Sleight (4 page)

She started off slowly, as if explaining something to her daughter Nene she wasn’t even sure a child could believe. Something like God.

“I think maybe the first one chose me early on because I was so unhappy. I didn’t know how unhappy until the eighth grade.” Lark looked up at her sister. “Do you remember when I was in the eighth grade and Claudia Shale moved in down the street? Everyone hated her and we were best friends. We smoked cloves in the loft above the basketball gym. Friday nights, if there was a dance, she’d meet me in the parking lot and we’d swig vodka out of a copper flask before going in. Claudia said alcohol tasted better like pennies. Of course we didn’t dance, just stood in the corner of the cafeteria. Being superior. Claudia lent me her entire Basque Liberation Front collection on vinyl, and some Delete.” As she confessed, Lark allowed herself a smile. “I learned that I was very, very unhappy.”

Clef didn’t interrupt. She was intent on the grotesque in her palm, playing the fingers of her right hand above it as if to stroke it, as if it were a corn snake or a love doll. But then she didn’t—uncertain of its relative frailty, substance. It was so light.

Lark denied herself the satisfaction of telling Clef that the Need wasn’t really like that, that the thing obsessing her was just what a dead Need
felt
like, visually. When the Needs were alive, they were elemental—pure, shifting forms varying in size, complexity, character. But dead—Lark knew after dismantling the small corpses—except for subtle differences in color, one Need is all Needs.

Lark watched her little sister: her head down, her hair a bordello veiling the pretty monster. Clef, all caught up. Lark had expected this; she made a good living anticipating fixation. She went on.

“When the Need first came inside me, it felt impossible. Like love, maybe happiness. I could feel it behind my face, burning out fault, blemish.” Lark pursed, then unpursed, her lips. “Clef, this is the thing—I couldn’t tell anyone. Not you, then. Not Kitchen later on. Drew knows, but only peripherally. In high school, two years after the first one came to me, the night I killed it, I tried to tell Claudia and she stopped speaking to me. Her silence was quick and nasty—not a mistake. Yours was the same.”

“You
kill
these?” The word had woken Clef from the Need in her hand—withered dragon-thing/dessicated moth; scaled wings split in four and shot through with iridescent indigo, and the body sickening, a large deflated condom, its milk-colored worm-skin trailing long, limp legs, legs with not enough structure to support what must have been the bulk of a live Need. A brief, comic image—her sister darting back and forth among Georgia pines with a butterfly net and a syringe—dislodged a nervous giggle from Clef. Then, a question.

“How
you do kill them?”

“How?” Lark looked off, musing, as if she’d never considered the method. But she knew how. She swiveled back to Clef.

“I just make myself hate them.”

Lark’s twelve-year-old body had responded to her first Need with more pitch than she knew it had. She’d always suspected herself capable of things, but what frightened her was it was not her accomplishing them. It was Need. Her Need took her half in sleep onto her pillow and with her own hand got her off. Lark feigned disgust. Was disgusted. And her Need made Lark’s sleight instructors finally take note. After struggling for years with her architectures, Lark’s manipulations improved, and she had bursts of what she could only call focus. Briefly, she could summon something fierce in the sleight chamber. On occasion, even without her webs—in practice clothes—she would glimpse the mirrors only to see herself dissipate. The instructors said she was coming into her own. They’d had hooks in Clef for years, but now they talked of sending Lark to the academy.
⁷
With the Need, she had begun to wick. Her talent was abusing her.

Clef was barely aware of her sister. She was more interested in watching the Need for signs. She tried to imagine how Lark might’ve constructed it. Clef was the sister who made. Before, Lark had barely had the will to dream up. But this thing was physical, alluring. Clef looked at her sister, reassessing. Lark was more physical now. The last time they’d spoken, the night Lark had left Monk, she’d been stretched thin. Like cirrus. Clef had assumed the triangle had unraveled her—two sisters begging annihilation from the same force of nature. Clef had defended herself and Kitchen that night, but Lark had only softly spoken of her Needs. It had seemed odd at the time—an oblique, ethereal sort of anger—but it wasn’t until Lark mentioned husks and wings that Clef grew worried. Still, she’d thought it was temporary. Rage and betrayal sprung into hallucination—that wouldn’t last. Clef thought it could be dealt with in time. By time. But not this, not psychosis turned into cadaver. Her sister in front of her looked heavier to Clef. Or if not heavier, denser, as if the water in her body were under pressure. As if anything inside her couldn’t help but drown.

Lark watched as Clef’s face trembled through thought—a vulnerability her sister had learned to mask in early adolescence, though only onstage. Lark saw flicker there fear, shame, finally concern. She decided against euphemism.

“Once I’m sure they’re dead, I vomit up the husks.”

Clef shuddered, folded the Need back into its cloth, pushed it into the box. Relieved of it, she shook her head too many times.

Lark broke the silence.

“Go ahead, call me insane. It’s easier.” Lark leaned forward and rubbed her ankle with both hands. “I don’t like talking, but these things—she tapped the wood lightly with blue fingertips—are as much me as you are. As Nene is.” Lark paused, looked to the floor. “I can’t believe you don’t know her.”

“Listen, Lark, we need sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow. You can have the left side of the bed.

“But that thing …” —Clef waved a blind hand toward the box—“that stays where it is.”

⁴
At the pinnacle of sleight, a performer is snuffed out. At that point, the audience cannot perceive the sleightist. The surrounding architectures are always only barely visible—the subliminal flash of their apprehension/dissolution is a property of the art. But sleightists also vanish. The performers know when such a moment has been reached, and by which of them. They call it
wicking.
It quickens their skin. They taste metal. The best sleightists wick several times during a performance, though duration varies. The problem with wicking is known to them but never discussed: it can last too long. Time spent “out” corrupts a sleightist. The most talented retire after only a few years. This fact, combined with the traditional anonymity of the playbills, keeps the art form from developing stars. So sleightists are most admired, and most pitied, by one another.

⁵
Recent additions to sleight vocabulary have come from varied disciplines. Hands have reenvisioned structures from molecular biology, Kabbalah, psychoanalysis, physics, Vodou, baseball, astronomy, rock art, the I Ching, chemistry, and knitting.

⁶
Areas of indeterminacy—initially called
Unbestimmtheitsstellen
by the Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden, then baptized
Leerstellen
(“gaps” or “places”) by Wolfgang Iser—are concretized in sleight. Thus, any timbre or posture left unspecified on paper, that which transpires onstage through the will of the performer alone, or accidentally, is embodied not as one thing or the other by the sleightist, but as
something wholly indeterminate yet perceivable.
In other words, there exist moments in sleight where potential is made flesh.

⁷
The academy, housed in an old brick warehouse near Emerson College, has lived quietly in that location for over eighty years. There is no sign, the building’s façade unremarkable. Only locals are aware of the June influx of lithe bodies. Through the multipaned and translucent windows on the second and third floors, the students in class and in rehearsal are just beyond view from the street. If passersby could see, they might think they were witnessing a ballet or a cult, save for the presence of the architectures and the extremity of the sleightists’ contortions. They would see instructors marking the margins of the chambers with long poles, driving them into the hardwood with metronomic precision, poking students whose focus has dropped to “recalibrate” them, and more rarely, passing the poles in sweeping gestures across the floor—to catch an architecture lazily manipulated and bring the entire linked structure, flesh and fiberglass, to ruin.

CALLING.

W
est found Byrne on the beach. The beach of a lake—a big lake, but a lake. Byrne was riffing in his notebook. The odd interests walked slowly as they passed him in his folding chair with his eyes buried. For a few minutes West watched from behind, then wraithed forward and read aloud the words he could make out on the page:
disaster, starfish, crucible, pelt, stolen, end-machine, frictive, flight.

Byrne closed his pen, slid it into his shirt pocket. He turned his notebook over and raised his face to his intercessor, his maestro. “What is it you want?”

The stranger handed him a playbill from the weekend’s performance. “I’m West, director of Kepler. Might you help me with the obliteration of an oversight?”

Byrne looked beyond West’s shoulder. An interval passed during which clouds felt the need to break apart. “Will there be much damage?”

West enjoyed Byrne’s question before answering it. “I suppose it’s possible—I’ve been lucky before.”

West’d been thinking on Byrne for a month. The director of another troupe had told him about a kid doing performance art in Chicago and calling it she-ight. The director was incensed. “This kid,” he said, “has never trained, is no sleightist. It’s just words, a few crude mini architectures—get this: straws and tooth floss dangling from his arms— a CD of Andean wind-sound, a rock.” The director called Byrne over-educated trash. Then he called Byrne “a waste of a blackbox … a feckless leech.” West didn’t say anything, and he didn’t laugh, but he’d been thinking for a while that his art form could use a good bleed. West nosed around and found a review that called Byrne’s work “a house for the irreverent and the waking: an antidote for poppies.” By the time Kepler reached Chicago on tour, Byrne’s show had closed, but West wasn’t easily dissuaded from a prize.

If West was a proselytizer, it was with reason. The world was caving in, and West alone knew the way to reverse it. Sleight could save lives, but salvation alone was only bread. West wanted more—to offer the world more. He wanted to be out in front of it. He’d keep on changing up the structures until enough of them started dragging each other to the theater. Snake oil, movement: all the world really needed was a little removal.

West could see what was wrong—the audience was always too much at the surface of themselves. All those seeky mouths. Often, for minutes after his troupe was set onstage, West would stand at curtain’s edge, eyes scanning the dark theater. He’d imagine how, if he delayed the performance long enough, they’d zeppelin. How the people would rise, hit the rafters. Go up like a matchbook. West was, admittedly, very fuck you.

It didn’t take him long to convince Byrne to join his ranks. The boy was hungry. But now that he had him, West wouldn’t allow Byrne’s gifts to be squandered on parody, or worse: atrophy. West contacted a hand he knew had difficulty with precursors. But that hand wasn’t relieved: he was insulted, hung up. One after another, seven hands slammed down the proposition. By the last, West’s voice was starchy with his particular brand of persuasion. His own grandmother, Fern Early, a respected sleightist—one of the few female artistic directors of sleight’s recent history—had pushed West to become a hand. He couldn’t do it. Though untrainable as a sleightist, he didn’t want to study the documents either; he thought the history
⁸
too cloaked in myth, and more to the point, irrelevant. Nevertheless, in his early twenties he had studied, hard, eventually drawing and producing two mediocre sleights. But it was his highly involved approach to seeing them navigated that convinced Fern to first apprentice him, then leave him the troupe when she retired. He’d never drawn, nor wanted to, again.

West thought of the hands that Kepler commissioned—pinched, dry boys in their libraries scouring books and films, few of them ever at performances but always clamoring for video. Addicts, but to what? West hadn’t seen or produced a remarkable sleight in over a decade. He had to get one for Byrne. For Kepler. And he wanted it navigated before their European tour. At the pit of him West felt, as he always did with a new idea, that death—the same white-booted white man on a white horse always—was riding toward him, trying to snatch the baby from his arms.

Byrne soon found himself in York, Pennsylvania—a working-class town that had, for nine brief months in 1777 and 1778, served as the first capital of the United States of America. While on a mission for jerky his second day there, Byrne read at least six plaques that told him so. He also saw one of his billboards mounted on top of an old drugstore. Since meeting the driven and doubtless West, Byrne had begun to think of things as his that he never would’ve claimed before. The birthing of the nation as atrocity—the idea pleased him. He stopped to jot down a few words, among them:
mine, barrow, compact, hapless pursuit, esquire, shunt, gun, game, faithless, horde, species.
York was now, Kepler’s director explained to Byrne on the third day as they ate three-dollar omelets at a hole-in-the-wall called Jersey’s, plagued with failing schools, de facto segregation, outlying rural poverty, and an inordinate amount of designer drug traffic out of New York.

Kepler’s studios were unbelievable—two stories high with skylights and sprung floors. Industrial meadows, they were full of ambient light, kinetic potential. Byrne had stood in the center of one of the chambers the day they first arrived, windmilling. Trying to create with his two arms and the momentum of his heavy hand something out of the vibrant nothing floating there. Byrne had never been inside a sleight chamber before, but he knew the ones in Chicago couldn’t be as spacious, crowded as they were into church basements and old office buildings.

West told Byrne that Kepler’s corporate sponsor had purchased the old cannery and converted it for a song. “Cheap space, cheap labor, it’s why we’re in York.”

Byrne asked, “Which song?”

West thought for a moment. “It might have been ‘Ode to Joy’—that, or ‘Green Door.’”

“But not ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’?” asked Byrne.

West responded, coldly, “That’s not how the business end is run.” West’s playful streaks, Byrne noted, had short lives.

When West wasn’t around, he encouraged Byrne to talk to the sleightists, to mess around with an architecture or two, provided he was supervised. Byrne was, and did. He’d never had a Christmas like this one. His mother had spent teary, listless winters hating the trees. His father thought it irresponsible to give children what they wanted. At least Byrne, being older, had gotten new things. Marvel had received Byrne’s old toys, rewrapped. How strange, Byrne thought, how predictable, that eight years after his father’s death, at the end of summer in a town that smelled like farm, Christmas had found and started rubbing up against him.

West, it seemed, was negotiating with the academy to get hold of one of the incomplete original documents: mere thumbnails of structures—not enough for whole sleights, and no accompanying precursors. Troupes had worked with them before, unsuccessfully, and hands were given one of them as an exercise at the end of their training. It was a negative lesson: to prove that compositional collaboration in sleight fails. The transitions between the hastily delineated structures were nearly impossible for all but the most fluid sleightists. In addition, these incompletes required the old blown-glass architectures. The one thing they seemed to have going for them was sound.
⁹
Byrne wasn’t certain what West expected him to do if they managed to acquire one, but until then, he was going to enjoy his time. There was nothing to do in York but fool around like a child in the chambers, and then one by one with the very receptive and undemanding sleightists of Kepler.

Over the four weeks they spent rehearsing, Byrne got a feel for Kepler’s director. West was tall and gaunt and randy as any preacher. But he never seemed to have sex, at least not sex that got around the troupe, which bothered Byrne since West’s energy fluctuations were unmistakable. Byrne wanted to know how, and more precisely with whom, West regathered focus. But the director was a model of nondisclosure and a certain type of restraint. He was quiet in most rehearsals. Even when he jumped up to run full-force at one of the sleightists to speed up a manipulation or a link, he never yelled at the members of his troupe. He screamed often otherwise: on the phone with the sponsor, with tour venues in France and Germany (in both French and German), at the two interns, at Byrne. But there was something nonthreatening in his raised voice, as if that wasn’t the West to worry about. The calm West—that was the eel.

Because Byrne knew nothing of structures, West had been handling the navigation of the retrograde. He’d gotten permission to use an incomplete as a training tool, but not to perform it. So West decided to conform to the letter of the law and fugue the thing, torque it beyond recognition. So few were familiar with it in document form, he told Byrne, no one would be able to identify this particular order, especially if it were not only reversed but attenuated to fill an evening.

“But Byrne,” West said, “you will need to find out why.”

“Why what?” Byrne was often lost with West, but not unhappily. He was Gretel, brotherstruck.

“Why this sleight could not be made whole until this moment—backwards, slowly, with you writing its precursor.”

Byrne flashed to breadcrumbs. He remembered it was birds who insisted that the children going home would finish the story too soon, before the fattening—before the arrival of Gretel’s capacity to murder.

⁸
In 1628, on the island of Santo Domingo, a French Jesuit named Pierre Revoix discovered a bundle of parchment secreted in a wall of his mission. These papers each detailed a series of theoretical structures, but none of them seemed to have been drawn by the same hand. In fact, the words on the hundred or so original documents were written in at least eight languages, among them Russian, Swedish, and Arabic. Revoix sent the documents back to Europe where they were copied and translated by members of his order. Only the copies survive. Revoix’s journal of his life in the New World chronicles his intense interest in the papers he never saw again. He died in 1642 of fever. Recent academic theses have posthumously characterized him as a schizophrenic who almost certainly forged the structures himself. His notebooks show a Revoix who, though clearly trained as a linguist, also considered himself an amateur mathematician. But a deeper personal history—what called him to the Society of Jesus—has proved unrecoverable.

⁹
The music sleight evokes borders on the natural. Fast-moving architectures make approximations of birdcalls, or of the wind over wheat. Slower manipulations can mimic the hollow, charged air of the few remaining old-growth forests, or gustless snowfall in higher altitudes. Even sleightists’ webs, crocheted from heavy metallic threads into patterns that hold mirror fragments in bodily eye-hives, contribute to the soundscape. A sudden cessation of movement by all twelve members of a troupe can paint a breaking wave, or the collapse of a doe beneath gunshot.