The Fifth Wall: A Novel

by Rachel Nagelberg

  “That’s absolutely disgusting.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s like, even weirder than anything I had possibly imagined you were going to say.”

  “Is it really?”

  “Positively.”

  “Well, you know, I’ve learned to research a lot since then. It’s like finding a gynecologist—you go to the one with the least amount of public lawsuits.”

  I lower my head in defeat.

  “By and large, you are not one to judge, Sheila Bee.” Mal wraps her arm around me, presses her warm cheek to my own, the sweet scents of peppermint and eucalyptus.

  Her phone rings, the theme song to Strangers with Candy. Her aggression is quick and piercing on the phone, as if continuing a heated conversation put on hold. A wild persona reserved for specific people, times, places. “All I’m saying is I got a weird feeling, lady. Plus he doesn’t want to have sex with you, which is hot.” She motions for the doorway. “And your vagina is like Neverland—she loves the lost boys.”

  Outside, the wind from the bay rips across telephone poles, knocks over garbage bins, thrusts between buildings in high-pitched resonances. The homeless poke through clinking glass bottles to sell back to the closest Safeway. A muscular woman leads a group of five children down the sidewalk all wearing dark sunglasses. A man walking by shouts HOW ARE MOMMY’S TEETH? into a Bluetooth. Beneath California, the Earth’s crust is preparing to release energy into shattering, seismic waves. The soil is preparing for its transition into sand. The Earth speaks, the city shudders. The smell of Southern Indian leaks through the vents.

  An unsettling feeling fills my stomach. That feeling I felt yesterday in front of the house—that depthlessness that came over me, that extraordinary sense, that lack—like a swallowing. Nothing that I can categorize into a WebMD symptom app. The house, pulling me inside its time warp of trauma. It’s not enough to die. You still have to disappear. I read somewhere that in some surviving ancient Mayan cultures, the body of the deceased is sat upright in the shared main space of the family’s household for days, weeks, and sometimes months, so that they can witness the process of decay—the skin, sinew, and muscle sliding from bones, the process of decomposition a communal spectacle, a collective visual mourning—the townspeople often speeding up the process by eating its flesh and meat. These practices are seen as the first burials, the liminal states between life and death. After the body decays, the second burial takes place, where the bones are then buried in the ground, often underneath the floor of the immediate household, becoming literally embedded into its history.

  The archaeologist who wrote the article visited this particular culture to observe this extraordinary death ritual. There, a townsperson asked him to account for burials in America, to explain the process of our transition from death to the next world. The archaeologist tried to explain embalming, but before he could even finish, the Mayan turned to the side and vomited, refusing afterwards to talk any more with any members of the team. The archaeologist supposed that the man was so offended by American practices, that he couldn’t even bear to accept their weight. The American Dream: to make the living dead look alive.

  But to watch a loved one’s body decompose—at first it seems more honest. To really know and witness death as a part of life. It only seems natural. But where is the ritual when a dense black ball of matter spreads its icy fingers into one’s brain cavities without warning? Where is the ritual in suicide?

  We had my mother cremated. Right after the small funeral, per her instructions (in a will she’d written and notarized a few weeks prior to her death), Caleb, my father, and I flew with her contents to an old horse farm in Ottsville, Pennsylvania, where her parents used to send her to camp in the summers. Apparently that was her favorite place in the world. None of us ever knew.

  A German artist, Gregor Schneider, recently released an ad for a volunteer to spend his or her last living days in a museum space. He wants to sequester a dying individual in the confines of four white public walls and display his or her last moments to all. In an interview he said that he wanted to display a person dying naturally, in peace. That he didn’t understand why death couldn’t be a positive experience, why it’s such a complication to portray the beauty of death, to create human places for the dying and dead. People send him death threats.

  There’s a three-second segment in a home video I salvaged in which my mother says something to the camera that I can’t quite make out. I’ve replayed it a countless number of times, to the point of an obsession I’m not quite yet readily able to admit. The film furrows and chafes; black and white lines zigzag along the cascading color image, light and dark grays forming up and down its quivering surface. From behind the camera, my dad asks her a question. He zooms in until her face fills the screen. My mother has one of those kinds of mouths that curl up to the side when she talks. She smiles and tilts her head a degree or two and says something to the camera and blinks. But her voice drowns out from the static on the tape.

  It is a machine that walks, runs, climbs, and carries—a sleek, four-legged assemblage of algorithmic, interlocking parts. Headless and faceless, but with a computer as its brain. An engine as its spirit. Named the “Drog” by its creator in reference to its dog-like proportions and its drone-robotic technology, the machine is considered “intelligent,” can navigate a wide variety of terrains. There are sensors for locomotion, joint position, joint force. Planning, actuation, pose estimation, control. It has a GPS, stereo vision system, lidar, and gyrosope. Proprioception, exteroception, homeostasis. This is a machine that can see on its own.

  “Four feet long, three feet high. This girl’s about the size of a Rottweiler.” The artist chats while an AV tech tries to get a sense of the Drog’s electronics to sync with the other pieces in SFMoMA’s new upcoming show, The Last Art. I stare at the artist while taking measurements for a custom barricade around the scary-looking thing for protection—whether for the Drog or for the public, I’m not exactly sure.

  Behind the scenes, the museum is bustling with at least three times as many bodies due to the complex technological nature of the show. They brought their own exhibition and AV techs, plus thirteen different curators to work in tandem with our own curators, preparators, and electricians. We’ve begun to start referring to this setup as “the war room.”

  “Its custom GPS allows for ‘human following’—you know, device drivers, data logging, visual odometry. We have sensors focusing directly on its internal state, monitoring the hydraulics, oil temp, battery charge, etcetera.” The artist is tall and lanky with dark inset eyes and pale, freckled skin. His nametag says Michael Landy. I can’t stop staring at his face. There’s something about him that looks just like Adam Black.

  Michael Landy looks toward me, and I immediately resume focusing on my menial task at hand. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse the Drog in an uncanny seated position against the far wall, not yet activated. I feel the artist’s shadow approach me.

  “Nice gloves,” he says, eyeing me.

  I immediately look around me, my favorite gesture of pretending to be blind. “Who, me?”

  He laughs. White gloves are mandatory for everyone in this room. He stands over me, silently.

  “What’s … up?” I ask awkwardly. The AV tech rolls his eyes.

  Michael Landy observes the chalked line I’ve been making around the Drog’s allotted roaming space. “You know in the labs we just let this baby run free.”

  “Is that right?” I pretend to be busier than I am, studying the tape measure intensively and double-marking off lines. The resemblance to Adam is less in his face than his overall bone structure, his authoritative stance. The unadulterated, academic sureness.

  “Yeah we have this little compound in L.A. We’re working on a whole Noah’s ark of machines that use drone technology to see, hear, and feel.”

  “Will they all be headless?” I ask.

  He laughs. “No, definitely not. This model is based on
a military funded prototype invented a few years ago at MIT to take the place of humans in hazardous environments. But here we’ve stripped away the military context and are presenting the first introduction of this kind of automata into a gallery space. How do we look at this kind of technology as art? is the kind of question we’re after.”

  “What does it mean to see without eyes?”

  “Precisely,” he says, moving closer. A smirk forms on his lips. “Or—rather—what is a visionless gaze?”

  The Last Art—a machine that sees for itself. What else could be left—a machine that dreams?

  Michael Landy continues to observe me with a new interest I immediately recognize. My body starts to grow excited. I realize that right here, in this room, I’m holding all the power. The artists aren’t even allowed to touch their own work.

  A timer goes off on my phone. In ten minutes there’s a mandatory team meeting about the museum’s acquisition of a multimillion-dollar Richard Serra sculpture—one of his infamous “torqued ellipses” entitled Band. It’s scheduled to open with The Last Art in three weeks. I begin to pack up my tools.

  “I expect I’ll be running into you in the near future,” says Michael Landy, grinning, and walks back over to the AV tech handling his Drog.

  I feel a slight shift of energy in the room, as if the world around me is rearranging. A hollowness forms inside of my body, but also a heightened sensation, a buzzing of attraction from the interest of this strange, yet uncannily familiar man.

  I hadn’t seen Adam Black in over four years—and he was hardly on any social media. We met in my Introductory Film class freshman year, which he’d taught—a young PhD candidate in film studies, from whom I suffered years of romantic obsession after a drunken encounter at a party. I’d sent him a long, esoteric email during my first semester of grad school, which he never responded to. Our whole nonexistent relationship had from the beginning suffered from multiple bouts of intellectual intensity patterned with long absences of nothing—no communication—at all.

  I’ve found that when you build up a fantasy, it tends to become stronger than the memory, strangling it to asphyxiation; it takes over the past. Adam Black: a figure ever since fixed indefinitely as the image of my absent lover.

  On my way to the conference room, I stop to read a blurb about The Last Art tacked to a makeshift wall in the gallery:

  THE LAST ART PRESENTS AN INTERACTIVE VENUE TO EXPERIENCE INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY AS WORKS OF CONTEMPORARY ART. WHAT IS THE DIRECTION THAT ART IS MOVING IN? WHAT KIND OF HISTORICAL PERIOD DO WE FIND OURSELVES IN, NOW THAT WE’VE HISTORICIZED EVERYTHING UP TO THE PRESENT MOMENT? WITH THE FLOODING ADVENT OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES THAT ALLOW USERS TO ARCHIVE LIFE AS IT’S HAPPENING, WE FIND THAT CONTEMPORARY ART IS BECOMING A WAY OF ARCHIVING THE PRESENT—THE IDEA THAT NOT ONLY CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS ARE ARCHIVISTS, BUT ALL WHO USE TECHNOLOGY, FOR WE ARE CONSTANTLY RECORDING LIFE AS IT IS HAPPENING. EVERYTHING IS HAPPENING LIVE. FROM HANDHELD RECORDING DEVICES AND GPS SYSTEMS TO VIRTUAL REALITY INTERFACES, SELF-DRIVING CARS, BIOTECHNOLOGICAL ANIMAL PROTEIN GROWTH, AND MECHANIZED ORGANS, WE HAVE ENTERED INTO A PERIOD WHERE WE NO LONGER NEED BODIES TO MOVE, OR EYES TO SEE. NOW THAT THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN ART, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY ARE BECOMING EVER-BLURRED IN THEIR ATTEMPTS TO IMAGINE NEW POSSIBILITIES FOR THE FUTURE, WHAT WILL THE ERA OF THE POSTHUMAN HAVE IN STORE FOR US, AND FOR ART? WHAT WILL THE ROLE OF ART TAKE ON?

  Printed below is an image of a sheep as the show’s advertised icon. It refers to the sculpture Dolly, a life-size replica of the infamous first living clone, Dolly the Sheep. It’s by the same artist famous for crystallizing an inoperative missile from the Iraq War.

  Several minutes are all that remain of man. The line comes back to me from a podcast I listened to on the bus over here—a former designer of nuclear weapons on NPR. It’s no longer in our hands.

  How could it be—in our society, where we go to the movies to view its own destruction as an aesthetic experience—that we’re still blind to the real life possibility of our own instantaneous deaths?

  I think of the camera I’ve mounted in front of the deconstruction, surveilling 24/7 the dismantling of my childhood home—this window I’ve opened onto this dreadful process.

  Perhaps it’s not that we romanticize our own destruction, but that we have to fantasize about it in order to understand it. That in this world now dominated by screens and images, we must stage massive fictions in order to live.

  Light pours into the conference room from four floor-to-ceiling length windows, spreads a sheerness over a central oblong granite table, leather executive axis chairs. Seven of us fill the seats with an unfocused mid-afternoon Monday energy, slumped and yawning in front of to-go paper coffee cups amidst a scattered arrangement of recyclable cardboard sleeves. A handful of others line the walls behind us, a slight murmur filling the room.

  On the far wall, Robby projects a video of Richard Serra’s Band in its initial exhibit at the New York MoMA in 2006. The sculpture looms before us, a gigantic and endless plane of movement, its form a twisted anatomy of a chocolatey-casted, weather-proof steel. Rising about twelve-and-a-half feet high and almost seventy-two feet in diameter, the surrealistic, slithering ribbon is a contorted rectangular strip on its side, an undulating band of one curvaceous body. From below, the camera focuses on Band’s concave façade, which appears windswept; it gives the illusion of an unfixed medium, like cotton, canvas, or felt. It defies any natural or architectural shape.

  Robby has one of those soft, malleable faces where the skin around the edges hangs loosely from bone. He has a relatively thin frame—small arms and legs, though a bit of a protruding stomach. He carries himself with a sophisticated clarity, has what I’ve come to associate as a strictly European-American trait: the ability to transform physical imperfections into attractive characteristics—knobby elbows, elongated torso, crooked teeth—though he dresses in faded cotton tees and loose, ripped jeans. Style versus comfort: an artist-technician conundrum. I’ve known Robby since my birth, he and my father having attended Stanford together, and both part of some elite intellectual boys club that met once a month over drinks and cigars to discuss critical theory and the state of postmodernism. My father, a budding dramatist, and Robby, then, a painter, both now living out the aftermaths of academic idealism with working class jobs and cirrhotic livers.

  “As you can probably tell, there is no way in fuck that thing’s coming in here in one piece. There will be a series of loading trucks carrying sections we’ll unload into the lower atrium through the two forty-foot garage doors, each piece weighing about twenty tons total.” Robby pauses the video and points to a loose map of the building drawn onto a dry-erase board, his beady blue eyes lit and bulging from some portion of his daily ten cups of gunpowder green tea. He traces the path of assembly with his finger.

  “There is, unfortunately, always an issue setting up Serra’s sculptures.” Robby crosses his arms. “One that I wanted to discuss in the sculptural curator’s presence, but considering she’s running a little late,” he studies his watch again for obvious effect, “I might as well go ahead and start.”

  Legs shake. Fingers tap. Somebody sneezes.

  “Richard Serra,” Robby says, slowly weaving his fingers together, “is a dick.”

  A tired communal chuckle erupts from the half of us who know this spiel already—one of Robby’s infamous “insert notorious artist” cautionary tales.

  “And I’ll tell you why,” Robby says, sitting down and crossing his legs. “A few years back at the Legion of Honor, my close buddy Phil, one of the ranking techs at Atthowe Fine Art Services, was hired to rig and install Serra’s House of Cards, which if you don’t know already, but should, is a balancing box-structure of four very heavy, lead antimony plates.” He crosses his legs and leans back, places his hands atop his belly. The chair croons. “Now, after analyzing the situation, Phil decided that for safety reasons, the piece needed invisible spot welds tacked in the upper corners of the plates. Howeve
r, this apparently incensed the collector, who demanded that Phil remove them immediately. And Phil, being a hard-working and highly intelligent technician told the fucker absolutely not, and excused himself from the project. The deputy director then ordered a bunch of interns to remove the bracing, and can you guess what happened?”

  “Human sandwich,” I say.

  “Try human vegetable,” says Robby, and my chest tightens. “Of course, one of the plates isn’t balanced correctly and falls on the poor kid, who hits his head on the floor and is in a coma for three months before the parents pull the fucking plug.”

  “Spoken quite candidly,” a woman scoffs behind me.

  Robby holds out his hands, shrugs comically. “The man is a psychopath. But fuck, is his art brilliant.” He then passes out contracts that depict an agreement between us and the collector that we can abide by all the safety procedures that Robby and Derek, the head tech for Atthowe they’re bringing in to help set up, tell us to perform. We all sign amidst buzzing, restless bodies preparing to disperse.

  After the meeting, Robby and I walk to the break room in search of free pastries he’d heard rumored earlier that day. He asks how I’m doing. He attended the funeral, which is where I’d asked him with sudden desperation about a job. He’d talked HR into letting me return as a preparator, but with some extra roles only if I want them—some kind of optional managerial status. Job descriptions in the art world are always sort of vague. He’d kept in touch with my mother even after the divorce. I tell him that I’m fine, considering that he knows nothing about the house, and I want it to stay that way.

  “I talked to your father over the weekend—he asked after you. I told him you were my right-hand lady. How good it is to have you back.” He pats me lightly on the shoulder. We stand in the sunlight holding paper plates piled with pastry remnants.