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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