The Fifth Wall: A Novel

by Rachel Nagelberg

  Why do you deny yourself a sense of wonder? This line suddenly comes back to me, flooding through my brain—a comment that Adam had made to me earlier that evening at the party. What had I possibly been talking about to receive such a peculiar question?

  I look over at Adam’s splayed body, collecting the desert’s energy like a sponge. Studying his face, I make out visible pock marks and pores, a shaving scar beneath his earlobe, his skin projecting a gray sheen undoubtedly from all the constant American Spirits and Jameson handles that feed his withering body—the image of his saggy ball sack bouncing against my ass during sex. Is this romance—rather, his sense of wonder? Would we even be sitting here under this brilliant, blazing sky without the chemicals—the toxicity raging through our lonely bodies in these ever-so-heartrending attempts at some sort of closeness? Adam Black and his theories on human existence and cinematic history—a failed artist himself, with dozens of unfinished films lining the very end of his wall-lined bookshelves, which I’d recently asked him about, but he grazed over the story with a few anecdotes about his academic brain outweighing his own artistry, and then quickly changed the subject. Have I always put so much weight onto men? The power that they instill in me feels so near to what I imagine a religious experience. A sort of idolatry of one male human into a force that moves through my every day—this magical, God-like presence stimulating my actions and thoughts, fueling my existence. Even years later, through semi-serious relationships—mostly badly-ending—in college and then grad school, Adam had never fully left my mind—perhaps because I’d never allowed myself to remember what actually happened properly.

  Perhaps the Lacks—like the tinnitus—aren’t spaces of absence or forgetting, but are more like reminders of my physical existence … my body communicating with me, screaming at me that I’m here.

  My mother, for years distracting herself with back-to-back television shows—Oprah, Maury, Seinfeld, Frasier—anything to numb her increasing neuroses. A welcomed form of submission, the mind’s way of controlling the body. I feel a buzz in my back pocket and check my phone, but there are still no service bars—a phantom vibration.

  A tumor can appear in an instant, like a magic trick—a silver coin from an ear canal, a white rabbit from a black top hat. All of a sudden it’s there, like the dust from the ground and God’s quick breath into Adam’s nostrils in the creation myths of man. Fully manifested and destined to fall. Was it her body’s way of sending a message? A last straw, a final warning? Had it been sending her messages all along, but that she just couldn’t translate?

  We use technology in place of our own coping mechanisms, denying ourselves the reality of the present moment. And now we’ve become too comfortable within these images—these deceptive comforts of a life unlived—to the point where we’re losing our most important sense. But it’s not sight that’s disappearing; it’s our sensation—our ability to feel.

  You think you control your body until it turns against you. Perhaps the shooting was her last attempt at gaining the upper hand, of destroying the intruder. An explosion to cover up the implosion—the bomb that already existed inside. The origins of the Lack.

  Deirdre Ackerman

  Tumor, 2013

  Cancerous cells, brain, blood, you know, etcetera…

  That night in a hotel room in Barstow, I am bent over the bed, forehead near the floor, my rear up and thrust out towards a fierce, thwacking body. Adam clenches my hips with his pointy fingertips, his scraping, chewed-off nails. The carpet chafes my elbows. He’s pounding away with a force from somewhere else entirely, somewhere inside of himself, out and away from the scene. A drive that seems wholly unconcerned with me.

  It’s something that, when it’s happening, you just know. The energies hurl towards each other, but miss by a hair, both headed for a direction well beyond the other.

  He is saying to me, “You like my hard cock in your pussy?” He is yanking back my hair. “You like this, huh? Don’t you?” He is saying this from somewhere else.

  I am thinking, yes, isn’t it obvious? Although my head’s this close to smacking the floor, I have a lot of really great nerve endings right now.

  I allow my motions to translate.

  Adam arches over me so that I can feel his torso against my back. He pulls me back up onto the bed and our bodies readjust, straighten out, continue.

  “Tell me why you like to have sex with me.” His voice is soft and demanding, urgent in tone.

  “What?” I muffle into the comforter, thinking I’ve misheard.

  “Tell me why you like having sex with me.” He pulls out and twists me around so we’re face to face.

  Perhaps I attract these violent men because I subconsciously desire the emotionally unavailable. The drama, the consequences. The act without the act.

  “Uhhh …” I try to force myself to speak but instead I choke on air. Because my body is attracted to your body, and you have a fairly large dick? I cough and turn to the side, pounding on my chest.

  “You okay over there?”

  It feels like I am swallowing sand. Like if I closed my eyes and reopened them we’d be submerged in sand, the bed would be a dune. The sky would open up to a limitless expanse of space and air, and time would fall and shatter into granules, coagulate the room with a desert heaviness.

  “Sheila?”

  “I’m fine!”

  Adam lets go and allows my movements to dictate his. I breathe in and wiggle my hair out of my face, twist and sit up, straddle his body, lean my face in.

  How it is possible to be gazing at a person and have multiple limbs touching, external organs buzzing, and not see him at all.

  “Is this okay?” I ask him.

  “Sure.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you feel anything?”

  “Sure.”

  “I mean if you’re not feeling much, we can change it up.”

  “No no, it’s fine,” he says.

  I am not sure what my expression is but by the slight raising of his brows and his slanted look, I sense a closing-off, a retreating.

  My unresponsiveness. My inability to express, my unwillingness to play. It all begins to culminate into a debilitating anxiety. Maybe I’m not intoxicated enough. My body is just so exhausted.

  I’m now propping myself over him, balancing on my wrists and knees. It is at moments like these when the sex becomes literal; organs become organs inside and outside other organs. The action dies down to a stillness. You start to really listen.

  It’s either listen or disrupt the juncture. Be the one to move.

  Because it won’t be long until the landscape beyond the bed returns, before the desert fades into sharp angles and stark fluorescent lighting.

  “Sex talk is just not my forte,” I try to explain. “It’s one of those things that I don’t not like hearing—I mean, I think it can be really sexy sometimes, I really do. But I kind of freeze up. It’s like how I can’t read comic books—the text and the illustrations—they’re just way too much simultaneously. I get so overwhelmed that the page becomes one big blurry jumble of information and I end up not being able to see anything at all.”

  He taps me on the hip and I pull myself off him, bounce over to his left. We face each other sideways. He’s looking at me as if I am all the way across the room. He’s trying to figure me out.

  I reach over and touch his forearm. Nothing on his body responds.

  “I’m sorry.” I sigh.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “We just lost the jive, it happens.” He smiles awkwardly and closes his eyes, wraps his arm around my torso and pulls me in. I think of ten thousand things I could say at this moment, and another thousand I could do without saying. But instead I remain silent, still, wondering where the flask went.

  Adam moves over me like an alligator. His head rests on my stomach, his body extended and still. I am playing with his hair and he is playing “I’m-in-a-partial-coma.” He sprouts from my torso, a massive, heavy l
imb.

  We sink into the bed. About five minutes of silence pass.

  The failure of this art comes when the connection tricks me—as it never fails to do—when my body mistakes these practiced, unfeigned motions as love. When the feeling overwhelms the situation, when what art is supposed to induce in us and yet always, and forever, fails to—the boundaries collapse, the object disappears.

  And what’s left is the desire for the part of myself that I’ve just lost, now mistaken as him—the setting lingering before me like a mirage—the Lack that’s actually been inside me since the beginning.

  Upon returning home the following afternoon, I open my Mac-Book. I click on the camera icon and the live surveillance feed comes into view. A barren dirt flatbed fills the screen. Gone are the hedges and plants and grasses aligning our front and back lawns; only the larger trees remain, framing the plot like lonely skyscrapers.

  I slam my fist on the desk. Why don’t I feel anything? Perhaps my brain can’t process the house’s literal absence from this kind of distance?

  On my phone are two voicemails—one from Jesse, and the other, my dad. The deconstruction is completed—hooray!—and Jesse was able to salvage about sixty-five percent of the materials, which was much more than he expected, considering the overall damage. And my dad has invited me to dinner on his boat tomorrow night. By the blatant concern in his voice, it’s obvious Robby called him.

  I walk down the hall to Mal’s room, where I find her in the midst of unpacking from her retreat. I collapse onto her bed with gestured exaggeration.

  “How was the double truth weekend?” I ask.

  “Oh, very relaxing, very open …well, kind of odd, actually.”

  “Why was it odd?”

  “I don’t know—I think maybe I’m just done with retreats.”

  “What do you mean? What about your whole monologue about how useful they are? You almost had me convinced.”

  “They’re definitely useful, up to a certain point. Then you kind of realize that the rest of the work to be done is actually outside of the naked near-orgies—which are certainly marvelous in their own right, don’t get me wrong—but after a while they don’t really…I don’t know… satisfy?”

  “Speaking of orgies,” I say, “what’s the craziest thing that someone’s ever said to you during sex?”

  Mal pauses to consider this while folding a pair of bright turquoise leggings. “I want to murder you,” she says.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “I was like—how are you so absurdly good at this?”

  We both crack up.

  She asks me why the specific question and I spill the whole story about Adam, the Drog, and the desert, and then about Jesse and The Lacks and then the deconstruction’s whole anticlimactic finale. By the end of my diatribe she has her head in her hands, yanking down her face-skin in a gesture of dire distress.

  “My God, Sheila—that’s a lot for just two and a half weeks!”

  I moan into her furry bedspread.

  Her phone vibrates discordantly on a wooden desk. “Apparently the Oracle has something to say about this.” She clears her throat. “The angel of death functions, cold and conditionally, in canine worlds in the outskirts of the city.”

  “You know, it sounds sort of like blackout poetry,” I mumble.

  “What’s that?”

  I turn my head to the side. “It’s where you literally black out lines in a book to create poems out of already-existing words on a page—it’s a technique of appropriation that started in the sixties with the beat poets in North Beach.”

  Mal scrolls through the Oracle’s previous text messages with a stern look on her face. “No,” she shakes her head, “I will not accept that simple of an origin.”

  I laugh.

  “The Oracle can’t just be simplified to a random composition of words!”

  “I wonder what would happen if you sent it a selfie.”

  “Hmm, like a sexy selfie?”

  “Any kind of selfie,” I say.

  “I think that would kind of defeat the whole point.”

  A quiet knock resounds from behind Mal’s half-open door.

  “Yes?” says Mal, loudly.

  Dustin pokes his head in. “Have you guys seen the video?” His oily face glows with evident fascination.

  We simultaneously shake our heads no.

  He slithers in, guardedly, his feet invisible beneath his gaping jeans, and holds out his iPad for us to see. We hover around the screen. The caption says GOOGLE GLASS CAPTURES VIDEO OF MAN BEATING WOMAN IN SAN FRANCISCO BAR; it has over three million views. Dustin presses play. It is an eight-and-a-half minute video filmed from a woman’s Google Glass as she enters a bar in the Lower Haight District. A young, hipster-looking dude approaches the camera (the woman) holding a glass filled with what looks like vodka and soda, which splashes around as he gestures to us. He is obviously drunk. At first he starts poking fun at us—asking why we’re wearing such a stupid looking gadget. The woman’s voice at first responds jokingly as well, saying she works at a start up that gave her a free model to try out. When the teasing continues and becomes increasingly hostile, she asks him to politely leave her alone. The hipster—who is very, very drunk now—gets very, very angry, and begins to try to swipe them off our face. We swat at him, shouting hey—come on now! And he quickly becomes more violent. Do you think it’s fun to record us now? He starts to shout at us as he slaps us in the face, and the camera becomes shaky from us ducking and turning from side to side. A knee shoots up and into our stomach as we keel over, coughing. A crowd forms around us and tackles the man to the ground. Bodies shout obscenities—a few women try to go at the man, while others actually start screaming at the camera, shrieking that Google Glass is an invasion to their right to privacy. Then there’s a lot of static and commotion and the video shuts off.

  For a while none of us say anything.

  “I feel like there’s something large and terrible happening,” says Mal, softly. “I’ve felt it in this city for months. Something deep and dire that none of us can possibly control.”

  “Are you talking about gentrification?” Dustin sniffs.

  “I feel it, too,” I say. “The feeling that at any day, at any moment, something really horrible could happen.”

  Mal reaches out and strokes my arm.

  “Cities go through ebbs and flows,” says Dustin. “It’s just in the process of learning how to act now with all of this money at its disposal.”

  Mal glares at him.

  “What’s interesting about this woman,” he says, “is that she’s begun this sort of war that we haven’t really seen before. One of, like, civil rights and privatized technology. What are we allowed to document? Just as we walk down the street and observe life, do we not have the right to record it, and save it, and display it publicly to all? As technology becomes smaller and smaller, the boundaries between the public and private are beginning to disappear. It’s fascinating, really.”