Sleight

by Kirsten Kaschock

  “Lark, get over here.” Clef gestured toward a kneeling Montserrat, her architecture held out in front of her like a child’s winter coat or dead pet. “I’ll need you to learn this so you can teach it to me over the weekend. These girls just aren’t capable.” Out of a peer’s mouth, this was a slap. 33

  Byrne watched. Lark began to learn Clef’s part as tyrant, as precarious god, as addict, as prey. The whole time she manipulated, Lark kept looking over at her sister, whose lower lip was swollen, whose teeth were pink with blood-threaded saliva. Even distracted, Lark was manipulating better than Haley had, and Clef seemed momentarily appeased. The other sleightists, however, nudged one another. Kitchen’s eyes were trained on Clef, and Yael seemed not unhappily surprised by her prodigal friend’s abilities, but the rest glared at Lark, suspicious.

  The tensions Clef kept adding to the structure were intensified by amorphous jealousies, exhaustion, mistrust. The chamber muttered. Along the wall, arms folded across chests. Shoulders raised. And the sleightists who were in actual, physical contact with Lark—their muscles tensed, making the partnering more difficult, dynamic, exciting. Because what Clef was making was undeniable, all the anger was settling upon Lark, who—summer asphalt—began to shimmer with it. Byrne was mesmerized by the implied violence. Sold. He didn’t return to help his brother Marvel in chamber four. He also didn’t see himself phantomed in each figure terrorized by Lark’s talent that Friday afternoon. And Byrne didn’t fantasize. This was not his daydream: him, bodied in the whole of the mob poised to pull her—the relentlessly vertical Lark—part from part from part.

  At six, Clef called the first section done, and a dazed Byrne wandered from the chamber. He hadn’t heard Marvel call T out of the navigation, so he wasn’t prepared to greet her naked body, trembling at him beneath Marvel’s color. If river clay was to be found in a pale, malignant yellow, T was entirely of that shade, even her hair. Then again, she wasn’t. Not entirely. Marvel had drawn a thin black band across her eyes and all the way around her head. He’d drawn it again across her nipples, and at the level of her pubic bone.34 A final one circled her leg at the narrow moment just below the knee. But—they didn’t circle. The lines were so thin that even at two yards they were difficult to make out, though at that distance and beyond they retained their effect: disruption. T was segmented. A skull pan. Upper tips of ears to bust. From fourth rib to just below hipbone. Crotch through knee. Calf, ankle, foot. Calf, ankle, foot. There, at the bottom—her symmetry lacked a flesh bridge. Byrne, not quite steady to begin with, put his hand on the nearest mirror. T was crying. Byrne could see streaks in the yellow stain, streaks that ran perpendicular to Marvel’s black divisions.

  “What have you done to her?”

  “Nothing you haven’t.” Marvel hadn’t shown up at Byrne’s apartment the night before. He looked insolent, but not victorious.

  T’s eyes blamed Byrne. He went over, picked her warm-up clothes up from off the floor at her feet, handed them to her.

  “Is this who you are?” T was tearful, not pathetic. Humiliated and lovely, she was more concerned for his soul than her degradation. Byrne saw her mirrors then. They had been crushed to a glitter and were smeared across the lines that cut her. They atomized him.

  “I’m not Marvel.”

  “No. Your brother … he knows what he is.” T held her clothes tight to her chest as she walked toward the restroom.

  Byrne could not watch her shifting lines, how her torso dissembled all that was above and below. He looked instead at his brother. Marvel had executed what Byrne could not. An admission of desire. A desire for destruction.

  But, beautifully. Beautifully done.

  West took Byrne out to dinner that night. It was swank. It was one of those places that disavows its surroundings, thinks it belongs to another town, city, country even. This place thought it was in France, maybe Arles: an elegant ceramic rooster in the center of the table eyed them thoughtfully, mustard yellow dishes sang beneath olive loaf, bold flatware weighted down the egg-blue napkins. West ordered them both Muscat and commenced his sermon.

  “I need you to go back. Rewrite. The precursor is nearly there, but the balance at the end has to shift drastically.” West sipped his water. “It should finish with a burial—or better, with a holocaust.” Another sip.

  “Okay.” Byrne had accepted dinner to discuss his brother, not sleight. He no longer knew what to think of West’s work—he didn’t like to think of it—but having his brother around was the real impossibility. His sleeping with T was of course expected. But his vivisection of her … “Why did you bring Marvel here?”

  “I think you know why. He’s talented, he’s a force. And he’s not afraid to say things with his art.”

  “It’s easy to say things when you’re a psychopath.” Byrne looked at the ceramic cock. It was garlanded with hand-painted flowers, white and pink. He added, “When you’re not strangling on words.”

  “Your brother understands color, and I’ve known color was needed from the beginning. He just gets this, Byrne.”

  Byrne flinched. “You’re shitting me.” The waiter had come with a bottle but didn’t approach the table. “Marvel, get sleight? He’s always hated it.”

  West motioned to the waiter. The pomaded youth leaned in, made a trembling display of the label. West nodded, and he poured.

  “I’m sure he still does.”

  “Then, what …”

  “Do you know how to manipulate someone?” West waved the waiter off, swirled his apéritif. It looked like piss. “You find out what they want to do, and then you make it possible for them to do it.”

  “Genius. You do know Marvel wants to cut people up?” Byrne’s rock rested on the table. He usually kept it down at his side when he was out, but the year was ending, and his arm was tired. “What is it you think I want to do?”

  “You? You want to atone.” West lifted his glass, toasted the air. “Here’s to it.”

  “I don’t know what Marvel told you—I had nothing to do with Gil’s death.”

  West wouldn’t put down his drink. His arm was extended toward Byrne, his eyes fixed on Byrne’s glass. Finally, Byrne raised it, clinked.

  “You didn’t stop it.”

  “No.” Byrne didn’t drink. He set down the glass and began to study the short, price-less menu.

  “And now you’re thinking about fatherhood, but don’t know how to fall in love.” West was amusing himself with Byrne’s discomfort. “That doesn’t make it impossible, mind you, just awkward. And Lark not only is—I’ve heard—but has, a remarkable child.” When West said this, Byrne’s rock hit his water goblet. Water sloshed onto the rooster, dripping off its wattle onto the black toile tablecloth, but the goblet remained upright. “So, Byrne, is it that you think—if she’d just let you into her little family, maybe you could make up for Marvel?”

  “Marvel?”

  “For failing him. As a father.”

  “I was his brother.”

  “You were his brother?”

  “Am. What the hell are you trying to prove, West?” Byrne raised his voice. “With me, with this sleight? I see two troupes, I see the new architectures, painted bodies instead of webs, I know you want me to be literal, I know you brought in Marvel to hurt me. It’s all fucked up. You want all of us to work from some tortured place, but sleight’s not therapy.”

  “I don’t offer therapy.”

  “Clearly. It isn’t goddamned witness either.”

  The waiter surveying the room from the corner glanced toward them nervously. West’s voice took on the hushed tones of placating nurse to the fever-muddled.

  “So not therapy. Not witness. I should be writing this down. Tell me Byrne—what, do you think, is sleight?”

  Byrne allowed himself to be calmed, lowered almost to a mumble. “It isn’t anything. It’s nothing. That’s why it’s beautiful. You keep trying to make it hold things. It doesn’t work that way. You’re stripping it of emptiness. You’ll kill
it.”

  “You think the navigation’s not working?” West’s voice was wet with concern.

  “It’s working, West. It’s dark and full of everyone’s entrails. Mine, Lark’s, now Clef’s. T’s. Shit—it’s Sleight of the Living Dead. I’m just asking, what’s left?”

  West took another drink. He put the glass down, then moved both his hands out over the table and took the rooster from its perch in the center of the farm-stitched linen. He turned the bird to face him and clucked gently to it, and Byrne felt suddenly shut out. West gave his answer to the cock.

  “What’s left? Cluck. What should always be left. What never seems to be, cluck, left … aftermath.”

  31 Sleights begin with all sleightists on the stage. During a sleight, no sleightist leaves the stage until the last few moments. It is the empty stage that marks the sleight’s completion, not blackout, not curtains. After the sleightists have left the stage, usually one by one, they do not return. There is no bow. All the elements of a sleight are meant to be constant throughout the body of the sleight, except of course during the wicking. When sleightists go “out,” it is not to be speculated that they simply left the stage. A sleightist’s presence, in this way, becomes a guarantor of the nature of his or her absence.

  32 Architectural links are accomplished by one of the following methods: a) looping one architecture’s fishwire through another’s (spider-point) or b) keeping the fishwire untouched and sliding one tube against another with continual pressure (whet- or passion-point) or c) catching a tube from one architecture in the joint of another (cradle-point). For obvious reasons, only the most ambitious links have more than a single point of contact between any two architectures. Complexity in linking is often referred to, pejoratively, as “wit” or “cunning.” As in: “Now, there’s a cunning structure—trading on wick for wit.”

  33 In sleight, as in many disciplines whose continued life depends on mentor-to-student transmission, certain anachronistic behaviors have outlasted their efficacy. “Girls” is a term used by directors and instructors no matter what the age or level of maturity of the female sleightist. Similarly, even if they begin their training in prepubescence or in childhood, male sleightists are “men.”

  34 Female and male sleightists keep themselves, except for the head, completely hairless. The practice is customary, a nod to decorum, originally conceived as an attempt at desexualization. In the early seventies, when it first decided to discard all stagewear except for webs, the International Board insisted that sleight directors distinguish their troupes from the burgeoning au natural culture with stringent hair removal, heavy and stylized stage makeup, and impeccable personal grooming outside the theater.

  THE OTHER QUARTET.

  SETTING: A party. Ballgowns and masks. A small child on the top steps of an offishly kept Victorian, a Victorian painted wrong colors. A spurned lover in the kitchen. A brother, loose-cannoned, on the couch. Against a far wall, petals drifting down, an open-faced woman. It’s snowing. There are exactly one hundred thousand snowflakes, each falling. The small child has counted them. They are all the same.

  NENE: It is late and the adults are mostly stumbly, except the ones who didn’t get that way and so are annoyed or gone. These adults are unlike other adults in that they are all beautiful in every way. They are animalia. You can see it in how they move. It is you who thinks this, you, the small child.

  MARVEL: The girl Nene came to the party, and her daddy Drew. Byrne wants to be ground down and spat out—don’t know why. But he’s clearly elected himself. Everyone knows.

  KITCHEN: I am in the kitchen. It’s a joke we used to do.

  MARVEL: I know. He’s my brother. West and Clef know. When Lark looks at him, it’s pity or nothing at all.

  T: Sometimes I have regret.

  KITCHEN: I am waiting, Kitchen in the kitchen, waiting for Clef to ask me back.

  NENE: You see how they flow from room to room, like lovely grazing things. Subsisting. And you notice these adults, unlike other adults, touch.

  T: I think Marvel was a mistake. He just sits on the divan, watching his brother, the sisters.

  MARVEL: Those bitches. It’s the most fucking annoying thing in the world—to be ignorant of your talents.

  T: In bed, he was sweet. That should’ve told me something.

  NENE: They touch each other and they touch walls to steady themselves and because the wallpaper is like letters Mommy wrote and sent to Fern, who was named after but before one of your Souls. They touched you when you came in, touched your braids—not many people do—touched your hand and one kissed it. That was like a prince, you thought, and excessive.

  MARVEL: Byrne the clown, dancing with that little girl like some precious uncle.

  T: He wasn’t desperate in the honest way sex should be desperate, especially the first time. Desperation of discovery, of encountering the new. Instead, he watched me.

  NENE: They all look like a show, which is what Daddy said they do, but who are they showing now? Maybe you, maybe you’re meant to be shown, stealing up from night, meant to be seeing them this way so waltzingly. Daddy cannot stop touching Mommy, but you see she is like she is sometimes.

  (Lark is made of falling. She has snow in her hair. In the crux of her left elbow, in her fingers. Between her legs—snow.)

  MARVEL: Then Byrne laughed with Drew even as Drew rubbed Lark’s shoulders. Byrne the slug.

  T: I see it now. He was dismembering me, even then, I wasn’t new to him.

  MARVEL: Where’s the fucking salt? Lark’s in a silver slip and I’ll give it to him, tonight she’s the moon—and he’s the moon’s slimy trail.

  NENE: She looks more like them than before, and talks like one. She hugged and kissed you and it was her, but then she asked you if-you-are-mad-why-are-you in one of their voices, you don’t know which one.

  MARVEL: I hear she’s been flashing out more than anyone, Byrne said, more than three anyones.

  NENE: You met so many tonight, and one who wasn’t, who was Byrne’s brother. Byrne twirled you, then Aunt Clef took and Rapunzeled you into a room if your hair did, but it doesn’t.

  KITCHEN: I will not beg her. This is my exercise in ridiculous and pointless dignity.

  NENE: Byrne had been sad from watching all the others touch you and a little angry and then thinking. Maybe he was allowed too, and there was a song he knew and asked you to dance. You liked that. He didn’t hurt your back with the rock like he was afraid.

  KITCHEN: Dignity is even harder and smaller than the ridiculous and pointless rock that boy carries around. Shame—there can be no other reason to carry a stone through the world. And now, Clef is carrying a stone.

  MARVEL: Then Lark goes to the motel to moon over her sister, who’s looking like hell, like three hells.

  KITCHEN: My stone. I swear, I would love it if she asked me to.

  (The weather inside is enchantment: its extra, unverifiable weight like a bullet or a bomb hidden in the body.)

  NENE: Of course there should be ballgowns now and masks and feathers …

  KITCHEN: It’s not difficult to love the ridiculous. The pointless.

  NENE: … but instead West was sinister and gave you a candy cane on the way up, though you aren’t supposed to after dinner. This is his house and the walls feel pretty and the bed in the room is deep but you can’t go down into it like a spoon through marshmallow. You aren’t tired.

  KITCHEN: Lark is as good as Clef, and it’s killing Clef.

  NENE: Aunt Clef held you and sang at the corner and cried she didn’t know you, but you knew her.

  KITCHEN: There. I’ve said it. I still love Clef. Her sister is taking the place she doesn’t want to want anymore, except that she does.

  NENE: Newt showed you Clef a hundred times.

  KITCHEN: Clef won’t tell me it’s killing her, and the navigation is, because she thinks I don’t want what she wants, except that I do. If she’s going to want it, I want it.

  NENE: She’s older
than how Newt showed her, but so like Mommy when Mommy is there.

  KITCHEN: I will want it.

  MARVEL: Byrne-the-fool says the sleight loves Lark, but I won’t even try to take color to her—I’m waiting for Clef.

  NENE: And she’s red.

  T: I was another woman to dismantle, another in a series, nothing differentiating us except the way he takes us apart, the color he adds.

  MARVEL: What would I do with Lark?

  T: West gave me away. Byrne won’t look at me. I want so much to be whole tonight, and the bourbon doesn’t.

  MARVEL: Lark’s sort of gristle-pretty, I admit. Can’t really look at her without thinking of her inside my mouth.

  T: The sisters, they’re loved. I don’t want to be jealous—a hateful, spiteful emotion. I’ve never been, not like now. West did this.

  KITCHEN: Clef is doing exactly what West wants, what Lark’s drawings demand. Require. It’s mesmerizing. There has never, never been another sleight. She is the only woman who could be pulled so hard in so many directions and maintain perfection …

  T: West’s watching, but he’s not watching me. He’s rolled up his sleeves to grease the wheels of his party …

  KITCHEN: … and take perfection and map it onto others.

  T: … filling mugs with too-strong cider, adjusting the music to counter the mood, control it.

  NENE: This is Christmas, is love …

  MARVEL: But tonight, Lark’s soft …

  T: “What a Little Moonlight Can Do”

  KITCHEN: There has never …

  NENE: … is dark …

  T: “Night and Day”

  MARVEL: … a thirty-watt bulb.

  KITCHEN: … never been another …

  T: “Bluebird of Delhi”