Sleight (20 page)

West had wanted information, but once he had it, he realized it wasn’t enough. This Marvel had to be brought in. So many things needed to be juggled, woven, collected, and set in the correct box. West was thankful for his own patience, a native attribute. He made some calls, got Marvel into rehab—he knew a program outside Philly. He hadn’t spent a life in sleight without watching a few try to re-create wicking chemically. When Fern ran Kepler, she was good at seeing those signs, getting her charges into counseling early, leaving them a chance of returning to the art. Since West had been running things, he’d lost three to drugs. The thing about sleightists on speed, or coke, or even heroin, was they actually burned brighter for a little while, on the stage.
²⁸
So for November and two weeks into December, Marvel would be drying out on the wooded edge of Germantown, bill footed by the Vice Corps. He’d agreed to it once West had explained the commission, only mildly shocked that Byrne had talked up his talent with such fervor.
Tell you the truth, man, I thought Byrne hated my shit. Too elemental for him.

Marvel should be nearly straight by now. West would take T to retrieve him. Byrne’s brother was a character and, absent Byrne, she could mother him. It was what she wanted. West liked T. He wanted to give her something, a gift.

Marvel was in the front hall to greet them. Behind him, the staircase swept up in a ballroom arc to a landing with a window that looked down on two wintering gardens, English and Japanese. Most of the patients here were affluent, but for the ones who weren’t, the return to their normal surroundings no doubt made sobriety a fleeting affair. Marvel was a slender boy-man like Byrne, his hair a loose crown of brown and gold. He grinned when they entered, magnetic. Proffered his hand.

“You’re West, my benefactor. And that makes you T.”

“Nice to meet you.”

T was immediately taken. How could she not be? The way they were smiling at each other—first day of kindergarten. West coughed.

“You must be ready to get out of here. Do you have things?”

Marvel turned his head to appraise West. A junkie, studying his face like a pro. “I do have
things,
in fact. I left them in the room because I’m already working. Thought you might want to see.”

“By all means, lead the way.”

As T followed Marvel up the wide and tapestried stairs past a small, elaborately framed Degas sketch, she couldn’t stop herself.

“This house, it’s hard to believe—”

She caught herself there, but Marvel helped her out. “Hard to believe they let people like me in. Yeah, I wondered about that too. Mrs. Heim lost a daughter to the pipe a few years back, and since then she’s gotten all soft. You know, in the head.” Marvel rapped knuckles on his own.

West smiled. The boy was like a fungus.

The paucity of his room was shocking. The wooden floor supported a Shaker-style twin bed, impeccably made up with a canvas bag at its foot, and an equally simple chair and desk by the tall window. Bamboo blinds closed off the ascetic quarters from gardens and daylight. A low-hung pendulum fixture supplied a more concentrated brightness. West ducked to clear it on his way to the desk. Marvel gestured to a stack of papers and stepped back.

“That’s what I have so far.”

It was a boast. West paged through the nudes, T at his shoulder. He asked the obvious question. “How did you get these colors?” Each sketch was a single contortion of the female form. The bodies were in impossible positions, even for sleightists, and the positions were—there was no other way to put it—ugly. Not a seductive ugliness either, not merely the ugliness of the unfamiliar. West felt T tensing up beside him. The pictures were hateful.

Except for the colors.

“Ah. Glad you asked.” Marvel maneuvered around them to the single drawer that ran the length of the desk. He pulled out a box of Crayolas, sharpener on the back, and the lid of a shoebox that had clearly served as a mixing palette. “Mrs. Heim—she doesn’t approve of us having lighters, because of cigarettes. She says replacing one addiction with another is a sorry way to health, but I’m very convincing. I melted the colors together.” Marvel opened the box, and the crayons, solidified in various stages of liquefaction, looked like the last day—a festival day—in Gomorrah. “I also used a black ballpoint pen, Q-tips, and spit.”

“Resourceful.” T could only get the one word out.

“The colors are perfect.” West was thrilled, but cautious. “And the patterns too—but will you be able to re-create this on skin?”

“Before I started working, I’d have said no way. But I’ll find one. This is sordid shit, my man. You do realize? If I paint their bodies, they won’t be able to breathe.”

“What are you talking about?” T’s voice quavered.

“I’m talking about reptile breath, about connection to the world. You already have the stage, the stylized movements. You’re already halfway to machine with your crazy little batons and your sealed-up doll faces. I’ll be cutting you off even more. Instead of putting on your face, I’ll be putting on your skin—emphasizing muscles that aren’t there. Minimizing or maximizing your breasts, thighs, hips.” He scanned T as he spoke. “Regulating you. I’ll be making the audience see what I see: color.” Marvel was positively merry. And he was speaking to T as if she should approve, applaud even.

“But these designs, they aren’t regular—the patterns are all different.” This was T, grasping at air.

“West told me the audience shouldn’t be able to see the calculus until it bites them in the ass.”

“Bravo.” This was West. Clapping.

²⁸
Sleight makes hybrids of its practitioners: without the art, they are no longer themselves. The art form, too, is polluted by its participants. The only possible way for sleight (or a sleightist) to manifest purely would be in the removal of one or the other. The performers know this. Retired sleightists, if they do not continue in a related profession, often sequester themselves from society. A few have spent the remainder of their lives as addicts in weekly hotels. Others have joined religious orders, suicided.

CHURCHED.

C
lef didn’t want to be there anymore. She was exhausted, and her sister’s presence had taken what joy she had in sleight and smothered it. That didn’t mean she wasn’t obsessed with her architectures; the new links had started to replicate themselves, but differently each time—an evolution. It was as if the two troupes were manning a zoo. The wicking was happening more often. Sometimes a few sleightists would go out simultaneously, and for longer. Every day was precarious, explosive. And West was experimenting with numbers. He had twelve of them stand like pillars in the chamber, anchors for the other twelve working coupling links around them. Only the hands of the still occasionally twisted, allowing their architectures to follow those of the wilder movers. Clef saw in this exercise the potential for equilibrium: yin/yang. But West’s tasks lacked balance. The dynamics were unequal, the emphasis on passivity. Couples or trios, quintets or septets, number didn’t matter—what Clef saw in West’s scenarios over and over again was an exploration of the idea
victim.

Clef didn’t want to work this terrain. But she did. Each day, she left rehearsal a little more drained than the last, furious that her signature rage had deserted her. She didn’t have it in her to confront West, but she would not be used in this way. She had to do something. Act. If she had a baby, she thought, that would be acting. She had discarded the thought of walking out—West would just replace her with someone who didn’t care. Besides, she’d tried it before. What troubled her was that the other sleightists were excited, not disturbed. All they talked of was West on fire. To them, his heat was an opportunity. Even members of Kepler were in awe, saying he had outdone himself. This work would be historic. They were making history.

Clef assessed her body—not worn, not thin, not like she felt. It was beginning to retain what it might need for the next months. Her fingers along her stomach no longer strummed corded muscle, but impressed a soft outer layer maybe an eighth-inch thick. She was cloud-heavy, potent. Pregnancy would alter West’s equation, or at least complicate it: her body, if she let it, could be something unpredictable. It wasn’t exactly life she felt inside of her—it was disobedience. And a new impatience. Six months ago she had been inside a pregnancy, but this time she didn’t know what to wait for, what configuration of star or crop circle or flight of bird might make it better. Might make her whole enough. To have a baby, she realized, a woman needed no one. She began intuiting a sapling woven up her spine, a vertebral knowledge.
I can be alone.
Hers would be resistance by inertia. She would allow herself to slow down, grow large, take up space. The idea didn’t strike her as maternal, or even romantic, but it was attractive. Because of gravity.

She still wanted Kitchen. She wanted him tomorrow and yesterday and in the mornings. But she’d always wanted him that way. Six years before, two years after she and Lark had joined the company together, he had come to Monk. The sisters were assigned to him, to make certain he had the rep down before his first tour. The troupe was rotating through four different shows that season, six sleights total. After long days, the three of them would sit in a little Ukrainian place on Second Avenue, drinking and commiserating about their director, Imke, her hard-assed perfectionism. Clef had watched Kitchen. Above the red tablecloth, lit by candlelight refracted through thick-glassed pitchers of vodka, his face was etched with lines so subtle they withheld age. Timeless too were the faerie tales he told of his past lives—ballet and butoh. His nearly colorless lips, blackbird brows, fingers like talking: this was beauty. But not love. He had been impossibly old at the time—thirty-four. Clef had decided to ignore her crush, thinking it was a mere missing of the father. Half a semester of intro psych had alerted her to the dangers of transference. So, instead, Lark slept with Kitchen.

After a few months spent tending her growing resentment—the ungazed-at face above their red table—Clef seduced her sister’s lover. It wasn’t so hard. The two of them were walking back from a long dinner, abstracting war. Minus Lark and vivid with alcohol, Clef and Kitchen riffed on pacifism, isolationism, imperialism. Coyly, Clef offered an observation. “My body is a colony,” she said. The connection was urgent. Clef had only ever been with boys at the academy. Kitchen had never been inside such highly articulated energy. He was embarrassed, but told her—later—that even that night he had seen their age difference not as his flaw, but as her incomparability. It should have flattered Clef, except she knew there was someone against whom he must have measured her. When her sister had returned hours later from her film—a pseudodocumentary, a woman’s narrative of husband and son, musicians both, slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge—Clef had been standing in the loft the sisters shared, waiting to be honest. But it wasn’t a fair match. Lark wouldn’t play. She didn’t seem to hear Clef’s admission, apology, defense. Instead, she talked about self-dug graves, incomplete bludgeonings, children serving up parents like overripe fruit to a fist, starvation, suffocation, ideology, fear. And then she spoke of Needs. Clef thought Lark was deflecting. Crazed. The next morning, Lark had quit Monk. Clef could still replay it in her head, its black-and-white grain—grief footage she should have seen. Cambodia.

Clef took refuge in her abilities. She was the best female sleightist in the troupe, possibly in any of the nine American companies.
²⁹

She worked tirelessly at it, as she had since she was a girl escaping the blank space left by her parents’ adoration of one another. She and Kitchen continued to see each other, but with less talking. Then, while they were on tour, Jillian killed herself and the hole left by Lark was suddenly too much. When they came back to New York, Clef quit. She told Imke to replace her. Imke hadn’t.

Clef read. Lark was gone from their studio apartment, leaving it as dead and immense as a cathedral. So Clef read about God. She read books about people who had met God, and people who’d slept with him; books by St. Teresa of Avila and Meister Eckhart, books about the lives of Moses and Jesus and Siddhartha Gautama, books of Gandhi and the Dalai Lama and Nijinsky. Clef read into the night and until her eyes burned with the bright, negative impressions of the fonts. All she wanted was to be told—it was a large and severe want. The loss of a sister, she chided herself, was not the same as the loss of God. But she had never had God, and Lark had left her stranded. What was she if she wasn’t on display—disappearing better than all other women disappear? She had hardly been and was no longer a daughter. She had failed at sister, a failure in which Kitchen was complicit. She was a lover, but that was a poison fruit. If there was some untainted role left for her, it would require witness—and wasn’t such a witness God?

She couldn’t help but be shocked to recognize while reading the different accounts what it was to see, be seen—to be pierced to the core with knowing. She discovered she
had
had God. During sleight, she’d had God maybe a dozen times a performance. God—another word for annihilation. Clef was not the vehicle of her architectures; she was their impediment. God—as Clef grew in those weeks to understand the concept—was equivalent to any dark stage: the offering-up-of, the I-submit-to, once the I has become small enough to submit. Without performance, subjugation, God did not happen.

Clef decided, over weeks of eye strain and limb atrophy, her legs folded into a stiff burgundy reading chair, that God was selfish and that she didn’t like God—but also—that she was good at God and would go back. She wasn’t religious. She’d been raised deep enough in the South, but by ex-Catholic atheists. She knew only that vanishing unnoticed gave her no pleasure. She needed her absence exhibited. What was piety, to her, without an audience?

Upon Clef’s return, Imke had kissed her six times and then resumed a more callous direction than ever, but at least Kitchen was angry, and speaking to her. They wouldn’t eat over a red table again, and so could never decide—not until they were scanning the window of a particular restaurant and bickering like rival beggars, like judges—whether or not they were going in.

Now Lark was back. Everything for Clef was still a mess, but she couldn’t quit. She had to resist West. She hadn’t originally wanted to think he had power. He had. She hadn’t wanted to believe Lark was truly damaged. She was. Clef refused to see Kitchen as something other than her fault. Because he was her fault. There was no decision to make; she would stay. For once, she would not just do, but do good. She would stop fighting her body and let it go to seed. Her body, Clef was beginning to understand, would never not be used. The difference this time was that she was choosing whom to sustain. As world-ocean to her fetus, she would continue in the realms of the not-quite perceivable. It was okay though, it was. Since she could remember, it had been her one talent: Existence In Service To.

West, by doubling their numbers, was setting the stage for a frenzy. Although she hadn’t confided this to Kitchen or Lark, Clef was thinking that the stage, even if the stage were God, wouldn’t be able to contain the feeding. She had to stay. Be a mother. Try to stop it. She just didn’t know how to do—not any of these things.

“Kitchen, help me.”

“Help you how?”

“We need to keep West from this.”

“Right. Remind me again how we’re going to do that?”

“We’ll make Lark give him something to work with that isn’t dangerous.”

“Dangerous.”

“Yes. Something benign. Harmless.”

“I know what benign means, Clef. Does Lark know how to make something like that?”

“I don’t know, but also …”

“Yes?”

“I need you to leave me.”

They were in the motel lobby on the other side of the desk from the space heater. Kitchen, more shell-shocked than anything else, was waiting for a key. “We’ve always lived together on tour, Clef, always. We’ve lived—“

She interrupted, “We aren’t going to.”

This knifed. Kitchen looked around vaguely, trying to understand something. He settled on the wall behind the desk. It was cracked, and a Toulouse-Lautrec calendar hung from a nail wedged into the fault line—December’s cancan, all inky garters and suggestion.

“This is about Lark?”

“No,” Clef said. “Or yes. All these things—you, her—we don’t matter. Just, we need to stop West.” The desk clerk’s nails were cartoonishly long, curved, a metallic merlot. She dangled the key in front of Kitchen. It seemed cruel, but was probably only an attempt to protect her polish.

They got to the chambers early and turned up the furnace. It kicked on loudly. West and T were gone that morning to meet with some artist, and West had left Kitchen in charge of the half day of rehearsal—class, and then continuation of a new string of exercises. During floorwork, Kitchen barely looked at Clef. Everyone began the cold day isolated, privately bundled in multiple, multicolored layers of knitwear. Once they’d worked through the first few links, the sleightists began to remove article after article of false warmth, and only then did Kitchen notice that Clef’s face was, for rehearsal, uncharacteristically unguarded. And that her chest, usually a field of milk, was confused with blue veins.

About halfway through the afternoon, Clef, who had been glancing into the tinted window of the short fifth wall all day, motioned to Kitchen for a break.

“Take fifteen everyone.” Kitchen started to walk toward her, upturned hand inquiring, but she was already through the door to the office.

West looked up sideways from the metal desk and smiled as Clef strode in. The fluorescence of the room made him sallow. The office had a small, murky window and a door on each cork-lined wall; only the positioning of the brushed steel file cabinet and the placement of West’s chair oriented it in space. Clef suddenly saw him from the other entrances simultaneously—four-headed, multiple, ghoulish: the purple sockets of his eight eyes sucking in light even as a circular band of teeth flashed, repelling it. He had been smiling too much recently.

Dizzy, Clef compensated, as she almost always did, by pouncing. “Glad you’re back, West. Lark’s ready.”

West kept smiling. If he had been unprepared for this statement, he didn’t show it. “She has a sleight for us?”

“I think so, yes.” Clef was staring hard at him, waiting for a larger reaction.

“So I can stop biding time with my exercises. Is that your subtext, Clef?”

Clef bit her bottom lip. She thought she tasted blood, but that might’ve been her gums. “I’m just telling you she’s ready. And I think you should let her navigate.”

“No.” West was rotating a pencil on its tip. On the legal pad in front of him, a knotty line of graphite was quickly developing into a quarter-inch tornado.

“What do you mean, no?” Clef began to work up her indignation. “Those are my architectures you’ve been screwing with for a month, only Lark knows what her drawings are about, and you, you—“

“You don’t like me.”