Sleight (28 page)

The curtain opens. Lights fade up. Lark stands far upstage right, facing away, aboriginal in her white paint. On the stage between her and the audience there is a roiling—limbs and the fiberglass flash of architectures. Lark maneuvers toward. Her architecture is a word in her hands, and then she speeds it up, and it is thought. No longer under her control. Its process pulls her into dialogue with the other sleightists, and the architectures manipulating them. It is the structures moving the sleightists now—puppeting them.

Lark is alarming in her pale, painted skin, so violently, terribly naked. Her movements—angular, yanked. Marvel hasn’t mirrored her in the same way he did Clef. In fact, except for Kitchen’s and Haley’s, he altered all the patterns. Kitchen’s still encircles his waist, but because the mirrors can only bounce back black curtains or dark audience, he has no center. Haley has no face. Montserrat is without upper arms. Marcus has a reflecting worm where his spine should be. Marvel thickened two of T’s lines but left off the rest, cutting her just at the knees. And Lark has no heart. Marvel, with mirror shards, has removed an asymmetrical hunk of Lark’s torso: the left side of her rib cage, front and back. Clef cannot look at the disfiguration. The hack job. It is horrifically literal.

Lark’s fingers are white.

The audience is hushed, as they were in Africa, Greece, Italy. The links are working without color. The bodies are still emphasized, though not singular. When Lark wicks, the architectures do not keep articulating—they spiral beyond what was meant, having lost their ballast, their plumb. Their flesh-marionette. On their own, the manipulations are too much, too open. It’s then that Clef sees Byrne above the rest. He is two hands only. Face. Two white claws, one gripping black rope, one around a stone. A dark mouth in the center of a stilled, white oval—façade of a face. Clef—whose practice it has always been to let the precursor wash over her, like lyrics—looks into this mask of Byrne and listens.

FrancescaAbigailSlutMarekAjaxJackassChristopherDopeDick
DeniseGilGusKikeStephanSpencerHowitzer

She doesn’t understand. Was this what was raining down on her? This onslaught? Suddenly Marvel’s paints seem almost benevolent. But Byrne isn’t saying this, is he? He’s just saying it. It’s nothing. Precursors are kindling—they have to catch fire. Newsprint is kindling and it too says nothing.

The wicking is growing closer, and Clef, punctured by the words, admits the beauty. Merciless. The links kaleidoscope over her—fracturing, multiplying. The architectures are lights on a radio tower, the sleightists—waves. Clef watches a structure contract a nebula, fitting it to the stage. She witnesses the molecular birth of a plastic. Clef sees a tree die, an entropic study of a cloud’s dispersal. At one point, all twenty-four sleightists link to affect the glint and stab of asphalt, in serenade of a star long dead. She feels strongly—design is here. Momentous configuration. Consequence.

And then Clef remembers: this is hers, her navigation. She did this. And she had no plan, no plan at all. Just intention.

The fetus inside her flutters. It is the first time.

Two hours they watch. Bea’s children are dumb. Clef looks over at the stoic older boy. Jay’s mouth is hanging slightly open, his eyes are wet, tearing up—he’s not blinking enough.
³⁷
Clef thinks maybe she’s hearing a siren, but it isn’t a siren. Barely audible, what she is hearing beneath Byrne’s wrong words she hears more clearly during the wickings. She begins to know it—the low-level song. It is the scratchy recording of a trumpet—muted. Music. It continues, fading in and out for the next ten minutes, twenty. She knows better than the rest of the audience where they are in the sleight, but even for her, time is lost here. She has been in this dark theater for a day, month. A year. She has been in this theater since her mother’s death. Clef misses her parents, and is ashamed that she cannot miss them more than she did when they were both alive.

It is some time Clef spends with the horn, trailing it through the sleight, in and out of Byrne’s words:
JossElsieAssholeLardassKaelDjunaSpicJorieLilithRachel

RetardHowardDonnieTammyStoneJaneJewboyLiselPashaKatanaBilly

PrudenceStefanieHankRaeDerringerWinonaAnnRachelLesboTasha

DarrylLugerMargaretRemiWinchesterOwenSolangeSterlingBitch

LawrenceVedaDrillSloaneFileMaddoxHoraceDjangoFaggotRenee.
It is some time with just the horn, the wickings deafening, and they must be nearing the end. Clef wants it to end. But West has made the end. And it is not yet.

A flicker. On the scrim. A flicker on the scrim. The sleightists, mirrored? A flicker, nearly subliminal. The next one longer. Longer. Longer—movement. A film. Video. A strung toy. A puppet. Another. A monkey, a horse. A bird. A lion. Behind the sleightists, a film of white parts, strung together. At the top of the scrim, on the tape. A white hand in evidence. A wedding band. Above the scrim, Byrne’s face. Byrne’s hands clutch. A rock, a rope. The dark. Below him sleightists are spun, twirled, slapped. By architectures. Flung. The film behind them—children. The puppets are bone. Bone sleightists. Strings are architectures. Architectures, strings. Little crossed batons. Little crosses over strings hanging down. Frets. Playing. Miniature deaths. The dancing dead. The prancing, swinging, prowling, waltzing, pawing dead. The horn. Cloy. Sweet horn. A-sail above scratch. Scratch. Cadaverous lovelies. Cadavering. Staged. A preciously. Precocious. A postmortem. Baptism. A bris. Away. Adage. Skinless children are sinless children. Say it with me. Skinless children are sinless children. All gone, Mommy. All. Gone.

It takes a few minutes to register. No one in the audience has seen this section of the Vogelsong tape; it wasn’t released. But the audience, all audiences, have a memory like a hunger for filth. This was, what, a few months ago? The animal puppets, the killer couple. Now, what was it they did? This film, then, on the scrim, this is children? The monkey, the horse? The bird? The lion? The audience moves. Shifts. It fidgets, uncomfortable, as if it were human.

Emmy, beside Lark in Bea’s arms, claps her hands together. Points. “Mommy, look, a birdie! Mommy, look! Birdie up! Up! Mommy! Emmy want up! Emmy birdie, Mommy! Emmy birdie!” A woman behind them doubles over and vomits onto the floor.

The audience begins to leave the theater. This—this zoo—it is not what they came for.

The end. Lark is barely there. She is in and out again and she is grateful. She feels the cold again. Deep, and all through her she ices. This is what she wanted. Out. To hate the sleight again—to remember why to hate. The word “plantation.” Hunger. I know I love my daughter. Know it. The other sleightists begin to leave the stage. Leave like Claudia. Like Newton. Jillian. Like Clef. Goodbye. Out. Then there is sound, it is warm like burning, and behind her a black-and-white fire. A house burning down, she thinks, on the scrim. Is she homeless? It seems right. Sad. To leave one’s home. Out. Necessary. Jillian needed. Nene needed. When home is sick, it’s right to leave. Out. You leave pain. You leave color because it, like pain, makes you feel. There is only black, only white. Red and blue and green impossible. Brown and beige impossible. Out. Not actual. It’s why she left my body. Out. Because I cannot keep color inside. I am only white parts. White parts it is right to kill. Out. Already infected. Yes, Jillian. Infected. See my red eyes. My blue fingers. White skin. It is not, Out, right to use the dead. To forget the dead. To use the dead. If I leave my body, Nene, then home, and I will be returned. Out. I will reach the other side and you can king me. The logic of it. For a moment Lark is worried—these ideas, they’re perfect, and that is always a sign. But she forgets of what. Out. Utopia. The word “plantation.” Out. Big house, instead of living inside the body. A body, instead of what? Out. During her next return she examines the theater. It is wrong, the theater. The theater is the test tube she has filled with disease. Out. Poor flies, glassed in. Out. The theater was rife with specimens and now is less. The people are not as much there. Wicked? Has she done it again? Were the audience hers? Did she hurt them? Out. Need them? She mustn’t hate them. She mustn’t hate them, though she knows she does. As herself. Out. As useless as that, Out, as needy. This is it—what must not. Out. Must not happen. But she did, she must have hated them because the wicking is gone from the stage. Out. Her responsibility, she drew it, Out, self-leeched it, and now it is Out, Out, Out in the theater. Perfecting. She would stop it. Out. Call it to her. Lark knows how to call things, how to pin them. She will, Out. She will fix the wicking down, Out, inside her bones. She will welcome all its cold. Out. What is perfect doesn’t move. It was never cold in Georgia, Out, like in Boston those summers. Out. The wicking, all inside her, all, Out, at once. The blue had always been right there, right at her fingertips. Drew understood. He had to. Out. Out. Here, finally, was something she could save.

Lark burned the house of her childhood down inside her. Lark did not mean to hurt, but needed to.

Clef stayed. It was the end of the sleight, and one by one the sleightists unlinked and left the stage. Only Kitchen and Lark were left now. And Byrne’s words:

JudithYouTheodoreNowJustusYouTheScissorsNowDianeYouNowByron
YouWhipLuciusNowYouVictorYouYouVerityNowYouTheScytheNowYou
DotheadYouHurtKieranNowJadaYouMiguelBlythelyNowGlynisYouTake
TheRockToReginaNowNowMacYouFuckUpTheHymiePatrickNowThe
StickToSamboNowNowFatmanFallonHideoNowZoeTheLatheNowDieDie
DieNowPleaseTheSickleYouAletteNowMeTakeByrneNowArtNowFaith
NowThemAllofThemTakeThemDownYouEnolaDownItDropItNowNow
YouCynthiaNowCynthiaYourTurnYouBeMachine

Lark flickery. Kitchen fully. She was in his arms when she was there at all, the link a cradle-point. Kitchen juggling. Bone-juggler tossing his hard scarves again and again against harder air. Art. Lark and light. Lark and light. Lark and light. Then light and light and light and light.

The architectures spun. For three seconds. Thirty. The Vogelsongs’ tape kept showing, looped, in the space where once was Lark. No more words. No horn. Kitchen let his arms fall to his sides. The architectures went on weaving for another few moments. Fell. Several tubes reverberated from the stage, graceless, before settling into awkward hush. And there was a child—come out from a slow dragging through milk, held too long under too much of what gave him life: Kitchen. He stood, hands down in front of all the white animals and nothing, nothing in his face at all.

Clef rose in the dark. She said, “Kitchen. Kitchen, I’m right here.”

It was the end. And Byrne, looking down and seeing Lark gone, thought to blame no one. He closed his eyes. Unclenched his hand from his rock. The sky falling hit the stage behind Kitchen. Everything, littled. As Byrne undid himself, he remembered a Mustang engine, out on the block, and Marvel only eight or ten, standing on a chair beside Gil, gazing into it.

The end. West watched from the curtain as Lark went. West watched the audience’s slow hemorrhage from the theater. He spoke aloud, and loudly, and to no one in particular.

You Are Now Leaving the Site of an Atrocity—tell me, where will you go?

³⁷
It is not uncommon for some audience members, attending their first sleight performance, to develop dry-eye. Because of the mind’s inability to process the act of wicking, the involuntary act of blinking is retarded, or shut down altogether, in an effort to catch the sleightist mid-removal. A product called Natural Tears readily relieves the symptoms, and after a few sleight performances, the mind adjusts to sleight’s opacity and the condition no longer occurs.

FISHING.

T
hey are fishing. The three of them wade out to the bone sofa of the fallen sycamore Nene dubbed Whale a decade before. Once they climb onto it, Clef, who doesn’t wear boots, pulls a leech from her calf and then rinses off the spittle of blood, pointlessly. It won’t stop.

It is a long time in the morning sun. They never catch anything worth keeping, but Abra is addicted to the way nothing happens, then suddenly does. Abra is their coddle, and they baby her. She leaves next week for Boston—her first summer at the academy. Nene thinks twelve is too young, she has argued it with Clef. Clef thinks Nene should get out herself. Georgia has gotten inside Nene, is making her thick. Haunted.

Nene smiles at her aunt. “It’s not the place, Red. It’s the ghosts.”

“Why don’t you go stay with Byrne and T? They’ve offered so many times.”

“You know why.”

“Nene. That was a child’s crush.”

“I would hurt them.”

“Fine.” Clef can’t make way against Nene. She is hard, vain, unlike any seventeen-year-old Clef has ever known. Nene doesn’t doubt herself. She graduated high school three years early, yet Clef couldn’t get her to apply to college, let alone leave the house.

When they’d first moved down, Nene had spent hours shepherding a then two-year-old Abra around the edge of the lake while Clef and Kitchen looked on. They had come temporarily to help Drew, because it was a big place for a man and his daughter alone, because Clef was done with performing, because they were all hoping Lark might somehow return. It was Clef who gave up first, when she realized she wasn’t hurting for no reason anymore. The men never admitted to it, but hoped longer. Then Kitchen opened a studio near the university. And Nene and Abra were riveted, fastened. Sisters. So Clef and Kitchen and Abra stayed, extending family.

Clef unlocks the tackle box and the girls take their bait—finger-thick earthworms dug out of the compost heap early this morning. When she and Lark used to come out here with their father, he’d had one rule: they couldn’t fight. As a result, fishing mornings were nearly silent, barring the occasional Newtonian lecture on the perfection of fish as organism, needless of evolution. Her niece used to tell Clef stories about him—grandfather-as-child—but somewhere around her eleventh birthday, Nene had stopped. Clef had been glad. It hurt her: Nene talking of talking to the dead. Her dead. Clef threads her worm onto the barbed hook, savagely—it is now two worms. Nene never meant anything by it. Lately, Clef was wishing Nene still had an adviser, maybe an editor, even if he were spectral.

“Abra, don’t go.”

“But I want to, Nene. I’ll be back in six weeks.”

“You’ll be different.”

Clef has heard this litany pass between them before, and it is getting old. “Don’t keep making her feel bad, Nene.”

“Why not? She’s going to learn how to drop off the planet. Do you want her to follow my mother?”

“We never made Abra take. She wanted to, remember? We never made you either, and you never wanted to. Sleight isn’t the enemy.”

“I’m going to Mexico.”

“What?” Clef’s head snaps toward her niece. Abra looks down at the water. Nene’s secret had been making her cousin’s hands itch. Now they are burning. Abra dislikes the constant, prolonged battle between her two guardians. It feels like she should stop them, but she can’t think of a way. Other than Boston.

Nene explains. “West wants to train me as a hand at the Dormitory.”

“He’s not even sanctioned. It’s not sleight. You can’t go.”

Since the International Board had relieved West of his stewardship of Kepler, he’d been in Juarez. No one had spoken with him in a decade, and then, last year, he’d called Drew. Said he’d been working with the girls there—that some of them had proved quite talented—but he couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened to Lark. After several conversations, over months, Drew agreed to talk to him in person. West had flown up at Easter. He’d worn a ridiculous white linen suit, and Clef had wanted to strangle him until he shit himself. She’d stayed out of the house for most of the visit.

“He says we should stop ignoring the root. That it’s how things get exponentially worse. He says he lost her because he didn’t know enough about his materials. That he threw them against one another for flint. People. Without adequate research. He’s studying. He wants to put together an all-female troupe—Slit.”

“What?”

“Slit. Past tense of sleight.”

“No.”

“You’re not my mother. Drew says yes.”

“What is he thinking?”

“You know what he’s thinking, Red. That of anyone, I might be able to find out what happened to her.”

“You won’t.”

“I know that.”

Abra speaks. She is shy, doe-eyed, constellated. Take away the thousand freckles, and she’d look like her father. But Clef is there, all over her skin. Abra is beautifully normal. Except she has been raised by Drew and Kitchen, Clef and Nene. And back at the house, on top of the bookcase in her room, she has four other hand-me-down parents: Newt, Fern, the Lacemaker, and Marvel, whose Soul is still red and orange but three years ago stopped breathing. She also has a box, inside of which a white knot cradles the corpse of Lark’s last Need. Nene gave all these to her when she turned four. Nene said she had her own things and reasons, but that Abra, more impoverished in that arena, might need to be
amused.

“What did happen to Nene’s mom?”

“You know this. She never came back from a wicking. She stayed out.”

“But how?”

“She chose to.”

Nene lays her rod across the crotch of the bleached tree and walks out. Once the water hits her hips, she dives, and with piercing strokes it takes her only a few minutes to cross this slowest edge of the green lake. Mother and daughter watch her go, watch her turn, watch her head back. She stands up. As she trudges the last few steps toward them, she squeezes out her thick rope of braid, winding it around her head like a halo, or a noose.

“Forget catching anything now, Abra.”

“Yep. Thanks, Nene.” Abra is used to her cousin’s profound shifts of mood, has found it useless to let them rile her. She’s also learned how to punish. “So … you don’t think your mom left on purpose?”

This exchange nearly breaks Clef. They are not at all replicas of her and Lark. Nothing like. Nene is self-assured, Abra is patient. But the energy they pass between them. The system of pain. She and her sister might have patented it, it was that identifiable. The lake water is bathwater, but Nene trembles.

“She didn’t
choose
to leave me. It wasn’t simple.”

Clef can’t unsay it.

“She loved you, Nene. I didn’t mean …”

Nene stops her. “I
am
leaving. On purpose. I’m going to Mexico.”

“Why Mexico?” Clef knows it’s already done. Her line is slack in the water. She hates when there’s no fight. She has always loved and succeeded at fight.

“Because I want to be a cowboy.”

Nene and Abra apparently share this joke. First, they shake. They start rocking and cannot stop. Abra drops her line. Nene’s hair comes undone, lashing out across her shoulders. Lasso. Eel. Abra’s giggle is punctuated with hiccupping intakes of air. They laugh and laugh. Their bodies are wracked and reeling and no fish. They are the fish. They fall into the lake and they’re leaving her, and Clef watches them flop, flash, wrestle in the silt like boys, and she works very, very hard to feel tragic.

Instead—always and where it should not be—there is joy.