a pair of gloves out of her pockets and flung them at her sister, who was by this time shaking. Lark snatched them out of the air.

  “Th-thank you.” Lark pulled on the gloves as they walked on, considering. “I think we are.”

  “Well, I don’t want to.” Clef bit her bottom lip, and Lark pulled up short to examine her.

  Her lips were violet. That was death. Her face was porcelain. Decorum. Her eyes were wet. Guilt. Maybe the wind. Her hair was brushfire. That was Clef. Lark reached out and put her borrowed, lavender cashmere hands over her sister’s ears. She pulled Clef’s head close.

  “You are a dear, sweet idiot with a brick will. I have always loved you.” Clef could hear Lark, but pretended not to. She hadn’t thought she was cold, but the sudden warmth made her head throb.

  On her third day in York, Lark began the morning in chamber one with the others. Monk’s director led, and though soft-spoken, he was thorough and the class was good. He had joined Monk a year after she’d left. In a letter from Fern, who—unasked—updated her on sleight developments, Lark had learned that her old director, Imke Kleist, had returned to Germany. As far as Lark knew, as far as Fern had shared, none of the thirty-one registered troupes currently had a female director. When Lark quit there had been only three, and they’d been in their fifties. Women vanishing, not replacing themselves. A pattern of what? Only some wrong thing.

  She didn’t want to like this new director, and she deduced from murmurings that he wasn’t respected. He kept offering the combinations to the troupes with question marks. And then a lateral after the missive? Yes. And then a rowing, or should we go to the grail next? The grail, right. The questions were unnecessary and irritating; he knew what to do with their bodies.

  On that day he paid particular attention to Lark. His verbal corrections were dead-on—she was hyperextending both legs and back to achieve a compensatory balance. She was forcing it, did need to ratchet everything down. Not that she could. She had never affected anything other than plough horse. And it was worse now that her technique was off—she worked as if a bucket of sweat could weigh in against years of stagnation, of motherhood. Nevertheless, he tried to help her. While she was struggling against a difficult floor gesture, he knelt down and placed one hand on her hipbone and another on the inside of her opposite thigh, his surprisingly strong thumb compressing the taut line of her sartorius. He opened her like a walnut—releasing, in one burst, six years’ bound tension from her lumbar spine: L5, S1.

  After class, Lark withdrew to an empty chamber to try out one of Clef’s architectures. At rest, the design was long and strict on one side, curved and giving on the other. Harp. She’d never worked with one that so clearly embodied opposed properties. Her sister had talent. Somehow, though, the architecture was familiar. Not harp then, maybe saw?27 Whichever, Lark knew exactly how to start the first manipulation. She picked up the tight side and stood its end on her lifted knee. But before she could scythe it across the space left by her spiraling torso, Monk’s director walked in.

  “Do you know what West wants?”

  Lark set the architecture gently down. Uncertain what he was after, she offered, “He brought me here to draw a sleight—to try to, anyway.”

  The man lifted his hand to his forehead and rubbed. Erasing. “I think,” he said, “you will get hurt.”

  Lark knew she was out of practice, but got defensive anyway. Why had he been so positive during class only to belittle her now? “I was a professional, I know my limits.”

  “No, no, no.” Monk’s director waved his hand. “Not you, but all of you, hurt …” He stared into the room, as if the clearer explanation were hanging in the chamber. He turned back to the door, reached for the doorknob, grasped it. His voice was slow and muddy. “Talk to Kitchen. These links are … too rhythmic, too thick. They hum. Do you know? You must.”

  It took a week before Clef told Lark about the children. She’d kept the daily papers, and she said they were still showing small clips of the video on the local news, though it had already disappeared from the national. Byrne’s apartment had no TV so Lark and Clef skipped out at lunch and went to Clef’s motel room. More narrow than most, it was less a room than a corridor oriented between bed and television toward bath. Escape, sleep, soak. Lark’s body was beginning to lament Byrne’s cold apartment, its coffin-sized shower. It hurt to sit down, to stand up, although a little less each day. Clef pulled out the first article from the pressed wood drawer of the bedside table. On top of the table: a lined pad, a rotary phone, a dirty-white Bible. The motel was the same motel it must have been thirty years before. This was troubling to Lark, who saw in stasis an insidious f
orm of regression. Perched on the edge of the dark synthetic quilt—indigo, mauve, and cocoa paisley—she read the clippings as Clef fed them to her.

  She tried not to, but couldn’t help herself: she went, not back into her own childhood, but into her daughter’s. Nene, alone and terrified and aware. Kidnapped, her daughter would’ve known what was going on, which would’ve made it worse. Killed. And she would’ve known why. To be killed. Because she was too smart, or black enough. Or both. It was always juxtaposition, Lark had told her, that causes fear. Beauty. Things isolated could be controlled: colors in jars, flies in test tubes. Combination, solidarity, exploration—these were what made power happen. Life happen. Forced to watch the grisly show, Nene would have known she wasn’t the first. She would have seen the bones in the toys. And if they were still there, in the basement, the children too. They would’ve spoken to her, wouldn’t they? Nene invited such confidences. Were children still as frightened, Lark wondered, after they were dead?

  “I’ve left my daughter. Tell me, Clef. Tell me I’m not Jillian.”

  Her sister said nothing for too long. Then: “Jillian didn’t cheat.”

  “What?” The words had blunted her, a baseball bat to the face. Lark felt her Need begin to shift. Swell.

  “Come off it, Lark. If you aren’t fucking him yet, you will be.”

  “You … you’re talking about Byrne?”

  “Are you blind? The way he watches you. And that first day, you were holding his hand.”

  “I was holding his hand.” Lark said this to herself, shocked, not angry. An eleven-year-old’s proof: holding hands. Her mind had been treading the water-image of her daughter, preparing for death, and Clef brought up this.

  “I don’t cheat, Clef.” Shock lessening, anger possible. “And I’ve never stolen.”

  Clef was prepared for this. “You didn’t love him. You didn’t love Kitchen.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Lark admitted it slowly, then rotated it on its axis. “I loved you and you shat on me.”

  Clef cut back. She scalped Kitchen from the field entirely, inserting what she thought was a stick figure, a dummy. “I don’t know how to be your sister. When I’m around you, I’m sick, all the time. Drew must be a fucking saint.”

  “All this fucking, Clef, what’s happened to you?” For Lark, Drew didn’t replace, didn’t counterfeit: he was. Clef would lose. “Drew is no saint, but I’m Lark for him, not some gawd-awful wraith.” She was slipping into her Georgia. “He expects reality from me—and guess what? I can give it.” Lark was thankful for this. If she drove around, took an hour detour after manning the kiosk to go out to the reservoir, or sat in the driveway too long, car idling, Drew got pissed off. He would remind her that it was time for her to go read Rosetti to Nene, to bathe her, put her to sleep. Such prompting wasn’t always necessary, not even often. But when it was, he did it. Drew nixed the stereo on days when she looped “Waltzing Matilda,” “River,” “Sinnerman.” And did it without commentary. Maybe he should be beatified for his subtle vigilance. But she gave too. In pieces, but she gave.

  Lark faced her sister squarely and said, “I need to talk to Kitchen.” Clef looked ready to spit. Lark continued, “These architectures you’ve made, these links, these children—West is playing tea party with battery acid, and Kitchen might know.”

  Suddenly, Clef felt beaten. “Might know what?” she asked weakly. Lark had somehow gotten around her, bypassed their explosion. But Clef was not satisfied, and worked to produce a final dagger. “Lark, if something is wrong—it’s with you.”

  Lark looked at her hands before she spoke. “Yes, of course, that’s right. But, Clef, it isn’t me making you sick. You’re pregnant again.”

  27 Like the links they unite to form, architectures occasionally resemble everyday objects. It is through this metaphorical reference that they acquire nicknames. Even more important, a resemblance suggests a place to begin. A sleightist who picks up an architecture that curves like a machete will begin to arc it through the air as in a ritual murder or gleaning. Manipulations develop out of such inclinations.

  LARK’S BOOK.

  Aphasia: Loss of the quality of speech, as a result of cerebral affection. Aphemia: Loss of the power of articulation, due to cerebral affection. A form of aphasia, in which words are understood and conceived but cannot be uttered.

  It’s been thirteen weeks.

  The day I lost myself was Nene. Terribly normal and neutral, not mangled. My body become one long throat—disgorging. And then, failed to close. Child, placenta, uterus, language. Words were gone. Or not mine to order. Not the way you do it in a restaurant: what you want, when you want, the way you want, brought to you.

  The doctors insist it wasn’t the birth. And wasn’t the complication, flux. That trauma was not the trauma they told Drew. Just a more recent facsimile. They hunt. Peck at. Jillian has been the maze. As the primary she is a wonderfully crayola target. What did she do? My fingers, in chalky flutter. Nene’s bruise-body swaddled in my blood. Cherries in rain, under glass. A spectacle. She came not out but through. Not out, through.

  She left behind a Need. It was at first a comfort. I had lost parts of my body to her, its heat. And although I was comforted by the word “body,” the word was always with me, and therefore, I realize, must not refer to anything actual.

  Yesterday, Nene turned three months old, and I tore down her Need, the ice cathedral sculpted by her exodus. Another ridding. A bottling. What I feel is flaked, chipped, like slate. Rockfaces shirring off, tumbling into dead trees below. It is hard, burnt out, the wrong brown. She is, sometimes. The skin I gave her is ghost skin, a veil over her real skin. Her sharp eyes cast about—she laughs at the nothing behind me. In that way, one fears for her. Maybe it is me fearing.

  Drew thinks Needs are blanks. Needs are not blanks. No names, but they are teeming. Cornucopias. Fruit baskets. Handbaskets. Hells.

  This past week I asked him to and Drew moved inside me, slow, the first time since—a stirring, an all-day rain. But he couldn’t dislodge the Need. Afterwards, my body a drain, I didn’t know his name. His name and I were divorced. The husband I had when I was with my husband was nameless. Not even “husband,” which re-became a verb—about use, about animals. I knew then I had to kill the Need. The trafficker, pimp. A brutal, brutal thief.

  The doctors all said the words would probably come back, but didn’t know how. I should tell Drew. I have had the Need out and will dismantle it. Along with the others. I will pull them apart and then pull her across. Pin Nene to this place. I have decided, she will let me.

  Lark stayed that day with Clef, and Kitchen came back after dark. He had food. “Bad Mexican,” he said when he saw the sisters doubling each other across the two beds, knees nearly grazing. They ate together: Kitchen and Clef on the one bed, the ripped white bag in front of them catching bits of shredded lettuce and dripped tomato water; Lark on the other, sitting upright and brittle, with chips. They watched a short segment on the Vogelsongs. This time, Melanie’s mother. No one thinks her daughter could kill. A son, she said, that’s different, but I did not, no, I did not see it in Ray. Melanie’s mother, she prayed every day for the souls of those little angels. She knew they were with God, which was a comfort. Imagining them at God’s table.

  Lark could see it too. Pipe-cleaner haloes and clothes-hangered, tissue-papered wings. Demurely bowed heads gazing down into blue Fiestaware—the empty, bright bowls of God’s table. Because angels don’t require sustenance. Not oyster crackers, not even Dixie-sized swallows of grape juice, staining between the teeth, forcing quarter-hour garglings with baking soda and peroxide. Melanie’s mother—you could hear it in her prim drawl—believed in the redemptive powers of bloodied floss.

  Lark watched as her sister balled up the burrito foil, pitched it into the brown wastepaper basket beside the dresser. “Two points,” Clef murmured. She switched off the news.

  CLEF: Lark wants to talk with us.

  KITCHEN: Okay.<
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  LARK: What is West doing? This subject matter—why? Why two troupes? Why me?

  KITCHEN: I’ve been wondering about this too.

  CLEF: You have?

  KITCHEN: Your new architectures, Clef—did you ever stop to think why you made them?

  CLEF: You know why. Lark’s book.

  KITCHEN: That can’t be it. Each one you wired together is a collage. Most architectures function; the inverted spiral, for example, is a funnel that can be adjusted to the size of what it funnels. It has a purpose—abstract, to be sure, but a purpose. Yours—not so much.

  CLEF: (getting off the bed) So, my work is useless.

  LARK: Beyond use. I played around with one that seems designed to slice without cutting. Each time I tried to bring it through the air cleanly, it swerved. I can’t use your architectures, Clef. Only follow them.

  CLEF: Even if that’s true—so what?

  KITCHEN: Why would West want us to work with what we can’t control? How can he hope to make a full sleight?

  LARK: I think he’s counting on me for that.

  CLEF: (walking toward the bathroom) Of course he is.

  LARK: This isn’t ego. The architectures came from my book, the links came from the architectures … maybe he thinks a sleight drawn by me would unite the two. (Clef runs water, Lark raises her voice) He doesn’t realize you put something in them, Clef. Something feral.

  CLEF: (walking back in) You’re wrong. Everything I did was from your book, Lark. Things resisting their natures—that’s not me.

  LARK: Because you don’t fight yourself.

  CLEF: You shut your mouth.

  KITCHEN: Are you drawing for him now?

  LARK: No, but … I will be soon. I have a new Need, and it’s odd—it’s not about anything.

  KITCHEN: Excuse me?