Sleight Read Free

the engines of cars.
    When Byrne’s mother skirted him and his brother along the edges of their father and off to the theater, it opened a geyser in him. It wasn’t that the last defiant seed of her identity was contained in that act. It wasn’t the cinema of murmur—the hush, then black. It wasn’t even the sleightists: their tatted webs glinting against then obscuring their limbs, their perfect, blank countenances as they braided through one another. Nor was it the shock of seeing his first structure: helical then crystalline then “clotted,” as “clotted” is indistinguishable from “containing life.” For Byrne it was the words—the beginning of the sleight that most of the audience took like a vitamin. The words became the crime to Byrne in its entirety.

    Byrne invited a girl up to his one-room.
    “A drink?” Byrne headed to the mini fridge in the corner.
    “Sure, what’s in there?” The girl looked comfortingly like all other girls.
    “Vodka, juice.”
    “What kind?”
    No answer, Byrne one-handedly poured the drinks into two coffee mugs, brought hers, went back for his.
    “Cheers,” he said, lifting his drinking hand.
    The girl tried not to look at the other one, the one clutching. Instead she tried recovering, tried trying out coy. She cocked her head, or tossed her hair, something before she spoke. Byrne didn’t quite catch what.
    “Cheers? What for?”
    “For fellows, flowerbeds, muskets, olfactories, sects, flowcharts, squirrels, plots, deceits, blemishes, carp, blocks, barkers, sidereal freaks-on-fire.” Byrne listed these absently and she giggled, uncomfortable, thinking she recognized this wasn’t a joke.
    Byrne wasn’t really that way, not clinically. He was verbally sketching a precursor, 2 already bored and close to forgetting her there.
    After she left, Byrne walked down to the corner cigarette, malt liquor, candy, diaper, and milk distributor. He bought a six-pack and some beef jerky, then sat on a bench maybe halfway back to his apartment. He held a can of ginger beer under one arm while he opened it, then shoved the jerky into his mouth and took out a pen and a folded index card from his shirt pocket. Once settled, he started composing on his thigh with his eligible hand. He was stuck on a string of words he attributed to the influence of the billboards. There was some disagreement online, but the first one had probably appeared almost a year ago. Some said outside Fairbanks, others insisted Wyoming. Now they were all over North America and Europe, Japan and India. All of the speculation centered on the author’s identity. If there was urgency, a dire reason for the Gatsbyesque post, very few seemed to care what it might be.
    Byrne didn’t know why he bothered writing. If you weren’t a hand, you couldn’t write precursors. They were supposed to initiate the sleight. In truth, he shouldn’t call what he wrote precursors—at best his work mocked. Precursors were supposed to pave the mind for a sleight, to bring the audience to capability. His did nothing close. They linked to nothing. I make overtures to nothing —it was a pathetic obsession. His father would’ve said, “I knew you weren’t a man.”
    When Byrne had begged to take, his father had said sleight was for academics, which was a crock. Gil Dunne hated intellect, which he assumed was some kind of affectation, some trick. So no. That was it. Byrne was six then seven then eight, a hating child learning carburetors. His mother used to sneak him and Marvel to the theater before Marvel started telling. Byrne never liked cars. He didn’t like working-class. His brother was anathema. And then he picked up his rock. 3
    2 Before every performance one of the sleightists takes the stage. The word-list the sleightist recites is called the precursor. In the first works, the precursors had actually been written as marginalia, arrayed vertically alongside the diagrams. The choice to have the words recited prior to the