Sleight

  They missed her? What a strange thing to say. Clef couldn’t know—Lark didn’t. They had been so far away for so long. At the party, Nene had been less like an old woman and more like a little girl; age was moving backwards through her. So much about Nene was out of the recommended order. Her daughter had blushed when Byrne asked her to dance—that, at least, was ordinary. Wait. Could she be wishing normality on her daughter? Yes, yes she could. When had Lark last blushed? For whom? Nene would be a woman one day, and Lark couldn’t show her how that was done. Not in any conventional way, not in any way that had proved successful. Drew was perhaps right to think he could do better.

  “West said in the airport that we’ll still go to the Midwest—they can’t replace us on such short notice, but no California and no New York. We’re on to something else now, Lark. It’s over. Kepler and Monk will split up. I don’t know if Luke will come back, I think he was pretty demoralized. I hope he does, though it doesn’t much matter for me anymore.”

  They heard the door creak before they saw him. It was Byrne. He was carrying a small package, balancing it on his rock hand with the other one. He didn’t seem surprised to find them there.

  “This was at my apartment. It’s addressed to Lark. I was going to leave it in the lobby, but here you two are.” Byrne looked at Lark. Clef looked at Lark. Lark was looking into the mirror. She watched herself lick glazed sugar from her blue fingers one by one.

  “I’ll take it.” Clef stood. Her right leg hung limp as she lifted a hip—as if by pulley—and the joint popped loudly. She walked over to Byrne. He nodded his chin at the box.

  “There’s a note on it from your director. It says it’s from Fern Early.”

  Lark,

  Here is the Soul you gave me. I have a feeling it’s not mine but yours. You shouldn’t give away everything you make, I’ve learned. Also, I have for a few years kept some information I’ve gathered. I don’t want to keep it any longer. At the academy you came to me, once. You asked a question that had been haunting me, unarticulated, for decades. You asked me how something that could do so much could do so little. You said it must take a lot of work to keep it cycling on empty. Who designed it this way, you asked. And you asked why.

  I decided to find out. After I’d heard you quit Monk, after West started producing things I felt were pushing at the edges, after my body started overproducing things I didn’t need and pushing them against the edges of me, I decided to go to Santo Domingo to research Revoix.

  In my youth, I was obsessed with Antonia Bugliesi. I modeled myself after her. Rich girl, big father. I thought she was the originator of sleight, but over time I have come to see her as an impassioned collector. She collected beautiful things, things she loved: documents she’d seen in Europe and known enough to become obsessed with, styles of movement, young people— especially attractive but expendable ones—glass,36 lace, and mirror fragments.

  She once called the Theater of Geometry her “living cathedral.” She saw herself as the avatar of a new religion—a religion of favorite things. I suppose there are worse. And the reality of what she created is not so far from that, I think. But her real achievement was to cloak everything she did in mystery and dogma, forging art from enigma. She single-handedly inculcated an order of novitiates. She showed them Revoix’s work and said, “This is our bible and I shall explain it to you.” She reinvented, or at least offered to America, the temple dancer. The vestal.

  I spent enough time, sixty-five years, moving in her church, pantomiming her sermons with my body. After your question, I decided to go to the source. Antonia Bugliesi was never tremendously interested in Revoix. He was only a hand to her, a proxy. It was the drawings that mattered, how she could combine them with other media in endless associative play. She was a spiritualist, a collagist, and a crackpot—our priestess.

  When I arrived at the mission, I realized that, like Antonia, sleight scholars have been so invested in his documents they’ve ignored the other activities in which Revoix participated. One of his main duties was to baptize the Native Americans, mostly Cherokee, brought from the Carolinas to work the sugar plantations. The traders stopped in Santo Domingo to check their cargo for disease, convert and catalogue it. Revoix had another job, too—to quarantine the sick. The abbot put him in charge of the infirmary. He kept records of all the transactions—I found them in the mission’s vaults. It seems the patients who were admitted to the infirmary were primarily between the estimated ages of six and thirteen. In the records, Revoix described these children in detail: by teeth (age), height, gender, and any other noteworthy physical characteristics. Beside each description was a number—a fee.

  The infirmary had a nickname: the abbot’s stable. The nickname is well documented. Local myth has it referring to smallpox, but none of the descriptions of the children include markings consistent with that disease. And Revoix listed too few deaths for smallpox. There were some, but next to these, the causes of death were not recorded. Only more numbers. Replacement costs, maybe. User penalties.

  I don’t think Revoix profited from the abbot’s business. I think he was in the position of sending these children to nearly certain death on the plantations, or procuring them for the abbot’s use and the use of his associates. Maybe Revoix saved some, let them loose in the town to fend for themselves. I don’t know. I only know these were the circumstances under which he began to draw obsessively.

  The abbot died not too many years after Revoix joined the mission, and another replaced him. The stable was dismantled. I believe that this was when Revoix hid his notes—the structures and the words—only to come across them decades later, after he had worked long and hard, ministering, to forget. It haunted him, what had been done. I looked again and again at the precursors, trying to decipher them. I think originally he may have been trying to translate or to encrypt translations of the children’s Cherokee names. He was a linguist. But there are no names in the infirmary records against which to check my theory. This could of course just be me hoping. That he tried to save—even their names.

  What I cannot decide is whether or not to remain hopeful. This art I have found all my life so astounding, so beautiful, this art I have built a life around, and West’s—it came from such misery, depravity. Is this any cause for hope? Every day I have been asking myself.

  My first inclination, and my second, and my third, is to say that it is not.

  I am writing to you because I want you to be well, Lark. Try to be well. You have done nothing. Maybe this is why you feel sick. I envy you for knowing so early on to be sick, to want to do more. Have you? I don’t know why you can’t feel, but I recognize it. My grandson will only hurt you. He probably already has. I can only hope it helps in some way.

  Yours, Fern

  Hancher Auditorium, Iowa City. A frigid day. Bluer than the second day in February has any right to be. Four are walking along the river that is not completely ice. They walk a mile, less, onto the college campus. They cross a bridge, and the bridge sings to them. Two of them decide to run back and cross it again—the song is happy, and happy is addictive. The other two laugh and frozen breath escapes them in a fine, glad mist.

  A group of students pass the four just on the other side of the bridge. The students are scrubbed and shining. They have exactly the right amount of flesh to fill their skin, the right amount of blood in their cheeks; they do exactly the right amount of bouncing and walking backwards as they argue physics or football, but when they see the sleightists, something happens. Perhaps for the first time in their lives, the students are envious of another way of being on the planet. They feel young and awkward, but not as they did in puberty, not ashamed of self. They feel young and awkward now because they move like humans—they lumber and fidget, they twitch and trip, they knock teeth when they try to kiss each other drunk. They are embarrassed. Once, not long ago, their natures seemed particular, but now the students share a communal shame: they would avoid having bodies if they could. Because they can�
��t, they are learning to wage a prolonged war against them. All of them, against all of their bodies. The school gym is always full, laxative supplies at local drugstores quickly empty. The students’ bodies are all around them, but they don’t think to live in them any more than they would think to study at the library.

  The students note the stylized walk in three of the four they pass, knees soft, heels never grounded. They unconsciously mark the posture, in which the shoulder blades are dropped and opened across the back, so that, thin as these sleightists are, they take up more space. How their faces, when animated, don’t end at the chin like masks but are integrated into movements of neck and chest—the entire torso, a speaking thing. Every movement, no matter how unconscious, is large and alive and purposive. This is what beauty is, one of the girls suddenly understands, to be what is meant. And it is—the girl is the philosopher of her group, and so follows one thought with another—what I will never be. The students look at the lovelies, each other, and then down at the new snow that covers everything this February morning. They want to crawl down under it. They want to leave the blue of this day to these deer, these willows, whose movements don’t give them away, whose bodies are trained to deserve it.

  The talk has been all over campus. Even the few that have never seen a sleight performance are trying to get tickets. Their school has, by accident, hit platinum: an Event. The sleight, in the three weeks since it debuted in South Africa, has received more local and national media attention than this year’s bowl game—a good one, Dorito or Toshiba—which they won. Parents are coming. Alumni, and those aficionados on the coasts whose tickets have been voided, are flying into Chicago and renting cars for the three-hour trek across 80. As they pass the sleightists, the students give them a wide berth. To make room for everything that surrounds them. The tallest boy of the group thinks one of the four is not so amazing looking, not so very other. Byrne smiles at this Ichabod, waves his stone at him. Indeed, he remembers this scene from the opposite vantage point, and knows he is not so very other—although he is, a little.

  HALEY: How far are we going for coffee?

  T: That kid backstage said there’s a student union building a block farther up.

  MARCUS: That’s never real coffee.

  HALEY: Sometimes it is.

  MARCUS: It never is.

  T: How’d you think tech went?

  HALEY: Okay I guess.

  BYRNE: Is West using slides on the scrim?

  MARCUS: I don’t think so. Why?

  BYRNE: I thought I saw them testing stuff from up in the ropes.

  T: What kind of stuff?

  BYRNE: Old film stills maybe—I was too close, but it was black and white.

  HALEY: I’m glad we didn’t do dress.

  MARCUS: West said the lighting here is set. He can punch in all the cues digitally. Not like Europe. He’s been strange—you know, since Fern. Says he doesn’t want to hurt our skin.

  HALEY: “Any more than is absolutely necessary.” What a crock.

  BYRNE: So why doesn’t he get rid of Marvel?

  HALEY: I guess Marvel’s absolutely necessary.

  BYRNE: He’s a monster.

  T: He’s your brother.

  BYRNE: So? It isn’t hard to love a monster, just exhausting.

  T: This I know.

  The four arrive at the student union. They go in. The distinct and not unpleasing smell of popcorn fills the warm air, and cannot be disentangled from it.

  36 Antonia Bugliesi admired blown glass. She was aware of the precarious process by which it was made, and she modeled the apprenticeship system within the Theater of Geometry after that of certain European glass houses. She lamented her estrangement from her father for a number of reasons, not the least of which was her disenfranchisement from certain elements of his estate. He had amassed an impressive collection of Venetian pieces during his lifetime, now on permanent display in Milan.

  CLOSING.

  Marvel started painting them at three in the afternoon. That morning they’d rehearsed, then broken for lunch. A deli tray in the lobby. West wouldn’t let him paint for the tech, said it wreaked havoc on the sleightists. Marvel knew that, of course—it shouldn’t matter. These freaks did plenty of nasty shit to their bodies. In fact, their bodies were agonizing to look at without the paint. He’d always thought so. No flesh, no imagination: all tendon and muscle and technique. Only his paints made them visually bearable. Not that he hadn’t fucked two or three these past weeks, but he hadn’t had much choice, had he? His junkie girlfriends may have been thin, but they weren’t so bristly, so aware at the level of their skin of other eyes on them, so in need of shellacking.

  He usually started with the men. Doug’s paint job was a pinkish red. Maraschino. Marvel applied the first daubs to his torso—Doug’s pattern he’d developed in spots, almost stippling, like a rash that’s won—then moved to his legs. A minute later, when Marvel looked up, the torso was avalanched in cherry blossom. Reddish-whitish—pink. He stirred the paint jar, went back over the area, but now it was bleaching out even as the color hit the skin. Marvel let loose a string of words that turned Doug’s face red, but nothing else. By this time Manny, Marcus, Kitchen, Tomas, and Vic were looking over.

  “What’s going wrong, do you think?” Kitchen tried to be calm, sensing that Marvel was perhaps not good in emergencies.

  “What the fuck does it look like, man—the paint’s malfunctioning.”

  “How about you try me?” Tomas offered an arm. “Maybe it’s just that one.”

  “Why in shit’s name would it be the others?”

  But even as he said it, Marvel was pulling another can from under the table where he was working. He opened it, stirred, and slapped some paint on Tomas. The deep, pacific teal started going pastel immediately. Marvel leaned over, searched frantically through the cans. In the next two minutes, he tried out each man’s colors on different parts of their bodies: arms, backs, legs, faces, feet. Then he put Marcus’s paint on Kitchen. Even as he attempted the transplant, the paints grew paler and paler and cracked. The men looked as if they’d been partially foiled in dead white leaf, or ash.

  Doug went to get West.

  By the time West arrived from the sound booth, the scene was mild chaos. Almost all the sleightists were milling around, examining the streaky ivories and eiderdowns and ashy-semen colors of the men. Marvel was pacing in the far corner, his head down. Byrne was walking beside him, talking softly. West scanned and assessed. He clapped his hands together, and the clap echoed, and they turned.

  “It’s perfect.”

  Kitchen walked right up into West’s face. “What are you talking about?”

  Kitchen had had enough. Enough of West’s machinations, enough of not knowing what they were doing and not understanding why it had been successful. If it was the sensation that it seemed, why had West canceled half the tour? He’d been curious about the project from the beginning, and—unlike the sisters—he saw darkness as necessary, a part of the scrutiny, the spelunking of sleight’s potential. But he never trusted West. Now that it was done, Kitchen thought the sleight hung on the color. He was sure of it. The color and the fronting of the individual—parlor tricks, really. The links were genius, Clef’s navigation was. But it was the props, vibrant nakedness, and the opportunity to attach celebrity to the sleightists that transfixed the audience. He said as much.

  “If we’re all white, we won’t be a zoo anymore—and not-a-zoo is the opposite of [untitled], isn’t it? It’s not what they’re coming for.”

  “No.” West ceded the point. “But it’s what they’re getting.” He brushed past Kitchen—he had no time for the thinker—and made his way over to Marvel, whose agitation was sparking uncontrollably in the corner. He was scuffling and muttering like someone off his meds who shouldn’t be, ever. Byrne stepped protectively in front of his brother.

  “Leave him alone.”

  “Byrne, I need Marvel to do this.”

  “Do what? Ther
e’s nothing for him to do.”

  Lark, who had been invisible in the room, spoke then. Quietly.

  “There is.”

  It was the first time anyone had heard her voice in weeks. Since they’d flown back from Barcelona, she’d been at all the rehearsals in York, even stepping in when Clef’s body gave out. But she didn’t talk, and no one had thought she’d come on this last tour. They had assumed she’d be headed back to Georgia, hoped she would. Something was wrong with her. Even as the pressure of making the sleight had receded, Lark’s presence had surfaced among them as a small dread. Many of them hardly knew her. They didn’t want to deal with trauma outside their sphere, and she had the feel of trauma. She belonged elsewhere. Clef couldn’t be asked to, but weren’t there other people—Lark’s husband, for example—better equipped to deal with her?

  But T, who’d once felt threatened by Lark, hadn’t since Cape Town. Lark wasn’t so odd. Everyone got quiet sometimes. So she carried a box—Byrne carried a stone. Besides, it was probably a gift from her daughter, or for her. T tried to draw her out during breaks. She small-talked, asked questions. And when Lark didn’t answer, she kept at it. It became important to her. The rest of her troupe, and many in Monk, shot malice in Lark’s direction. Some of it was holdover from the navigation process, anger and confusion over how Lark had—after six years outside sleight and in only two months—made herself capable of things they couldn’t. And this, after drawing the most astonishing sleight they’d ever been asked to perform. So, the typical accusations: ambition, insanity, witchery. T thought differently. She framed it safely, genetically: Clef’s got talent—why not her sister? They were maybe born that way. T noted all the wrong energies around Lark, and realized hers had been one. In recompense, she tried to act as a buffer.