The Fifth Wall: A Novel

by Rachel Nagelberg

  At work, as we begin mapping out the Serra installation, there’s a heightened energy in the atmosphere, but also the feeling of imminent catastrophe—the whole crew together in one space amped up in preparation for Richard Serra’s multimillion-dollar Band—measuring and marking the concrete ground of the lower atrium, bringing in the forklifts, gantries, and cranes, setting up winches, skids, and slings. Robby’s more anxious than I’ve ever seen him—running around with a headset and his shirt untucked, triple-checking everyone’s status and station—yes, I will be standing right over by the doors, yes, I will be overseeing piece number three. Rushing bodies, leg spasms, the rumbling of heavy machines—anticipation is everywhere.

  In the past two days, there have been signs of the Drog, but still no discovery. A tiny piece of its machinery was found by the Rachel Whiteread sculpture. A security cam caught it walking slowly through the third floor media room, but somehow it immediately disappeared. A few times I’ve run briefly into Michael Landy, appearing more and more haggard looking since the missing of his Drog, as if he hasn’t even left the museum since. There’s rumors of him crouching in corners, whispering into the walkie-talkie, his glasses lopsided, his hair spiked up in all directions, his black t-shirt toothpaste-stained and tearing.

  “Now, Brandon—drive the crane over about twenty meters to the right corner of the atrium, and we’ll unload there. Sheila Ackerman, go stand there and wait for him.”

  “Feet, Robby, feet. Speak American.”

  Robby lowers his megaphone and rolls his eyes. He stands on a raised platform in the middle of the museum’s garage. Both barn doors are propped ajar to reveal four rear-facing trucks open and displaying guts of dismantled pieces of Band like dead branches, unmagnificent without the tree. We help unload them using cranes and the steady hands of trained technicians, the majority of whom are most likely hungover, subsisting on stale bagels and endless coffee refills. Orange cones lead from the garage to an opening in the makeshift wall of the lower atrium, where the massive sculpture will be installed.

  “Sheila, earth to Sheila.”

  I am a human Transformer. Watch me carry almost one ton of steel in my hands.

  The technician lifts Piece #3, the lower half of an S-shape. It’s golden brown and as thick as the length of an index finger. The curve of the steel is flawless, its weight invisible beneath its flowing simplicity.

  “Sheila, what are you waiting for? A full moon? Let’s get a move on!”

  I feel as if a hand is putting pressure on my chest, holding me back while the room stretches forward, expands into a separate, flat dimension. My awareness of the room changes. The scene splits up.

  A crane. A helmet. A pivot. A truck. The room becomes filled with objects.

  I start to actually look at them. They are foreign, unfamiliar. I see a room filled with things, but it’s not just a room anymore. A platform. A steering wheel. A concrete ground.

  Agile metalwork, corrugated steel. They pop out of the room, these foreign entities, as if someone has cut and pasted them, a duplicate world on top of the original. A two-dimensional space.

  I lift my arm to touch them. Perhaps if I feel them, they’ll become real.

  “What the hell is she doing?”

  And the air feels strange. It feels as if something is missing, but everything’s too vague to tell, or really be sure. There’s a connection and disconnection all at once. I am here, but not here.

  “Am I speaking English, Sheila, or have I become a fucking mute? Get out of the way of the crane.”

  A blinding white flash.

  The bike falls on top of me. Cold steel smashes against my skin. I throw the bike off of me; it hits the floor with a stiff thud. I reach out to touch her head. There is no way I cannot look.

  “STOP, STOP!”

  My mother faces away from me; I know it’s her and yet I have to see. I have to see. The fly is buzzing; the sound is getting louder and louder. I need to see.

  Someone is squeezing my arm. A burning. A sharpness.

  And then a flood of cold.

  “Fuck!” I scream. “What the fuck!”

  Someone is pouring water over me. I cover my face with frantic gestures, confused at what has happened, at what is going on.

  “Sheila? Can you hear me?”

  A crowd circles around me in the museum’s garage. I hear Robby in the background panicking over the sculpture; one of the curator’s kids shrieks that he wants a banana. Robby hovers over me, eyes wide and straining. I blink just to make sure it’s real. “What just happened?” I hear myself saying. “What is this?” I feel myself shaking. I realize I’m lying in the middle of the atrium. Robby touches the back of his hand to my forehead. It feels cool, and light, and smooth, and I want it off me this very instant.

  “Sheila, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I say, and hurl myself off the ground, push through the crowd. I make no eye contact, allow no indication of hesitancy, in fear I might see her face. In fear that at any moment, if I stop for just a second, I’ll collapse.

  I walk out of Robby’s office and up the atrium staircase to a hallway just off the main lobby where the restrooms are. I push open the door with unusual force; it accelerates into the doorstop, clangs and reverberates across the floor. Two receptionists look towards me, their palms open and raised.

  I shrug my shoulders and walk with my head down out through the revolving glass elliptical into an open and less concentrated light.

  I’d sat in Robby’s office for a long time, my head buried in my lap, unsure of what to say or how to say it. He asked me to explain what happened a series of times. I remember standing there and watching the crane start to move and thinking, “I’m going to walk over there now,” and then feeling water splashing all over me. He asked me to repeat it again and again, but that’s all I could really come up with. There’s something lurking inside of me that I don’t recognize, I finally shouted at him. A presence I have never felt before. I think I might be dying.

  He told me that I’d better take some time off to recuperate and revitalize. That there are some things in life that, no matter how strong we are or think we are, just need time. I protested dramatically, but he said it was an order. I’d slammed the door in his face, shrieking that I needed a shot.

  Try to calm down. I decide to walk back to my apartment. Nothing is ever that serious. The Lack probably has a simple explanation. I Google the symptoms on my phone again. A new possibility turns up: PTSD. PTSD, or a food allergy. This website recommends an elimination diet. Another website says it’s all due to low cortisol levels. Another website says it’s the body responding to an alien invasion.

  Oh, if only it were that simple.

  At home, I swab the inside of my mouth with a Q-tip and seal it inside a plastic bag. I place the plastic bag, along with a check for one hundred dollars, in a cardboard box addressed to a small facility in Germany, who will email me in a week of their receiving it with the results. I’d run into Mal just as she was leaving for Harbin Hotsprings, and had remembered her talking about this kit the other week. It turned out she had an extra one from some health expo—that this company is known for their honest procedures, their holistic background, their precise attention to detail. The agreement promises the email will contain every possible deficiency in my body, every piece of microscopic matter that my body has ever lacked. My DNA reduced to names and percentages on an intricately ordered list.

  Across the street from my apartment is the San Francisco School for Blind Children. This afternoon an instructor is leading a group of a half-dozen five-year-olds in a single file line, attempting to introduce them to a world that exists unseen. I watch them from the window—small, fragile, bouncing bodies smile with grasping hands extending, reaching up, bending down, touching everything. One little boy meows, pretending he’s a cat. To think a blind child can have a sense of humor! The ambling pack mimics him, laughing. The instructor tries to calm them down, allows herself to la
ugh for a moment, and then quickly becomes stern. Now what is to your right? She is asking. What is to your left? Up, down, touch the ground. Everywhere is really nowhere, children. We’re all lost and blind, even with two eyes that see.

  We now inhabit the realm of the infraluminic, I hear Michael Landy’s voice, staticky through a walkie-talkie. The limits of speed have been reached—except for computing speed, of course. It’s not the end of human history, but the end of a historical regime. History is happening now, synchronized to world time, live from this very moment …

  Since Mal took her car, I borrow her bike and ride towards BART. I don’t want to think right now, I just need to move. Twenty minutes underground and I’m rolling up just as Jesse’s removing the flooring material—almost down to the last remaining floor joists that form its basic foundation. The house is almost gone. His face lights up when he sees me. I drag him over to his truck and push him inside, where we fuck fervently in the grimy back seat. He loves every second of it. I feel like crying.

  I have this vision while I’m riding my bike. It happens mostly when gliding down hills at night, my feet locked into place, gravity dictating speed. What happens is I’ll be coasting and suddenly I’ll see a transparent, imaginary world on top of the real world. It will be like I am both myself and seeing myself at the same time. And what happens is first something falls off—it’s not in the same order every time.

  But let’s say that this time, first my left handle bar falls off, and then my left pedal. And then the right. Then it’s suddenly the back wheel. I am gliding and suddenly my bike is falling apart right beneath me, and yet I do not fall. Then go the gears, and the brakes, the seat, and the other handle bar. The frame scours the pavement, drags jaggedly without sound. Off goes the stem that held up the handlebars, and then the front wheel.

  Then everything disappears.

  I’m trying to know a distance. In grad school, one assignment was to walk everywhere—to understand the feeling of from here to there. The whole class was based on making maps. The idea was that an artist is never here nor there, their work is never this nor that. There’s no fixed agenda, no endpoint, no solution. Artists work as a means of exploring the relationships between things.

  One guy in my class fastened a fifty-pound anchor to his leg; for a week, he literally dragged the thing everywhere. He looked idiotic, but the idea was legitimate. He wanted to feel time.

  I, shockingly, recorded everywhere I went. But there was a catch—I attached a digital camcorder to my backpack. Instead of a forward movement, the distance became a retreat. I literally put eyes in the back of my head. The hindrance of not seeing created a tension. The effect was like facing the opposite direction on a train—movement is reversed: it is the landscape that moves away.

  At TC 96:52:15.54, in slow motion, my body bends at the waist, knees, and ankles, arms reaching, fingers spreading, hands blooming. I grasp the heavy tool, my muscles tightening—as I lift it towards my right shoulder, raise it higher and higher, my left foot stepping forward, and then my right, my left, my right, until it’s a rapid succession of leg muscles straining, a gorgeous pattern of swift, flawless movement. I don’t know where I acquired such steadfast legs—so purposeful, so resolute. From behind, I can feel my eyes piercing like living candles, like a vivid reflection, on fire. I am heaving the axe into the sheathing—my pixelated wrists revolving in their sockets in an action of desperate BOOM, a splatter of fibers—a heaving, strenuous pull. I feel the power of exhilaration, of scattering, multiplying cells. The axe flails out, leaving the house framing my erratic, violent body. Screen distortion for a moment before a large, incoming tan hand grabs my wrist and constricts.

  I pause the video.

  What if it were Adam?

  That night Adam and I meet at a small local brewery where he knows the bartender and we toast to the end of his spring semester teaching over incredibly rich, ten percent barley wines. Around us bodies press up against other bodies, breathing heat into one another, filling the air with a moist density. The lighting is dim, the only luminescence projected from the bar’s overhead lights onto a colorful wall lined with at least twenty different taps, the rest of the room shallow and thin, black walls forming a rectangular aperture filled with standing tables, a jukebox, obscured bar art, the faceless clenching together in dark spaces. An illuminated Exit sign burns red above the back door. Here, voices fuse together into hollow echoes; noise is one collective mass. Body odor sticks to surfaces, insulates the collective muddle brazen with displaced energy, weary from daylight. The young living-dead.

  This, here, is the end of the world. I glance around the room. This must be where it ends.

  “I peed in a jar earlier,” I tell him. “Dustin was shaving or something and I couldn’t hold it so I just ran into the kitchen and grabbed one of Mal’s empty sprouting jars and took it back into my room and just peed in it.”

  Adam bursts out laughing. “Not to sound creepy, but I really wish I’d been there to witness that.” His cool, dry hand touches my waist.

  “It was a really bizarre feeling. It was like I re-remembered how it felt to be an animal. Like—oh, right, I am also something that has to perform certain bodily functions that apparently can’t always bow to cultural etiquette. Here I am squatting in my bedroom where I do many other private things that are not peeing, but yet this feels completely ridiculous because when I look at this jar, I’m looking at something that holds a product I can consume.”

  “I once tried to piss in a car on a road trip.” Adam’s hand moves up and down my waist. “I was in the passenger seat of my buddy’s car. We were driving east for Christmas, and it was really late, and cold—all I remember is this really uncomfortable moment of having my dick pressed into a stale coffee cup.”

  I laugh.

  “But I just couldn’t do it. I had to go so badly that I thought I was going to piss my pants. But even then, I don’t know—for some reason it felt wrong.” He brushes a piece of hair behind my ear. “I felt like a woman—I couldn’t go because of the ambiance.”

  I push him playfully and he laughs, coughs deeply, takes a sip of barley wine.

  “So what happened?” I ask. “Did you pee or didn’t you pee?”

  “We pulled over to the side of the road. Apparently I’d rather piss in the freezing cold pitch-black.”

  “You were so far gone from your animal spirit that your body would rather implode than release its toxins in an unfamiliar space.”

  “Right—a typical closet case.”

  We both giggle, allowing some of my tension to release. I tell him how I often feel like a slave to my bodily functions, and he responds that he considers defecating just as he considers eating and sleeping—as diseases. Anything that takes you away from the real work to be done. I consider this while watching him slug down the last of the barley wine and order an IPA from the menu, his hands jittery with nicotine cravings. He asks me for an update on the Drog, and I tell him that we’ve found nothing yet, but also that Michael Landy seems to be falling off the wagon. He walks around speaking into a walkie-talkie to no one, taking on some sort of psychotic role that still feels oddly staged, and yet I haven’t seen him break the mold, nor talked to him directly for more than thirty seconds. I don’t mention the Serra sculpture, or my temporary dismissal—details entirely unnecessary for him to know. Nor do I mention how the world has taken on a nightmarish quality—how it feels like an uncanny layer of reality has inserted itself directly over the present one, as I watch myself play out a role I designed for myself the second I saw my mother pull the trigger.

  At some point our conversation turns to installation art.

  “These days I feel like installation art is too aware of itself,” says Adam. “It’s like, you go into a museum and immediately there’s a written blurb about the exhibition, the artist, and the history behind the artist’s work. You read some condensed version of one person’s analysis and suddenly you’re looking at the art with a bia
sed eye. And if you choose not to read the blurbs, you’re still thrown into a realm of artifice. You walk in a room designed to display—poisoned already by even the existence of the blurbs, not to mention the other museum visitors obstructing your total absorption.”

  I nod, sipping from his beer. “That’s pretty much the catch-22 of the museum space.”

  “So, ideally,” Adam continues, “there’s a barrier between art and entertainment, and everyday life going on outside of that—installation art is then supposed to break that barrier by re-introducing a subjective experience back into art. It invites the viewer to survey and evaluate, to invoke a personal experience … a feeling. But now there’s too much of a filter.”