Sleight (12 page)

LARK’S BOOK.

[On page 45]

I’m eight months pregnant. Am going to City Hall. I love, though an irrelevancy.

I found them almost a year ago. Mother’s papers: Clef’s and my pedigree. Funny, but when I showed them to Drew, not. I’ve been going it alone. For him, a wedding present. For our child. I’ve been using the Alberta May Library for the census. They request records from the LDS Library of Salt Lake City—the largest depository in the world. I’ve received dozens of copies of original documents from the early eighteen hundreds. Amazing—beautiful, beautiful penmanship.

In one document, the selection of names for the mare colts and horses are the same as for men: a bay horse named Sully, a man Sully; a gray mule Hal, a man Hal; a mule Georgie, a man Georgie; a mare Jim, a man Jim; a bay mule Dick, a man Dick; a bay mare Buck, a man Buck.

A document showing the date of sale of Drew’s ancestors: his great-great-great-grandmother, Evie, his great-great-grandfather, Gus, and sister, Evangeline—sold by Silas Toomes to his daughter, Emma Toomes McCleod, on her wedding day, “for $15.00 & her continuing love and duty.”

I am near the end. I went North to visit the DAR library. Drew’s family didn’t fight in the Revolutionary War. It was the Toomes men who were American patriots, “serving with distinction and valor.” I have the Scrye, the Dolan, and now the white Toomes family trees alongside my child’s father’s—also Toomes. Black Toomes. The white Toomes’s is, by far, the most detailed lineage.

My mother spoke of her ancestral poverty like a bedtime story: salad days and shanty Irish, whiskey beatings and potatoes I don’t doubt immigration was difficult—Northeastern coal mines didn’t welcome micks. I’ve learned, from her papers, that when a Dolan died, the family gathered and scraped together funds for a photograph to commemorate the wake—all of them dressed in their best and only suits.

From the LDS papers I have learned that when a slave woman’s age is listed followed by several children’s names and ages in descending order and about two years apart, one might consider this a family.

MISSION.

O
ver the past few years, West had more frequently thought of his mother, imagined her harvesting wild rice on a small lake in Minnesota—though it was unlikely she’d gone back to her family. She was probably still in New York not far from Fern, in Brooklyn or Queens, past use as an exotic call girl, maybe doing the aging hippie thing. Fern had told West that the one time she’d met her, the whore had been wearing a string of turquoise beads.

West knew his mother was Native American, maybe in spite of the trappings. Moaning Wind was the name on the three thousand-dollar checks his father had made out to her, trying to convince her to drop West. The thought of him. His father had once envisioned himself holding a position in government. Holding a position—as for a camera, as on the stage. An illegitimate child to a buckskinned prostitute didn’t fit any such tableau.

During rare visits, West’s father never once mentioned the expensive indiscretion that had resulted in a son, but Fern said he’d been furious when she had retrieved the boy from Moaning’s loft just off Amsterdam. Fern spent thirty thousand on her grandson—far more than fair market value for a child of any race. Later, Fern had tried to convince West that his mother was a doe-eyed Jew who’d ironed her hair and Siouxed-up for the sex trade. West didn’t know why it was important to Fern that he was not the half Injun he so wanted to be back then. Loved being—at least until he was eight. But it was.

Recently, cancer had made his grandmother maudlin. Fern—out saving prostitutes, and native ones. West wouldn’t have been surprised if this new, sick grandmother had tried to contact Moaning. But maybe his mother was beyond contact. A junkie now—a barfly. Or maybe she actually was on a Midwestern reservation, piloting a small boat through the reeds with West’s half brother and two nephews, or dealing blackjack. He sometimes dreamt her on a corner in Chelsea with arms outstretched, filthy and deranged, waiting for her child to be returned. West didn’t care that she’d let go. Money used in that way—to pry children out of darker arms—was no sale. It was pure and driven and one-dimensionally purchase. A clean, white thing.

West phoned the director of Monk. He set up a meeting. West had ideas about appropriation, about how stillness works, about pendulums, about the beauty of the obstacle. West was roused: he was going to break another rule and not think twice. The first hands (or one dear, mad hand) had been out to unveil physics. The bride. Like everyone, they’d been hunting primes, hungry for the irreducible. West viewed sleight’s architectures as approximations that—combined with current culture (the words of the precursor), the anima of the human form, and the performers’ will—create displacement. Escape, yes. Smallish death, yes. Latchless mind, yes. But also. Also. To West, the first sleights were the gunning-down-a-fast-road-through-salt-air to the bad but unimpeachable song from last decade that would become anthem for the next.

West had decided it was time for a new anthem.

The other director would be reticent, but West could call upon Clef and Kitchen. The most gifted sleightists in Monk would have pull with their mediocre leader. They didn’t much like West, he knew, but he was recovering Lark—they’d be indebted.

West drove early the next week to Bucks County, Pennsylvania—farm country not far from Philadelphia. It was nearing winter. Still, the place was green with hills and ripe with cows, although sadly it had also come to boast espresso and beds, breakfasts, wine. He drove fast in his eighteen-year-old off-white Citröen—the last personal gift he’d accepted from Fern, a graduation present. He saw a billboard beside a barn adorned with a huge hex sign: you ARE LIVING ON THE SITE OF AN ATROCITY—
.
Yes,
he smiled.
Try to protect yourselves.

For two hours he listened to the pauses in the conversation he was having in his head. The wet grays and greens rolled by too slowly. Color, West thought, is so often an act of revenge. That’s why it’s so frequently done with blood. Red pools of light. He could do that—and when sleightists passed through, if they were painted red, it would be like a half-wicking. A wicking that is truly illusion: color disappearing them.
²⁰
They would eventually understand. Sleightists were brightly lit people. Invisibility achieved through something other than artistry would become to them something other than desirable. This would be an invisibility removed from talent, from choice. Yes—having them experience a different trajectory to nothingness would be first in West’s order of operations.

He’d arranged to meet with the other director halfway between York and New York, inside the first hand sanctuary—the rural commune Antonia Bugliesi had created over a century before for her retiring male sleightists, to keep them in the family. Busying them with art that wasn’t introspection.

He pulled up the long gravel driveway to the gray stone farmhouse. A low maple, hoarding the last of the season’s blotched flame, hung a branch over the front of the car. West ducked beneath it to make his way to the side door—the one that led through the mud-cum-laundry room and into the original kitchen. A scrawny post-adolescent came to and cracked open the door. Recognizing West, he flung open both the inner and the screen doors and gestured, disciple-ish, toward a kitchen lit yellow against lengthening evenings.

West said, “Thanks, we should only be a few hours.” And then, remembering, he asked, “How many will that displace for dinner?”

The boy, looking threadbare in an undersized indie-rock T-shirt, frowned before answering. “In July we were eight, but now there’s only the three of us.”

“Look”—West’s tone was sympathetic—“the same happened to my crew right out of the academy. I was one who eventually left, wasn’t made for it—believe me, it’s better to drop the untalented quickly.” West put up a hand, stifling protest. “Here, take this.” He held out a fistful of cash. “Is the Shot Clock still open? Go get some real food. I know how they keep this place stocked. Have a cheeseburger.”

Monk’s director was anxious. He didn’t know what West wanted with him. West was legend. He was not. He sat unnaturally erect on a salvaged pew across the thick kitchen table from West. He nodded smartly, tried to ask the relevant question, but he was distracted. His eyes darted the room in a weak effort to stitch sense to what he saw: dozens of drawings on sheets of graph and legal paper scotch-taped to darkened oak in inscrutable systems. Arrows, grids, fountains of ink: the beginnings of sleights. Some of the structures, he noted, lacked what he would call verve; others were beyond ambitious, unnavigable. He felt uncomfortable passing judgment, however. Monk’s director had never before been inside a commune; he hadn’t been a hand. An ex-sleightist, he was insecure about his background—maybe it made his navigations too predictable, maybe he catered too much to the performers, maybe shortchanged the forms. That was, at any rate, what critics said of Monk. He tried to tune back into West, who was offering up a detailed plan for the collaboration but no reasons for it. In front of the dead kitchen hearth, its limestone maw blackened with over two hundred years of soot, West crackled like kindling—this was the impression the nervous man had.

“Why color?”

“Why not?”

“Their skin, you say? What about the webs?”

“We’ll glue mirrors to the skin itself, maybe even tint the reflections.”

“Why two companies?”

“Size.”

“Obviously, but why?”

“It isn’t a massacre with twelve.”

“Massacre?”

“Numbers. I need numbers. Twenty-four is barely adequate, but I think I can make it work.”

“Make what work?”

“Look, I need your company. This is big. You have some of the strongest sleightists the academy has ever produced. Wouldn’t you like to offer them something worthy of their talents?”

“Now hold on a second, West—”

“I’m not insulting only you. My own company has maybe two sleights worth its breath. We need this. Sleight needs it. It’ll mean something.”

“Mean something?”

“I’m not saying it’ll have a story, at least not one to articulate.
²¹
No worries there. But it
will
have something for the sleightists to commit to other than their own vanity.”

“Now you’re insulting the—”

“No, I’m not. Why do they wick? Tell me. I mean, aside from proving their own techniques.”

“I don’t know … for the pleasure of the audience? A sense of community?”

“The audience can screw themselves and get just as much pleasure, for just about as much time. No. No sleightist wicks for the audience. And what did you say—a community? Of what, themselves? Working toward what?”

“I don’t know. What would you have them work toward?”

“Exactly.
Exactly.
That, friend, is the first worthy question you’ve asked.”

Clef was deep in practice with Kitchen when the director entered the studio. She was standing, heels in her lover’s hands, her head nearly skimming the ceiling tiles, trembling with balance. The couple had skyscrapered two new architectures, linking them from Kitchen’s ankles to her wrists.
²²
Clef was trying to figure out how to add a next link, and then, how to bring the thing down kindly. She glanced over, saw killjoy in the doorway, and nearly lost it before regaining her focus in the mirror. She waited for his commentary. It usually upset Monk’s leader—to catch Clef working with her own designs. Not today.

“You know, you should ask Haley in, if you need another body. She’d love to be part of this sort of thing.”

“I’m sure she would, but no, that’s okay.” Clef tried not to show shock at the unexpected helpfulness. She smiled, maintaining her frozen posture. “Kitchen and I manage. How was your trip, by the way? How was West?”

Clef had knocked the wind from his sails—she saw it in his reflection. When she made a sudden jump down, the architectures clattered to the floor in dull violence. She hadn’t meant to reduce him.

“I know him a little, West. It was me he called to get your number.” Clef smiled apologetically.

“He’s not trying to …”

Kitchen stepped forward to assure the man, whose ankles, like a girl’s in patent leather, were starting to roll over his loafers. “No, he’s not. He’s interested in Lark.”

“Clef’s sister Lark?” The director took in a breath. “Why?”

“We aren’t exactly sure.”

“Hmm. He told me he wants to work with Monk. I’ll be honest … I don’t know what he’s planning—but I’d be a fool, wouldn’t I? I would. So I said yes. He wants to use your architectures, Clef. Says he’ll get approval. I’ll be anxious to see how he does that. But he gets what he wants, doesn’t he? I wonder if that’s his grandmother. The thing is, we need to start quick. He wants us in York Monday.”

“What about tour?” Clef had been looking forward to South Africa.

“We’ll be combining our schedules. West is handling it. Along with pretty much everything else, actually.” The man grinned, as if he’d put something over.