The Fifth Wall: A Novel Read online

  This is

  A Black Sparrow Book

  Published in 2017 by David R. Godine, Publisher

  Post Office Box 450

  Jaffrey, New Hampshire 03452

  www.blacksparrowbooks.com

  Copyright © 2017 by Rachel Nagelberg

  Cover art copyright © 2017 by Anthony Baab

  www.anthonybaab.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information contact Permissions, David R. Godine, Publisher, 15 Court Square, Suite 320, Boston, Massachusetts 03452.

  SOFTCOVER ISBN: 978-1-57423-228-8

  EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-57423-232-5

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Nagelberg, Rachel, author.

  Title: The fifth wall : a novel / by Rachel Nagelberg.

  Description: Jaffrey, New Hampshire : Black Sparrow Books, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016050041 | ISBN 9781574232288 (alk. paper)

  Classification: LCC PS3614.a428 F54 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016050041

  for my parents

  The close-up in film treats the face primarily as a landscape; that is the definition of film, black hole and white wall, screen and camera. But the same goes for the earlier arts, architecture, painting, even the novel: close-ups animate and invent all of their correlations. So, is your mother a landscape or a face? A face or a factory?

  GILLES DELEUZE AND FELIX GUATTARI,

  A Thousand Plateaus

  Love can tear anything to shreds.

  KATHY ACKER,

  Blood and Guts in High School

  Prologue

  I imagine the tumor as a dense, dark ball of mass, thick and strangled, icy black, pulsating. There is her forehead, covered with skin, a skin that coats the ivory bone of her skull, a skull that houses her gelatinous, salmon-pink brain tissue, a tissue that envelopes the black.

  I’ve tried many times to visualize its origin—the split second when her body gave birth to terror—to the point where all my memories of her are now contaminated. The tumor is always there, existing invisibly, silently, waiting to attack.

  First you prepare the site. You clear out your workspace, organize a plan. Out with the stone-trimmed gravel pathway, the three-tiered ceramic, solar-powered birdbath, the raised flowerbed you and your older brother, Caleb, helped her install. The budding fairy lilies, the anticipated thistle sage. Make sure to pull from beneath the roots, and then place carefully in the allotted pots and jars. The overgrown barberry bushes. The maidenhair ferns, the needlegrass. Say goodbye to the backyard, to the clover epidemic, the praying mantis mating ground, the labyrinth of cacti and succulents. The turtle sandbox that has growing inside it you-don’t-even-wanna-know. The hanging stars and half-moons, the celestial copper sun. Take a good, long look. Capture it firmly in your mind.

  There are memories that cannot be filmed.

  Set up your demolition fencing, mark your roll-off locations. Organize your tools. Surround everything with yellow caution tape. From now on spaces will be called areas. Watch the walk-ways become entry ramps, the ground become a zone.

  Out goes the interior garbage, the waste of human entropy, of past familial decay. Plastic containers, towering piles of paperbacks, magazines, and stacks of mail. Cardboard storage boxes bulging with old report cards, rubber-banded art projects, graded tests. Dust balls, loose change, long-lost erasers, pencils, pen caps, and pins. Then, of course, the furniture—the oak table, the polypropylene chairs, the mahogany breakfront, the bed frames, the end tables, bookcases, the dozen cat scratching posts, the torn-up leather lounge and loveseat. Into the Goodwill trucks they’ll go—all these objects now lacking context, scattered and abandoned in indeterminate space.

  I seriously considered complete demolition. The idea of using heavy, monstrous machines to attack and destroy satisfies me on a level I can’t quite fully explain. The obvious reasons are of course for the spectacle of it, the energy, the violence—the immediate, crashing results. Why little boys like to set fire to inanimate objects and throw old TVs off the roof. Why we chuck things when we’re angry. Why nuclear weapons exist. But the contractor, Jesse, suggested “deconstruction” as an alternative, greener way to go about it, which wouldn’t make as much press—something I hadn’t really thought about. There were the local Berkeley newspapers to consider, the affluent neighbors on the hills, and not to mention the restoration activists I’d almost definitely be fighting off. Plus Jesse was sexy, and I desperately wanted to please him. I’ve always been this way with men.

  The camera wasn’t intentional, at first. I’d set it up to capture a living moment of the house before it was destroyed, and then just left it on, mounted it more securely to the front lawn by burying the lower half of it like the stem of a beach umbrella into sand. It’s now set up to record 24/7, transmitting the video to my MacBook like a surveillance camera, so that I can keep an eye on the site and monitor its progress, have the ability to see it live before me on a twelve-by-fifteen-inch screen.

  Then go the fixtures, the appliances, all of the windows and doors. You separate the woods from the metals, the concretes, the disposables and the hazardous. The interior fixtures, the interior trim. Everything is placed in correctly marked areas, specified receptacles.

  My art has always been about documentation. My unfinished thesis consists of me assembling entire rooms from my own fantasies, from my projected desires of a romantic future. I create three-dimensional settings filled with emptiness—spaces with no human presence, no narrative, no history. I film the process of each room from start to finish, which I then archive, and plan to display in exhibitions, where viewers will be invited into the makeshift rooms to experience the ghostly absence of a presence that never existed, sort of like walking into an apartment of someone who has just vanished into thin air. Spaces for the living dead.

  I found her, I said for the record, and that was that.

  They nodded with a practiced formality. I watched their pencils quiver.

  For some reason I decided not to tell them—what I had witnessed, what I had seen.

  I thought: how can you even identify someone without a face?

  Let’s rewind a little.

  No one knew my mother was sick. It had been almost two years since I’d seen her—I’d been living across the country in Ithaca finishing up my MFA in Fine Art at Cornell. We rarely talked on the phone—the conversations always felt rushed and uneventful, lacking in drive or interest. My mother, a retired RN, lost from the years of her own increasing neuroses, with a ruthless addiction to television. She’d been living in that house alone for the past decade, having been divorced from my father for years—a professor of dramaturgy at Berkeley and ex-childhood actor. He’d been living on a sailboat docked in Marin for the past few years with a three-legged German Shepherd named Pozzo and terrible cell phone service.

  Why didn’t she tell us? Why didn’t she wait?

  Let’s just say my visit was impulsive—an urge which I at first attributed to the suffocating deadness of an upstate New York winter, the hours holed up in my windowless studio, fully consumed by thesis work and attempting to teach undergraduates how to look at art. But I know it was something deeper—some sort of panic under the body current, a pull that was unmistakably biological, as if my DNA itself were communicating with me, drawing me westward, calling me back to her. I needed to fly home.

  My visit would be a surprise—a quick trip of about four days. I’d see some friends in San Francisco, then ho
p on over to the East Bay to visit her. I thought it possible that an unplanned visit could excite her—force her from her comfort zones, her self-created limitations. The sight of my face would shock her into some accidental joy, even if just for a moment.

  I still think my father must have, somehow, known.

  A house is like a body. It has an interior, an exterior. A complex system of interworking parts. It stores things, holds things, deteriorates when deserted. It requires constant upkeep, becomes more and more familiar with time. A house is a massive living artifact, the most private of moments stored in the deep crevices of its creaking floorboards, in water stains and pencil marks, in tiny cracks in the ceiling, in chipped paint in the corners of rooms, in microscopic collections of dust and skin.

  Lathe, plaster, dropped ceilings, ductwork. Wiring and tendons, insulation and blood. You deconstruct a building in order to continue the lives of the materials, the purpose being to salvage the maximum amount of those materials for their highest and best re-use. It’s all about the process. The collating and associating, the intention, the patterning.

  The and… action!

  Again, let’s rewind.

  It’s the end of January, two days into my surprise trip. I borrow my friend Mallory’s flashy ten-speed, which I carry onto BART to head over to my parents’ house, only a short ride from the downtown station. It’s an unseasonably warm day, thick with sunlight and a calm ocean breeze. I remember it so distinctly that it’s almost like I’m back there on that day, entering the house with the bicycle over my shoulder. The bicycle is painted a neon pink and covered in glitter, with multicolored streamers dangling from the handlebars, and of course one of Mal’s furry fabric trademarks sewn onto the frame. I turn the knob and the door’s open, like it’s always been on the weekends when my mother’s home tending to the garden. I walk in sweating and panting from my recent lack of exercise; my thighs and calves are straining. I open the door and my mother’s right there, poised in the foyer, facing a mirror, a gun in her mouth.

  She’s dressed normally, in jeans and a black crew-neck tee. Her hair is pulled up into a loose bun of faded gray-brown—I immediately notice that she stopped dyeing it blonde. I believe she is wearing canvas slippers.

  I realize that I’ve never before seen an actual gun.

  It happens in a second. I walk in and I see her, and for the life of me cannot remember and will never know, if she saw me or knew I was there, had heard me roll up on the stone pathway.

  I open the door and the gun goes off and the bullet flies out the back of her and into the wall. Just like that. I hear the actual cracking of her skull. I watch both the gun and her body fall to the floor in a dead stillness. She pauses, drops, smacks on the floor. It sounds horrifically familiar, like a heavy schoolbag or a full laundry basket. Her body a heap of limbs reduced to weight. Dark blood pools around her, expands. It happens so fast that the moment is almost dissatisfying—like there should have been more build-up, more raw emotion, more immediate tension. Like the whole situation is somehow too real.

  But the shock of the gun surprises me and causes me to jump back, which proves difficult because I’m still holding the bike, which I immediately drop, but because of its size and furriness and placement on my shoulder, it falls slanted, and the front wheel knocks me sideways. The whole bike crashes on top of me and twists my right knee to the point where I’m crying out more from the pain in my leg than from what I’ve just witnessed, which I still haven’t fully processed yet, and which sends me into a whole new level of distress—guilt, untimeliness, self-hatred at my own clumsiness, unforgiveable, targeted self-pity. It turns the whole thing into an appallingly awkward moment. It confuses the subject of my reaction, prevents me from focusing.

  I remember, while I lay on the floor, disheveled and sobbing from shock and embarrassment, smelling, suddenly, an overwhelming onslaught of her perfume. I remember thinking it doesn’t make any sense that she is dead if I can smell something so distinctly familiar, so recognizable, so normal. It confused me because I couldn’t recall smelling it before I fell down. I wanted to know how that could work scientifically—if when someone dies somehow their smell intensifies, rushes out of their pores or something. I needed it to make sense.

  There was a fly buzzing in a corner of the foyer that would not for its life desist. I heard a TV on in the background, the ideal consistency of cupcake icing. The creaking hinges of the front door. Everything and nothing was keeping me from focusing.

  I wanted it to feel different. I wanted to feel more.

  I remember lying there as the blood escaped and coagulated, formed a halo around her head—her face, at that point, still shielded from me, facing the wall, leaving my own body and seeing the scene from above, watching it and replaying it as if on a screen, judging myself and my actions, wishing to go back.

  Perhaps I installed the camera because I know I’ll want to recall the deconstruction later, as it actually happens, in real time. It’s depressing how memory doesn’t seem to be enough anymore. I need an image to verify what’s happening outside of the screen.

  “I thought your art was about constructing things,” Mal says to me when I show her some of the footage. I’d dropped out of the program my last semester, subletted my apartment in Ithaca for a year, and moved in with Mallory in the Mission District.

  Art, I shake my head at her. This is definitely not art. I ask how could it be? This is my real life that’s happening. How can this possibly be art?

  Just knowing that the house existed gave me terrible anxiety. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. Masturbating was just out of the question. At work I almost spilled my coffee on a Takashi Murakami paper dress—I just walked right into the mannequin. I’d been picking up art preparator shifts at SFMoMA, where I worked all throughout undergrad. The principal exhibit tech—my boss, Robby, a longtime friend of my father—actually ordered me to take a nap in the conference room.

  Something had to happen. Together, the house and I could not exist.

  Now watch it come crashing down.

  The house becomes a series of rooms, becomes compartmental units, becomes an arrangement of objects, becomes a composite of materials. It is a construction in reverse—you dismantle from the inside out.

  It’s like an autopsy.

  I pick up the axe. Then everything disappears.

  ACT ONE

  The Real itself, in order to be sustained, has to be perceived as a nightmarish unreal spectre.

  SLAVOJ ZIZEK, Welcome to the Desert of the Real

  I awake in a trembling bedroom on an unusually sunny morning in a house that takes me six long and agonizing seconds to discern must belong to the contractor, Jesse, as the floor rumbles, the furniture shakes, the light fixture rattles, and the body beside me faintly stirs amidst a deep slumber, his calloused fingers twitching by my exposed thigh as the structure around us prepares for takeoff. It’s a sobering feeling—the movement of the Earth. Even growing up with these quick moments of terror doesn’t prepare you for the next one; each earthquake instills a slight shift in consciousness, as if parting the amnesiac fog of reality—a cosmic reminder that we exist on a complex living organism that is much, much larger than us, blindly orbiting in a universe that is wholly undiscovered. I quietly climb out of bed and tiptoe naked out of the drafty bedroom to find the toilet, the layout of the living room rendering subtly familiar, as I begin to recall flashes of the previous night’s ravenous activities from a cold, porcelain seat.

  Right after my violent outburst with the axe, Jesse had buckled me into his truck and we’d driven back to San Francisco straight to a hole-in-the-wall bar that sometimes served Ethiopian food. Jesse knew the bartender, a large, intoxicated woman with a thick accent and burly presence, from whom he ordered two double margaritas. We sat at a round table next to a jukebox blasting Thriller, sipping the sour and salt as he told me about an experience he’d recently had while working at a site on some remote, woodsy location right up no
rth next to a river, building a solar panel roof for a wealthy client. He’d brought his dog along, an ancient creature suffering from cataracts and some form of Alzheimer’s, whom he didn’t like to leave alone for more than a few hours, and the fresh air always calmed her. At some point he’d heard splashing and a high-pitched yelp, and he ran sprinting to the water to find old Maddie twenty feet deep into the river, unable to swim. He said his heart almost dropped out of his body. Without thinking twice, he rushed into the freezing cold after her, with clothes, boots, tools—everything—and reached her just as her legs gave out. Both of them panting, he pulled her towards the shore, threw her in the car, drove straight back to his house in the city and right into the hot shower—both of them shivering under the pressure and steam. He said nothing had ever terrified him more, nothing except for what had happened earlier that day, when I tore down the lawn towards my house, a giant axe raised in my palms like a crucifix.

  I sensed less of a concern than a sparking interest. Jesse was gaping at me with an intensity I hadn’t experienced before. Our playful flirting the past week had been merely a tease at most, nothing to this degree. He listened intently as I—still partially in shock—told him I still had no recollection of what happened before he tackled me to the ground. I recalled standing in front of the house in deep contemplation when all of a sudden a bizarre feeling came over me—all-consuming. It was like a severe case of déjà vu, where everything around me looked both familiar and foreign at the same time. Oddly depthless. As if the landscape was lacking something vital for me to process as “real.” Jesse’s weight had shifted closer to me, his concentration stark and aggressive. I quietly told him about the secret tumor, and then the gun. How I found my mother dead in the hallway. At least that’s how I decided to tell it. I still haven’t been able to admit the whole truth out loud. I must still have a lot of anger bottled up, I tried to joke, although it wasn’t very funny. I’m always demeaning everything I feel strongly about. Is it out of some sort of embarrassment? Some flawed characteristic—a lack of conviction? It did concern me that that I had nearly killed myself with a very sharp, heavy object in some sort of unconscious state. I did distinctly remember waking up from it—seeing the actual fissures in the plaster in front of me, a heavy burning object in my hand, feeling a tight hold on my wrist. I remember that the heat was not from the axe but from my body’s elevated temperature. I remember rage unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, a feeling so foreign to me, and yet shockingly exhilarating. I had felt dangerous, beautifully and horrifically alive. I wanted, consciously, to destroy, to completely obliterate. To kill. I knew I was being filmed.