Sleight (11 page)

Clef curled into her body again, without the architecture. This time the contraction wasn’t maternal but fetal; the air—living, resistant tissue. When Clef released the position, her small frame expanded into an X that seemed to disengage her joints and send her extremities to separate quadrants of the room. Clef repeated the combination several times, inner withdrawal followed by the peaceable quartering of the body. Finished, she rolled onto her right side—this was called “relieving-the-heart”—and slowly made her way into the vertical plane.

Clef rearranged her leotard, then bent over to gather up the architecture. During performance she wore no leotard beneath her web, but in rehearsals the women wore them, while the men sported athletic belts or biker shorts. She looked in the mirror. Her hair, though pulled back, was coming undone around her face, which was growing red. She could already see blood pooled where a few bruises would be forming: one beneath her left knee, one on either hip. A throb told her of a fourth on her shoulder. It felt good—her—moving again. Tender.

Clef began to rotate her tubes and wires.

She started slowly, using mostly her hands, testing the limits of the architecture’s flexibility, watching mirrors to the front and side to determine how best to accompany the shapes that came. Soon she was entering into the figure, inserting arm or head or leg through openings in the revolving form. Clef, during manipulation, felt as if each architecture were a symphony, and she—a child again, dancing in the grass at Piedmont Park during a Sunday concert. It was never only limbs. She pushed again and again her
self
through the architecture—when it was good, that was how it felt. With the ones she invented, she felt also a strange possessiveness. The not-wholly-oppositional senses of entrance and ownership clashed within her.

This one, though, allowed no conflict: each time she moved it into a form, there was only one way out—and that new form also coerced. The architecture yoking her shoulders demanded next to be swaddled in arms, then extended into a weapon form that required a telescoping downward, inward. The architecture—the instrument—in this way possessed itself of a willing Clef. As its shapes accelerated, sweat began to fly from the pools above Clef’s collarbones, spattering floor and mirrors. She partnered the figures, leaning hard into thought until thought merged with skin and nerve and reflex, and all trained upon the architecture: how to maintain its escalating metamorphoses, how to offer it flight or escape, how to best exploit Clef as catalyst. And then, unexpectedly, and for what must have been a remarkable duration, she wicked. In the chamber, Clef was no longer.

Clef ate an apple as she walked toward the subway. The apple was a world. The wind that whipped a lock of wet hair into her mouth was inside the apple. She sucked salt from the hair before pulling it from her lips. Above her the blue pressed down coldly. She was taller now, and could pierce it. Clef cut a swath from the air as she moved down the street. First, someone noticed her passing. Then, someone else. Scraps of newspapers and neon-hued flyers drifted down to settle in her wake. She tossed the apple core into a wire trash can and peeled some red paint from her palm. It had the irregular shape of a continent. Some vagrant continent—brightly bloody.

“You did what?”

“I wicked.”

“On the first day?”

“The first day? Try within the first two hours.”

“Wait. That’s hardly possible.”

“I know.”

“It takes weeks.”

“Months for most of us, Kitchen.”

“Is this architecture like another one you’ve worked with?”

“Nothing like.”

“Then how …”

“I don’t know. But I was out for a while.”

“How long?”

“I’m not sure. But the light from the window, the diamond …”

“What about it?”

“It moved.”

“Are you sure? How far—what, half an inch?”

“No. Not an inch. A foot. Maybe two.”

“You’re on crack, Clef.”

“No. I will admit to feeling a little high afterwards.”

“High? Like post-performance high?”

“No—not
up,
not
on
. I felt, maybe … unencumbered? Like I’d left something inside the wicking. Something heavy. Cruel.”

“Clef, I want you to talk to someone.”

“I want to talk to someone.”

“You do?”

“Don’t get excited. I won’t discuss my sleight with your butoh gurus—or anything else—so just please, don’t. You left them, remember.”

“I left them because—”

“You were tired of exploring your humanity. I know, Kitchen. And you certainly have excelled in that regard.”

“You say something cruel fell away during the wicking? Not fucking likely. Okay. So if not Ito or Masaka, then who?”

“I hear she’s dying, but Fern Early.”

COMPOUND.

F
ern offered Clef a drink, and Clef took it. It was strong, faintly medicinal.

“What brings you here? I haven’t seen you since the premiere of
Squaw King,
¹⁹
have I?”

“No, and that was four years ago. You were only at the after-party for a few minutes—I’m surprised you remember talking to me at all.”

When Clef had called that afternoon, Fern had immediately invited her over. Clef assumed this meant Fern had become addled, or—too old or sick for lovers—had grown lonely.

“It’s cancer, dear, not Alzheimer’s. Of course I remember. You were nervous that the audience had sensed your connection to the work, and I told you not to overestimate them. You were always such a pleasure in class. I taught you—what?—four summers? But so intense, everything taken too much to heart. You felt an obligation even then. Not at all like your sister.”

Clef was thrown. She swallowed a mouthful of whatever sweet burning thing Fern had given her. Too quickly. Her face felt hot.

“You remember Lark?”

“As I said …”

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t—”

“I know you didn’t. Ignore me, I’m just old and mean. But you were asking do I remember Lark? Dear god, yes. She frightened us.”

“Excuse me?” Clef kept losing her footing. She didn’t remember Lark garnering much attention at the academy, especially not from Fern, whose interest in the more talented older girls had been fodder for gossip.

“After your sister wicked, she got weak. Every time. Not like the rest of you. That usually happens to a sleightist getting ready to retire. Am I right in thinking she stayed in Monk only briefly?”

“Two years. But what does that mean?” Clef remembered her sister’s odd reaction to wicking—it was one of the reasons she never thought Lark very talented. Lark didn’t return invigorated. When she managed to get offstage, she was a quiver of flesh—as if she’d been repeatedly shot through. After they wicked, other sleightists said they felt more present in their bodies, more alive. Not Lark. She hated it. And when Clef had pressed her for details, she’d said she felt eaten.

Fern stood up and walked toward the window. She motioned Clef over. Clef looked out at the taxi-strewn traffic below—too much of the wrong yellow—and then across the street. A sliver of park glinted from between two buildings: one art deco, one hidden behind scaffolding. She looked to Fern, expecting a tangential lecture on the buildings’ construction or renovation, like the ones she used to deliver at the academy, but Fern was focused on the windowsill. There, set on top of a white silk scarf, was not what Clef at first took to be an ashtray, but a Soul. It was the palest Soul Lark had ever made, though Clef couldn’t know that. Eyeing it, Clef wouldn’t have called it white, but she wouldn’t have called it another color. The gray light from the window collected inside of it and was drained of gray. The Soul seemed to pull the city in and through, leaving only light—thick like liquid.

“Where did you get this?”

“Lark sent it to me a few years ago. I believe it was one of her first.”

“She gave this to you?”

“Yes. Your sister may be volatile, but she’s generous. Since then I’ve shuttled quite a few collectors down to Georgia. Of course, they have to pretend not to be serious. Lark won’t knowingly sell to a gallery. And she won’t do an exhibition, you know. She’s been approached.”

“I didn’t know.”

“We’ve exchanged a few letters. She says she doesn’t want her Souls to be another performance. I can’t say I blame her.”

“For what?”

“For wanting to know herself without the incessant doubling. Not that I think it’s possible.” Fern walked over to the coffee table and poured herself another glass. She gestured toward Clef with the decanter. “More? I don’t suppose your sister is what brought you here. Shall we get numb before prodding about in you?”

They prodded for some hours. Afterwards, Clef couldn’t explain to Kitchen exactly what had taken place. She tried. Retried. Fern had spoken of her overdue pilgrimage to Santo Domingo, about how she’d been made aware of certain unhistoricized practices: what Revoix couldn’t stop seeing, what Fern could not. She had shown Clef pictures from her compound in Mexico. (“She calls it a compound, Kitchen, isn’t that strange?”) Fern had tried to tell her how little could be done against the deadened wall, and how necessary it was to do that little.

“The dead-end wall?” asked Kitchen.

“Just be quiet and listen—she is incred … an incredible woman.”

Kitchen interrupted her, “Did you at least
mention
the wicking?”

“Shh, Kitchen—hush, please.” Clef put her hand up to Kitchen’s mouth. “It’s because she is so sad from buying West … she says you shouldn’t buy children, not even if they’re yours to buy and you have the money, and that’s the reason he will never stop hating her.”

Kitchen removed Clef’s hand from his face, gently. “Clef, I think we need to get you into bed.” He helped her up and to the bedroom, and—while she talked on, gesturing obliquely when words were lost—he undressed her and laid her back onto the comforter. Once her eyes were closed and quiet, he sat down in the rocker beside her and started humming a leitmotif from a German operetta that had been grafted onto a Japanese commercial for long underwear, circa 1982.

After dropping off Byrne in Georgia, after the train north, West headed to T’s. A decade before, he’d taken over direction of Kepler from Fern and immediately moved the troupe to York. When he’d bought a dilapidated Victorian a few miles from the studio, he’d discovered one of his sleightists’ hidden talents: T had strong thumbs and lips, the latter incessantly chapped from pursing nails between them. She had a husband too, Joshua, whom West liked. Joshua was a trial lawyer in DC and kept a modest apartment there where he stayed during the week. At the beginning, West didn’t wish to complicate T’s life with an ultimatum. Now, everything but the sex had been wrung out from between them. Besides, she’d taken on Byrne.

She was on her front porch just finishing carving ears on a disturbingly large pumpkin. A fluorescent light above her haunted her face. No matter how many times he’d hated it aloud, she hadn’t changed it out.

“Aren’t you running a little late? Halloween’s tomorrow.”

“Then aren’t you early?” T stood up, wiped her hands on the thighs of her jeans and opened the screen door. She turned back to him. “Grab the knife for me, would you?”

Once inside, they headed to the shower. They ran the hot water into cold. The heaviness of two days on the train almost vanished from West’s limbs, shuddered out. After T dressed, she said there was soup to heat up. She left to put it on. West, naked at the bathroom mirror, looked down at Joshua’s things arranged on a wicker stand beside the sink: a razor, a comb, some man gel, cologne. They were familiar, these artifacts of the absent man. They made West neither sad nor jealous. He wouldn’t open the cologne; he wouldn’t shatter the bottle against the shower tiles in a cloud of citrus, or musk. He sometimes asked about Joshua, as he might’ve asked about T’s brother. T had no brother. West would never complicate her life with an ultimatum. She was an excellent carpenter.

“This is good. What is this?”

“Leeks. And potatoes.”

“Mmh.”

“So you took your protégé down?”

“My
protégé?”

“Yes, yours. He’s just my sweet Byrne, he’s your project.”

“I did take him. What’re the orange flecks?”

“Half a carrot. For garnish. And he was okay with that? Didn’t balk or anything?”

“No. He was intrigued.”

“You left the book with him then?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t even copy those pages that were getting to you?”

“Which ones?”

“Please, West.”

“No. I didn’t.”

“Well, you should’ve. There aren’t many people I know bought or sold these days. It’s okay it gets to you. Really. Do you think you’ll want another bowl?”

“No, delicious though. And it doesn’t. It’s been over a long time now.”

“You think? Listen. I’m sorry about this, but you can’t spend the night tonight. I got a call earlier from Josh and he’ll be home around eleven thirty. Missing me or some such.”

¹⁹
The rules for naming sleight structures are obscure, even to directors, who must get approval from the International Board. The process is such that the rules differ subtly depending on whether the structures come from Revoix’s found documents or were drawn by a known hand. Of the previous type, some of the most often performed are:
Musics 1 & 2, Carapace, The Face of Leaves,
and
Negligence.
The latter have been given wider-ranging appellations—titles such as
Hold, Iota of Crouch, Field-plate, Dart, Blastula, The Trepanation of an Orange, Grail-split, Hush a Day Late, Matadorsal, Cleave,
and
Dimebag.