Sleight

  West was amused, nodding and smiling, looking at his desk as she spoke. When she stopped and took a breath, he leaned forward, searching out her eyes, then examining them for a long moment. Clef held his gaze, but felt exposed.

  “You’re really quite a find, you know. I thought, after I saw her book, that your sister was the one, but obviously there’s something in the water down in Georgia. Your architectures, Clef, these ideas for the navigation—you don’t need to change what you’re doing. It’s you, you who are already incorporating the children. They’re woven through everything you’ve shown me. You aren’t appropriating their pain, Clef, you’re giving them a voice. Look around you. Everyone is working harder, pushing. There’s a sudden urgency in this process that I haven’t seen since my grandmother directed Ach Grace. Trust me, if I’d simply wanted to shock the audience, I could’ve done it without recruiting so many contrary women. You’re making this vision more difficult for me, but that is exactly what will make it something other than a … spectacle. It is your doubt that will keep this from being merely self-indulgent, or gratuitous, or obscene. This is yours, Clef. Your baby. I’m giving it to you completely.”

  Clef was without response. This speech wasn’t at all the speech she’d expected. She tried to take in what West had just given her—complete artistic control. Direction. She would be navigating the sleight, orchestrating it, conducting it. His hand, out of the soup. Surely he didn’t mean it—he’d insert himself somewhere, he’d have to. After a moment or two, thinking through how she might test his offer, she began cautiously outlining a few more ideas, ones that she’d originally thought West would veto.

  But he didn’t.

  Two hours later Lark stood among the troupes in chamber four. West and Clef were in front of the central mirror, facing the cluster of bodies—yawners, stretchers, adjusters—all variously shifting their impatience from hip to hip. West had spent half the morning in the office with Clef, leaving Kitchen to warm up the rest. West hadn’t asked for her presence, and Lark was glad—she didn’t want to be included in the cabal. Maybe Clef didn’t understand that, but Lark just wanted out, to be done with her part. She was exhausted. Exhilarated. She’d agreed to this—agreed to vivisect her Need and then put it on display. She had not agreed to instruct others in the intricacies of its anatomy. Her drawings were observational. Analysis belonged to someone else, a West—and now, to Clef, her little sister. She was anxious to see what they would make.

  Out at the kiosk with her Souls, she got what amounted to an inadequate fix with each purchase. The money was meant to compensate her for the lack of a more profound response. It didn’t. If anything, the steep prices she charged for her work, while a means of support, were also revenge—exacted for the ends she imagined her art met. Stupidity and stupidity. She didn’t know what happened to her Souls out in the world. They might sit on library shelves gathering mites, suffer gossip on living room coffee tables, or fill with loose and dirty bedroom change, accruing domestic value. Up until now, she had preferred a total lack of feedback to its alternative—criticism. Fern Early had sent no less than three collectors down to buy from her before Lark stopped it. Lark didn’t want the Souls in a gallery or in a museum any more than she would have wanted them to hold her ashes.

  Souls were empty. Fixed. Her Needs may have begun as living mutations, but once she cast them onto the wooden knots, they no longer struggled. They congealed—mail-order brides waiting to be delivered. They were not her, and so she worried for them. Twice she’d lied and said a Soul had been commissioned rather than sell it to the wrong buyer. Once a Soul was finished, she both wanted it gone and didn’t. Her compromise had been to gift the ones she couldn’t part with to Nene.

  But her drawings of the Needs were different. Lark recognized it. Her sketches were neither complete nor static. They were stirrings, interrogatives, queries. West, Clef, the other sleightists—what would they make of them? Of her?

  “I’ll need Latisha, Manny, and Sarah to go with Clef. She’ll start the navigation. Clef knows the architectures better than any of us, and we’ve come up with an initial schema for the first few structures. We’ll be using a few of the links and manipulations you’ve developed these past weeks, of course, as well as some Clef has designed directly from Lark’s drawings.”

  As West said this, a number of sleightists turned to look at Lark, some smiling, some not. They all knew the sleight was going to be hers—over the past weeks the rumor had ossified into fact—but this was the first official mention, confirmation. Lark was their hand. T’s troubled face was one of those turned her way. Lark found herself looking directly at this woman, wondering what she had done to incur such enmity. In a countenance as serene as T’s, any cloud was an omen. This was a storm. But Clef spoke next, and before Lark had reversed the trajectory of T’s hostility and followed it back to Byrne, all eyes were on her sister.

  “I want us to work through the next three weeks with reverence.”

  Clef spoke authoritatively, but to Lark she looked and sounded small. Hair, voice—both attempts at volume were silly. Weren’t they? There, at the front of the room, Clef was vulnerable. Her face, mottled with some emotion Lark couldn’t place, squinted out into the sleightists. She hadn’t pulled back her hair that morning and now seemed in danger of dissolving into the red mane’s white noise. Lark felt a sudden urge to take her sister from the room, feed her sweet tea, reason her hair into braids. For the first time in weeks, she didn’t care about her drawings, the sleight, this new Need.

  “You all saw my reaction the first day West asked us to use this tragedy. I wasn’t convinced such a response was appropriate. But the material we’ve created in the past month has proved me wrong. Something about the story of those children has moved us, moved me, to make something new. Something extraordinary. Now we’re going to pull it all together. I’ll be working the links first and then sequencing the structures. But this sleight won’t work without a different type of commitment than is usually asked of you.”

  Clef spoke clearly, coldly, corporately, and to the opposite purpose than they’d discussed that morning or during the past weeks. Lark felt hamstrung. She’d been counting on Clef to neutralize West’s influence during the navigation. And now her sister, like Lark, was balking at her responsibility to check West. Beyond that, she seemed taken with his ideas. By his ideas. Hostage. Lark hadn’t expected this. Neither, it seemed, had the others, who had stopped stretching, yawning, and scratching and whose attentions were trained on the newly conditioned Clef. But it was West who spoke.

  “We need you to engage.”

  “What did you say?” Haley said in disbelief.

  “Engage,” he repeated. “Not suppress yourselves—emotionally, physically, or otherwise.”

  “You’re asking us to emote?” Kitchen’s question made West wince.

  “No. Not emote. I want you to be there. Inside the technique. I want a sense of the individual, all of you as individuals. I want you to be empowered.”

  “I don’t get it.” Manny’s voice surfaced among the others’ murmurs.

  Clef fielded. “We’re asking you to care. To care about what this sleight is about. If we don’t care, we’ll just be using their nightmare for our own ends.” Clef clarified: “The children’s … their nightmare.”

  “But sleights aren’t about anything. They’re specifically not, so as to not underestimate the audience’s intellect.” Haley continued, “If a sleight is coherent, it condescends. Sleight itself is experience, not the mediation of experience.” She rolled off the clichés like a catechism.30

  “You don’t fucking believe that shit, do you blondie?” A voice like Byrne’s, but wryer, louder, from behind them. An unfamiliar made his way up through the troupes, tracking ice, ending the trail in a puddle of gray water between Clef and West. “Because if you do—the hair’s perfect.” Then, without taking his eyes from Haley, he slapped Clef’s back. She blanched. In her face, briefly drained of its stran
ge obedience, Lark saw loathing.

  “This is Marvel,” West said, enjoying the effect of the boy’s entrance while shifting the focus back to himself. “I’ve hired him as art director for this project. He’ll tell you what we need from you, and you will oblige us. We have a vision.”

  Byrne had walked in with Marvel but remained at the back of the room, arms folded in mute tantrum. He waited a few beats after West introduced his brother before heckling.

  “So tell us, West. What is this sleight about?”

  West’s reversal was both flawless and overt. “Since you’ve been hoarding the words, Byrne, I actually thought this might be an opportunity for you to illuminate us.”

  And despite Byrne’s perfect awareness, West began to reel another one under.

  30 Although sleight is, with the notable exception of the precursors, a predominantly nonverbal enterprise, certain tenets of sleight have been passed down word for word over generations. While some sleightists allow this dogma to bounce off them, sleet against windshields, others are scored by the sharp bytes. Most of the doctrine concerns itself with why sleights can’t mean—a question students of the art form wrestle with endlessly, until one day they don’t.

  FAMILIAR.

  “So. Whose bed is this?” Marvel was sprawled on the sheets, one boot on the arm of the couch, the other on the floor, hands behind his head. “And where’s your TV?”

  “Lark was staying here.” Byrne stared down at him, having yet to fully grasp his presence. He’d learned of his brother’s involvement the moment he saw Marvel, T, and West step into Kepler’s lobby that afternoon. His brother had gained some needed weight since Philly. “Are you really off the shit?”

  “Clean as a whistle.” Marvel took the pillow out from under his head and buried his face in it. A yawning inhalation sealed his mouth and nose; its twin exhalation created a pocket of used air. After a few deep breaths—suffocation-play—he removed the pillow and looked up at his brother with mock concern. “Speaking of cleanliness, your girlfriend is a very sweaty girl. Here, smell this.” He threw the pillow at Byrne.

  “Shut up, Marvel.” Byrne didn’t catch it. He let it hit his chest and fall to the floor.

  “Knew you hadn’t nailed her. You should’ve seen your face when she came into West’s office. What’s happened to you anyway? You never used to be such a chickenshit.” Marvel sat up and looked around. “Seriously, you don’t have a TV?”

  “The world. Doesn’t interest me.”

  “Poor Byrne. But what about the beauty and wonder of nature as viewed from inside a leaf-cutter ant colony? What about pay-per-view boxing? What about British sitcoms on public television? What about the porn, man? What about the porn?”

  “I said shut up, Marvel.”

  “Oh, dude. That’s it—you’re fucking smitten.”

  The next day, the navigation began. West introduced Marvel to a stunned Kepler and Monk, and Byrne finally handed over a copy of his precursor. West took it and withdrew into his office. After his introductory speech, he didn’t emerge to help Clef with the sleight for over a week. Meanwhile, Marvel spent his days pulling sleightists from Clef’s navigation in chamber one to try out different pigments and patterns on their skin. And somehow, Byrne—with nothing left to write and not wanting to leave anyone alone with Marvel—became his brother’s assistant.

  West told Byrne and Marvel where to find a thrift store, and there they picked up several damaged vanities. Marvel joyed in the smashing of oval faces in the parking lot, and the subsequent assembly of the shards. For each sleightist who came in, Marvel developed an individual design. Kitchen received a corset of eight-inch spikes that extended from ribs to hipbones. Marvel used weak glue for the initial fitting, and Byrne was in charge of sanding the mirrors. When Kitchen tried out a manipulation, one of his stays came loose and pierced him just below the tip of his sternum. He said nothing, and Byrne started rounding the upper edges on the rest. Marvel just laughed.

  After a day or two, it became obvious that the body art wasn’t working the way he wanted—the paints were too flat or too shiny, too paint-like. They didn’t live. The mirrors were by far the easier part. So every hour or two, Marvel went out for a smoke and to wail at the dumpster with a tire iron, rethinking the colors. While he was gone, Byrne slipped into the back of chamber one to see how the navigation was coming along. Clef was using Lark as her stand-in.

  Every day the thing had more flesh. By the end of the week, Clef had put together nearly thirty minutes worth of material from Lark’s drawings—and the beginning of the sleight was unlike any Byrne knew or could piece together from his early childhood.

  Opening.31 A single sleightist stands far upstage right, back turned to the audience. The rest, twenty-three of them scattered across the chamber on their backs, are already manipulating. Rabidity—sea churn. The vertical sleightist slowly revolves, working her architecture so slowly its configuration is perceptible. The architecture is revealed, no longer a play of light. Not pure, not reason. The architecture as awkward prosthesis, replacement for something missing. Something crucial.

  The sleightist begins speeding up the manipulation until the architecture again lacks definition, the glimpse—of crutch—immediately forgotten. She moves first downstage, then stage left, then downstage, then stage left. Hers is a step pattern, and like all step patterns, it simulates progress. She passes over the other sleightists, linking with each one in turn.

  The first link begins. She gently steps between one of the sleightist’s legs, carefully forcing them open. She initiates a link that pulls the sleightist working on the floor almost into a sitting position several times, but each time the seated/prone figure returns in undulation to the ground, head lolling toward the audience. It wants to be a child perhaps rousing an adult, an urgent waking, but is unsuccessful, though by the end of the duet the architectures are moving furiously—shrieking past the horizontal sleightist’s face, which is blank, blind, elsewhere.

  As she moves to the next position, the vertical sleightist steps on the sternum of a second prone figure. Her free leg then begins to rise, released, as if buoyed by flammable gas. The two sleightists, top and bottom, begin to pass their architectures back and forth between them—the link makes claims of superiority or subversion without ever resolving which. Meanwhile the top holds her raised leg and maneuvers it in contortion close to her face. Two arms and the upraised leg fix her as lotus, while the sleightist beneath her bogs—his compressed torso echoed by thick-slow limbs that quicken only when an architecture descends, flicking it away like bottle flies.

  It continues. With each link, the vertical sleightist fights to remain vertical, all the while coaxing, coercing, painfully extricating, or failing to extricate, some new thing from the prone. The vertical sleightist affects untenable shapes while stepping here on a sleightist’s stomach, there on a thigh, here an upper arm, small of back, hand, side of face. Finally, she plants her foot on a neck, and this time the trodden ascends—first managing to pull her legs underneath her, then making it awkwardly onto her knees, then crouching in a push toward the upright. This sleightist, chin to chest, trembling with the weight of another woman on her neck and upper back, never ceases the manipulation of her architecture. The under-sleightist works her manipulation low—near the floor—and haltingly, and the sleightist above her cannot link with it. The result is two asynchronous orbits around an instability. Dissonance.

  Then, a sudden gesture: the under-sleightist reverses her rotation, repulsing the first. Hurling her, in fact, into the other sleightists, now upwelling—rising hostility evident both in their physicality and in the threatening wall of links they wield.

  The truth was, no one could manipulate the links as well as Clef, and though the navigation was moving fast, she seemed distracted and frustrated when a sleightist didn’t immediately pick up the work. In the first two days, every time Byrne looked in there was a new central figure treading across the others. First Clef tried out Yae
l, then an elfin sleightist from Kepler named Jade, then T. When she put Haley in, she kept her there for almost three days. But Haley, though energetic and a quick study, lacked eloquence, and—necessary for this sleight—a depth to her urgency.

  Byrne was there on Friday when Clef gave in to the obvious. Haley had just slipped off Montserrat’s neck for a third time when Clef said, “Just please, would you please just stop.” The sleightists quickly caught up their architectures. Doug and Elisa were linked at more than three points and had to rewind in order to disconnect.32 After a few seconds though, the room was quiet. Expectant. Byrne had noticed the regard her own troupe and Kepler had been showing to Clef. He thought it was because she was, visibly, on some edge. Since the first day, she’d shown the kind of tunnel vision associated with inspiration. Her short fuse, glazed eyes, and lip biting made her appear not quite in control, and didn’t that mean she was being controlled, probably by something greater? So when she spoke now, the other sleightists didn’t immediately bristle at her arrogance. And Haley, the most recent target of Clef’s exasperated direction, seemed relieved to be sent to the floor to join the corps.