The Fifth Wall: A Novel Page 2

  I also knew, as I returned Jesse’s gaze, that I was witnessing the innate attraction of this much older male to an acute madness inside me. It was a power I had felt only a handful of times. And I immediately loved it. Every second of it.

  After one margarita I was smashed, but effectively hiding it, and we ordered two more and huddled closer together. Jesse, a young forty-seven, with a fit, trim body in his paint-splattered canvas Carhartt workpants and scuffed Timberlands—a dog lover with grit-encrusted nails, the energy of a stallion.

  “Most people I work for want to build up,” Jesse raised his muscular arms, “like the whole of civilization, always reaching for the stars. The nature of progress. But you—you called me and said I want to unbuild, to alter the course of evolution. I was like, who is this woman?”

  I sipped my sour drink and smiled.

  “You’re lucky the house was beyond any sort of affordable repair. The termite damage was insurmountable. And the house was never fully secured onto its foundation in the first place—it would have been impossible to sell in its condition.”

  “Yes, we’re doing everyone a favor,” I said. “The materials that aren’t damaged will become embedded into new projects in a continuous cycle of inevitable decay.”

  Jesse laughed. “Your morbidity is terribly sexy.”

  “The treacherous life cycle of a building—like a body with thousands of organ transplants and plastic surgeries, being kept alive by machinery.”

  “I’m absolutely loving this.”

  “I’m glad somebody is.”

  “Most people take buildings for granted,” he said. “They think of them as permanent fixtures—as if they weren’t created by human hands.”

  “They create stability. They’re always here, witnessing our lives.”

  “You wouldn’t believe the panic attacks I’ve seen over trivial matters like a broken toilet, a hole in the roof, a basement leak … you’d think these people’s lives were ending. And here you’re literally taking it apart.”

  “Well, you’re literally doing it. But yes, I’m extinguishing its power. Eradicating its history. There’s a dangerous power to spaces. They hold certain energies, like bodies. They trigger memories. I mean—the idea of ghosts haunting houses has existed for thousands of years, in different cultures across the globe. I think there’s something potent in this idea—in thinking about a house as a body-organism, a living structure designed to hold things, programmed for attachment.”

  “Okay, so I see you’ve thought through this all theoretically. But what does the rest of your family think about all this? Are they even in the picture?”

  I told him about my parents’ divorce when I was fifteen. How my dad, a tenured professor at Berkeley, lives now on a sailboat docked in Marin. For the past few years he’s been making calculated steps to ultimately moving “off the grid”—what I see as just a glorified way of disappearing. He removed his name from the lease years ago—he and my mother having rarely spoken in the past decade. She lived in that house all alone. Then there’s my brother, Caleb, who’s been traveling in Peru for the past couple of years studying shamanic plant medicine with a tribe of indigenous Shipibos. We hear from him infrequently—usually in the form of heavy-handed emotional correspondence often emailed or texted directly after some drug-induced state. He flew home for the week of the funeral, and then hopped right back on a plane to Lima. And all my grandparents are dead, with some aunts and uncles scattered around the country living separate, private lives. I am pretty much a lone wolf.

  “It’s like you’re living the movies,” he snickered.

  “Cinema does love the dysfunctional.”

  “Why’d your parents get divorced?”

  “I think that when two emotionally unavailable people couple, it can either be oddly functional or disastrous.”

  Jesse moved in closer. “So what you’re saying is that the sex was terrible.”

  “It always comes down to men and sex.”

  “What can I say? It’s biological. We have absolutely no control.”

  This was a man who had six chickens, was known in his neighborhood for leaving fresh eggs on doorsteps in recycled cartons decorated by his four-year-old niece. He sat inches from me, his knee just barely grazing my shin. He radiated a vibrant youthfulness, smiling with his whole body, seeming to speak a special language embedded with playfulness, laughter. But his intensity was alarming. His deep interest felt genuine, but also as possibly that of a predator who preys on the weak—one who gets off on playing the role of the knight in shining armor. But he lifted a heaviness in me I realized right then I’d been carrying without feeling its full weight. It escaped from me like sand bursting from an hourglass, scattering around me with shards of broken glass. I felt light, buoyant, incredibly alive.

  We both knew where the night was headed, but pretended to be blind. After another round and some horrible Ethiopian, I told him I wanted to meet his chickens, so we headed for his place—right around the corner, no doubt—with buzzing bodies exuding a sexual tension that was sure to be catastrophic.

  From then on the images are blurry, violent, tequila-infused. It takes a few minutes to get the pee out from all the soreness. But there is relief in the pain, something dark, and joyous.

  Back in my apartment, I pause the recorded footage. I take a deep breath, and then rewind about ten minutes. I press play.

  There I am, standing motionless, with my back to the camera, the silhouette of my body outlined against the towering, faceless structure. I am a thin frame of near-translucent skin. Wind tousles my hair, whips through branches and grass. The elastic strap of the filter mask hugs the back of my hair; two plastic points of safety goggles stick out from behind my ears.

  To see myself from a third eye point of view. This is the power of the camera.

  Around me, the construction crew prepares for the removal of the house’s non-load bearing walls. A few minutes pass where I do not move. There is something startling in seeing myself from this angle. Like witnessing something I’m not meant to see.

  Oh, but here it begins—oh boy, is it coming. This scene is absolutely incredible. Academy Award-winning. Two thumbs up. It still gets me every time. All right, here we go. Watch it closely. At exactly TC 01:92:14:01 my right hand begins to stir. Do you see it? It’s like watching Frankenstein’s first awakening, or the hand of the wounded alien on the fanatical surgeon’s table in Independence Day—when the camera shot zooms right in to the first sign of life, purposefully directs our focus to its movement. (A typical film strategy for creating tension—movement returns first to the extremities.)

  Here, ladies and gentleman, is me, SHEILA. I point to the screen for an imaginary audience, and circle my body with a fluorescent yellow pen. And here, about two feet beside me, I tell them, is a stray PICKAXE, which I also circle, but in fluorescent blue.

  My hand starts to shake, and soon my entire body. I look like I’m convulsing. Perhaps it’s the lack of transition between my near five-minute paralysis and the sudden awakening, or the sheer dissonance I feel with my image on the screen—but the shock of the moment is terrifying. I watch myself slowly bow my head down and spot the PICKAXE. There is a three-second pause. Suddenly I’m bent down and grasping it, lifting it over my shoulder and into the air—a crazed tyrant, a rabid executioner. I’m sprinting with this heavy object that I’ve never before used down a small grassy incline and across the front lawn past a bunch of busy workers who appear to be in the process of still figuring out that something is not quite right. Jesus Christ—I swing the PICKAXE into the first floor’s outer wall. Look at how it breaks the skin and gets slightly caught, how I manage to pull it out, almost losing my balance, instead catching myself with a half-skip and wobble. It appears almost like a dance. Although I can’t see my face, I am ninety-six percent sure that I’m displaying what is known notoriously as the Sheila B. Ackerman Face—the contorted, pained expression I can’t help but make when I’m thinking hard, w
hich happens often in class and also while creating art, and unfortunately, during sex, which often involves the guy asking if I’m all right, which can get fairly awkward at certain not-quite-the-right-moments. Watch me drive that fucker and hit the metal framing, which I can tell from afar because of the motion’s hard, visible pause. From this distance—if you look really hard—you can also spot the cracking of the second story’s SHEATHING, the slight shaking of the board above me, loosening with each blow. There is JESSE now, running towards me, waving his hands in the air and shouting, it looks like, although there is no sound.

  I pause the video.

  In the kitchen, Mal stands at the counter stirring a ceramic cup of Yerba Mate with her special metal straw. “Did you feel that five-point-seven this morning?” she asks, staring at her iPad.

  “I woke up on a rocket ship,” I say while typing amnesia, paralysis, convulsions, and rage into the WebMD symptom checker app on my iPhone. It’s apparent she didn’t hear me sneak in this morning.

  “This article says we’re in for a series of intense ones within the next couple of weeks.”

  “Is that right?” The website says loading…

  “First the drought, and now this—the planet’s obviously trying to tell us something.”

  Upon moving back to California, I’d been shocked at the desolation of the city—trees that normally brim with lush greens are now brown and sagging, lacking vibrancy, stunted in their natural bloom. A thin layer of dust shrouds all cars and buildings. The air feels drier, deader—a vast thirstiness you can feel deep inside your bones. San Francisco is turning into a desert.

  “They expect the next one to be at least a five-point-nine.” Mal covers her mouth.

  “You better secure those jars.”

  Mal looks up and quietly contemplates the kitchen. “The jars.” Her eyes widen.

  I pour some leftover hot water into a French press lined with local fair trade coffee we get discounted from Mal’s barista friend, and watch the granules steep, while a screen the size of an index card loads all the possible medical threats to my living body. The kitchen looks like the combination between an apothecary and a meth lab. Alphabetically organized bottles of liquid herbal supplements line the counter along with stacked mason jars filled with soaking hemp seeds, raw nuts, lentils, and seaweed. There’s a food processor, a dehydrating oven, two juicers, and a bullet blender. Atop the refrigerator a Saran-wrapped container of homegrown tofu sprouts next to a fermenting kombucha mother hovering in a massive glass bowl. Somewhere during the three years I’d been away Mal had met the Angel Granola and converted to an artistic practice of naturo-pathology. I open a non-GMO Snickers bar and pour my coffee.

  Mal and I met in undergrad at Berkeley in a Foundations art class. This was during a third-wave-feminist phase of hers—years before Miley Cyrus’ conversion—where she dressed in elastic onesies, platform shoes, and bleached her then long, wigishly thick hair as part of some grand, ironic public gesture of female assertion—a walking, talking caricature of herself. She worked in mediums of sculpture and performance, often creating works using solely untraditional materials, such as makeup, hair dye, and once even real menstrual blood in order to create what she called “authentic works of female desecration.” I’ll never forget modeling for her notorious Feminine Product Clothing line, my outfit composed of two hundred maxi-pads sewn together into a three-dimensional chastity belt, a push-up bra shaped with tampon applicators, and a set of diaphragm socks. I still sometimes use a photo from that show as my Facebook profile picture.

  This past year has been a rough one for Mal as well. A gallery job she’d been working towards for quite sometime fell through, so she’d been forced to pick up more hours at an upscale pizza restaurant she’d been working at on and off since undergrad—a funny place to work for the now budding raw foodist. Then, with the rent doubling from the previous master tenant’s surprise move-out, she’d had to quickly find a replacement who could afford the difference—a young but balding Delaware transplant named Dustin who programs some kind of drones for Google, wears baggy JNCO jeans, and drinks beet juice incessantly out of a plastic-lidded cup with a straw. In just a few years San Francisco has turned into a tech scene cesspool, where a studio price now starts at about $1600 per month, and most of our mutual artist friends have moved across the bay to Oakland—now also considered an “up and coming” area that’s quickly becoming unaffordable. But Mal isn’t ready to give up the vibrant, eclectic city life, nor the queer scene she’s been involved with—formed an identity around—for years. Luckily I’ve moved back just in time to turn the awkward living situation into a threesome—we converted the old Victorian’s dining room into a viable bedroom using two thick curtains and a few layered oriental rugs.

  Mal met my mother a handful of times—had joined us once for a wine tasting weekend up north during one of my mother’s unsuccessful attempts to have family time, a trip which proved to be a huge cover for my mother not knowing how to reveal to me that she had been asked to move to Paris by a former lover she’d recently reconnected with over the Internet (a “trained Ethnobotanist with a superior taste for French cuisine”), and that she was planning her move for that following spring. Of course that never actually happened, as the man turned out to be an ex-convict writing to her from a halfway house in Denver—which my mother luckily discovered before buying her ticket when mentioning his name to an old mutual friend—but a deep understanding had taken place there between Mallory and I, as she’d witnessed the extent of my mother’s neurosis first hand. In other words, the deconstruction makes sense to her on some level—albeit she worries, I’m sure, that it’s a lot more work—emotionally and physically—than it’s worth. But Mal’s not one to stop any project halfway; she’s a proponent of taking anything to its end.

  Peripheral neuropathy, transient ischemic attack (mini-stroke), hypoglycemia, intoxication, cocaine abuse—I scroll through the virtual hypochondria—lead poisoning, epilepsy, premenstrual syndrome …

  Mal hops off the counter. Her short, matted bed-hair sticks up in outrageous places, though appears somehow purposeful, framing her face beautifully, perfectly effortless. Her bare, olive-toned arms and upper torso showcase many visible moles and warped stick-and-poke tattoos, faded and bleeding out from the years. “I’m planning on going up to another retreat at Harbin next weekend, so you’ll have to keep an eye on these babies.”

  I stare at the jar-filled cardboard box groggily, caramel sticky in my teeth. “Since when did you become such a retreat junkie?”

  “Since I met that woman ‘Astral Sunflower’ a few years ago and she opened my eyes to an invisible world of pure, potential happiness. And extremely hot women.”

  Multiple sclerosis, Lyme disease, weeverfish sting, cannibalism in Papua New Guinea. Weeverfish sting? Cannibalism in Papua New Guinea? I shut off my phone. “Isn’t that the woman who gave you herpes?” I say.

  She glares at me. “Sheila, everyone has herpes.”

  “I don’t have herpes.”

  “You probably have herpes. They don’t even test for it anymore.”

  “I sincerely doubt that, Mal.”

  “Look it up—,” she reaches for my phone, “I’m telling you the truth, I swear!”

  Dustin appears in the doorway wearing a Bluetooth headset, slurping a plastic cup caked with a day-old dried burgundy. I watch Mal slightly throw up in her mouth.

  He grabs a half-eaten burrito from the refrigerator, speaking numbers quietly into the mic, and slithers back through the doorway.

  “What do you even do at these retreats?” I sit at a counter stool and pour another coffee.

  “Well, it depends on the retreat. This one’s at a hot springs and is called True Embodiment & the Realization of Self Truth.”

  “You know that title uses ‘truth’ twice.”

  Mal contemplates it for a second, and then shrugs.

  “What does it even mean?” I ask.

  “I mean, it’s
a bogus title, Sheils, but it’s also pretty irrelevant—it’s like when a bad writer goes to see some really cool fucking art. If the art is legit, it transcends any wording catastrophes that try to box it in.”

  I sip my coffee and nod. An image of one Mal’s first installations, Gut Feelings, comes to mind, where she arranged onto walls enclosed boxes of chicken livers and intestines tacked in various positions with hand-sized holes for daring audience members to stick gloved hands inside and feel around for the box’s surprise.

  I wonder what my organs would feel like if dissected and rearranged, mounted in dark space.

  “Whatever you say,” I shrug. “I know weird shit’s bound to happen at gatherings like that.”

  “Weird shit happens all the time, everywhere, around the clock. Especially in this city. I mean, you’re from Berkeley.”

  I give her the look.

  “Okay, okay.” She concedes, and sits down next to me. “There was this one retreat, a few years ago—it was only my second or third one. It was up at Mount Shasta and we were staying in our own separate yurts, men separated from women, of course. After a week, all of the women’s yurts—mine included—started to reek of urine. We had absolutely no idea why this was happening—the outhouses were closer to the men’s yurts, and we were using a ton of sawdust.” She shakes her head. “Anyway, it turns out that one of the men was sneaking into all the women’s yurts and leaving drinking glasses filled with his own urine underneath our beds—I’m guessing as some sort of fetishistic gesture of leaving his scent…”