Sleight Read online

  When she finished she knew this one felt odd. Familiar. She went down the stairs and into the dining room where Nene and Drew were playing Memory and showed them.

  “It’s all gray,” said Nene.

  “It’s really lovely.” Drew took it from Lark and turned it over in his hands. “You know, you never have adequately explained how the varnish makes the wood so much heavier.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Well, this one really is lovely. It feels like wind.”

  Nene reached over to touch it. “It needs a name, Mommy.”

  “Nene, this one isn’t for you. Your birthday isn’t for a few months.”

  “I know. But this one needs its name. It’s Burning.”

  Clef smelled coffee. She looked out from beneath the down quilt, squinting. The digital clock blur was a yard—a mile—away on the dresser. Kitchen’s leg was over her leg, her leg asleep. Sigh. How could there be coffee, and did it matter? Coffee was good. Someone was already moving. Purposefulness in her kitchen. Clef should go, host, but reminded herself she was naked. A pause in the hall, a knock on the bedroom door. Clef rolled out, stood cold on her waking foot, reaching to the back of the pine rocker for Kitchen’s silk robe. It was the most unbelievable shade of violet. Things kept circling back to Lark, Lark’s Need. Infuriating. Clef looked at her sleeping lover—in sleep the category applied better, she thought, than any individual name. It freed her, for just a moment, from the unique nature of her weakness. The rocking chair nodded her toward the door. Another knock. There is a stranger in my home who has made me coffee. How loved she was. Clef met her eyes in the full-length mirror that hung on the back of the door. She was purple with it.

  She limped over and slid through the cracked doorway into the hall. The man had the decency to take a few steps back. She was shorter than she was onstage.

  “What’s wrong with your foot?”

  “I sliced open my ankle a few weeks ago, but that’s the other foot. This leg is asleep from the crotch down. I was asleep until a few seconds ago.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. This couldn’t wait. It is almost ten forty-five.” The tall figure glanced down at a bony, watchless wrist.

  “We performed last night.”

  “I thought you were injured.”

  “I am, but Kitchen …” Clef gestured unapologetically toward the bedroom. “I mean—Kenichi, he isn’t. I’m also pretty sure he’s not going to be up for a while yet. Should I have him call you?”

  “I haven’t introduced myself.”

  “Jesus West, do you think anyone doesn’t know you? You’re here to recruit Kitch—Kenichi. I’m just surprised you haven’t tried before now. He’s amazing.”

  “He is. But he can sleep. Come in and have some coffee. I’d like to talk with you.”

  On the flight back across the Atlantic, West had recalled a sleightist named Clef who, it was rumored, liked to restring architectures and had even designed a few new ones—maybe she’d drawn something. It was rare for a sleightist to step outside the technique.13 If she’d done so once, she might’ve again. The last time West had seen her perform, nearly two years before, she’d been dating an ex—butoh dancer named Kenichi Baba. Clearly they were still extant. That night, the two of them had been phenomenal—wicking twice as much as anyone else in Monk. But during the time they weren’t “out,” the audience was riveted to them. And that wasn’t as it should be. West was certain they had been reprimanded, certain also they’d experienced a more personal shame. But since that night, West had become less certain their transgressions should’ve been swept from the stage. And now, he was beginning to think their methods should be embraced.

  “Do you know why there aren’t any female hands?”

  Clef looked up sharply from her coffee.

  “That’s an interesting way to open a conversation. There have been … your grandmother, for one.” Clef cared deeply about the gender division in sleight: the overwhelming number of female sleightists and sleight students vs. the nearly exclusively male club of directors and hands. Instructors were split almost down the middle, although even that wasn’t equitable—not the way she saw the numbers. But Clef had no answers. And Clef—who liked having answers—shut off after too much not-finding.

  West acknowledged her correction. “Yes. Fern did draw. A total of five sleights.”

  “She was gifted. I’d rather have drawn her five than a hundred of the sort we’re producing lately.”

  “No doubt, no doubt.” West drank from his mug. “Do you draw?”

  “What? No, of course not. I was never trained.” Clef was caught off balance. West had put her there. She had heard things about him—that he could manipulate anything but an architecture. It was true she thought of herself as more than a sleightist, an instrument, but couldn’t explain why without demeaning her own profession. West waited. He drew his middle finger along the thick rim of his mug. Clef counted three unhurried circles. She ventured a little further.

  “This is the first real injury I’ve had. When I retire, I was thinking I might go back to the academy, but …”

  “To teach.”

  “Yes. Why not?”

  “I thought you might have other interests. I was—hopeful. I’m in need of a hand. A new one.”

  Kitchen was up. They heard him before they saw him. Coughing. He shuffled in wearing pale-yellow threadbare boxers, his hairless musculature leaner and longer than his five-foot-six stature and forty-odd years should allow. He went directly to the sink, hacked up some phlegm, turned on the spigot. They waited for him.

  Kitchen lynxed himself onto the granite counter, cross-legged—there were only the two chairs.

  “Hey West.”

  West nodded. “Kenichi.”

  “It’s Kitchen. What’s going on?”

  Clef had been twisting her hair distractedly, frowning, but Kitchen’s presence was a balm. She made up a small smile for her lover. “Toss me a couple of chopsticks, would you?”

  Kitchen reached into the utensil drawer beneath him, and flicked two ivory sticks onto the bistro table in front of Clef. As she secured her topknot, she spoke directly to Kitchen, bypassing West as if he were out of hearing range, an incompetent, a child.

  “West here is looking for something structural, and seems to fancy himself a progressive—but we knew that. Do you think … should we show him Lark’s book?”

  When Kitchen nodded, Clef left. When she returned, she was carrying it.

  “My sister left this here.” Clef looked down at the large, cloth-covered journal. The cover was worn, frayed at one corner. She set the book in front of West—and West’s face was empty. She saw explanation was necessary, so she gathered up some air and dove.

  “Lark was in Monk a while ago. Not for long. I’ve never seen any drawings—you directors are cagey—but Kitchen has. He says these look like structures, but for no architectures he’s used. I don’t think Lark knows what she’s drawing. I think she’s sick in a way I don’t know how anyone would fix. You look at that. I see pain. I don’t … I think … maybe she should come back to sleight. If you can do that, you keep the book. I don’t know why she left it for me. I’m no good with what’s not there. She should know that.”

  Clef was looking at West. She was waiting. He ran his hand over the book, taking time.

  “I can’t say I’m not curious. And sick isn’t something that scares me, though you make her sound … ruined. I often find sickness to be the sign of a working mind. But why,” and West looked bemused, “why so quick to trust me with this? Haven’t you noticed? I encroach. I break enterings.” His smile was light, almost coaxing.

  Kitchen answered. “Clef doesn’t trust you. She sees your use. When she showed me this, I told her we’d need to understand it if we wanted to help Lark. But I—knew—Lark once. I’m not the person to help her. Clef’s happy to have you take an interest.”

  Clef stood to take her cup over to the sink. She stopped in front of Kitchen. />
  “You make me sound heartless.”

  “You have a heart, Clef. You just like to grip it with both hands.”

  13 The vast majority of sleightists are familiar with but scant history of their craft. They can recall a few names: Revoix, Bugliesi, even Dodd. But they do not know what transpired on the island of inception. They have read not one of the diaries left by Antonia, nor those of the bastard daughters of the Theater of Geometry. Most are divorced from other areas of their art. Expert at the handling of existing architectures, very few sleightists attempt the design of new ones. They know nothing of the work done by hands, the drawings completed far from theaters, the painstaking experimentation, the research. Their system of training suggests to the sleightists that they purposefully self-restrict to instrumentation. The technique demands so much of them: they are led by one another to think it is enough. Safely cloistered within the mechanism, sleightists choose not to reflect. On rare occasion, a talent, one who wicks often and with duration, cannot help realizing what has not been at stake. One might think these few would seek to reform their passion, but invariably, they withdraw from the sleightworld—quietly and culpably aware.

  LARK’S BOOK.

  [On the first four pages, detailed pencil-drawn diagrams.]

  Sketch one: Suggestive of a spiderweb with a central snarl. Cause unclear. Or a game of cat’s cradle with the children’s fingers removed.

  Sketch two: A family of trapezes. Horizontal bars with connective tissue everywhere indicating attempted and aborted support.

  Sketch three: Parabolic. Small line fragments arranged to describe waveforms. A digital tide that could be construed as the splintering of a single gull.

  Sketch four: A machine with pulleys. All lines reach to a central form. The proposed function either to raise up or to strangle.

  [On page five, a newspaper clipping. A photograph with no caption. In the photo a bound man is being dragged behind a military jeep by his legs. His face is to the pavement. It is impossible to discern whether he is still alive.]

  [On page six, Lark’s handwriting begins.]

  I’m back here. Have decided to stay. I have nowhere else. The ghosts aren’t as thick as I expected. I came two weeks ago to clear out, maybe sell some things. I found my old papers. I recopied four drafts I did of the first Need. I got better at putting them down, I think. Still, these first attempts aren’t bad. I was only thirteen. I can’t believe Jillian never found these. Not that she cleaned. She never mentioned them. They were under the windowseat, just where I put them. It’s helpful here. The dogwoods. I’m going to make soup tonight that should last the week. I went to the farmer’s market yesterday and saw people. That girl from French class with the hips. The black boy I had a crush on junior year. He remembered me. I couldn’t think of his name. I was rude, asked, my North coming out. Drew. We talked a little. He had the paper in his hand. This picture was on the front page—I kept looking down at it. I couldn’t keep up my end of the talking. Drew noticed, gave me the paper, said he’d see me around. It’s possible now, I suppose, that I could have that sort of life. Except—the man’s face. I keep seeing how it must’ve left a trail of blood and saliva, skin and bits of bone on the asphalt—a screaming of. Itself. Into the asphalt. And so, now, I can’t help thinking—what sort of life happens prior to that? What sort of life is possible with that death waiting?

  West shut the book. He spoke to Clef.

  “Do you mind if I take this with me?”

  “I said you could.”

  “Your sister, where is she now?”

  “In Georgia, where we grew up. With her husband and her little girl.”

  “Would you mind if I called on her?”

  “Called on her?”

  “I would like your permission, of course, but I’ll do what I have to.”

  Kitchen knew what West had seen, but asked him anyway. “What did you see?”

  West looked at Kitchen warily, but with eyes too tired to lie. “I saw a horse, legs buckling under, coming down. I saw white boots caked in red mud. And a child old enough, for once, to run.”

  CELL.

  Fern lived in a twenties-era apartment on the Upper East Side. The apartment was white. Everything in the apartment was white except for the wooden floors. But every white thing was a different shade of white, and every hard white thing was draped in volumes of white fabric. West had always thought of his grandmother’s place as exclusively hers, not his at all, but warm. Warm and clean—a guest towel folded on top of the bathroom radiator.

  His grandmother, perfectly rendered though wasting, was curled up on the couch in an ivory afghan, drinking tea. Her face was gaunt and glowy. She continued, even in stage four, to look twenty years her junior. Good rouge, West thought.

  “How are you feeling, Fern?”

  “Come off it, West. Why don’t you just tell me why you’re here?”

  West went from shamed to defiant in three seconds, and so subtly Fern barely caught it, and she was the only one who could have.

  “It’s always money, isn’t it, Fern?”

  “It always is.”

  “Well, I need two extra salaries, and the sponsor won’t budge.”

  “The sponsor.”

  “Yes, the sponsor, Fern. We could’ve been the only troupe in the world privately funded, unsullied by the Vice Corps,14 but you had other plans for your wealth.”

  “I did.”

  “And how’s that going for you? Your charity?”

  Fern decided to ignore West’s sneer. She looked directly at him, and answered the question as if it were honest. “I think we’re doing well. I haven’t been down to see the girls since the cancer took this turn. But I get letters.”

  “They write?”

  “There’s a school at the compound. Most of them are still school-aged when we get them off the street, West. They get used up pretty quickly.”

  West was done with the conversation. “So, can I have it or not?”

  “When have I ever denied you?”

  “You denied me the time I refused to ask.”

  “There you go.”

  As West walked toward the park, he relaxed. He’d gotten the money. He would send Byrne down to meet Lark. He had a feeling they would work. What he needed now was to sit and think about next. Something bigger?—always a temptation. Maybe technology.

  He was at Alice. He always ended up at Alice. Her, big and bronze on her big bronze mushroom, arms outstretched. Him—having run away from Fern at nine, ten, twelve, because she’d been making him listen about his father, or about practicing, or because there was another one of her women in the apartment. The summers in Boston while Fern taught at the academy had been worse. She’d tried to make him rehearse with the other students there—the best from small towns all over the country. Most of them female. And when he’d gotten frustrated by his inadequacies, when he’d thrown down his architectures or tripped over someone else’s—there was no Alice to run to. No big bronze girl blithely holding court among others’ absurd expectations.

  West watched as a little boy climbed onto her lap with the help of his father. West’s father still lived and worked downtown, he assumed. It had been over a decade. The few times his father had been to see West, the three of them—Fern, West, West’s father—had gone to eat at a place with dark green walls where waiters refolded his napkin every time he went to the bathroom. He’d always gone to the bathroom at least once during those dinners. Because the soap there smelled like other countries.

  Fern had made West keep a daily journal since he’d turned ten. In it, there was a page-long entry about soap. Soap that didn’t smell like his grandmother. She told him each night what to write in his journal, and that night he disobeyed. When they came back from the restaurant and his father took off—again—Fern said West should write about how he felt, and he wrote about soap. Musky soap. Soap that didn’t smell like clean. Stolen soap he’d hidden under his bed in a small leather suitcase with buckl
es.

  In his late teens, West discovered that the journal was a sleight tradition. He read around in several of the diaries kept in the academy book room. Sleight’s founder had made her protégées take notes on every performance: imperfections, serendipities, suggestions.15 Before they attempted their first tour, Antonia had her sleightists research the towns through which they would caravan, including chief industries, average per capita income, ethnic makeup, and weather. The performers became fixtures at the newly opened Free Library of Philadelphia. Their journals were dry, full of statistics and numbers—and for the most part, absent the authors themselves.

  West supposed he was fortunate. His grandmother had only had him take notes on people: what they said, how they said it, how they moved, what they looked like, what they wore, what they didn’t say. No research required, only a sound eye. When, as an adolescent, he’d toured East Asia as a roadie/techie/usher with Kepler, she’d quizzed him nightly on the composition of the audience and the demeanor of the critics. West, lacking the finer motor skills, lacking hand-eye coordination, gained a knowledge of humanity both indispensable and dreadful. And unlike Antonia’s disciples, he was always present in his journal entries—as adjudicator. Fern did that for him.