Sleight (10 page)

“I see.”

“But he likes words too. And he knows a lot about Mommy. He calls her Checkers.”

“Why Checkers?”

“Because she doesn’t have red hair.”

“I see.”

“You always say that when there’s nothing
to
see. You can’t see Newt. You can’t see Mommy brushing Aunt Clef’s hair in the bathroom. You can’t even see the inside of your own rock.”

Byrne stilled himself, tried to breathe evenly. If he didn’t move too suddenly, or at all, maybe this creature would keep speaking.

“So will you let me see them too? The words?”

“Yes.” Byrne breathed it. “Nene?”

“No. I can’t tell you. But you didn’t hurt him. Neither one of you did.”

“Nene, who are you talking about?”

“You and Marvel didn’t hurt your daddy. That’s stupid to think that. Your rock is very tired of it all the time.”

“Nene, how do you know my brother’s name?”

“I have his Soul on my dresser. Do you want to see? I love that one. It’s red and orange and it breathes.”

¹⁷
This page is reprinted with permission from
The Pathologies of Performance,
an anthology compiled by the California psychoanalyst A. D. Statt, PhD. All texts within the book are the works of musicians, actors, dancers, painters, etc. This list was composed by a patient of Statt’s, case number 33.2, a hand, as part of a decades-long treatment both during and after a semidistinguished career in sleight.

¹⁸
Antonia Bugliesi chose her students and then trained them in a manner that made their questioning of the underlying properties of sleight unlikely. Most were prostitutes, or at the very least destitute, without education or prospects. She offered them a living that required both unrelieved physical focus and obedience. In the few cases where a sleightist seems to have questioned Antonia, if that sleightist were a woman—she became pregnant (possibly by Bugliesi’s lover, the lewd puppet-figure Dodd). If a man—he was asked to study the documents and eventually produce an original sleight: these were the first hands. In essence, when Antonia felt her charges were too close to the source, she shuttled them into acts of creation far from the well.

LARK’S BOOK.

[On pages 17 and 18, fragments of graph paper pasted into the journal. The resulting pages are warped but the drawings—precise and depth-bearing.]

Sketch thirty-four: Bowel. A meander with searching

inner filaments. And among the morass: unnamable occlusions.

Sketch thirty-five: A perfect and thickening spiral pitted

against a cube. High, pornographic discourse.

Sketch thirty-six: A shutter.

Sketch thirty-seven: A tilled field, could all of its rows—

its whole—be viewed simultaneously from within. Or below.

[On page 19, Lark’s handwriting.]

It took me too long to figure out the things to hate. The word “plantation.” Quiet boys who told me how I should. All my alien-withins: pity stones, unending suck, the impossible entrances into another, silver strangles—crotch to throat. After I had them figured, I killed them. I couldn’t take how I couldn’t take. How I was, am, girl. At twenty-five.

The first time, I was fifteen. They were drunk, some tripping. Eight of us. They made me drive Space Highway out to the res. I didn’t drop that night, so even though the wine made the headlights talk so sad—white cryings, spider brides—I was the choice. We piled into a rusted-out Impala and some kindness took us ten miles to the spot above the river.

Got undressed. Claudia was the other girl, the one who’d dragged me in. My body, newly sprung, was still caving its chest into a sort of grotto: airtight, godtight. The boys were a year older, smart. They ranted about the breathing dark between stars, howled how willows swayed out essential seduction. Remember “essential” was all I could think. I tried to see it and the trying made me bold. That night I brought my body out—it, me, verging. Ready for shame.

Sleight had made my walking and standing better suited to intoxication. I had some balance. I half-tightroped, half-cakewalked along the lip of the dam. Spun a lopsided polyhedron. That night my limbs were limbs of hoary gods waltzing on the sea. That night, the boy I hurt for most begged a kiss—and I, naked, began it. But only seconds in, he stopped me. Grabbed my arms and wrenched them down. Off him. Said acid confused our lips, made it hard for him to keep us separate. “Besides,” he said, “you’re a pure and perfect child and I am a goat.”

That night I learned what it was—a muse. A muse is to be relegated.

What I wanted didn’t need to be taken from me. Was kept instead as if just above, not admitting my reach. I do not admit. So I, still throbbing with the silt-feel of muck between my toes, thighs slick and woken, started to kill the thing, the Need, that made me hope I was for something intended.

That was my first.

[On page 22, a clipping from a tabloid. The headline: HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS OPPOSE BAPTISM—MORMONS CLAIM DEAD JEWS AS THEIR OWN]

Two days after West’s invasion, Kitchen found the note in Clef’s apartment. She was off to Iowa for the last week of her recovery. She wanted to visit a friend of hers, an ex-sleightist who’d married an oral surgeon. They hadn’t seen one another in years. Bea had three children under the age of six. Kitchen tried not to laugh at Clef’s lack of self-preservation, but he did. Until two tears.

She called the next night. “They’re beautiful.”

“I’ve seen the Christmas cards.”

“I mean, they’re insane, all over the place, and Bea’s a
mother,
but they’re beautiful.”

“Have you held the baby?”

“Emmy. Yes. But hardly a baby anymore. She’s beautiful. She has such perfect …”

“Fingers?”

“Yes, and …”

“Feet?”

“Yes, and Clara Bow lips. Red. Her mouth is a bud.”

“Rosebud. Of course—the mute enigma crying out. Unless … does this beautiful child not cry?”

“She only cries when she needs something, Kitchen.”

“And how often is that?”

“I know. I do. I can’t stay the week, I’m getting no rest. The toddler came into my room in the middle of the night last night.”

“He’s a bad sleeper?”

“Not really. It was six, but Bea and I’d stayed up.”

“Drinking?”

“Stop it. She needed to talk—you wouldn’t recognize her. Bea was always the gone one, remember? And now she’s just so … there. She covers her tattoos, all except the asp and that’s because it’s around her neck. Jesus. Bea was the last person I expected to …”

“To what? Settle down? Settle for settling down?”

“You know, Kitchen, it’s not always about us. Bea—she seems … well, she can’t be happy. Can’t be. But …”

“What?”

“She swears she is.”

Clef changed her ticket. Two days later Bea was driving her to the Des Moines airport. A few miles from the entrance, Clef saw the billboard for the first time: YOU ARE LIVING ON THE SITE OF AN ATROCITY. She made Bea pull over. Bea started to protest, but Clef assured her an hour was plenty of time for a domestic flight. Bea pulled onto the gravel.

“Clef, you can’t
not
have seen one of these.”

“I’ve heard of them, of course. But yes, this is the first one I’ve actually seen.”

“They’re not in New York?”

“There’s one right outside the Holland Tunnel. Also on the BQE, the LIE, two on 95. I just haven’t seen them.” Clef was weirdly ashamed.

“I think this one’s about pesticides.”

“Pesticides?”

“That or the groundwater. The agricultural runoff around here is frightening. Especially what it can do to children.”

“I bet.” Clef had her own ideas, very few of which involved children. She got out of the car and walked closer. The yellow grass was tall there, just off the shoulder, and she bent to scratch her nonbandaged ankle. Bea had gotten out too—to follow her? Clef wondered. She turned quickly to her friend, to catch her in the act of mothering. But Bea was squinting up at the dark sign.

Clef asked, “Who do you think is putting them up?”

“I never really thought about it.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Seems like a legitimate warning. Why be suspicious?”

“A warning? But according to this”—suddenly annoyed, Clef thrust her arm toward the black rectangle—“the atrocity has already happened. There’s nothing left to do.”

“Or is already
happening.
And there’s always something left to do, trust me.” Bea’s hand went through her hair, worrying it, before it reached her neck and lingered there—covering the head of the snake like a cowl. She looked over at Clef. “Come to the car. I’ve got to get home before Jay’s soccer game, and you’re missing Kitchen.”

After they were back on the highway, Clef spoke.

“Why did you say that? I told you how awful he’s been. I just need to get into the city, into the chamber. Back into my body.”

“Okay, you don’t miss Kitchen.” They were quiet together for a while. Then Bea reached across the front seat and laid her hand on Clef’s stomach. She let it rest there. Clef did not think herself easily shaken, and not by so small a thing, the weight of a woman’s palm. But—she hadn’t expected it.

After a minute or so, Bea withdrew her hand and returned it to the wheel. Clef watched it go. Bea was by this time saying something—about finding a lost key in a spider plant, about potting.

“Do me a favor, would you Clef? You know that pep-squad twit they hired to replace me?”

“Haley.”

“Could you be mean to her for a few days? In my memory?”

“Done.”

“And give Kitchen my love.”

Clef stared out across a blear of flatland. Nodded.

Clef made her way up the five flights to the chamber. The paint was coming off the pipe banister in large red flakes. On the way back down, sweaty from class or rehearsal, she often came out of the stairwell looking as if she’d just murdered some vagrant clown. Some balloonman. Today she wasn’t winded when she reached the top, but she was no longer used to the climb. It had been over a month. She took out her keys and undid the deadbolt. No one would be there this early—she would have a chance to regroup.

Clef undressed in the cramped anteroom and slipped her shoes, coat, and sweats into one of the cubbies against the wall. She dropped her bag onto the floor, unzipped it, and pulled out an architecture she’d designed during her recovery. She’d adapted it from one of the more involved structures in Lark’s book. The shape was an inversion: its center could rotate to the periphery and vice versa. The mechanics had kept Clef up nights, but she’d finally wrought it. She thought its novelty might help her ignore the unavoidable pain of reentry.

In the chamber, mirrors lined three walls. There was a small diamond-shaped window on the fourth, and two structural beams interrupted the room’s flow. It was small for a sleight chamber, but that was because Monk, unlike so many other troupes, had maintained its urban presence, with chambers on Avenue A since the forties. Clef had been to other troupes’ larger, more welcoming spaces, but there was something about grit and obstacle and a low ceiling that felt true to her field. Her art wasn’t about expanse or breath. It had irritated Kitchen when she’d said it aloud, but she had come to see sleight as a death practice.

Clef placed her architecture on the Marley floor and curled her body around it. She lay there for a few minutes, eyes closed, to memorize the configuration of sharp lines and wires with the nerves and muscles of her thighs, inner arms, breasts, and abdomen. Keeping the architecture folded into her, her body protecting it from contact with the ground, she began to work her way back and forth across the floor of the chamber. This was kitten-play, Clef’s preferred method of getting to know an architecture. She embraced it, scrapped with it, twirled it above her with feet and hands when she rolled onto her back. Then the play elongated, and when Clef went backwards, over a shoulder, she extended and arched her body, guiding the architecture down her spine in a spooling motion as she controlled the descent of her legs to the floor. She never allowed her movement to cease or gave the architecture over to static. For half an hour, maybe more, Clef used the rhythm of her breath to maintain energy. Then stopped.