Sleight (5 page)

RECOVERY.

I
n the recovery room, they gave Clef an electric blanket for her abdomen. It was pink. They hadn’t let Lark in during the procedure, but afterwards she walked into the room, droning with awful, soothing Mozart, and a row of girls—most with eyes closed—in vinyl recliners. She moved quietly over to her sister and handed her the orange drink in a plastic cup from the table beside her. She said she wanted to tell Clef the secrets of her birth.

“I was five, and there was a cardinal on the back gate near the day lilies. Red in the orange. I never fed cardinals, only jays. They were meaner, but I liked that their blue meant they could hide in the sky. I knew I was going to hate you because you came early, before my room was painted. They didn’t bring you home at first—you couldn’t cry right. Jillian had to rinse your eyes with a yellow bulb. I was the one who taught you to cry—how and what about. I only wish I had an old camera so you could see yourself. It’d have to be an old one. The grain lets you think you felt a thing—but hurt isn’t lived. It’s passed hand to hand until it goes … like soap.”

Clef held the cup with both hands and took small sips while her sister spoke. Her forehead was a little sweaty, and a wisp of red hair curled just at the center, as if she had been horrid.

When they got back to the apartment, there were white roses from Kitchen.

“You know he knows that’s death,” Clef said.

Lark felt a shock of understanding that was sharper than the cramps she was also suffering. She didn’t want to say anything more, but she did say.

“He’s trying to acknowledge something lost, Clef.”

“Like love?” Clef came back with this quick, more herself than earlier in the day. This time Lark didn’t say, but went to cut the stems and find a vase. She hoped Clef still had the unsentimental one she’d bought for her in Oslo, the cobalt blue.

IN BRIEF: “POLAND”

BY GABE THIESSEN, ASSOCIATED PRESS

OCTOBER 2000, 12:43 GMT

LVOV (AP) — In Lvov this weekend, Kepler performed a new work entitled
Poland.
Let me first say,
Poland
is most remarkable in its brevity. Although a full-length sleight—the customary three hours—
Poland
moves so slowly, sped up it might be performed in half that time. The beauty of the pacing is that the architectures seem to extend just beyond themselves before evolving into unpredicted forms. It’s as if
Poland
threatens to pull apart at its borders, but then collapses back at the last possible moment into an exquisite contortion of its former self. Despite my misgivings about
Poland
’s elasticity and the unorthodox use of the precursor as accompaniment, there is no doubt that Kepler is a technically masterful troupe and that the creator of
Poland,
a young hand Artistic Director West refuses to name to the press, is talented. The precursor, strung throughout the piece as it is—Kepler’s trademark—is astonishingly subtle and seems at home inside the low architectural wind. Because of its lack of dynamics, at least in terms of speed, West must have felt it necessary to use the more resonant traditional instruments. However, their effect is haunting in a way that he could not have anticipated.
Poland
has a voice like black smoke, could it withdraw itself from the lungs of birds, could it return itself to the stack. My initial questions about its less-conventional elements are moot. I joined the audience in Lvov in giving Kepler a silent ovation—sleight’s highest praise, and one rarely proffered in Eastern Europe.

When they first arrived in London, the last stop on the sold-out three-week tour, West immediately sent Byrne out to talk with two hands, a matched set who roomed together in Oxford. He arranged for them to meet Byrne at the train station and take him to a pub for mild illumination. West, thrilled with Byrne’s first success—knowing, as the audience could not, that it was his precursor that had made the sleight—knew also that Kepler wouldn’t be able to continue working with the incompletes. Besides, West wanted Byrne to find a partner. Neither of these two would be it, West knew, but Byrne had never met a hand. They took practice.

BYRNE: So, you two draw?

HAND 1: The boy is stunning.

HAND 2: I draw. He wanks.

HAND 1: Shut it, Leo.

BYRNE: I’m curious, when you sit down to do it—what do you think about?

HAND 1: Nothing. The mind must be cleared of refuse.

HAND 2: Easy for you since your mind is a void.

HAND 1: Come off it. My structures are just as complex as yours.

HAND 2: But they aren’t well-reasoned, and they have no arc. Now—for weeks, months, before I sit down to actually draw, I’ve been making notes, thinking through transitions. My sleights have balance and composition. They’re coherent.

HAND 1: No, they’re not. Coherence comes from a moral center. I research. I read, I watch as much film, I’m at the microscope and the telescope and the needles as often as you are. I work in the garden and I’m better in the kitchen, particularly with Indian. But then, when it’s time to draw, I empty my mind. That is how one gets to a sleight. Yours are overdetermined, artificial. Yours are
clever.

HAND 2: I’d rather they were clever than totally fragmented. You’re self-indulgent and melodramatic, and so is your work.

BYRNE: I’ve never heard a sleight called melodramatic before. Wouldn’t there have to be emotional content for that?

HAND 2: The audience can’t see emotion because they watch the sleightists for it. And if the performers aren’t well-trained enough to suppress their own, then one can’t get underneath the thing, can one? The emotion lives in the structure. Clearly you don’t understand the structure. Hardly any of the audience does—they aren’t meant to—but what they do understand is intensity. They understand presence.

BYRNE: Isn’t sleight about absence?

HAND 2: Oh, child.

HAND 1: Leo, there is no need for condescension—although
that
at least you’re good at. And you aren’t being accurate. It isn’t emotion that’s present. Sleight accesses something beyond both emotion and reason, which is why yours always fail. And don’t abuse our guest, even the sleightists think it’s about absence.

HAND 2: You’re a prick.

HAND 1: I’m a prick?

BYRNE: What is it that’s beyond emotion and reason?

HAND 1: Sorry, what?

BYRNE: You said they access something beyond emotion and reason. What’s beyond?

HAND 1: You think we know?

HAND 2: Oh that’s rich.

BYRNE: So you don’t know. What exactly is it you guys do for a living?

HAND 1: It’s more of a calling, actually.

HAND 2: We draw structures within a given set of limitations …

HAND 1: … what the sleightists are capable of, which architectures the troupe we’re working for has trained with …

HAND 2: … and we bring all the figures we have personally and painstakingly harvested from the approved sources …

HAND 1: … which are expanding all the time …

HAND 2: … and which you take advantage of too often …

HAND 1: … and we set them down in their most significant order.

BYRNE: And that’s a sleight?

HAND 2: Not yet.

HAND 1: It isn’t a sleight until we drop in a precursor and it’s navigated.

HAND 2: We aren’t involved in that.

BYRNE: I thought you wrote the precursors.

HAND 1: Oh yes, those.

HAND 2: But we don’t navigate.

BYRNE: Why not?

HAND 2: It just isn’t done.

HAND 1: What Leo is trying to say is that it so often ruins all our work. We can’t stand to be there.

BYRNE: So why give your work to the sleightists if they kill it?

HAND 2: We didn’t say kill. We said ruin. Entirely different. I can’t believe … is he really asking this?

HAND 1: I believe he is.

HAND 2: Because without the sleightists, sleights wouldn’t exist.

HAND 1: They’d be documents.

HAND 2: Akin to the original copies, which lay two hundred years unnavigated, two hundred years dormant. Did you know, for a brief time they were here in England?
¹⁰
But no one knew how to value them. They were mere oddities.

HAND 1: And then we really would be wanking, wouldn’t we? Thinking what we’d done was worthy of renaissance.

HAND 2: Resurrection.

BYRNE: But you do think that.

HAND 2: Sleight is the healthiest performance art on the planet. It has the largest audience, it’s only somewhat co-opted by the sponsors …

HAND 1: I don’t think they can quite figure out how to do it completely.

HAND 2: … the performers are the most highly trained, the troupes have as devoted a following as in football, and you re suggesting that we should refuse to participate because …

HAND 1: … we have some misguided sense of our own product as, what, pure?

BYRNE: Don’t you?

HAND 1: Listen. Your father taught you everything you know. He loved you and he raised you. But he banged your mother and slapped you around a bit. He put food in your mouth and his foot up your arse. Did you ever hate him?

BYRNE: Every day.

HAND 1: But you never did kill him, did you?

¹⁰
In the early eighteenth century, the copies of Revoix’s documents made it into the hands of a Mrs. Esther Planck, an English widow who, after inheriting her husband’s Wunderkammer-a curiosity cabinet with a great number of anatomical specimens-decided to display them in the Bloomsbury district of London, supplementing her meager pension with donations. A number of medical students record viewing the documents in this location. In various writings, they express bewilderment at the structures, some of which uncannily resemble materials they were viewing beneath a newly acquired instrument at the university: one of Leeuwen-hoek’s expertly ground microscopic lenses.

PILGRIMAGE.

P
hiladelphia. A day trip. Byrne would rent a car, drive through Amish country, take some pictures. Then Philadelphia. York was wearing thin. Actually, Byrne had only been back two days. Maybe Kepler was wearing thin. West hadn’t bothered to return with the troupe; he’d stayed on in Manhattan after the flight. Business. Although everyone was technically on break, half the sleightists lived in York and were in and out of the studios, impossible to avoid. Extraordinary things had to be done for them stay fit: yoga, Pilates, aikido, ballet, contact improv, swimming, and—for at least one of them—tantric sex. Byrne was no athlete. He hadn’t thought he was in lousy shape a few months ago, but he now knew that by sleightists’ standards, his flexibility and stamina were nonexistent.

“Whatchya thinking, Byrne?”

This was T. T mumbled prayers over roadkill and had a face like a meadow. T’s body lacked almost all swerve, was thinner from the side than from front or back. This was the result of the broad-shoulders-for-my-frame she frequently bemoaned. And T hated the taste of beef jerky.

“I’m thinking of leaving.”

T’s mouth popped into an
o,
a child realizing the Halloween candy has run out. Byrne reassured her.

“Not forever. For a few days.”

T’s face undid itself. “Good.” She tried to look stern. T could only partly accomplish this, and only by placing her hands on her hips. “Byrne, you worry me,” she said. “The way you say things.”

“Don’t be worried. How could I leave?”

T shook her head side to side, eyes wide in enthusiastic agreement.

“No. How could you leave?”

Byrne at first had adored tour—watching from the wings as the sleightists eclipsed their own best work. And on the nights they performed
Poland,
he’d actually been onstage, suspended invisibly in black from black ropes, uttering at jagged intervals the words of the precursor. He was high up and not lit; the audience couldn’t watch him watching them, couldn’t see the trembling thighs entwined in oily hemp, the mouthing of the disembodied words. To them the language was a haunting, arriving from the structure raw, but sourceless. After a while, Byrne couldn’t imagine his slow-motion scat without the structures below. It was beyond vertigo, this staring into sea.

But it felt wrong too. As if they were all just masks with nothing behind, or else wreckage. The sleightists moved slowly, but for Byrne there was no movement at all.
Poland
was not
Poland
—it was Easter Island. His rock bled into the joints of his left hand. He was dumb, although the words came and hung in front of him like nooses. He tried to offer the audience this same terrible stillness. And they somehow took it, and somehow they wore it, in the end, remarkably, finding breath. Byrne thought,
They shouldn’t be able to breathe.

On the opening night of
Poland,
Byrne had been scared. Once the curtains descended and his ropes were lowered, he bolted from the stage, barely taking time to leave his black face in a white towel before running out to the lobby where they all stood around—unmarred. Discussing it even. When he couldn’t take it, had to go out for air, they were there too, hailing cabs with ringed fingers. How could they be there as if they hadn’t been there? Byrne was even more shocked at how, for the sleightists, this was rote. “What is experienced at a sleight,” West told him, “doesn’t carry over.” Sleight’s addictive nature was tied to this, as were some sleightists’ bouts with melancholy. West said these things as if he regretted them. Byrne’s stomach was a graveyard. He’d adored tour. But did he also loathe? He did—and mostly West, for articulating this lack of weight. Their tracelessness.

Byrne wanted to get away. Not from the art exactly, but from the other practitioners, the disciplined and the unquestioning—T & Co. From people. He could best accomplish that in a city. He’d made the arrangements that morning. He chose Philadelphia because it was close, West wasn’t there, and the two hands in Oxford had told him to go—it was the birthplace of sleight.
¹¹
Philadelphia was also where Byrne’s mother said Marvel had gone once he’d left Atlantic City. That had been after Detroit, which had been after Milwaukee and nearly a year ago. Byrne assumed it would be Marvel’s last stop: his mother on the phone the night before—
couldn’t you please check in on your brother just this once … not such a terrible inconvenience, is it?
—had been, even as she nagged, unable to apply her usual pale gloss of hope.

T’s eyebrows were knitting. “Whatchya thinking, Byrne?”

“I’m thinking maybe I have time to go back to your place for a few hours. Game?”

T grinned, her meadow bright. As a rule, T didn’t do melancholy. She clasped her hands behind her back and leaned forward, audibly releasing the zippered tension from her spine. She stood up. She teased.

“Why Byrne, have you been practicing?”

Byrne walked up the too many stairs. It had been a hike in cold almostrain, and now someone wanted him to be Rocky. He didn’t even want to see art. He wanted a security guard. He wanted to ask about his brother and be done with it. Duty. When he finally got inside and paid the obliged donation—more stairs. He didn’t start for them, but looked. Halfway up those stairs, a naked giantess was wielding an implement of death. A Diana. Furious modesty flaunting its stone skin. Byrne turned away. To his right stood a guard. Finally, a piece of luck.

“Excuse me, miss. I’m trying to find my brother.”

“This’n’t no lost and found.”

Ah, this was just perfect. Byrne paused, and when he spoke his tone remained even, respectful.

“My brother, he loves museums, but he’s … he’s a junkie. He’s probably been showing up here once or twice a month for six months or so. Maybe you’ve had to kick him out for disturbing patrons?”

“Oh, him. Yeah, I know him. Marvelous, right?”

“Marvel.”

“He’s a smart one. Knows his art. So, you looking for him? Let me see.” The guard paused. “Maybe it was he hangs on South Street—that the kids treat him all right there. Yeah … I think that was it.”

“Great. Thank you.” Byrne almost left, then thought to ask another. “Is that all you know about him?”

“I know he does sketch. I’ve seen him watching the shadow people. In the museum they can get pretty bad, coming out of the corners like they do.”

“Well.” Byrne stood for a second, blank. “Thank you.”

“Nothing to thank. You hold that rock for a reason?”

Byrne glanced down. People didn’t usually ask. Usually, the question that hung thick in the air for hours or days or weeks was popped just before the sex, if at all. Sometimes the question, or its answer, put a real damper on the afternoon. Rarely did a stranger come out with it. Byrne slowly lifted his arm so that the rock nearly grazed the dark sleeve of the guard’s uniform. They were that close. Byrne looked into her face for the first time. She was no prize.

“It’s a sort of promise. Like … my word, I guess.”

She smiled. An older sister’s smile, Byrne thought, though he’d never had one. He was cowed. How did some women do that? Why was he never attracted to them?

“Needs proof that heavy … hmm.” Still smiling, the guard turned away—first heading for the stairs, then up them toward the stiff woman with the drawn bow. Byrne noticed then that the Diana was balanced precariously atop a small sphere on one foot. Her arrow could never fly without her being brought down by the wrath she let go. By the time the guard reached the statue, Byrne was gone.

Walking through Philadelphia’s Italian Market, off South Street, Byrne neared the black and red char of a spitted pig in an open storefront. He quickly reset his course, dropping down a side street to escape the immensity of spiced flesh he so adored in desiccated stick form. Embarrassed, he consoled himself: jerky was sterile and not from a pig. Byrne was still vaguely nauseated when he saw Marvel sitting on the far curb smoking a cigarette. Byrne wasn’t surprised to see him. Coincidence was an illusion caused by proximity, and he’d worked hard to produce this nearness. Marvel, though managing to be alive, was spare—a stray girl huddled against the lean-to of him. His flannel shirt was faded, a red that couldn’t seem to announce itself against the weather. Byrne didn’t call to him.

“Byrne,” Marvel said finally, handing the girl his smoke. He’d been staring from underneath loose curls across the narrow street at Byrne for over a minute. It may have taken him that long to place his brother’s face.

Byrne crossed the alleyway.

“Byrne, this is my girl.” He put an arm around the sleeveless, dark-haired shiver. Byrne thought about mentioning it was October, decided against it. A black, outsized crucifix swung between her negligible breasts.

“Hello,” said Byrne, but he didn’t have her name. Possibly, Marvel didn’t have it either.

“Byrne is my brother.” Marvel didn’t seem to be saying it to her. “Aren’t you, Byrne?” Byrne nodded. Marvel stood and pulled up the little breather. She was alternating between puff and fidget, unhappy, Byrne thought, to have been made to unfold.

“What can I do for you, my brother?” Marvel asked. If Byrne had needed a place to stay, Marvel would have offered up a corner of the laundry room in which better-placed junkie friends had been letting him crash.

“I’m fine.”

“How’s Mom then?” As a child Marvel had gotten their mother handled, sometimes brutally. He never failed to ask after her. “She’s fine. You been to the museum lately?”

“Yeah. But this one doesn’t have enough Rothkos.” When Byrne offered no sign of recognition, Marvel continued. “You know the ones, ten-foot slabs of orange on red, the breathers …” Marvel trailed off, his eyes looking somewhere—maybe somewhere warm.

“I guess.”

Marvel refocused, fixing on his brother’s face. “Not an easy thing for you—breathing?” Byrne shrugged.

“I see you still have my rock.” The girl’s eyes shot up then, suggesting a first interest in the conversation. “Someone has to carry it.”

“Oh, I’m carrying it.” Marvel grabbed the girl’s ass. “Don’t I carry my own rock, Ellie?” So he did have her name. Ellie cringed. Then, deciding something, she slapped his hand away and headed off down the alley with his cigarette. Marvel watched her go, shaking the sting from his wrist, grinning. He said to Byrne, “You should know by now there’s more ways to carry it than in your hand.”

“Our hands.”

“Yeah. You go ahead.” Marvel was revving some engine. “You
tell
me why they shouldn’t be free.”

Byrne hadn’t shown up to be accused of responsibility. He volleyed. “Free to do what? You free, Marvel?”

“Hell yeah I’m free.” Marvel ceremoniously lifted his arms, palms upturned, and started skip-stomping out a circle. A child’s war-dance or rain-prayer, the movement had a certain flailing grace. Marvel’s boots flung up oil and water from the street in dirty benediction. Byrne began to soften then, thinking, Some fifteen-year-old somewhere—some future sleightist—is dropping acid for the first time, and she’s seeing this. He almost laughed.

Marvel, meanwhile, was yawping into the drizzle. “I’m a shooting star. I fucking fly. I’m. Fuck. Ing. Fly. Ying.” He spun and spun, obscenity swirling around him like cotton candy: no good for you, ill-colored, ache-sweet.

“It’s not flying, it’s falling.” Byrne meant to mouth this, to quietly release his sarcasm into the air without bite—he wasn’t angry anymore. He was, as always, a little dizzy from his brother’s directionless momentum. But Marvel was sober for Marvel, and hearing, quickly landed his pirouette. He looked with a strange pity at Byrne, as if his older brother were slow, or on something that was making him slow.

“It’s not falling until the very end, my brother. Not until I taste the ground.”