The Fifth Wall: A Novel Read online

  I nod. I tell him I haven’t even seen my dad since the funeral. And he’s never been much of a phone talker. He did send me a used copy of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy in the mail—what I took as a thoughtful gesture, but of course wholly missing the point. Living on that sailboat has brought his isolation to a new level.

  Robby sighs. He isn’t naive about my dad’s reclusive tendencies. “You know I’m here if you ever need anyone to talk to.” I smile and nod. We munch the overly sweetened bread in silence.

  The television show was called Impossible Joe. It aired on NBC in 1959 and ran only one season. My dad played “Impossible Joe,” the sitcom’s protagonist, a troublemaking nine-year-old in rural California who, in each episode, was faced with solving a mystery in his town all by himself, since no adult would take him seriously. Each black and white episode ranged from twenty to thirty minutes, and always ended with the phrase, “Oh, Joe—you’re impossible!” which was then followed by my father’s signature smirk at the camera, forever binding his secret honor with the audience. There were thirty-six episodes in total, all of which Caleb and I watched dozens of times as kids, reciting lines to each other, telling all our friends. When the show’s contract failed to renew, my dad took a few commercial gigs and a brief role as the voice of a talking gazelle in a popular children’s cartoon, but soon he—in his own words—grew bored with the limitations of intellect as an actor, and decided to pursue playwriting instead, a decision that my grandfather (a big name in radio, who’d gotten my father into the movie business as early as possible, and who, before he died, lectured me on the stupidity of my father’s backwards career move and told me I was following in his footsteps with a fine art degree), never fully got over.

  Growing up, I always had my father’s support for my pursuit of art, though it was inversely shown through either personal criticism, or lack of interest. Regularly he would criticize me for having thin walls. I’ve always been sensitive to places. I can feel energies, charges, blockages, commotion. I can only be in public gatherings for so long, until the intense emotional exhaustion hits, abruptly like a kind of violence. Though I’ve never quite figured out how to navigate it. I always went home after school to unwind; having time and space to myself was essential, a block in the day for my body to process. And I was a very emotional child—always reacting with high ups and downs. Rarely did I ever feel peaceful—always heightened with a forceful, manic energy, or deeply filled with doubt and unrest, lost in massive questions about life’s meaning, feeling alien and isolated from others in my vast inability to be in life. Perhaps this is why I still cling to the camera; I’ve always been watching myself from afar.

  Emotions from others would just bleed into me; especially my mother’s—when she was upset, I’d feel it. And she was often upset. The most trivial disturbances in life horrified her to points of near madness. My father called it “Deirdre Syndrome”—this emotional upheaval, her apparent biological state of becoming lost in seconds. Her instantaneous reaction to the realization that she, ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, had no control. It’s like she always felt crowded. She constantly needed space and yet, in that space she’d distract herself with technology. Soap operas and sitcoms and detective shows, computer Scrabble, Minesweeper, and other thought-numbing games. Her modes of distraction advanced when my father left, and reached a whole new level once Caleb and I left home. The whole house became appalling. Its necessary upkeep dwindled; various rooms were consistently in the midst of construction, picked up and dropped by either her or various Internet boyfriends; you felt like you were walking into a ruin. Wallpaper that had begun tearing fifteen years ago ripped off into strips and peeled from the walls like hanging flaps of colored skin. Throughout the years she’d acquired cats she rescued from the local shelter (upon cleaning out the house I’d discovered five, and quickly gave them away to neighbors), which clawed up the backs of chairs and furniture to frayed messes. A layer of cat hair coated all objects. Cat beds, cat toys, cat scratchers, empty cardboard boxes and bags for the cats to play in. A stranger upon walking inside might think it was a house for cats, with a person inside of it walking from screen to screen. The television and computer screens got bigger and bigger, and each visit it seemed like she sat closer and closer. By the end they were colossal. Tabletops stacked high with murder mystery and romance novels, local newspapers, popular women’s magazines. It’s as if the material world became secondary to the methods of distraction. The inhabitant moved from one station to the next. The in-between time proved a highly uncomfortable period, bearable only with prescribed marijuana and sparkling white wine on ice. All the furniture was pushed out from the wall in order to not touch the cords that ran behind it—trained by the hypochondriac of the family, my father, who would spend hours checking the house for possible fire hazards before we left for vacation, who once turned us around and backtracked two hours because he thought he left the toaster oven plugged in. The house, for him, seemed more like a responsibility than a refuge. The chaos of possible problems that existed outside of his study, where he’d spend hours reading Aristotle and Bataille into late hours of the night, lost in his own critique, the ice chinking in his tumbler that I heard from my bedroom while trying to fall asleep. The white noise from the television. My father would unwind from a semester by taking a few days to himself, in which he’d unplug and drive up the Northern coast with nothing but a pocketknife and a few other bare essentials, disappearing into the wilderness. This kind of “losing” of one’s self terrified my mother; in the beginning I think she found his sovereignty attractive—probably kept him close to have that kind of power near—but in the end, couldn’t break her fear of living, raised herself by working class parents in New York who lived through the Great Depression—I have early memories of my grandmother at restaurants shoving empty water glasses and ketchup packets into her purse—my mother never being able to release herself from her own holding onto the stable fixtures in her ideas about safety, duty. Mostly she was a private person; she rarely liked to talk about the past. Humor was a way to break her rigidity; never was she afraid to laugh. Often I find myself imagining how life would be if she had told us; composing sitcom-ish dialogues in my head between us. So now that I have a tumor, I have to be babysat? As helpless as she’d feel inside, she’d never want my brother or I to leave our respective lives—some guilt complex she developed from years of suffering from a depression she never confronted. Her body trapping thousands of emotions, writhing and constricting like imprisoned reptiles in the container of skin and bones and blood. This power of the body—its ability to create a foreign object that didn’t come from outside—how the killer entered and possibly changed her brain, corrupted the frontal cortex until there was no compassion left. A gun, the prop, she and my father had bought for protection years ago, kept in a shoebox in the back of a closet, knowledge neither Caleb nor I had until later. Mrs. Ackerman in the Foyer with the Gun in her hand. The players around the table throw down their cards. The game is now over. The truth has been discovered.

  At home, I check the live deconstruction cam and watch Jesse pulling drywall with two shirtless, perspiring Mexican men. We’ve planned another rendezvous for later this evening—I’ll bring over a fancy pizza from Mal’s restaurant, and he’ll supply the beer.

  With a couple hours of daylight left, I decide to take a short walk to the bustling part of the Mission to the restaurant, to have an early drink at the bar. The air outside is cool and brisk, but tolerable without a jacket. Clouds move swiftly above buildings, the sun appearing and disappearing like lightening, a false threat of rain. I arrive around five, just as they’re opening up. Inside, Mal’s behind the counter pressing her uterus against the pizza warmer. She spots me out of the corner of her eye.

  “Industrial heating pad,” she smirks.

  I sit down and she pours me an oversized glass of Barbera. The wine tastes thick, fruity, and delicious. She sucks on an olive, looking bored. I tell
her about the Drog and The Last Art exhibit. How everyone’s talking about it being the most controversial show the museum’s ever hosted. Mal says she’d seen an article for it in the Chronicle just last week. She’d had a nightmare that evening about Dolly the Sheep. Dolly hadn’t been a sheep at all, but a costume that her aunt pulled off during a dinner party. The dinner had then gone on as usual dinners go. She had no idea what it meant.

  I hadn’t been remembering my dreams for years. But they started returning right after the suicide. They began as flash-backs of the shocking moment when I opened the door—the gun would go off, she’d fall to the floor, and then the bike would fall on top of me and I’d wake up. But recently they’ve begun to shift. Each time the scenario twists, time shifts, and my past memories seem to mingle with the event to create a whole new scene altogether.

  As the wine begins to set in, I feel my body altering to a space of slightly more detachment. I smile, feeling hot blood flowing through my veins.

  Mal rushes from the kitchen and serves a large steaming pizza to a table of two. She walks back over to the bar.

  “Check this out.” She thrusts her iPhone in my face, and I examine the brightly lit screen.

  “The becoming of human,” I read aloud, “—unlike all other images or fakes, runs via a culture of total control. This strange desire, marooned in the abysmal darkness of this city—I am nothing, you are nothing. This is something we understand. This is our only armor.” I look up from the screen. “The Oracle’s having a good day.”

  Mal shrugs and quickly slips the phone back into her pocket. For the past five or six months, Mal’s been receiving unsourced text messages from the same phone number, which we’ve named “the Oracle.” They arrive erratically, often skipping days or weeks, in paragraph-long stanzas brimming with ontological desperation, never demanding a response, as if calling out from a void of electric currents, of sonic depths. They seem to at once predict the future, indicate the present, and symbolize the past. She’s begun to trust in them—messages that seem to come from no one and are written to no one, but are—despite intention—for her. I’d Googled the number—a Manhattan area code. She once tried to call it but it just rang and rang.

  She pours me a second glass of wine, this time a Chianti. “It’s like I can’t remember my life before the Oracle.”

  “You can’t imagine living without him,” I say.

  “Or her,” she says.

  “Or her,” I repeat. “Or it. Who says it has to be human?”

  A man walks into the restaurant and takes a seat at the bar beside me. Mal smiles and hands him a menu. She pours ice water into his glass, and then curses under her breath—she keeps forgetting she’s not supposed to serve water anymore unless the customer asks, and plus she’s already on thin ice, due to the other week when she got written up for ranting to a customer about the degenerative qualities of consuming gluten—obviously not the best selling point in a restaurant that makes all its dough off of dough. The man sitting next to me turns to me and smiles. Mal runs to check on a table aggressively waving their hands.

  “Robert,” the man announces, holding out his hand. I shake it, frowning.

  “You look even more stunning in person,” he says.

  I stare at him with great confusion. I have no idea who this man is. I look around for Mal, but she’s cleaning up a spill at a table.

  “What a trip, getting here.” He thumbs the laminated menu in a clockwise motion. Wire glasses frame his long, thin face. His short, dry hair a dark brown specked with gray. His other features are indistinguishable. “I’m so glad I made it on time. On the way driving over, I almost ran into a deer! A deer—I’m telling you, but it was already dead. It was in a heap in the middle of the street. I was coming from a job down in the Peninsula—it was right near the turn-off on 280. Just a big, old heap. And it was pretty fresh—not too much blood or anything. And it was weird—nobody else was around, no people walking, no cars. It’s pretty rare—a deer in the city. I hadn’t seen a deer in a long time. You know, I used to do a bit of taxidermy with my pops growing up. So I just decided, you know, why not just take it? Why don’t I just hoist this baby into my trunk and put it in the walk-in cooler at work tomorrow morning?” The man looks at me and grins.

  I stare at him. “There’s a dead deer in your car.”

  “I know, how funny is that!” He laughs and looks down at his menu.

  Mal hurries to the bar looking exhausted. “Fucking Alexa just called in sick. I’m so tired of this bullshit.” I drain the last of my wine and slam the empty glass down in front of her.

  She glares at me. The dead deer man says he’ll have what I’m having. She studies him, then looks at me. I give her the look.

  She pours us both a glass of Chianti and leaves the open bottle on the counter, rushing back towards a dinging bell from the kitchen.

  “You know taxidermy’s a dying art form. You got these new age people all obsessed about the implications of hunting—I mean, don’t get me wrong—these days I think ideally you should either hunt to eat the meat or find the exotic creature dead—but there’s little respect for the art of preservation that goes into really high-quality taxidermy. There’s something about experiencing the girth of an animal in its real flesh. You can feel its power. Sure, we have those nature planet shows—the places those cameras go! Amazing stuff.” The man laughs. “But you can’t feel a real presence from a TV show, you know? So what looks good on this menu, anyhow?”

  My head feels dizzy. A throbbing develops in my temples. A woman approaches the bar wearing a long wool coat and dark, red lipstick. She looks around aimlessly, then spots the man beside me.

  “I’m so sorry I’m late!” she says.

  “Excuse me?” The man looks perplexed. He looks at me, and then back at her. His eyes widen.

  “Rebecca?” he asks.

  The woman extends her hand.

  I drain the wine and leave immediately. The cold bay air stings my face and neck.

  Pizza malfunction, I text Jesse on the curb. Need assistance. HELP!

  Meet at my place, he writes back. Running late. Door should be open.

  I hop on the 19 Muni toward Potrero, a living, breathing mass. We climb on and we climb off, the bus stops and releases, consumes, moves forward, stops and releases, consumes us. The sounds of creaking plastic seats, rubbing nylon material, shuffling footsteps. A woman sitting behind me depicts a violent rape scenario in a conversation with herself. A plastic bottle rolls up and down the aisles. A young man coughs brutally into his sleeve.

  Fucking dead deer in trunks. The wine surges through my bloodstream.

  Jesse’s sweet old dog, Maddie, greets me at the door with an awkward wobble. Then she bangs her head against the wall. I feel like crying.

  Jesse’s house is large and drafty, filled with mismatched furniture, tools, and dog hair. I run my fingers along the smooth granite kitchen counter lined with a gorgeous repurposed wooden trim.

  I pull out a Pacifico from his fridge and sit on the sofa. I take off my shoes. I lay out on the sofa. I prop myself up with my elbow in a more attractive position. I wait. What kind of person leaves their door unlocked in this city? Especially with this senior citizen. I gape at Maddie, who sniffs my foot repeatedly. Then she hobbles over to a floor cushion and smacks her body to the ground. Sounds emanate from the door. I stand up.

  Jesse walks in with a great energy. His grin exceeds the walls of the room. I fling myself at him.

  He boils pasta and cooks a homemade mushroom sauce that smells heavenly as I pace around him telling him about my day—the Drog, the dead deer man, the crazy people on the bus. It’s been just over twenty-four hours since the incident with the pickaxe and already the whole world feels like it’s shifted to some disproportionate degree, and I am somehow in the center, spiraling, attracting destructive forces and energies orbiting around me like planets.

  He had an interesting experience today, too, he says. The reason he was
late is because he stopped by IKEA on the way home to pick up some cheap bathroom mats for his sister. He was rushing through the store—it was about to close—when he came upon a pregnant woman having a panic attack in a corner of the bathroom section. Apparently she’d been trying to find the exit for hours, but the store kept leading her to different rooms—the poor woman couldn’t escape! He left the mats and helped lead the shaking woman out of the store to her car, where he sat with her for a few minutes making sure she was okay. She’d left her cell phone in the car, along with her emergency granola bar, which she inhaled while Jesse patted her back until she was ready to drive home.

  I tell him how IKEA uses a specific type of coercive architecture designed to force you through the entire building before you can exit. That there are a bunch of interesting essays written about it on JSTOR. He says it sounds like it’s right up my alley.

  Later, after we fuck on the bench to the kitchen table, I lay awake buzzing in the arms of Jesse, while he snores with the mysterious sounds of an old man. A calm, collectedness washes over me, a sense of security. Asleep, Jesse is just a breathing body. All of his energy is contained in this one action—the pure, peaceful gesture of breath. His shin rests against my calf; my face nestles against his clavicle—time slows down to merely the placement of bodies. Nothing else exists but the two of us.

  In my dream, I walk into a house that’s not my mother’s real house, but it’s familiar and I recognize it as my own. It’s dark outside and there are lights on in the house but not overhead lights—more like candles or low-wattage lamps—because the house is very dim-lit with shadows protruding out from all corners of the rooms. There’s something eerie and absent about the house, something cold, though I don’t recall feeling any sort of temperature or even what I am wearing or not wearing, and now that I think about it, one of the most startling details is the lack of definition between the outside and the inside of the house, like the only differentiation between the two is my recognition of the house’s basic structure, because I walk in and the only real details I distinctly recall noticing are the wooden floorboards that cover the entire vicinity. So I’m walking through the rooms and am overcome with a sense of terror, as if suddenly my body knows where I’m going and why I’m going there but it’s for some reason forgotten to tell my mind, so I’m picking up my pace now, and almost jogging through incalculable space until I get to what I recognize as the family living room. I drop to the floor and start prying open the floorboards with my hands. I am frantic and unstoppable, I am heaving with each breath. The floorboards tear away easily as if they know of my intentions and approve of them, and I realize that I’ve been screaming something since I entered the house, but I can’t make out the actual words, only the shrieking, and finally a handful of floor-boards are piled beside me as I gape down into the hole at my mother’s naked body splayed out in front of me seeming as heavy as a large block of marble. I make out my screams now as, “Jesse! Jesse! Jesse!” because he’s running in now to find out what’s the matter, but he stops before he gets to me and gives me this look like Sheila, what are you doing? What have you done? and my eyes must be fucking swollen because I can hardly see through all of the liquid and I just don’t understand, and I feel some sort of movement beneath me so I look down and my mom’s head has started to move. Her head reanimates, but the rest of her body lies still. I can’t remember actually seeing or recognizing her face, but just somehow knowing that it was her, and I’m not even exactly sure what she told me, but I remember it being something like assuring me that it was okay and to please just let her die, and my body just can’t take it anymore—I’m shifting my neck back and forth from Jesse to my mom from Jesse to my mom and I think I’m screeching at Jesse why’s he just standing in the corner, how he can possibly just let this happen—and then what happens last is why I no longer trust my own mind—I gasp because my mother’s limp and exposed body is splitting like cells into two identical entities and one is rising above the original like some sort of spirit, and the head on the first one is still twitching autonomously while the second body, also naked and not dead, but not alive either because both bodies seemed somehow warm, lingers above, and before I know it Jesse has pushed me aside and is reaffixing the floorboards as I’m staring in horror at him and his motions and at the situation in general and wondering where my dad and brother could possibly be with all of this going on and if I’ll ever stop shaking.