Sleight (7 page)

SOUL.

L
ark picked up a knot. Drew’s participation in her craft was limited to this: he and Nene scavenged for fallen branches in the woods behind the house Lark had grown up in. They brought home the trees’ deformities, tumors or abnormal sites of twist, dried them in the attic, eventually sanding them into silken cups with angry grains—evidence of the violent seasonal winds that had brought them down. More of these lined the house’s bookshelves than Lark would ever use. She examined the one in her hand. It was from a sugar maple—a bird’s-eye pattern dappled the knot. Drew had brought it to her almost four years ago; he had been carrying Nene in a sling, and when he tried to pull the gnarl out from beside her, she’d clung to it. Lark placed it on the oversized desk—once her mother’s—where more than forty baby-food jars sat, vivid with cool-hued crystals. She opened the box Clef had refused to keep.

The night before, when Drew and Nene had picked her up at the airport, she’d looked at her daughter and felt it. She had been gone sixteen days; Nene had missed her gravely, was angry, was older. Lark spent the drive home atoning, telling Nene about her Aunt Clef, asking her about pre-K and the books she’d taken out from the library, about the two minor hurricanes her mother had missed. It hadn’t worked. Nene was too quiet, and Lark, desperate, pulled out the box. She showed the Need to her daughter. Nene perked up. She wanted to hold it and Lark let her. After examining it with the grace of hands that have no agenda, Nene asked, “Mommy—why do yours hurt?”

That night, Lark put the box in the freezer, and in the morning the Need was ready for disassembly. She gingerly set the now brittle and painfully cold Need on the large square of wax paper that covered most of the desk. She hadn’t done this in years and was surprised to find her hands trembling. She steadied herself, then picked up a pair of tweezers and grasped the edge of one of the wings in its pincers. She quickly twisted her wrist and the wing shattered, azure crystals scattering across the paper. Her eyes darted, attempting to follow each, lose none. Lark used the tweezers to recover and separate the fragments into the small jars according to color. Some were murky, others not. The jars varied in content from a soft willow past green through most of the known blues. The bodies of Needs, though originally colorless, all turned to some vegetative or oceanic shade with the cold, and fragile. This Need’s central sheath was like moss, and when Lark tapped it, it came apart in pieces small as sea salt. It was a color she would use sparingly. She continued with her process—the ruthless aparting and assigning of the Need—before turning her mind as another woman might soil.

She stood up and stretched. She was tense. She went to the bathroom and bent over the tap for a few gulps of water. She looked out the window above the bathtub. The trail of an airplane was disseminating into noon sky. She waited until the evidence of its trajectory was diffuse, deniable. Until she hadn’t seen it. She headed back in to the desk.

Lark sat down and placed the maple knot in front of her, along with a small can of varnish and an empty watercolor tray. This part, the painting, was familiar. Although she hadn’t had a new one to dismantle in years, not a single one of her colors had run out. This vibrant powder—the last throes of her dying Needs—seemed inexhaustible. She began mixing, streaking, daubing at the thing with her fingers. Four years before, not long after Nene’s birth, she had learned that the powders’ tints weren’t fixed, that they changed when they hit different qualities in the wood or paper. Then, she’d discovered the knots—how they produced the most variation in the least amount of surface area. Efficient.

Lark chose hues, knowing they wouldn’t stay true. Early on she’d stopped questioning why she divided color from color at all—it was her chosen futility. Lark’s failure to predict an end product was immaterial. She created patterns that ought to enhance the natural features in the hollows, but the results—through no design of her own—were unfailingly unnatural. Looking into the dip of a Soul, Lark’s customers found dread. And had to own it. Lark watched them struggle with the cups, drawn to certain ones, transfixed. Whatever they saw they did not name. Lark could only guess what held them, not herself the author of her Souls. The colors played. They were frivolous and volatile, mutating to engine reds and dead-skin whites, or remaining infuriatingly blue, as on her fingers. There was no formula. The wrenching apart and recombination of Needs created something of its own. Lark midwived. For her, it was about listening to horror. Having rejected her Needs bodily, she couldn’t abandon their infant cries to silence. They were hers to pass on. To foster.

When she finished she knew this one felt odd. Familiar. She went down the stairs and into the dining room where Nene and Drew were playing Memory and showed them.

“It’s all gray,” said Nene.

“It’s really lovely.” Drew took it from Lark and turned it over in his hands. “You know, you never have adequately explained how the varnish makes the wood so much heavier.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Well, this one really is lovely. It feels like wind.”

Nene reached over to touch it. “It needs a name, Mommy.”

“Nene, this one isn’t for you. Your birthday isn’t for a few months.”

“I know. But this one needs its name. It’s Burning.”

Clef smelled coffee. She looked out from beneath the down quilt, squinting. The digital clock blur was a yard—a mile—away on the dresser. Kitchen’s leg was over her leg, her leg asleep. Sigh. How could there be coffee, and did it matter? Coffee was good. Someone was already moving. Purposefulness in her kitchen. Clef should go, host, but reminded herself she was naked. A pause in the hall, a knock on the bedroom door. Clef rolled out, stood cold on her waking foot, reaching to the back of the pine rocker for Kitchen’s silk robe. It was the most unbelievable shade of violet. Things kept circling back to Lark, Lark’s Need. Infuriating. Clef looked at her sleeping lover—in sleep the category applied better, she thought, than any individual name. It freed her, for just a moment, from the unique nature of her weakness. The rocking chair nodded her toward the door. Another knock. There is a stranger in my home who has made me coffee. How loved she was. Clef met her eyes in the full-length mirror that hung on the back of the door. She was purple with it.

She limped over and slid through the cracked doorway into the hall. The man had the decency to take a few steps back. She was shorter than she was onstage.

“What’s wrong with your foot?”

“I sliced open my ankle a few weeks ago, but that’s the other foot. This leg is asleep from the crotch down.
I
was asleep until a few seconds ago.”

“I know, I’m sorry. This couldn’t wait. It
is
almost ten forty-five.” The tall figure glanced down at a bony, watchless wrist.

“We performed last night.”

“I thought you were injured.”

“I am, but Kitchen …” Clef gestured unapologetically toward the bedroom. “I mean—Kenichi, he isn’t. I’m also pretty sure he’s not going to be up for a while yet. Should I have him call you?”

“I haven’t introduced myself.”

“Jesus West, do you think anyone doesn’t know you? You’re here to recruit Kitch—Kenichi. I’m just surprised you haven’t tried before now. He’s amazing.”

“He is. But he can sleep. Come in and have some coffee. I’d like to talk with you.”

On the flight back across the Atlantic, West had recalled a sleightist named Clef who, it was rumored, liked to restring architectures and had even designed a few new ones—maybe she’d drawn something. It was rare for a sleightist to step outside the technique.
¹³
If she’d done so once, she might’ve again. The last time West had seen her perform, nearly two years before, she’d been dating an ex—butoh dancer named Kenichi Baba. Clearly they were still extant. That night, the two of them had been phenomenal—wicking twice as much as anyone else in Monk. But during the time they weren’t “out,” the audience was riveted to them. And that wasn’t as it should be. West was certain they had been reprimanded, certain also they’d experienced a more personal shame. But since that night, West had become less certain their transgressions should’ve been swept from the stage. And now, he was beginning to think their methods should be embraced.

“Do you know why there aren’t any female hands?”

Clef looked up sharply from her coffee.

“That’s an interesting way to open a conversation. There have been … your grandmother, for one.” Clef cared deeply about the gender division in sleight: the overwhelming number of female sleightists and sleight students vs. the nearly exclusively male club of directors and hands. Instructors were split almost down the middle, although even that wasn’t equitable—not the way she saw the numbers. But Clef had no answers. And Clef—who liked having answers—shut off after too much not-finding.

West acknowledged her correction. “Yes. Fern did draw. A total of five sleights.”

“She was gifted. I’d rather have drawn her five than a hundred of the sort we’re producing lately.”

“No doubt, no doubt.” West drank from his mug. “Do you draw?”

“What? No, of course not. I was never trained.” Clef was caught off balance. West had put her there. She had heard things about him—that he could manipulate anything but an architecture. It was true she thought of herself as more than a sleightist, an instrument, but couldn’t explain why without demeaning her own profession. West waited. He drew his middle finger along the thick rim of his mug. Clef counted three unhurried circles. She ventured a little further.

“This is the first real injury I’ve had. When I retire, I was thinking I might go back to the academy, but …”

“To teach.”

“Yes. Why not?”

“I thought you might have other interests. I was—hopeful. I’m in need of a hand. A new one.”

Kitchen was up. They heard him before they saw him. Coughing. He shuffled in wearing pale-yellow threadbare boxers, his hairless musculature leaner and longer than his five-foot-six stature and forty-odd years should allow. He went directly to the sink, hacked up some phlegm, turned on the spigot. They waited for him.

Kitchen lynxed himself onto the granite counter, cross-legged—there were only the two chairs.

“Hey West.”

West nodded. “Kenichi.”

“It’s Kitchen. What’s going on?”

Clef had been twisting her hair distractedly, frowning, but Kitchen’s presence was a balm. She made up a small smile for her lover. “Toss me a couple of chopsticks, would you?”

Kitchen reached into the utensil drawer beneath him, and flicked two ivory sticks onto the bistro table in front of Clef. As she secured her topknot, she spoke directly to Kitchen, bypassing West as if he were out of hearing range, an incompetent, a child.

“West here is looking for something structural, and seems to fancy himself a progressive—but we knew that. Do you think … should we show him Lark’s book?”

When Kitchen nodded, Clef left. When she returned, she was carrying it.

“My sister left this here.” Clef looked down at the large, cloth-covered journal. The cover was worn, frayed at one corner. She set the book in front of West—and West’s face was empty. She saw explanation was necessary, so she gathered up some air and dove.

“Lark was in Monk a while ago. Not for long. I’ve never seen any drawings—you directors are cagey—but Kitchen has. He says these look like structures, but for no architectures he’s used. I don’t think Lark knows what she’s drawing. I think she’s sick in a way I don’t know how anyone would fix. You look at that. I see pain. I don’t … I think … maybe she should come back to sleight. If you can do that, you keep the book. I don’t know why she left it for me. I’m no good with what’s not there. She should know that.”

Clef was looking at West. She was waiting. He ran his hand over the book, taking time.

“I can’t say I’m not curious. And sick isn’t something that scares me, though you make her sound … ruined. I often find sickness to be the sign of a working mind. But why,” and West looked bemused, “why so quick to trust me with this? Haven’t you noticed? I encroach. I break enterings.” His smile was light, almost coaxing.

Kitchen answered. “Clef doesn’t trust you. She sees your use. When she showed me this, I told her we’d need to understand it if we wanted to help Lark. But I—knew—Lark once. I’m not the person to help her. Clef’s happy to have you take an interest.”

Clef stood to take her cup over to the sink. She stopped in front of Kitchen.

“You make me sound heartless.”

“You have a heart, Clef. You just like to grip it with both hands.”

¹³
The vast majority of sleightists are familiar with but scant history of their craft. They can recall a few names: Revoix, Bugliesi, even Dodd. But they do not know what transpired on the island of inception. They have read not one of the diaries left by Antonia, nor those of the bastard daughters of the Theater of Geometry. Most are divorced from other areas of their art. Expert at the handling of existing architectures, very few sleightists attempt the design of new ones. They know nothing of the work done by hands, the drawings completed far from theaters, the painstaking experimentation, the research. Their system of training suggests to the sleightists that they purposefully self-restrict to instrumentation. The technique demands so much of them: they are led by one another to think it is enough. Safely cloistered within the mechanism, sleightists choose not to reflect. On rare occasion, a talent, one who wicks often and with duration, cannot help realizing what has not been at stake. One might think these few would seek to reform their passion, but invariably, they withdraw from the sleightworld—quietly and culpably aware.