Sleight (3 page)

PAIN.

F
or Lark and Clef, the everyday injuries of sleight—pulled muscles, floor burns, fishwire and fiberglass cuts—came to both of them synchronously, as if they shared a single body or phantom abuser. Coincidence might have been plausible, until Lark left the sleight world and the unexplained bruises continued raising their greens and purple-blacks eventlessly upon her.

It had been six years since she’d left. Six years of minor aches and injuries not her own to tend.

And now—pregnant. Lark’s breasts hurt, but she wasn’t. Couldn’t be, stitched, zipped up as she was. Nipples raw against T-shirts, sheets. With Nene this, yes, but else? A kind of calmly. Although she moved through it more like numbly, as during mending. Bones knitting. Her, pregnant, had been a broken state, and the child was a fix. A knot inside the wound. Nothing won, and when she gave birth, it was just another rent, another bit she wasn’t getting back. The right mother would have made good, simple words at the in-fluttering thing: fly, go, be. You. The right mother could give and feel all sorts of right things she was incapable of. Whole joy. Resale-value joy. That store didn’t like her. It was Clef who was pregnant. Had to be. But to live this again, adjacently, for her sister’s body—how could that be fair? And how could she be thinking
fair?
Whose word was that?

Lark’s dream woke her. Her, swimming in borscht.

“Drew?” she asked.

“Yes?” Drew was now awake too.

“I think I have to get out of here.”

Drew’s body nodded toward her, his eyes closed. “Was the ocean bouillon?”

“No. Borscht.”

“Yes,” Drew said, “that’s no good.”

NAMING.

O
n the flight to New York—to Clef—Lark had the aisle. The young girl beside her was maybe in high school, maybe not yet. She smelled like powder. Something about her assured Lark she’d never taken. She was lovely in a really human way. She wasn’t, for example, aware of Lark staring at her. She didn’t, because of the staring, extend her limbs against the short seat so her thighs wouldn’t thicken. She slouched, but didn’t slouch with length.

“What’s your name?” Lark asked.

“Anna.”

Lark smiled. It was a lovely, human name.

Lark’s parents named their first daughter after a type of bird or adventure—an adventure lite. One that flew or flew by. Lark was supposed to grow into her name, to gather it round herself like an Easter shawl to keep her safe from every weighty thing. Forget that shawls don’t protect against the elements, that only widows pin tight the neck, or whores—with gaudier jewelry. Forget that children kite them overhead in wind, that little girls taunt imaginary bulls with dirt-swept shawls, torn. To her mother and father, Lark’s name was like an aria. They forgot that it rhymed with dark.

Lark had tried at light, lovely. To disappear. By herself with ten or eleven other girls daily for over a decade. The room she grew up in was the exact shape of a shoebox. On one side of the sleight chamber, a string of windows allowed her to look down on the suburban development where she’d never played but watched others play. The opposing wall was mirrors. Every childhood evening, after school before home, Lark had attempted sleight between sunsets. One might think this would promote an auspicious sense of beauty. Lark spent all her youth, penny by shiny penny, measuring herself against beauty and its mimic. Herself, she found wanting.

Lark looked at the girl again. Anna was now sleeping, and sleeping, younger—capable of pluck, of damage by fingertip. Out the window of the plane beyond her it was late afternoon.

By age twelve, Lark had acquired all of the normal self-hatreds. She became a meticulously ordered catalogue of ugliness. Repulsive to herself. Lark was uncertain, now, how repulsive she’d been to others, but a torturer cannot concern herself with the guilt or innocence of her captive. She’d had acne. It was mild, as acne goes, but ever-present. It had haunted her cheekbones and hairline, cropped up beneath her jaw and around her nose. Nights, in front of the mirrors that seemed to be everywhere—sleight chamber, locker room, her purse, at home in the bathrooms, bedrooms, hallways, and on the dining room wall—Lark had picked at her face until it oozed or bled, then splashed rubbing alcohol on the wounds and cried. Really the pain was unworthy of tears. They’d simply attached themselves, recognizing the uncanny way they completed the evening ritual. If she didn’t shed a few each night, she’d been certain she’d wake the next day welted, leprous. She never tested the hypothesis—tears were too easily produced to forego.

Anna coughed. Lark reached over to cover her torso with one of the blue blankets. The orange in the sky was now orange in Anna’s hair, and for a few seconds she looked like a softer, more manageable Clef. Clef had always had a wildly red mane Lark should have been too old to envy. Lark’s hair was boy-short now, but she’d worn it long and silky black in high school. To keep it from separating into clumps, Lark had brushed it constantly and washed it with hard soap twice daily, which made the roots brittle, which meant when she pulled it back for sleight the hair around her face broke and small quarter-inch shafts spiked outward in an unintentional nod to punk rock. Lark had wanted to be Catherine Deneuve. She was nothing like her, and it had made her furious. She’d trembled all the time.

Lark stole another look at Anna sleeping, Anna folded in. And because she was aware of herself as mother, herself as failed sister, Lark decided the girl was still cold.
Is this how it will be for Nene? Thingness? Dolldom? Too many of the worst possible years spent being leered at and worried over?
Lark shivered. She rarely considered her daughter in the future tense. It seemed self-indulgent. Nene was so unlike her mother. Nene, despite everything else, had honest limbs.

As a child, Lark had hidden her potential among tendons. Specifically, her knees and elbows, always poised slightly bent, were prepared to let wrath exit through a swift extension of forearm and fist, shin and foot. She remembered living in that position for years, never exercising her anger except during certain of the fastest sleight manipulations, or in bed. The wall beside Lark’s bed was battered by sleeping. To a social worker, she mused, the room—now Nene’s—would’ve looked very much like the scene of abuse.

The pilot announced the landing. The ground was moving close, Lark’s ears were blocked. Anna woke up and, noticing Lark awkwardly opening and shutting her mouth, stretched and smiled her barely developed embarrassment. It was too sweet. How unreal the girl was, how actual.

Lark had expected something different from life, something extraordinary. Public. That’s why she had gone to the academy, and she had been good, very. But sleightists aren’t known by name. Their greatest feat is an out-of-sight, a wicking
⁴
—the most talented hardly visible during a performance. She was never a true sleightist. But once she quit, Lark didn’t seek out notoriety. People who want fame are willing to make other sacrifices, of a different kind. Lark only ever slaughtered a few Needs for her Souls. This last, she thought, peering into the indigo whorls of her fingertips, made eleven.

Anna walked behind Lark into the terminal. Lark held herself impeccably. She occasionally turned her head so that Anna could just see the left side of her face, the high cheekbone. It was a good angle.

In the middle of the final series—1st sefirot, fortress, sacri-fly, infold, purl, 2nd sefirot, j-ladder
⁵
—Clef felt the alien tug. The thing was too small to make noise, but she’d read yesterday that her body would start immediately converting itself into house. The tendons would start the realign without her say-so for this first crocus. She’d spent her entire life mastering her entire life, which lived bodily, continually bending the bodily toward what was not. Ad absentia.

She knew her torso. She knew the seven exercises it took to get the abdominals and latissimi dorsi warm quickly, how far she could drop a lateral (lower to her left than right by 2.6 inches), how the empty space felt, concave between hipbones when she extended full-length in hotel beds after sleight, too tired to eat for bad dreams. And she was supposed to end this knowing because Kitchen’s condom broke. She was supposed to give up her body for eighteen months—nine flitting up to light, nine in burnt drift down—and Kitchen didn’t want it, and said so. Nor did she. Did she.

There was taking care. Every fifth woman she’d known had taken care of some thing sometime. She’d always said she wouldn’t because it was easy to say and seemed right. But the tug didn’t seem natural to her. Would something change this? Would saying so? She tried it: You there, Child. No, it was still “it,” a not, a bud—closed to her with no way in, no inside were there way. How was it possible for this to tulip? How does a fist shift into a cup of sun?

A light flickered in the back of the second balcony where no one could be smoking.
I cannot have.
Clef thought she smelled pot. A taut architecture passed sharply into her ankle, and it was like wind with blood, and she would not trip, did not, but made it in awkward, accidental flight to the curtain trailing a red whip.
⁶
When she came offstage, Lark caught her.

Lark went with Clef to the hospital. Although the Achilles was unscathed, Clef’s ankle required six stitches. The sisters spoke little—a few words about Clef’s upcoming schedule, the time she’d need off. A sullen cab back to Clef’s apartment and it was two a.m. They limped up the stairs to the second floor of the brownstone. Clef turned two locks and shouldered open the oak door. They went in and squared off across the coffee table, red and black; their father had called them Checkers—one nickname for both, an oppositional collective. Exhausted, they collapsed in eerie, familiar unison. Lark had never been in the place, but didn’t comment on the high ceilings, live flowers, large, ugly art, or Kitchen’s ancient, green leather jacket tossed over a lacquered Buddha next to the fireplace. Instead, Lark reached into a shapeless duffel, all she’d brought with her, and took out a wooden box—a cube that could hold perhaps a sparrow, a baseball. She placed it on the coffee table next to their injured, now elevated, ankles. Clef cringed.

“I don’t need a Soul, Lark.”

“It isn’t a Soul, it’s a Need.” It was the first one Lark had had out since just after Nene’s birth. Her sister sat forward and looked at Lark until Lark looked back. Clef’s voice was low.

“I don’t believe in those. My god, you’re—you’re still sick.”

Lark swallowed hard. “I brought you one.”

Clef looked at her hands and took a breath to settle, another to decide—not wanting to enable but needing to see the extent of her sister’s instability. Finally, slowly, she reached for the box. The hinge was smooth and resistant, the wood almost white. Inside was a brown cloth, soft as a chamois. Cold. Unfolding it, Clef let out a small gasp. The Need was the loveliest, most repulsive thing she’d ever seen. Glimpsing a fraction of its anatomy, Clef snatched out the cloth and shook it so that the beast-husk dropped like a hand into her hand, the once-limbs falling in strange laces through her fingers. She looked up at her sister.

“What is this, Lark?”

“A Need. I mean—the husk of a Need. They’re always empty like that.” Lark paused, measuring. “I’m beginning to think, although I didn’t before, that everyone has them. Maybe it’s only that I’m capable of manifesting mine, or at least … their remains.”

Lark had given up sleight. Not because she didn’t love it—she’d loved it like a rope. Lark had given up sleight because of guilt. By the time she had been in Monk two years, she had slaughtered four times that many Needs. It didn’t matter that they had hurt her—they’d been alive. It was again and again her reason.