Sleight (25 page)

Since West’s holiday party the brothers had been getting along well enough. Byrne assumed it was the new paints; Marvel was thrilled with his own work, and from what Byrne had seen of it he had the right. He’d started spending his evenings with West, drinking Byrne assumed, though he didn’t think any other substance had entered into the relapse yet. Marvel had always been easier intoxicated. His intensity—less cruelly directed outward. That’s how it had gone with Gil too, up to a point. West said Marvel should join him, and asked Byrne didn’t he have work to do—an eleventh-hour revision? Byrne watched them move toward the hotel bar, then skulked to his room to ugly up his language, as per instruction.

The next day was tech and dress rehearsal. The sleightists got to the theater around noon. Byrne had gotten there a little earlier.
Lake, knife, jackoff.
He was in the unlit theater as they took class onstage.
Kilter, deepwell, jill.
Since Monk’s director had abandoned the project, Kitchen had been the de facto rehearsal master, but he didn’t seem to enjoy it. He gave a perfunctory warm-up. Afterwards, Byrne saw him take a few sleightists aside.
Élan, Alan, nylon, pianofire.

Somehow everyone had managed to stay healthy—at least, none of the interns/understudies had had to replace anyone from the main company
³⁵
—but Clef’s navigation was so technically demanding that the smallest lack of focus could cause disaster.
Fungus, handgun, haibun, hotcross, blush.
Several of the sleightists, after the last few weeks, were not at their most acute. Kitchen and those few stood at the edge of the wings doing a centering exercise, breath-based, while the others gathered their things from the back of the stage and went on break. The troupes had been provided with a complimentary massage therapist, paid for by a friends-of-the-theater organization in Cape Town. Byrne put down his head to write in the dim light bouncing around and off the stage, but he heard Kitchen send two sleightists to the woman—her table was set up in one of the dressing rooms. He told them to visualize the last two sections while she worked on them, make certain she didn’t go too hard. No rolfing.
Toothloss, haircrush, crash, seedbelt, bread, breast, locust.
Byrne had learned from T that sleightists preferred deep muscle work—but Kitchen knew it could cause discrepancies of reach and balance too close to a performance.

Cleo, clit, bender, gypped, sum, alcohol, heal, stiletto, fealty, tittybar, yard, improperty, confestation, insectual.

Byrne noticed that Kitchen hadn’t taken Clef aside, though there was something off in her form. She worked alone onstage after everyone had gone, marking through the sleight. Byrne was ravenous. He had nothing with him—his desire for jerky was gone—but he stayed to watch her go through a three-hour performance in forty-five minutes, without architectures, without other sleightists. It was just her and the changing lights as stagehands maneuvered around her, checking gels and foci. When the stage got completely dark, she moved through it, and when the lights came up, her eyes were closed. Watching Lark’s sister catstepping, watching different points on her body interact with architectures he was left to imagine, Byrne remembered what he loved in this, and it wasn’t Lark. The knot inside him gave way in the dark theater. A deep breath, a sob let loose, tears strung out, hungry zeroes.

Every other year he could cry. It was always a surprise.

The words were drumming:
dogged, godding, annie, does, boers, conscription, deficiency, foreign-hand, lesion, twine.
He wrote them down in his notebook. With his new hand, he had been incorporating too much meaning, sometimes autobiography, even syntax. He tore out the page. He wrote them down again. He crossed out
boers,
then
godding.
The paper was wet. Byrne’s face was flooding, but he turned the page. He wrote down
fingers, bird, blew, flown.
He wrote
lossed.
He wrote
lark.
Down. He wrote
I,
wrote
crawl.

³⁵
Most troupes have between two and four unpaid apprentices working at any given time both in the office and as understudies. These young men and women rarely make it into the troupes, though there have been exceptions. The work asked of them is grueling and thankless, though the sleightists are generally kind. When interns have to go on for the injured, the lack of integrated rehearsal time makes them perform at a much lower level than they would be capable of under normal circumstances. This shouldn’t be, but is, generally held against them by the directors when they join an open audition pool. A sleight student asked to become an apprentice would be wise to refuse. None do.

OPENING.

T
he debut of this sleight has earned the troupes international attention. The audience is full of tourists and critics. The crowd is standing-room only, and over a hundred have chosen to stand. Because West violated a dozen conventions without so much as a nod to recognized authority, those who follow sleight politics expect the International Board to revoke Kepler and Monk’s charters and put pressure on their sponsors to drop the troupes. However, the sleightists know nothing will be decided until board members see how the sleight is received. And Monk and Kepler believe in West. They believe in the way he doesn’t give a fuck. They believe if there were reason to, he would.

Clef stands far upstage right, her back to the audience. She slowly turns. Lark is breathing through each movement with her, the same breaths. She is crouching backstage, behind a tree of lights. When Clef leaves her sister’s line of sight, Lark moves to keep visual contact. Before Clef finishes the first duet, she has already wicked twice, once at the very beginning, once as the link was dissolved. The flickers were brief—badly spliced film. Clef is blue, blue as flame, with upward strokes like flame, all blue except her hair, which Marvel left alone. He mirrored her in small rectangles placed so close together the effect is zipper, patterned in a large
Y
on her torso, with one line down the underbelly of each limb. In her palms are two larger mirrors, and on the inside of Clef’s high arches, two more. Lark doesn’t care about color. She’s watching her sister for breaks in concentration. And she’s counting Clef’s wickings. Timing them.

When, after two days of close contractions, they finally took Nene out of her, Lark had been cold. They’d put the baby under the lights on the silver platter. A little roaster, her mouth so large and red. Nene looked as if she were supposed to eat and also be eaten. And the blood wouldn’t stop. After the doctors took her uterus out, before Lark could speak again, after Drew brought his wife and child home, Drew’s mother came. She didn’t understand her son’s wife, or her silence, but showed Lark how to braid. Lark had known how to braid before, but hair—the part of a woman she keeps even though it is dead—like words, had become foreign to Lark.

In the theater, Lark hardly registers Byrne’s words as he releases his precursor into the space above the sleightists. She hasn’t seen it in a month. He’s never rehearsed it aloud, not even at last night’s dress rehearsal, and only twice did he come into the chambers in York to mutter it to himself as they ran through the structures. West wanted it that way. West told them that despite the precision required for linking, this sleight needed at least one raw element. The week before they left for Africa, the sleightists worked for the first time in the paint and mirrors—then complained of chafing, of the steel wool and abrasive soaps needed to remove the new colors. And West increased his estimate of necessary raw elements to two.

A preoccupied Lark doesn’t hear Byrne’s recent changes. The sleightists onstage who do focus on his voice slackening in and around them like rope—they’ve never heard these words at all. Lark watches Clef so intently she doesn’t note it when a name loops around the ankle of one of the others. But Byrne’s precursor doesn’t trip them. Only a subtle tightening of their limbs, a minor constriction of air. When the sleightists hear a name that means, their nerves react—stiffening, bracing them for the next. It is only sometimes weapon. After a few near misses, the sleightists begin to wonder if they’ve lost one. Where is the name of their childhood friend, their nephew, lover? Is this a list of the doomed or the saved? Is their own name included? If not, where is their name? Under what replacement? Lark is heedless. Intent. Lark is willing her sister through the sleight—names are a luxury.

Clef’s wickings grow longer and closer together. Lark is disgusted with herself. Clef began the performance more exhausted than necessary because they’d been up arguing. Lark had come on tour as Clef’s plan B—no one else was capable of understudying her—and because Lark had somehow misplaced her husband and daughter and didn’t know how to find them. Since then, she’d played splinter-fetching mouse to Clef’s lion, and nursemaid: giving her sister nightly foot-rubs, plaiting her hair, bringing Clef’s favorite coffee through customs and brewing it in the hotel room despite caffeine, coaching her through the monolithic sleight. And—except onstage—Clef had been passive through it all. Not herself, not fierce. But when Lark saw her in dress rehearsal, it was over. She made up her mind: her sister wouldn’t perform on opening night. Maybe no one would.

Last night’s dress rehearsal was the first time they’d run the piece in full makeup and without a stop—and the wicking strobed. First, not Clef. Not Clef. Not Clef again. Again not Clef. Ten, maybe eleven times. Then not Clef with Mikaela. Those two not again. And more. Not Clef with Jade and Kitchen. Each wicking happened nearly thirty seconds apart, and the intervals seemed regular until Lark realized—at over an hour into the rehearsal—that they were growing incrementally closer. And Clef had missed none. When the wicking was happening at a heartbeat’s pace and Clef was out for three, sometimes four at a time, there was still a half hour to go, and Lark fought her instinct to rip Clef from the stage. At the end, Lark’s throat was sore with bile and her tendons were clenched in hornets’ nests throughout her body.

Clef had come offstage and immediately lost consciousness. Lark couldn’t speak then, but after physically pushing Kitchen back and waving the others off, she brought Clef around and took her backstage. Meanwhile, West gave an hour’s worth of rehearsal notes to the other sleightists—all in various stages of collapse, but still coherent. Lark had a stagehand call her a cab while she showered and dressed her sister. She took her back to the hotel and asked the concierge to have a broth brought up. Broth was not English he knew. “Broth.” Lark said flatly, “Soup without anything in it. Empty soup.” That seemed to do it, and he picked up the phone.

When they got back to the room, Lark had been firm.

“You can’t.”

“I can.”

“Look at you. You can barely speak.”

“So don’t argue with me.”

“What about the baby?”

“The baby is fine.”

“How can you know that? No one has wicked so much pregnant.”

“If it isn’t hurting me, it won’t hurt the baby.”

“You call this not hurting?”

“I’m fine. I want to do this. It’s only seven cities, a twelve-day tour. I can do that on my head.”

“Didn’t you feel it, Clef? You weren’t there half the time, and this was only dress rehearsal. It’s so much worse than in the chambers. Too many go out at once.”

“How many?”

“It never got all of you—but at the end there was a moment when I thought it would.”

“So?”

“After all of you … who then?”

“Lark.”

“I’m serious. Outside of this project, how many have you ever seen out at once?”

“Three. Four … five tops.”

“And that’s coincidence, not design. This is mechanical, Clef. And we made it. It’s not a good thing.”

“How can you know that?”

“I barely
saw
you.”

They continued in this vein for two hours. They didn’t know, was one end of it. They couldn’t believe, the other. After all, what was this they were making? It was a sleight. Sleight possesses and sleight consumes, but sleight accomplishes nothing. They hated this, but West couldn’t change it. He wasn’t capable. No one was. In this way, they assuaged their guilt for their complicity—complicity, hell, they were cocreators. And this thing, it was a project aimed at, and locked onto, wrong. They had to believe it wouldn’t reach its target. No matter how badly West might want the wicking to jump from the stage, Clef and Lark didn’t truly believe it could.

Clef won the argument because they doubted, and because Lark saw that her sister was too frail to finish it.

Onstage, it is opening night. The sleight is pulsing, and Clef. Lark whispers,
Come on, come on.
Then,
Come back.
She doesn’t register the colors and the lighting, and from backstage she cannot fully fathom what Marvel has achieved. After being disappointed by the dress rehearsal, Marvel spent all day battling the lighting designer with West’s help, and he has his effect. The sleightists are jungle, engine. The sleightists are aether, beaded with plasma. The sleightists are more than anything else that they are, beasts. It’s color that has done this—color that divests them of something human, but offers what is essential. Each—distilled to his or her most basic attributes. Purified.

Kitchen is so royal, so plum in his torso plated with knives, that when he links with Clef, it is war. Haley is pink, tequila on its way to salmon, slippery on the eye—sweet, peppery—her entire face mirrored. Montserrat is willow streaked with sage: to watch her is to understand where grief lives in the body—her mirrors, all in hidden places. Manny is gold, a Toltec idol, a starlet. The mirrors inside Manny’s hands are twin compacts, the oval ones on his inner thighs a vulgar gold.

T is still yellow. With his new palette, the only change Marvel made in T’s coloring was to divide her not with black but with a red indistinguishable from black. It is the same color he chose to hide Byrne from the audience. Up in his ropes, Byrne wears a black bodysuit, but Marvel has made his brother’s face and hands entirely scabrous, the blood-black of a tick, fingers like leeches. As he sways above Marvel and West’s circus, Byrne would give anything—his rock—to have a bit of flesh in which to bury his throbbing head.

Lark isn’t looking at Byrne. No one is. She’s fixated on her tiny sister, colossal in her blue skin, alone. Clef wicks and wicks. One in a hundred sleightists have ever felt the wicking—Lark was one. When she was younger, it was ice. An incapacity to hold warmth in the marrow, below the level of bone. She clings to her belief in this sensation, which is a six-year-old shadow now. Clef is going to freeze. Clef’s baby will turn blue inside her, and the blue will not be the blue of chemical fire but the blue of blood pooling just below the surface of motion—molecules forgetting momentum. Clef has done nothing to protect herself. She doesn’t know how to flush her system of desire. To separate herself. She denies hurt even as it eats her.

Lark is crouched in the wings, pleading in a hoarse whisper for her sister’s return, when her body starts heaving. It rocks back, forth. Her body contracts like anything else shedding its skin. The ripple starts at the base of her, moves up and around the rims of her pelvis, and then becomes a rolling pressure, pulling her organs up, slamming them against the floor of her diaphragm, and Lark is not breathing. She’s heaving, but nothing is coming in. It’s all trained on out. Out.

On the floor in front of Lark is broth and bile and the remnants of a banana, black bread, some salad. On the floor in front of her is a husk. A small blue thing. She picks it up. She is tender, her two hands a cradle.

It is wet, and does not move.