The Fifth Wall: A Novel

by Rachel Nagelberg

  “So you think art should be returning to a notion of involvement—not just something to look at or absorb from a distance?”

  “Fucking exactly. We’ve become solely spectators of art. High art’s become so conditioned to white walls that even our awareness of its flaws no longer provides any useful conflict. And performance art’s turned into this whole façade of culture—I mean, it’s all about reperformance now. What’s the fucking point without the context?”

  “We need another Fluxus movement. Another Yoko Ono, another Carolee Schneemann, another Valie Export in some fucking shocking Action Pants. Let’s bring them all back from the dead!”

  “How about a Sheila B. Ackerman?” Adam eyes me slyly.

  I smile, and order the same beer from the bartender. “Well, the house will be gone by tomorrow.”

  “Then we have two reasons to celebrate tonight!”

  “Yes, to the erasure of history, childhood, suicide, and death.”

  “To the dismantling of the distinction between art and life.”

  “And…to this beer.” I burst out laughing.

  “Yes, of course, without this beer we would be terribly boring.”

  “Without this beer you might be terribly boring, but I would still be just as interesting, just maybe … sadder.”

  “All right.” We both chuckle. “This toast ended four toasts ago,” he says.

  We chink glasses and gulp them down, our bodies quickly settling into the night that lies ahead.

  At around 2 A.M. we stumble out onto the windy streets of the city, barely able to contain ourselves. It’s a Saturday night, so the streets are still crawling with last calls, voices echoing as we pass swiftly by closed doors. The city spins gloriously, my body buzzing from a mixture of alcohol, horniness, and despair. We stagger through the Tenderloin, becoming shadows amongst the crowds of forsaken, soulless bodies, having given up themselves to cravings, lost in the murmuring of millions of past lives, telling and being retold to eternity. I don’t know why or how it starts, but all of a sudden Adam’s pulling on car handles, testing them to see who’s the lucky winner to have forgotten to lock their doors. I follow his lead, laughing at his stupidity, the evening’s meaninglessness—how glorious it feels to feel nothing. In the first car we find a painting—some artist’s mediocre attempt to mimic Miró. We take it, running from car to car, this huge canvas flapping awkwardly alongside us. I swipe someone’s Ray-Bans, which I know I’ll never wear. Adam chews some hot cinnamon gum. We set off a car alarm and run. The exhilaration lasts for a little while, until our adrenaline dies down and the alcohol settles. The objects become meaningless, trite, and wholly unnecessary. We leave them in an alley and stagger towards his place.

  Sheila B. Ackerman (b. 1984)

  Romance (from graduate thesis: The Fourth Wall), 2012

  Installation and video

  The video begins with a three-sided, white-walled gallery space. The camera is centered so that there is one wall in front of you and a wall on either side, suggesting you are possibly in an enclosed room, or a theater. You watch me come out from behind the camera and survey the space. I walk around the perimeter a few times, and then disappear from the frame.

  I start to drag in objects until the room becomes filled.

  Materials: one (donated) queen size mattress and box spring, floral comforter, high-thread count sheets, multiple pillows, blankets, and shams in lush, muted earthtones of cotton and down. Night stand, record player, long, flowing drapes (also curtain rods, rod holders, nails, screwdrivers—electric and hand-held), strewn book dust-jackets, used tissues, ginger-lemon tea bags, organic dark chocolate, bottles of Malbec, multiple packs of cigarettes.

  You watch me assemble a bedroom, a utopian space conjured from both memories and projections of love. A false history composed solely of objects. A fictitious lived-in.

  I film in order to see a progression from here to there.

  We look into the distance in order to be able to see what’s right in front of us. Isn’t that the point of utopian thought?

  But what happens when you project and assemble an architecture of fantasy is the culminating anxiety of its stark falsity, the realness of its inert objects, dead without use.

  The walls close in.

  Sheila B. Ackerman (b. 1984)

  Nightmare, 2013

  Images, ideas, emotions, and sensations in the mind during sleep

  In my dream, I stand with my back to the camera, facing the room. My posture is straight and stiff, my head cocked slightly to the right. You can’t see it, but I’m imagining a desert, a landscape of desolation, death, and dread.

  I leave the room for an hour and—fast-forwarding—return with orange paint, packages of sand, rocks, potted cacti, crates and bags of miscellaneous items, a foot-long Home Depot receipt.

  I start to fill the room.

  Birth control pill-packs. A ventilating mask.

  The room grows, swells with cluttered heaviness. Orange paint drips onto the nightstand, the bedspread, the long, flowing drapes. Sand granules collect in piles, inches, feet. Plants sprout from pots, tentacles spreading like lava.

  Frame one, frame two, frame two hundred and ten. The walls begin a stark white and become a deep shade of candied orange.

  The room takes on a life of its own. A narrative begins to form. Time enters in.

  The nightmare begins once it hits that nothing will ever stop changing. That the room will never be—and can never be—done. That what exists inside my mind is a lost image that can only be duplicated with objects. That the nature of all art is constant failure.

  That memory contains everything.

  That the sand will consume us all.

  “What’s it called?” Adam asks me the next morning.

  I ask him what he’s talking about.

  “The project—the performance. The deconstruction. It has to have a name.”

  I have no idea, I’m about to say, but then it comes to me instantly.

  “The Fifth Wall.”

  I watch him mouth it silently.

  “A space beyond the fourth wall of the theater between audience and stage.” I picture my open MacBook, the live image of the almost-empty dirt plot, where so far I’ve spotted gophers and raccoons and an occasional wild cat. Where I watch the previously recorded footage like I’m an actress on a screen. “An invisible theater where the audience is actually watching themselves.”

  ACT TWO

  There is no route out of the maze.

  The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.

  PHILIP K. DICK, Valis

  The air is dry and dusty, with wind flapping violently through open windows, the sun baking the truck’s hot black metal and steel. The highway opens onto a wide expanse of desert sagebrush, barrel cacti, and dogweed. Joshua trees poke their thick, stubby fingers from the parched, reddish earth. Smoke from Adam’s cigarette mixes with the desert’s fresh, dead scent, the radio crackling as we zoom forward into the vastness of the deep Mojave under a clear blue sky.

  Adam holds the wheel with a comfortable carelessness, his body gradually loosening as we penetrate deeper into the desert’s landscape. He grew up in this kind of terrain, he tells me, and often feels constricted by the vertical pollution of the city, how it offers much less room for the mind and body to move. I observe a slight drop in his shoulders, a giddiness to his temperament. He takes a swig from a flask and passes it to me. The sharp whiskey burns and soothes. We are driving to a remote location where a group of men will gather to launch objects into the upper atmosphere. Adam met them years ago right before their first launch at a bar in Lancaster, a small town bordering the California side of the Mojave, where he’d stopped during a drive home from his mother’s house in Joshua Tree. He’d followed them out to a large expanse and witnessed the initial trials of this bizarre activity. Since then they’d gained a larger following and had created a website with an email list announcing new launch dates and other spec
ial local events.

  The truck zooms through the lingering breeze of mid morning, just a few hours before the inevitable sweltering heat. We woke up at dawn to get a move on, having spent all of Sunday hungover in bed, watching movies, eating Vietnamese takeout, and fucking in a blur. On the highway, driving itself feels like a practice of amnesia, the speed of the truck along the straight road warping the landscape around us. I take another swig and feel a welcoming haziness, the road seeming to stretch forever towards a fated central point. The service bars on my iPhone vanish as we thrust inside the scene.

  We approach a massive stretch of bright crimson ground, as we penetrate acres of blooming poppies basking in the sunlight. A sign reads ANTELOPE VALLEY CALIFORNIA POPPY RESERVE. I reach my arms out of the window as if to touch them, my fingers rippling in the warm air above the red. Adam turns off the road just beyond the reserve—the one reference point in the directions we’ve been looking for. We drive down a long, bumpy road towards a fading backdrop of snowcapped Sierras.

  The plateau is hard and wide, a dusty golden yellow. Slamming the truck door, I drop my sunglasses down from my forehead to shield the sun’s oncoming blindness, and am immediately confronted by a large cactus—a tiny brown lizard crawls in-between thin spikes along the massive succulent’s protruding arms, raised up to me as if in surrender.

  Adam and I approach a group of about a dozen men ranging from a hypothesized age range of late thirties to mid-fifties, all dressed pretty gruffly in dirty jeans and faded button-down tees. Adam’s black western boots click satisfyingly on the desert’s hardened dirt, his tight black jeans and also tight black v-neck forming a silhouette of himself on the flat, shadeless ground. I roll up my sleeves to catch some light on my pale, freckled skin.

  I’d asked Adam what these men could possibly want to shoot up into space. He said he believed it’s less about the actual propelled object than the act of propelling it. He remembered lucky baseballs, a few desert rocks, a glass paperweight with some sort of insect carcass embedded inside. He joked about once wanting to shoot up his dissertation, how great it would have felt to watch it blast out of sight and watch hundreds of its teeny tiny remains fall and scatter like ashes over vast distances of desert and light.

  Adam, too, has romances about the destruction of things.

  A hefty, sunburned man wearing a floppy cowboy hat greets Adam with a masculine one-armed hug and a slap on the back. He introduces himself as Charlie, and welcomes us to the group by popping open two cold cans of Budweiser from a cooler. Sipping the welcome of cold, I follow Charlie to a little station he’s created for himself, where he demonstrates how they actually launch the items—a mechanism they developed by using a large helium balloon with a chemical component, which travels up for roughly an hour-and-a-half to two hours until it bursts, the objects reaching anywhere up to about ninety thousand feet. He says he’s seen people at NASA who use tracking systems and altitude recorders and tiny little cameras to transmit all the data of the objects for analysis—usually to launch some sort of satellite—like we need any more machines watching our every move.

  “You know satellites will outlive us,” says Adam.

  “And all of humanity,” I add.

  “A ring of machines orbiting the Earth, sending signals to no one.”

  Charlie brushes dust off of the mechanism. “Well that’s a scary thought.” He turns it around in his hands. “We boys of the desert like to do it in what I called the old school way—just plain shooting regular old objects up into that great and beautiful unknown.”

  I watch Charlie and a few of the other guys mount what look like metal devices securing their objects to the swollen helium balloons. I identify a silver necklace, an arrowhead, and an empty half-size box of Pringles. Adam downs his beer, crushes it in his hand, and tosses it behind him. He removes two earplugs from his pocket and fits them into his ears.

  “Having this kind of power—,” he speaks loudly to me now with the earplugs, “—makes you have to believe that creatures like us were sent here to destroy all this.” He opens out his arms and breathes in the arid, dusty air. “Our evolution has been fixed since the beginning. The biggest feat for us to realize is that we’re the enemies.”

  “On your mark, get set, FIRE!” Charlie and two other men launch the balloons up into the sky. I shove my fingers in my ears to block out the noise. For a split second my head feels swallowed by a deep sound, like being plunged under water. The ground rumbles beneath us. The objects shoot up with tremendous force. Baritone voices around us cheer.

  Adam, laughing, hands me another Budweiser and toasts to the launch. I ask him about his earplugs—nobody else seems to be wearing them. Plus it feels unnatural for Adam, who subsists on two packs of smokes a day and a handle of whiskey, to be taking such physical precautions.

  “I have tinnitus,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Tinnitus. It’s the medical term for chronic ear ringing. I played in hardcore bands all throughout high school and college.”

  “What do you mean by ear ringing?” I have never heard of such a thing.

  “It’s like a constant high-pitched frequency buzzing in my ears—mostly my left. I’ve had it for years.”

  “And you hear this all the time?” I am shocked.

  Adam nods.

  A few vehicles arrive, and a handful of others head towards us, carrying coolers, lawn chairs, and their own launching equipment. A hawk glides effortlessly through the lurid blue sky. The brightness, even beneath my sunglasses, feels excruciating. I ask Adam for his flask. Charlie asks if I have anything to launch, and I feel like I’m blanking—I search my pockets, feel my wrists and neck for jewelry—nothing—and the scrounge through my dusty backpack. I pull out The Birth of Tragedy, knowing I’ll never read it, and hand it to Charlie. Adam assures me he has a copy somewhere on his shelf at home. A constant high-pitched ringing in his ears for every second of every day of his life? Charlie examines the cover and shrugs.

  As Charlie instructs me how to mount the rifled book into the launching device, I think about the Oracle, and Mal’s almost secretive affection for it—this intimate venue of communicating with forces unknown. And here, this launching up into space—this almost dire method of physical interaction—literally bypassing the Earth’s atmosphere into the vastness of the unknown. Then there’s Caleb, who ingests a combination of plants that thrust him up into similar spaces, where he claims to be able to converse with DNA, perceive auras, and communicate with spirits and the dead. I try to imagine myself hearing a sharp piercing consistently for the rest of my life, but I can’t—it’s too painful. Adam had explained that it’s processed in his brain like an external noise, but really it is coming from within—a lack of hearing processed in the brain as sound. A ghost in his machinery.

  I prop up the launching device with both hands, angling my face away from the piercing sun as Charlie counts down from five. Adam’s fingers brush my lower back. Four. All these times when I think the only sound between us is the intensity communicated between our eyes and bodies—three—it is there, the sound. Two. Invisibly present and silent to everyone but him. One.

  We lay on top of hot black metal, arms and legs spread wide, our drunken bodies desert angels in a sweltering invisible snow. We watch the sun set from a striking overlook onto sand dunes and cacti, a cascade of pink-yellow-blue enveloping the mountains, casting their shadows over the dark valley below.

  After launching The Birth of Tragedy, we waited over two hours, but never saw it fall. Often the objects end up as far as four to five miles away, in some stranger’s backyard, or in the middle of the flat, open earth. I imagine the pages falling over bleeding red poppies, scattering amongst their blooming brightness, or caught in an orbit around the dying, spinning Earth. I take in the landscape and the beauty of the dimming sky, trying to picture the machines orbiting around this great planet, like mirrors of the Earth’s existence—rather, Earth’s billion-dollar “selfie” appa
ratuses, now equipped with cameras that can reveal invisible systems from galactic altitudes, all the way down to the incremental. We confirm our existence over and over, constantly place ourselves in a specific place and time—the planet as our stage, and the audience everywhere. With machines that mimic the body and mind with sensors that now have sense, we don’t really have to be alive anymore to see. Is this the endpoint to our exploration—how we’re going to die out? The Second Coming, in actuality, will be scientists turning nature inside out, cloning it, and running their program alongside of it? A dead world made to look alive.

  Adam turns to me and tells me that he got my email. I ask him what he’s talking about—I haven’t written him any email. He says the one that I sent to him very late one evening from New York, nearly three years ago. He received it, and read it—in fact, many times over. I turn away with humiliation, going back to that awful moment in a time of desperation, now rewriting the past from that point up until now, before thinking that he’d passed over it, disregarded it, thought absolutely nothing of it…

  “It actually really turned me on,” he says.

  I stare at him. Then I ask him why he didn’t respond.

  “I honestly wasn’t emotionally invested.”

  “Ouch.”

  “You were so young, and you didn’t realize it. I knew I couldn’t in good conscience pursue you with any seriousness. Plus I was in the middle of a PhD—I didn’t have much of myself to give.”

  I return to the evening of the party. This was the August after my freshman year, just a couple of months after my class that Adam taught had ended. I’d made friends with a bunch of Berkeley grad students in the art department, and showed up one evening to an end-of-summer party in Oakland. We’d sort of kept in touch through a few emails about films and books—I made sure to try to intellectually impress, as I’d never met a man who stimulated me that way—by means of such intellect that motivated my artistic practice—and who was also quite charming, and of course retained a position of academic power. His interest in me was obvious, but I’d had little practice in reading men. I had an older boyfriend in high school who would light candles every time we fucked, which I at first found thoughtful, but then realized, with growing disgust, that it was an image of romance fed to him by romantic comedies he consumed like candy during childhood. The candles would often burn down onto his wooden dresser, and all I’d be thinking about while this half-hardened phallus pushed inside of me was that the room would catch on fire and that his mom would walk in and find us copulating and scream and order us to run for our lives, forcing us to escape buck naked onto the Berkeley city streets! I’d showed up to the party with a male friend I naively and consistently used as a potential third wheel, and had run into Adam, near-wasted, sitting on a porch railing, smoke encircling him, a drink in stock position in his other hand. The whole night was ours. We talked about everything from our childhoods and interests to the analysis of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. I’d fantasized sexually about teachers before, having always connected with passionate older men. But this was different—I’d been pining for months, creating scenarios and instances of our eventual running-ins over and over until Adam became almost intangible—a sheer shadow in a memory of a future that never existed. We stayed at the party until very, very late—long after BART had stopped running, and Adam offered to drive me back to the Berkeley campus. I’d always refused to get in a car with anyone who had been drinking, but Adam was a fabulous drunk driver. He smoked and drove and blasted obscure hardcore music, going on and on about the history of the band and the scene and the style. My heart was out of my chest by then—I watched it pumping on the dashboard, while an opportune wetness leaked out of me, quite possibly all over the seat. I was living in the dorms then, and we sat in his truck outside for a while, talking nonsense, until I awkwardly asked him in. He was so drunk by then. He was stumbling and muttering and looked almost anachronistic in the very quiet student building—because it was summer, and most kids went home or away, but I’d stayed there because I couldn’t stand to live alone with my mother and her horrible habits—the constant TV, the nagging, and then the random bursts of energy that always freaked me out—Adam had followed me up to my dorm, examining the horrible campus art, stumbling along the carpeted hallways until we finally made it to my bedroom, where he became aggressive and I tried to play along. We were both drunk, but he was much further gone. After trying for a while to get it up, he finally gave up and pushed me off of him, and we stared silently at each other for a long time. I was so happy to have him in my bed that I didn’t even care about the outcome—I didn’t really understand what was going on. He kept looking at me with this expression of inexplicable inquiry, as if waiting for me to say or do something that I wasn’t saying or doing. But my fantasies had morphed the whole appalling scenario into an event that couldn’t be anything but romantic. This, here, was true romance. This was what I’d been waiting for. He’d then passed out and later left while I was sleeping—I’d woken up only to the traces of fuzzy memories of his being there, wondering if it even happened at all.