The Fifth Wall: A Novel

by Rachel Nagelberg

  “Before anybody asks it, the answer to the most predominant question I receive is—No, my sculptures are not walls.”

  The audience laughs, though I’m not sure why this is funny. Why couldn’t the sculpture be a wall if it was the spectator’s experience of a wall? Isn’t that what his whole fucking lecture was about?

  Adam nudges me and nods toward the exit; I follow him—squeezing around knees and pointy shoes and up the aisle, through the main lobby, and outside into brisk air and a darkening city.

  Adam lights up a cigarette. I watch him inhale it with his whole body, his skin absorbing its smoky gray sheen.

  “No Q and A?” I lean against a railing.

  Adam paces along the concrete. “Q and A’s a joke. You know that.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  He looks at me with that expression I recognize so suddenly that it hollows my stomach—that look of inexplicable inquiry, as if he’s assessing my thought patterns, coding my emotions into a categorical script. It feels like there’s a camera pointed at me.

  Neither of us says anything. Sirens resound in the distance, growing louder for a moment and then receding into muted echoes, mixing back in with the steady hum of downtown traffic. The wine pulls my brain in different directions. My ankles feel loose and wobbly. I watch a man whisper something into a woman’s ear, her face expanding with each word until she bursts with a cackle.

  Adam pulls a hard drag and tosses the butt on the ground; a thin line of smoke wavers up, disappearing into the atmosphere.

  “I gotta go take a piss,” he says.

  I watch him disappear into the building.

  Leaning against the railing quickly becomes uncomfortable, so I shift to standing, and suddenly I’m immersed in a pocket of cool air that sends shivers up my bare arms and neck. A new awareness enters—I feel naked in the space around me, feel the lack of action and purpose in my stance—my empty hands, having nothing to hold, drink, smoke … it’s times like these when I sincerely wish I liked cigarettes, when every eye feels like its focused on me, every object becomes a witness to my inability to hold my own space, to gain control of the situation, to stand strong in the midst of some sort of belief system I’m supposed to have created just by being alive. But instead all my thoughts feel fraudulent, fickle, and insincere.

  What the fuck is Adam’s problem?

  These past few weeks all I’ve wanted was to please him, to embody an image of this terrifying artist he projected onto me the moment we reunited in this very place—almost the exact space I’m standing right now, alone.

  I burst through the main lobby and head towards the restrooms. I pace amongst a few groups of loitering, also anti-Q and A individuals discussing the lecture approvingly, or at least that’s how it feels—like everyone in this materialist, multibillion-dollar hellhole adheres to a certain kind of “high art” discourse, fashions their opinions around a collective intellectualism defining what is and isn’t good art. Let me tell you something—I hear my father’s famous phrase activate my stream of thoughts—the way you look at me, Adam, feels like a knife being plunged into the essence of my being—the way you push and pull and always have, finding glimpses of some part of yourself in me you feel you’ve lost, and the second I rebel from that image you fucking cowardly turn away.

  A dark figure swishes in my sight’s periphery and I catch the back of Adam’s jacket vanishing through the exit door to the side staircase, leading to the lower atrium.

  Where the fuck is he going?

  I dart behind him, following his quick footsteps down the stairs and emerge into the atrium housing the massive, slithering Band. The sculpture towers above the ground, a magnificent fluid ribbon. “Adam?” I call out, spotting a dark body wind around the gleaming orange edge. I follow the echoes of his movement, running my fingers along the cold steel surface of its flawless curvature, each piece mathematically constructed to balance atop one another without welding, as if steel were a durable material you could mold with your hands. “Adam?” I call out again. The tapping of his boots echo on the concrete; they resound with what sounds like the opposite side of the sculpture, but from all the echoing, it’s difficult to really tell. I continue to move along the contorting wall, experiencing the changes in space that the steel structure provokes, becoming lost along its labyrinthine body, the ground feeling no longer fixed. You might have the concern that you’re walking back in the same direction that you came from, but you’re not…

  “I thought it might be you.”

  Startled, I whip around to the voice—a tall, gangly body mimicking my gesture along the steel surface with his hand, his face enveloped in the shadow of the sculpture’s curve. “How did you…” I look behind me and then back at him. He slides towards me along the metal as I walk backwards, his face now coming into the light.

  “How did I what?”

  “Oh my God—,” I jump back, cupping my hands to my mouth. The artist Michael Landy grins wide. I start to nervously giggle. Have I been following Michael Landy this whole fucking time?

  “I haven’t seen you in ages. I’d planned to run into you, but you seemed to just vanish like the Drog.”

  “Well here I am, coincidentally,” I pause, “right back where I started.”

  “Ah,” Michael Landy smiles. “So you heard.”

  “The basics,” I say, continuing to look around for Adam as we move incrementally along the sculpture. I really could have sworn it was him. “Did you figure out the problem?”

  Adam’s uncanny clone shrugs. “Something happened in the wiring—to be frank, we’re not exactly sure. I had to dismantle him. My partners shipped another prototype from L.A.—a smaller version, one of the earlier models. It’s not as exciting, but it’ll have to do. It’s still, you know, press.”

  “A human error in the end then, I suppose.”

  He stares at me intensely. “We are human because we’re defective.”

  “What are you doing down here anyway?” I nearly shout at him, feeling overwhelmed and flustered, pulsating with built-up adrenaline for a confrontation with another man.

  He eyes me mischievously. “I came to get some air, some space to think. There’s something about being in the presence of a great object that has no other purpose but to be. It balances the advanced circuitry of the brain, don’t you think?”

  I stare at him. Around a curve we bend and dip, absorbed in the sculpture’s imposing utterance—I take it all in, feeling this grand presence of icy steel in my bones.

  “There’s something about you.” In the light, Michael Landy looks worn out and haggard, his dark eyes reflecting off the sculpture in a glowing orange-red.

  “Oh?”

  “Something charged. Something desperate. Something wild. I’m very sensitive to energies. Often I can see auras. Yours—,” he reaches his hand towards me, squinting his eyes, “—ah, precisely…yours is a luminous red.” An enormous grin spreads across his face. Loose curls fall against his forehead. “Red, the life-blood force. The color of survival, action, anger, and love—of revolution.”

  “Are you sure it’s not just the reflection of the sculpture?”

  “I felt it the day I met you. It drew me towards you. This compelling energy. Very masculine, and yet exceedingly sexual.”

  He shifts closer to me, his face now only a few inches from mine, and I stare up at this bizarre creature—his expression gleaming, pulsating, alive with a similar sort of energy that he just described, though terribly invasive.

  “What are you so afraid of?” he whispers.

  His question echoes deep into my body, penetrates my every cell. We inch around Band’s curves like slinking centipedes, shadowed and unshadowed in its slick, sweeping metal. Whether it’s the alcohol, my depression, or the presence of some invigorating aura—I feel gripped with a racing terror. I rush to check and see if Adam’s called or texted, but the screen is black and dead; recently it’s been doing that, dying suddenly, even if nearly fully
charged. I feel like slamming it against the wall.

  “Hey, let’s say we get out of here—?” Skin brushes my wrist. “Have you eaten yet?”

  My focus switches to my stomach, and I register that I haven’t ingested much all day besides some Ritz crackers and bland cheese before the lecture, and a bottle of cheap Zinfandel. I shake my head, feeling the hollow in my stomach.

  And he’s calling an Uber. He’s leading me up the staircase towards a terrifying city. He’s saying he knows a hidden gem with the best dumpling soup in town, close to the Airbnb he’s been renting in Chinatown—evidence that he does, in fact, leave the museum. But now we’re stopping in the stairwell; he’s frantically searching through his pockets. He’s pulling out a tiny plastic baggie filled with a fine, snow-white powder. I hope you don’t mind, he is saying, I’ve also invited my dear friend, Molly. His grin is like the Cheshire’s. He’s inserting the tip of a key into the powder and thrusting it up into his right nostril, inhaling grotesquely, rubbing the excess powder around both nostril cavities. Something about his smile feels artificial, infected—as if masking a great dread that permeates this scene. But the temptation intensifies the second I see his body shudder gratifyingly, lights a burning ember in my chest. I lick my finger and dip it into the bag, then shove it in my mouth, cringing from the bitter, acidic taste.

  But where is Adam?

  “This is the purest of the pure,” Michael Landy is saying. “None of that rat poison bullshit. This is Silk Road pure—the finest MDMA Bitcoin can buy!”

  Almost instantly I feel my awareness changing, my body tingling, my chest opening up in a massive fluttering, the setting around me pulsating with new waves and flows, the darkness in my perception altering—a new aura of possibility. Michael Landy’s face glows with near-deafening charisma; I feel his fierce energy all over me.

  Fuck Adam Black.

  What am I so afraid of?

  The restaurant is crowded and bustling; a young waiter runs back and forth between packed tables—obviously the owner’s offspring or some close relation—while two women manning the register also rush steaming food from the small kitchen window to random tables in what appears to be no logical or working system—just pure, gastronomic chaos. The lighting surrounds us with a harsh yellow; the smells of bone broth, fried meats, over-steeped green tea, fresh white rice. Metal silverware clinks on water glasses and ceramic plates; paper placemats dampen and tear from watermarks; wooden chopsticks scrape together. I stare at my humongous bowl of bulbous dumplings floating in a thick, oily broth with deafening, over-joyous hunger. A tall frozen glass of Singha tastes refreshing after the heat of soup; Michael Landy orders more cool, cloudy sake for the table. Hot and cold, hot and cold. I feel charged with what feels like a heavy light—not a lightness that’s peaceful, but feels directive, and all-consuming—as if controlling my perception with a heavy, monstrous hand.

  “What I love about Chinatown,” Landy chews and talks, “is how it feels like it’s its own separate world. A different culture, a different language, a different pace—like it’s somehow severed from real time, existing alongside of it! I feel a great—,” he conjures with his hands, takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, inhales, “—presence in this community—something deep and lurking beneath the bustling city streets, behind these run-down store fronts and trash-filled alleyways—like a three-headed dragon asleep for thousands of years, hidden below concrete, just waiting to be jarred awake.” He looks around suspiciously, eyes widening.

  Behind us, the door to the restaurant opens and closes, cool air coming and going, the constant ringing of a bell.

  I find myself nodding crazily. “Perhaps that’s what’s causing all the earthquakes. A dragon rustling beneath San Francisco, stirring in his sleep.”

  Michael Landy smiles. “Just imagine this city reacting to a disaster on that kind of level.”

  “The dragon level?”

  We both crack up.

  “I expect we’d do exactly what New York did in the aftermath of September 11th,” he says.

  “Which was what?”

  “Call Hollywood, obviously.”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “But doesn’t it make the most sense? Who else in this country has experience with disasters on that type of a scale?”

  I tell him about the real government webpage for the Zombie Apocalypse that Mal showed me the other day, with literal steps and courses of action on how to proceed in case of emergency. How it exists, seriously, without any irony or self-reference to its own fiction.

  “Propaganda!” Michael Landy downs a shot of sake and waves me off.

  Clatters and clinks resound in the restaurant in jarring patterns. I feel the weight of zealous consumption surrounding us—humans reduced to grotesque creatures, mouths buried in bowls, slurping questionably sourced ingredients, screeching in harsh, drawn-out vowels—the pure noises and sounds of the living.

  “What’s more interesting to me are drones,” Michael Landy is saying. “All of a sudden drones are everywhere—shipping our packages, filming aerial porn in epic landscapes, flooding social media like a virus. It’s hilarious!”

  “Why is it hilarious?”

  He guffaws. “I’m surprised at you. Don’t tell me you haven’t spotted the most textbook example of blatant propaganda!”

  I shake my head.

  Michael Landy exaggerates a loud sigh. “Obviously it’s all a ploy to acclimate Americans to drone flights over civilian territory.”

  A catchy rap song immediately enters my brain. “That drone cool, but I hate that drone—chocolate chip cookie dough in a sugar cone. Drones in the morning, drones in the night. I’m trying to find a pretty drone to take home tonight.” I tap my fingers on my leg to the beat, though I can’t seem to synchronize the two properly.

  “You know, this is all precisely what the Drog plays on,” he’s saying, “—using this feared war technology to create an instrument that sees and feels without actually seeing and feeling. The interactive social experiment becomes how the viewers respond to the machine’s assessment of them—an assessment way beyond the powers of our natural senses. It produces real terror and fear.”

  I glare at him. “You planned the whole escape scenario, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Then how else does a machine just disappear and somehow avoid all the security cameras? Where was it hiding? And how did it end up exactly where it started?” I feel my hands shaking, my teeth grinding, my brain moving a mile a minute. “There’s no other logical explanation.”

  “Why, there’s violence merely in the Drog’s existence. You have to remember that this isn’t a new invention—the model that it’s replicated from has existed for more than a few years now. Its usage in the military is publically documented in both Iraq and Afghanistan. My mere gesture of copying it and displaying it in a prestigious museum for others to look at as art is in itself a very violent action.”

  “It’s contributing to its propaganda.”

  Michael Landy clasps his hands together. “That’s exactly what it’s doing. It’s revealing and mimicking the whole concept, but outlandishly so. What happened in the museum—when the Drog escaped—was merely a coincidence, but a coincidence of the highest order. An effect that I couldn’t have planned better if I tried. The machine came alive in a way I’ve never seen before. In a way that I, or anyone at my company, has yet to understand. But the moment when coincidences start to happen, a whole new world opens up, and if you look closely—take them as signs—only then can you see what the world at large has to offer.”

  I stare at him.

  “We willed the Drog to escape, is what I’m trying to say, Sheila. It manifested our deepest desires!”

  I think about that awfully sunny day just over three months ago when I walked Mal’s bike up the inclined driveway, along the cobblestone pathway to the door. I propped the bike on my shoulder, I opened the front glass door. I pushed in the
wooden door. I watched my mother pull the trigger.

  Did I will it to happen? The pull I’d felt was definitely real—the strong desire to come home. Would it have happened if I hadn’t bought the ticket? If I’d decided to call first to let her know I was coming, to let her know that I was there?

  “There’s nothing more relevant today than fear.” Michael Landy pours us each more sake to the brim of our minuscule glasses. His mouth seems to be moving at a speed faster than his voice. “Most of us don’t even realize that we live with this ever-constant notion of doom—we all subconsciously know that we’ve extended the resources of our planet well beyond their possible usages. Fear is a response that’s been preserved throughout evolution—working up to this very point in time for its optimal usefulness. It’s only a matter of time now, with more and more cancers, ecological disasters, the ticking clock of nuclear weapons …”

  Earlier this morning I’d been listening to a podcast about how in Pakistan, they shuttle their nukes from station to station in, quite literally, trucks on the streets. How right now a band of lunatics could be hijacking the world’s most powerful and deathly weapons. A nuclear bomb could go off at any moment, but for some reason we’re not talking about this all the time. We don’t seem to be doing anything.

  “I think we crave it, this fear,” I’m saying to him. “We crave it without even knowing it. And this feels like the scariest part.”

  “Well sure, we want fear—its thrill, its stimulation—but without its consequences, of course. The excitement of danger without the danger itself. That’s the American way! And it’s simply the best way to employ a system of power.”

  “But fear drives people to do horrible things …” My eyes feel like they’re popping out of my skull.

  “It’s when the desire to live kicks in, Sheila. Where do you think all this technology comes from? Fear of death. The ultimate fear. What The Last Art is all about! Our fear has brought us to the point where we’re quite literally transcending our limitations, well on our way to becoming—well—dare I say, Gods? I mean, why do you think ‘superfoods’ are becoming so popular? We’re preparing our bodies to go up into space! Technology has become a secondary force of evolution—we’ve successfully combined our thumbs with our brains to the point where we’re manifesting our imaginations, reverse-engineering life. Artificial systems are behaving more and more like natural systems—we’re finding the patterns in brain waves to match up with the layouts of city structures, which matches up with the physical structures of microscopic bacterium, which matches up with fucking dark matter … these coincidences aren’t accidents.”