Sleight (15 page)

“There are worse things.”

“Yes.”

“No.” Lark was suddenly adamant. “There aren’t. You can’t do comparative suffering. It doesn’t work.” She ran a hand through her dark hair. “You just like how he didn’t make you feel awful. Elegant, you said. You were eight? ten? He made you feel big—told you that story in a way that didn’t make it seem impossibly far away or insane. But I don’t admire pretty, or what’s … self-abnegating.” Her hand fell away from her head. “Of course, I’m not a man.”

It pissed Byrne off a little, actually—Lark, condescending. As if he were much younger than she was. He wasn’t.

“How about you? Vomiting up emotions—that’s not self-abnegation? not denial? Christ then, what do you call it?”

Lark pulled out, gasoline dripping. She stared at Byrne blankly, then turned back to the pump to retrieve the receipt—glancing at, then crumpling it.

“What do I call it? I don’t. You can’t imagine what it’s like … not to have desires but be populated by them.”

“Tell me then.”

It was a dare. She cocked her head at him. This was a confessional truck stop, perhaps. But she couldn’t talk about it, not after that. He would compare. He would hold her story up against his war hero’s and find it lacking.

Byrne was gnawing on some jerky he’d picked up inside. Lark watched his mouth, his jaw, the willful working of the flesh.

“What does that taste like?”

Byrne swallowed before answering. “It’s a little like … like a beef raisin.”

Lark laughed. She was pretty when she laughed, and it was electric, such an abrupt shift in the dynamics of her face. Byrne found himself smiling back, bits of jerky in his teeth. Then Lark opened the car door, signaling that the conversation was soon to end. She didn’t converse well while driving.

“My mother would sometimes put raisins in our lunches. Press them into the sandwiches to make desiccated little eyes and mouths. Clef loved it, but I wasn’t … convinced.”

Clef walked outside the room to go find coffee, maybe a bagel, and saw a paper on the ground two doors down, big photo and headline font too large. She picked it up. As she read, her stomach knotted. And then a lower cramp, lower than her stomach. She dropped the paper. Ran back through her motel room into the bathroom, fell to her knees. She wanted to, found she couldn’t vomit. She reached over to lock the door and then slumped, forehead against the toilet bowl, staring at the crossword of tiny black, white, and blue-green floor tiles for minutes. She couldn’t identify the size or shape of the repeating unit, which infuriated her. Kitchen eventually knocked.

“I saw it, Clef. Come out. Please.”

“I’m going to be sick.”

“Then let me in.” Kitchen waited. He tried again. “Or I’ll huff and—”

“Children die all the time. Famine. War. So there’re killers in the neighborhood. That makes it special?”

“It tends to.”

That morning they barely worked. It was all over the papers and on TV. To report it was to encapsulate the current world-sickness, different from past world-sicknesses only in the viral speed with which things of horror could be repackaged for re-creation. Still, doorsteps mattered. These twenty-three, possibly twenty-five, had been killed in York, a few streets over from West’s house—in a well-kept and mannered neighborhood, if such places were to be believed, which they weren’t. They’d all been young, from what could be told, between five and eight. And these were recent killings, all within the past half decade. It was like bad cinema—the mug shots of the couple hovered, Bundy-style, around a-little-too-good-looking, but white like most and in their mid-thirties; the husband sang in the church choir every Sunday, and the wife was on her company’s softball team—apparently, a solid second baseman.

The sleightists had drifted in behind schedule that morning, and then done not much. West ordered some salads for a late lunch. He sat both troupes down on the floor in the largest chamber. Still clutching the plastic utensils he’d handed out at the door, some of them stretched hamstrings and quads. But no one ate, as no one had worked.

“This has nothing to do with us,” West said, “but we can use it.”

Haley glared. Many of Monk’s members nodded as she spoke. “I think we should call this day shot—I mean, you guys live here. We’re just passing through, and it still feels like I’ve been kicked in the gut.” She started, “Did you see how they …” then broke off.

Since the eleven o’clock news the night before, parts of the macabre video had played too many times in a row on the local stations, as if there were no children left but these. The couple, the Vogelsongs, had created a theatrical hive in their basement. A pageant. Voluminous curtains of pomegranate, tangerine, and honey hung around the room on six boxed frames just over five feet in height. The boxes faced into the center of the hexagon with a gap of perhaps eighteen inches at each corner. Each box had a different inner backdrop—detailed dioramas of the Serengeti, a rural Midwestern landscape replete with silos and combines, a mountain-pierced night sky, the mottled floor of a rainforest, Appalachian-style woodlands littered with birch, a thriving and technicolor coral reef. While giving the grisly tour, the eerily childlike and bearded Mr. Vogelsong floated in bust form as he passed behind the theaters, naming them as he circled—Safari, Farm, Stars, Jungle, Trees, and Sea.

Ray Vogelsong or his wife Melanie would have sat in a rolling office chair on the outer edge of the boxes to work the strings. The alternating puppeteers could have moved around the room with ease, while the interior audience—a bound, gagged child on a bar stool—would have been rotated from setting to setting, world to world. Her new surroundings. Maybe the child had been allowed to speak after the hours-long performance, to choose a habitat. Or two. Or all six. “Where would you like to live, dear? If you could swim or fly or gallop faster than the nighttime, which would you choose? Pick your pets. Pick the colors and shapes of your future. Such pretty homes we’ve built for you. Do you see?”

The news showed segments of the documentary-style footage: the camera scanned the basement shelves lined with plain brown shoe-boxes—each labeled with a Polaroid of its contents, a date of completion, and a list of initials. The media had decided, in this case, to relinquish all but the most vestigial decency. So it was only in these cataloguing pictures that the Vogelsong’s works were offered to the general public: in photo after photo, from the deft fingers of the couple were suspended their exquisite miniatures. Animal marionettes. Petite beasts fashioned from the boiled and bleached bones of past audiences: each one masterfully rendered—carved and polished but unpainted, as exemplary specimens of driftwood remain unpainted in the hands of discerning craftspeople.

It was impossible for a sleightist to stare at the television and not wonder—how had they configured the tiny rhinoceros skull, the bat wing? Could the horse trot? The monkey mouth swing open? It was this aesthetic curiosity that caused them to shrink bodily away from the television while their eyes remained, riveted in shame. The morbid fascination that other citizens could suppress or deny was, for the sleightists, much more compelling. It was professional interest.
²⁵

But it wasn’t only the dozens of strung toys and the couple’s workbench, with its precise divisions of unused bones and fine, clean tools, that impressed them. The very character of the space demanded admiration. The killers had reversed the concept of theater-in-the-round. Like many brilliant ideas, it was simple and elegant and it borrowed—wrenching function from an earlier model. The victims, had they not been too frightened by the kidnapping, might have at first delighted. In how just-for-them it was. Eventually, the spinning would have disoriented them. Some might have gotten sick on themselves. And if they weren’t too tightly bound already, their accumulating complaints and struggling to be undone would have earned them more rope: a cocooning. The transformation from child into animal would have begun long before the Vogelsongs picked up their long knives for the reincarnation. It was all there—in the space. Any good sleightist could read it.

“Listen. I know it’s gotten to you. But Clef graciously decided to put aside our differences to come in today and help with her architectures, and Byrne and Lark are on their way. We don’t have much time before tour.” West was looking around at the two dozen faces, polling their expressions.

“I’m not feeling that hot, West.”

“I wasn’t feeling so hot yesterday, Clef. And that had something to do with you.”

A couple members of Kepler sniggered and immediately fell silent, embarrassed to have found humor in this climate.

“What do you want us to do? Create links about this? Improv on the dismemberment of children?” Clef’s voice, though caustic, was not up to its usual fire.

“Actually, yes. I think yes.”

“You’re a sick fuck. I can’t believe I put you in touch with my sister.”

“Maybe. But you all know that it’ll feel good to move. Better, even, to wick—though with the new forms, you probably won’t get that release. And if you work with some sense of purpose—for these children …”

“All … the … pret-ty, lit-tle hor … ses.” T mumble-sang this with her face hidden in her hands. Then she bought them down, folded them in her lap. She lifted her head. “I agree with West. Action is preferable to nonaction. If we don’t practice, I’ll just go home and chop wood all afternoon. Oh.” She put her face back into her hands. “Jesus.”

“I just can’t.” Haley shook her white-blonde tresses in a no.

“It’s beyond exploitative.” Kitchen said this.

“What else are we going to do?” One of Kepler’s women stood up. “I don’t want to go home, I don’t want to see it anymore. Do you?”

This was what it took. They slowly stood: one, and then another, and then a few. They dropped their forks and knives in front of West, who sat cross-legged in the middle of the space. With each piece of plastic, his look of satisfaction grew and his presence faded. Cheshire. The sleightists migrated to the edges of the chamber to pick up the various architectures. They decided quietly among themselves who would work where. Some resisted and went to sit in the lounge, but eventually, even for Haley, the idleness became suffocating, and those few reentered the chambers.

After nearly half an hour spent watching Clef, brutally numb, Kitchen pulled her to her feet. “West’s right about this,” he said.

Drained of heat, her voice atonal, still she attempted a refusal—“You said it was exploitation.”

Kitchen kissed her damp forehead. “Yes, Clef. It’s art.”

West knew it was wrong to see this as a stroke of luck. But he wrestled with the moral dilemma not at all. This was what they needed. Impetus. Emotion they couldn’t rid themselves of as they worked, and imagery. He’d thought he would have to dredge up something historical—Dachau, Nagasaki, Kibuye. But today was history, closer and more vivid than anything he could bring them in a book. He would not have to work to have them haunted—and not merely by the children. The details would catalyze them: the painted fantasies of place and those pale animals, and the idea of each child alone in the midst of it—alone in the center of his own disappearance, watching milky creatures court his bones to soaring horn and bullfrog tones. It seemed the Vogelsongs, at least on their basement hi-fi system, had been partial to early recordings of Satchmo.

The husband had gone to the police station to confess. The wife, simultaneously, to York’s Channel 8 with their homemade footage—a sympathetically filmed and narrated journey into the couple’s world. There was no reason. No one had found them out; not one had escaped or nearly escaped. They were tired of their work going unremarked upon perhaps. His eyes were no longer attentive enough, hers no longer admiring. They were obsessives who had honed their skills while craving difference. They hungered for a wild-type reaction. It wasn’t possible to switch up the victim profile or method, everything having been perfected. So they varied the response the only way they could: they went public.

West understood their quandary. The scales had tipped. The pride in their work had finally won out over their need to continue performing: it had come time for fame. He wondered who had been the first to fall. He didn’t assume it had been the man.

For West, horror was a natural throe of childhood. These children had just escaped a longer set of convulsions. They’d gone off like honored guests—wined and dined and performed for. All children were slaughtered into adulthood; these ones had been thrown a party. West was unable to stop analyzing—disavowing their pain with analogy, swerving it into commonplace, an American cliché. In the media, the Vogelsongs would be called monsters, but he knew better.

Although his mind might be fringed in a bitter light, that light allowed West a pitiless clarity. At the edges of his worldview the cowboy had always stood: a pure looming, a reversal of gypsy, tinker, the Goodguy who swept all dark children up and away. That’s who the Vogelsongs were. Sweet wranglers who had saved these unwanteds from future treachery. That’s how the couple saw it. That’s how much of the country would see it soon, after repeating to one another, with far too little embarrassment, soundbytes from Melanie Vogelsong’s oddly poetic monologue: