Sleight (22 page)

“I want us to work through the next three weeks with reverence.”

Clef spoke authoritatively, but to Lark she looked and sounded small. Hair, voice—both attempts at volume were silly. Weren’t they? There, at the front of the room, Clef was vulnerable. Her face, mottled with some emotion Lark couldn’t place, squinted out into the sleightists. She hadn’t pulled back her hair that morning and now seemed in danger of dissolving into the red mane’s white noise. Lark felt a sudden urge to take her sister from the room, feed her sweet tea, reason her hair into braids. For the first time in weeks, she didn’t care about her drawings, the sleight, this new Need.

“You all saw my reaction the first day West asked us to use this tragedy. I wasn’t convinced such a response was appropriate. But the material we’ve created in the past month has proved me wrong. Something about the story of those children has moved us, moved me, to make something new. Something extraordinary. Now we’re going to pull it all together. I’ll be working the links first and then sequencing the structures. But this sleight won’t work without a different type of commitment than is usually asked of you.”

Clef spoke clearly, coldly, corporately, and to the opposite purpose than they’d discussed that morning or during the past weeks. Lark felt hamstrung. She’d been counting on Clef to neutralize West’s influence during the navigation. And now her sister, like Lark, was balking at her responsibility to check West. Beyond that, she seemed taken with his ideas. By his ideas. Hostage. Lark hadn’t expected this. Neither, it seemed, had the others, who had stopped stretching, yawning, and scratching and whose attentions were trained on the newly conditioned Clef. But it was West who spoke.

“We need you to engage.”

“What did you say?” Haley said in disbelief.

“Engage,” he repeated. “Not suppress yourselves—emotionally, physically, or otherwise.”

“You’re asking us to emote?” Kitchen’s question made West wince.

“No. Not emote. I want you to be there. Inside the technique. I want a sense of the individual, all of you as individuals. I want you to be empowered.”

“I don’t get it.” Manny’s voice surfaced among the others’ murmurs.

Clef fielded. “We’re asking you to care. To care about what this sleight is about. If we don’t care, we’ll just be using their nightmare for our own ends.” Clef clarified: “The children’s … their nightmare.”

“But sleights aren’t about anything. They’re specifically not, so as to not underestimate the audience’s intellect.” Haley continued, “If a sleight is coherent, it condescends. Sleight itself is experience, not the mediation of experience.” She rolled off the clichés like a catechism.
³⁰

“You don’t fucking believe that shit, do you blondie?” A voice like Byrne’s, but wryer, louder, from behind them. An unfamiliar made his way up through the troupes, tracking ice, ending the trail in a puddle of gray water between Clef and West. “Because if you do—the hair’s perfect.” Then, without taking his eyes from Haley, he slapped Clef’s back. She blanched. In her face, briefly drained of its strange obedience, Lark saw loathing.

“This is Marvel,” West said, enjoying the effect of the boy’s entrance while shifting the focus back to himself. “I’ve hired him as art director for this project. He’ll tell you what we need from you, and you will oblige us. We have a vision.”

Byrne had walked in with Marvel but remained at the back of the room, arms folded in mute tantrum. He waited a few beats after West introduced his brother before heckling.

“So tell us, West. What
is
this sleight about?”

West’s reversal was both flawless and overt. “Since you’ve been hoarding the words, Byrne, I actually thought this might be an opportunity for
you
to illuminate
us.”

And despite Byrne’s perfect awareness, West began to reel another one under.

³⁰
Although sleight is, with the notable exception of the precursors, a predominantly nonverbal enterprise, certain tenets of sleight have been passed down word for word over generations. While some sleightists allow this dogma to bounce off them, sleet against windshields, others are scored by the sharp bytes. Most of the doctrine concerns itself with why sleights can’t mean—a question students of the art form wrestle with endlessly, until one day they don’t.

FAMILIAR.

“S
o. Whose bed is this?” Marvel was sprawled on the sheets, one boot on the arm of the couch, the other on the floor, hands behind his head. “And where’s your TV?”

“Lark was staying here.” Byrne stared down at him, having yet to fully grasp his presence. He’d learned of his brother’s involvement the moment he saw Marvel, T, and West step into Kepler’s lobby that afternoon. His brother had gained some needed weight since Philly. “Are you really off the shit?”

“Clean as a whistle.” Marvel took the pillow out from under his head and buried his face in it. A yawning inhalation sealed his mouth and nose; its twin exhalation created a pocket of used air. After a few deep breaths—suffocation-play—he removed the pillow and looked up at his brother with mock concern. “Speaking of cleanliness, your girlfriend is a very sweaty girl. Here, smell this.” He threw the pillow at Byrne.

“Shut up, Marvel.” Byrne didn’t catch it. He let it hit his chest and fall to the floor.

“Knew you hadn’t nailed her. You should’ve seen your face when she came into West’s office. What’s happened to you anyway? You never used to be such a chickenshit.” Marvel sat up and looked around. “Seriously, you don’t have a TV?”

“The world. Doesn’t interest me.”

“Poor Byrne. But what about the beauty and wonder of nature as viewed from inside a leaf-cutter ant colony? What about pay-per-view boxing? What about British sitcoms on public television? What about the porn, man? What about the porn?”

“I said shut up, Marvel.”

“Oh, dude. That’s it—you’re fucking smitten.”

The next day, the navigation began. West introduced Marvel to a stunned Kepler and Monk, and Byrne finally handed over a copy of his precursor. West took it and withdrew into his office. After his introductory speech, he didn’t emerge to help Clef with the sleight for over a week. Meanwhile, Marvel spent his days pulling sleightists from Clef’s navigation in chamber one to try out different pigments and patterns on their skin. And somehow, Byrne—with nothing left to write and not wanting to leave anyone alone with Marvel—became his brother’s assistant.

West told Byrne and Marvel where to find a thrift store, and there they picked up several damaged vanities. Marvel joyed in the smashing of oval faces in the parking lot, and the subsequent assembly of the shards. For each sleightist who came in, Marvel developed an individual design. Kitchen received a corset of eight-inch spikes that extended from ribs to hipbones. Marvel used weak glue for the initial fitting, and Byrne was in charge of sanding the mirrors. When Kitchen tried out a manipulation, one of his stays came loose and pierced him just below the tip of his sternum. He said nothing, and Byrne started rounding the upper edges on the rest. Marvel just laughed.

After a day or two, it became obvious that the body art wasn’t working the way he wanted—the paints were too flat or too shiny, too paint-like. They didn’t live. The mirrors were by far the easier part. So every hour or two, Marvel went out for a smoke and to wail at the dumpster with a tire iron, rethinking the colors. While he was gone, Byrne slipped into the back of chamber one to see how the navigation was coming along. Clef was using Lark as her stand-in.

Every day the thing had more flesh. By the end of the week, Clef had put together nearly thirty minutes worth of material from Lark’s drawings—and the beginning of the sleight was unlike any Byrne knew or could piece together from his early childhood.

Opening.
³¹
A single sleightist stands far upstage right, back turned to the audience. The rest, twenty-three of them scattered across the chamber on their backs, are already manipulating. Rabidity—sea churn. The vertical sleightist slowly revolves, working her architecture so slowly its configuration is perceptible. The architecture is revealed, no longer a play of light. Not pure, not reason. The architecture as awkward prosthesis, replacement for something missing. Something crucial.

The sleightist begins speeding up the manipulation until the architecture again lacks definition, the glimpse—of crutch—immediately forgotten. She moves first downstage, then stage left, then downstage, then stage left. Hers is a step pattern, and like all step patterns, it simulates progress. She passes over the other sleightists, linking with each one in turn.

The first link begins. She gently steps between one of the sleightist’s legs, carefully forcing them open. She initiates a link that pulls the sleightist working on the floor almost into a sitting position several times, but each time the seated/prone figure returns in undulation to the ground, head lolling toward the audience. It wants to be a child perhaps rousing an adult, an urgent waking, but is unsuccessful, though by the end of the duet the architectures are moving furiously—shrieking past the horizontal sleightist’s face, which is blank, blind, elsewhere.

As she moves to the next position, the vertical sleightist steps on the sternum of a second prone figure. Her free leg then begins to rise, released, as if buoyed by flammable gas. The two sleightists, top and bottom, begin to pass their architectures back and forth between them—the link makes claims of superiority or subversion without ever resolving which. Meanwhile the top holds her raised leg and maneuvers it in contortion close to her face. Two arms and the upraised leg fix her as lotus, while the sleightist beneath her bogs—his compressed torso echoed by thick-slow limbs that quicken only when an architecture descends, flicking it away like bottle flies.

It continues. With each link, the vertical sleightist fights to remain vertical, all the while coaxing, coercing, painfully extricating, or failing to extricate, some new thing from the prone. The vertical sleightist affects untenable shapes while stepping here on a sleightist’s stomach, there on a thigh, here an upper arm, small of back, hand, side of face. Finally, she plants her foot on a neck, and this time the trodden ascends—first managing to pull her legs underneath her, then making it awkwardly onto her knees, then crouching in a push toward the upright. This sleightist, chin to chest, trembling with the weight of another woman on her neck and upper back, never ceases the manipulation of her architecture. The under-sleightist works her manipulation low—near the floor—and haltingly, and the sleightist above her cannot link with it. The result is two asynchronous orbits around an instability. Dissonance.

Then, a sudden gesture: the under-sleightist reverses her rotation, repulsing the first. Hurling her, in fact, into the other sleightists, now upwelling—rising hostility evident both in their physicality and in the threatening wall of links they wield.

The truth was, no one could manipulate the links as well as Clef, and though the navigation was moving fast, she seemed distracted and frustrated when a sleightist didn’t immediately pick up the work. In the first two days, every time Byrne looked in there was a new central figure treading across the others. First Clef tried out Yael, then an elfin sleightist from Kepler named Jade, then T. When she put Haley in, she kept her there for almost three days. But Haley, though energetic and a quick study, lacked eloquence, and—necessary for this sleight—a depth to her urgency.

Byrne was there on Friday when Clef gave in to the obvious. Haley had just slipped off Montserrat’s neck for a third time when Clef said, “Just please, would you please just stop.” The sleightists quickly caught up their architectures. Doug and Elisa were linked at more than three points and had to rewind in order to disconnect.
³²
After a few seconds though, the room was quiet. Expectant. Byrne had noticed the regard her own troupe and Kepler had been showing to Clef. He thought it was because she was, visibly, on some edge. Since the first day, she’d shown the kind of tunnel vision associated with inspiration. Her short fuse, glazed eyes, and lip biting made her appear not quite in control, and didn’t that mean she was being controlled, probably by something greater? So when she spoke now, the other sleightists didn’t immediately bristle at her arrogance. And Haley, the most recent target of Clef’s exasperated direction, seemed relieved to be sent to the floor to join the corps.

“Lark, get over here.” Clef gestured toward a kneeling Montserrat, her architecture held out in front of her like a child’s winter coat or dead pet. “I’ll need you to learn this so you can teach it to me over the weekend. These girls just aren’t capable.” Out of a peer’s mouth, this was a slap.
³³

Byrne watched. Lark began to learn Clef’s part as tyrant, as precarious god, as addict, as prey. The whole time she manipulated, Lark kept looking over at her sister, whose lower lip was swollen, whose teeth were pink with blood-threaded saliva. Even distracted, Lark was manipulating better than Haley had, and Clef seemed momentarily appeased. The other sleightists, however, nudged one another. Kitchen’s eyes were trained on Clef, and Yael seemed not unhappily surprised by her prodigal friend’s abilities, but the rest glared at Lark, suspicious.

The tensions Clef kept adding to the structure were intensified by amorphous jealousies, exhaustion, mistrust. The chamber muttered. Along the wall, arms folded across chests. Shoulders raised. And the sleightists who were in actual, physical contact with Lark—their muscles tensed, making the partnering more difficult, dynamic, exciting. Because what Clef was making was undeniable, all the anger was settling upon Lark, who—summer asphalt—began to shimmer with it. Byrne was mesmerized by the implied violence. Sold. He didn’t return to help his brother Marvel in chamber four. He also didn’t see himself phantomed in each figure terrorized by Lark’s talent that Friday afternoon. And Byrne didn’t fantasize. This was not his daydream: him, bodied in the whole of the mob poised to pull her—the relentlessly vertical Lark—part from part from part.

At six, Clef called the first section done, and a dazed Byrne wandered from the chamber. He hadn’t heard Marvel call T out of the navigation, so he wasn’t prepared to greet her naked body, trembling at him beneath Marvel’s color. If river clay was to be found in a pale, malignant yellow, T was entirely of that shade, even her hair. Then again, she wasn’t. Not entirely. Marvel had drawn a thin black band across her eyes and all the way around her head. He’d drawn it again across her nipples, and at the level of her pubic bone.
³⁴
A final one circled her leg at the narrow moment just below the knee. But—they didn’t circle. The lines were so thin that even at two yards they were difficult to make out, though at that distance and beyond they retained their effect: disruption. T was segmented. A skull pan. Upper tips of ears to bust. From fourth rib to just below hipbone. Crotch through knee. Calf, ankle, foot. Calf, ankle, foot. There, at the bottom—her symmetry lacked a flesh bridge. Byrne, not quite steady to begin with, put his hand on the nearest mirror. T was crying. Byrne could see streaks in the yellow stain, streaks that ran perpendicular to Marvel’s black divisions.

“What have you done to her?”

“Nothing you haven’t.” Marvel hadn’t shown up at Byrne’s apartment the night before. He looked insolent, but not victorious.

T’s eyes blamed Byrne. He went over, picked her warm-up clothes up from off the floor at her feet, handed them to her.

“Is this who you are?” T was tearful, not pathetic. Humiliated and lovely, she was more concerned for his soul than her degradation. Byrne saw her mirrors then. They had been crushed to a glitter and were smeared across the lines that cut her. They atomized him.

“I’m not Marvel.”

“No. Your brother … he knows what he is.” T held her clothes tight to her chest as she walked toward the restroom.

Byrne could not watch her shifting lines, how her torso dissembled all that was above and below. He looked instead at his brother. Marvel had executed what Byrne could not. An admission of desire. A desire for destruction.

But, beautifully. Beautifully done.

West took Byrne out to dinner that night. It was swank. It was one of those places that disavows its surroundings, thinks it belongs to another town, city, country even. This place thought it was in France, maybe Arles: an elegant ceramic rooster in the center of the table eyed them thoughtfully, mustard yellow dishes sang beneath olive loaf, bold flatware weighted down the egg-blue napkins. West ordered them both Muscat and commenced his sermon.

“I need you to go back. Rewrite. The precursor is nearly there, but the balance at the end has to shift drastically.” West sipped his water. “It should finish with a burial—or better, with a holocaust.” Another sip.

“Okay.” Byrne had accepted dinner to discuss his brother, not sleight. He no longer knew what to think of West’s work—he didn’t like to think of it—but having his brother around was the real impossibility. His sleeping with T was of course expected. But his vivisection of her … “Why did you bring Marvel here?”