The Fifth Wall: A Novel

by Rachel Nagelberg

  “Yes, like—what kind of experience are you, like, looking to have?”

  Michael Landy’s bloodshot eyes glimmer in the distance.

  Eli leans in quietly. The whole room pauses, as if a film on a screen. His eyes are penetrating, devilish. “Tell me,” he whispers, “do you think of yourself as doomed?”

  CLOSE ON SHEILA as she stands up, staggers backwards away from table. CONTRAZOOM as SHEILA begins to reevaluate the scene: CLOSE UPs on faces more clearly—the pale, sickly gray quality to WAXED MUSTACHE’s face; ELI’s facial stubble, eyeliner running, slobber all over his suit jacket, watching him nearly fall over, so high he can hardly sit up; MERCURY’s smudged leopard paint, cracked dry lips; MICHAEL LANDY’s bloodshot eyes, his wicked smile.

  FLASH CUTS to previously seen people in theater but now with gaudy make-up that’s dried, cracked, and smudged; eyes blazed; wrinkles in skin; bloated bellies. The AERIAL DANCER’s bulging veins. An UNATTRACTIVE MAN wearing a monocle grotesquely squeezing a DANCER’s exposed breast; a CLOSE UP of him licking her dark, engorged nipple.

  MICHAEL LANDY approaches SHEILA as she backs away in horror. He motions to her in elaborate gestures, his face contorting into monstrous expressions (MIT OUT SOUNDS of his voice so she’s only hearing her own internal TRACK of theater’s confused chaotic noises). MICHAEL LANDY tries to grasp SHEILA, but she pushes him away.

  SHEILA

  (shrieking)

  You’re all fucking

  imposters!

  The SOUND of an AUDIENCE laugh track.

  SHEILA

  You think you’re artists—but

  you’re all just actors!

  ELI

  (laughing)

  You still think that your

  fucking art comes from you.

  Can’t you see that you’re

  just a filter? A vessel for

  the ‘art’ to flow through.

  (pointing)

  You’re the fucking imposter,

  and you’ve known it all

  along.

  SHEILA

  (squeezing the sides of her head)

  Some things have to be real.

  All this is real, isn’t it?

  This is actually happening.

  SHEILA has the urge to tap her feet together three times.

  MICHAEL LANDY

  We can choose the ways we

  want to live.

  (snorts from Mercury’s necklace)

  But of course there’s always

  a risk involved.

  MERCURY

  The risk is the fun part.

  WAXED MUSTACHE

  (scribbling)

  Now, if you could be anyone,

  who would you choose?

  SHEILA

  (wildly)

  How am I supposed to play a

  role when I can’t even play

  the role of myself?

  ELI

  This is the magic of this city—a city of mirrors. The trick is when you think you’re lost, you’re actually always there, right fucking in front of yourself.

  SHEILA

  (nearly pulling out her hair)

  (to MICHAEL LANDY)

  I didn’t will it to happen.

  I never wanted it to happen.

  I walked in the door and

  there she was. It was a

  split second and then she

  pulled the trigger. What

  kind of world produces that

  kind of coincidence? What

  kind of world hands me that

  kind of guilt?

  I collapse into my seat, feel myself back in my living body, my whole being heaving with breath. I find myself telling the table my story—how I felt a pull to fly back west—like a ghost calling out to me, the future sending me a message. I tell it exactly like it happened. How I rode Mal’s bicycle up to the door, how I opened it and saw her pull the trigger. How the bike fell on top of me in this horrific moment, interrupting my processing, causing me to fall. Eli and Mercury listen intently, eyes widening as I continue my tale. Michael Landy nods—almost satisfyingly—while Waxed Mustache, enthralled, twirls his mustache. I tell them about the discovered brain tumor, and then about the deconstruction and the camera. How it all came to me as if in a nightmare in which I never awoke. How I’ve been having these moments in my life where I completely lose myself in my own trauma and act without knowing or remembering—how I’ve nicknamed them the Lacks. How I’ve never been able to say what actually happened out loud; I’ve been holding the truth in, grasping onto it for dear life, attracting violence everywhere, waiting for someone to save me.

  “This is fascinating,” says Eli.

  “It’s brilliant,” says Mercury.

  “This is in Berkeley, you say?” asks Michael Landy.

  I nod. Eli’s eyes widen. He downs the rest of his drink and slams it on the table.

  “The party bus!” he shouts, nearly choking. “Where the fuck is Rudolf?”

  Mercury puffs the e-cigarette. “He’s probably out back smoking a bowl.”

  I look at my phone to check the time, and then remember that it died hours ago.

  And we’re gliding downstairs, my arm being pulled by Eli, the sour smell of sweat and whiskey, charging through the masses—the drugged out dancers, the costumed audience. By now the magic of the room is dwindling; the pianist has his pants off, is bent down beneath the whip of a pudgy dominatrix while a small crowd gathers around. There’s a DJ on the stage now, bodies before him writhing, pulsating, in blinking electric blue and white lights. They look like they could be holograms. Eli leads us to a side door, where we’re stepping out into the dark, cavernous night. The outside air, a cool whip on my face and shoulders. The rumbling of an engine. We’re climbing on a school bus painted in swirling colors, a mural depicting thousands of eyes.

  “What’s the address, Sweetheart?”

  And I’m giving directions to a shaggy, meth-addict-looking man named Rudolf in the driver’s seat. I’m being pulled into the gutted monstrosity on wheels, its floor layered in velour carpeting, aligned with polyester pillows, faux-fur blankets, strings of Christmas lights, a swirling disco ball.

  Bump snort gag cough sniff trickle roar screech pan gurgle shriek laughter. Shadows immerse us. Bumpily we traverse overhangs, zoom through yellow lights. Like stage actors awaiting a performance in the wings; time becomes liminal, our mild conversation extraneous. Crossing the Bay Bridge feels like one great pause. A behind-the-scenes non-moment. Fingers and limbs everywhere. Bodily functions exaggerated; consumption, consumption. Higher and higher and—resume.

  The bus with a thousand eyes pulls up to Ground Zero with an abrupt halt; the screech of the emergency brake; the heavy sigh of the door clutch releasing. We all stumble down its stairs, nearly falling out onto the dirt that meets the road. Eli whoops with energy; Mercury howls at a brilliant full moon. “Could there be a more perfect night for this?” she screams.

  Rudolf sulks against the bus, lights a cigarette. “Am I fucking missing something?”

  The street is dark and deathly quiet, the only light from a dim streetlight and a porch a few properties away, with faint sounds of our footsteps echoing, the movement of trees, the rustling of bushes, unseen animals scurrying, lemons falling from branches.

  “There’s the camera!” Waxed Mustache points excitedly, and the group follows his lead. We stand over the mounted device, now covered in a thick layer of dust and dirt—Eli and Mercury oohing and ahhing—as if examining artifacts in a ruin from an ancient civilization.

  “Okay, okay,” Eli staggers to the middle of the plot, Mercury following behind him in a sheer purple robe. “Here—you be Sheila.” He flicks his wrist, motioning for her to retreat back to the start of the nonexistent path. “I’ll be the Mother.” Eli tries to balance but it appears increasingly hard for him to stand still without swaying; he keeps wiping away snot and drool from his face, his suit a wrinkled and dirty mess. “LISTEN UP,”
he shrieks. A dog barks in the background, echoes in the gaping stillness. “SHEILA ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?” Michael Landy and I approach the invisible stage they’ve created and plop down a few yards in front of them as the audience. I find that I am tongue-tied, and pinching myself, but I don’t seem to be feeling any pain. Behind us, Waxed Mustache inspects the camera, mumbling to himself about the year and the make, furiously scribbling who-knows-what into his notebook. “This thing is on, right?”

  “THE EARTH IS A TEMPLE OF DEATH AND THE DYING.” Eli dramatically cups his forehead. “I WAS GIFTED A BRAIN TUMOR TO END THE ILLUSION OF A MERCIFUL GOD.”

  Off to the side, Mercury claps her hands together, squealing with delight, jumping up and down, barefoot on the dry, rough dirt, her feet cracked and bleeding.

  I literally have no words for what’s happening—my head still a churning mixture of substances, my body a physical confusion of sentiments.

  As if given some cue, Mercury begins walking towards Eli, swaying her painted hips, thrusting her chest forward, feigning the motion of rolling a bicycle down an imaginary front path—meanwhile Eli paces around, expressing mixed emotions of consternation, misery, and terror on his face.

  “I’m going to surprise my mother,” Mercury half-sings in her purple cape, like Little Red Riding Hood in a film adapted to an NC-17 porno.

  “Why are they doing this?” I manage to whisper to Michael Landy, who grips my hand tightly and holds it against his chest.

  “It looks like they’re reenacting it so that you don’t have to.”

  “WHO AM I?” Eli is screaming. “NOW THAT MY BRAIN IS BEING INVADED. DO I LET IT TAKE ME, OR DO I TAKE MYSELF FIRST?”

  Mercury opens the invisible door on the invisible wall to the invisible house. Eli shoots himself in the head with his hand, feigns falling to the ground, aggressively twitching before lying still. Mercury gasps, then falls over herself, landing on Eli with the terrifying sound of dead weight. A moment of deep silence passes. Then Mercury lets out an enormous burp and they burst into a fit of hysterics, Eli wailing with laughter, clutching his stomach.

  “Curtain!” he shrieks through the laughter. “Curtain!”

  “These people are sickening.” I say. “You people are fucking sick!” I scream.

  The creaking of a door, footsteps on concrete. “I’m calling the police!” A neighbor shouts.

  “FUCK YOU!” I scream back, now standing up and pacing back and forth.

  Eli’s doubled-over, trying to stand up, attempting to calm himself and Mercury from their drugged-out giddiness. “Let’s fucking bolt,” he staggers, “—but wait,” he pauses, unzips his pants, barely getting his flaccid penis out before he starts pissing on the ruin.

  Michael Landy covers his eyes. “You sick fuck,” he says, grinning. “You’re still a two-year-old, Eli.”

  Eli tries to give Michael Landy the finger, but stumbles and nearly pees on himself, while Mercury squats beside him, urinating a heavy stream.

  “Oh yeah, now that’s kinda hot.”

  Mercury succeeds in giving Michael Landy the finger.

  “Um—Sheila?”

  “What?” I look up at Waxed Mustache, knelt over by the camera.

  “I think I may have just… turned it off.”

  I stare at him.

  “I was just checking it out for a second, and then the batteries fell out, and now they’re all covered with dirt, and—”

  An abrupt wave of nausea—I fall to the ground and start to heave.

  Rudolf yells from the driver’s seat, “I’m outta here in thirty seconds—y’all better get on the bus, or have fun with the poh-leese.”

  A darkness consumes me, fills up my chest, energy pulsating through my limbs, rising up through my stomach, my throat near-gagging from some invisible mass—like a retching cat coughing up a hairball—and I’m hurling up my insides—acidic, bitter, clumped and tangy—my body merely a vessel designed to release all this accumulated weight.

  Moans escape from my system. I rock back and forth on my knees, fluid streaming from all my facial orifices.

  “Sheila, come on,” Michael Landy grabs my arm and drags me to the bus, my body now sagging behind him, feeling so, so drained—so light now—and so, so tired. I hear the others behind me bickering, shuffling onto the steps, the engine crackling, heating the interior—the bus a terrifying womb abrasively rocking me to sleep.

  I dream of a vast snowy landscape in the pitch-blackness of unconsciousness, night. Pointed castles formed of ice and snow border the horizon, towering like massive stalagmites in the foreboding setting. My mother, father, Caleb, and I trek along the icy ashen ground until we approach the entrance of a cave. The cave’s entrance is tall, but tight, like the stretching of an open wizard’s mouth. A blizzard whirls around us. Ambient bass sounds echo in the backdrop. I know that there is evil here. We climb cautiously into the snow-paved tunnel on some silent, mutually acknowledged mission. I look ahead, trying to spot a reason to retreat, and have a vision of how far the end is, knowing no one else can see. Time shifts and space moves forward rapidly, and we are approaching the end, heaving, shivering, breathing deeply into the night. My mother’s way ahead of us, approaching the precipice of the path, descending down into a ruin surrounded by lava. No, Mom, stop! Caleb and I are screaming from the top of the precipice. But it’s as if she can’t even hear us. She continues to walk, slowly down, as if caught in the pull of a witch’s spell. My eyes focus on the setting below in the arena-like ruin, where I spot what my mother is walking towards. It’s a living copy of herself, gray-skinned and dressed in rags, blood leaking from her head all the way down her body, half of her face torn apart, open and dripping. MOM, we are screaming through the popping lava, PLEASE MOM, COME BACK. But there’s no stopping her. She’s already gone. She’s chosen her own doom.

  CALEB

  Sheila, r u OK? Tonight in ceremony I felt a huge shift—I was traveling through the depths of space, amongst the most complex of crystalline fractal palaces, consuming vibrant pulsating colors with a clarity I can’t even begin to describe… and I burst through this wall of healing Sheils—it was the most beautiful thing I ever felt. I was flying through space at a speed that felt not fast but at this perfect timing with my interior body, this sort of underworld to all the sickness blasting through me like a secret unveiling of the light behind the darkness. It swarmed through my whole body—this light, this TRUTH, working its way into the folds of my organs and bones and right as it almost filled me up right before it burst through my skin is when I saw ur face. I had a vision. It showed me ur soul. Ur frail spirit. It told me that u thought u were going to die. I felt ur spirit’s sorrow. I held ur shadow to my chest. I tried to transfer the healing to u—I concentrated so, so hard. I sent u all the love I had. And then I exploded, I lost my body, I lost ur body. Our cells and memories opened up into a swirling galaxy, collapsing into one another, freeing us to the stars!!! I spent a long while spiraling in this bliss, discovering what it means to truly exist. I will have to tell u more in person. These messages can’t possibly translate it. But when I came out of it a voice told me that I needed to check in w/u. That u were really in need right now. My flight back to the states isn’t for another few weeks, but I want u to know that if u need me, I can leave at a moment’s notice. I’m sorry that I was so checked out before. I didn’t have any room.

  Streaming outside light. Sharp reflection, open window. Brown watermarks on ceiling. Polyester blanket barely covering adjacent collapsed body—nude, facedown. Breathing, yes. My shirt on, jeans on, but unbuttoned, socks on (mostly good signs), location of shoes unknown. Slippery brain. Increased heartbeat. Thirst. A strong scent of frying oil from the street. A toilet upstairs flushing. The aftertaste of bile. A clock on the wall. 7:33 A.M. Skull pounding.

  Quietly muster strength to roll off bed. Locate shoes. Take one last look at Michael Landy’s squished face, drooling onto pillowcase. Note: this will not happen again.

  Dead
phone in pocket. Wallet and keys in jacket. Locate front door. Unlock. Escape.

  The day enters. Chinatown in the light—a much different experience. The hustle and bustle of restaurants and businesses opening, sizzling pans, beating butcher blocks, shuffling items outdoors for display. The commotion is calmer, gentler, lacking the anxiety that slithers in with the night. I take a deep breath, collect the air deep within my belly and hold it for a moment, before releasing it back to the world.

  As I walk through the narrow streets towards the nearest Muni stop, I notice a new lightness—like a tiny pinhole in my brain—releasing the smallest stream of air; an ever-so slight shift in the nature of things. The feeling—like a sort of relief—that the worst is—quite possibly—over. Or, rather, that it couldn’t get any worse than this.

  The bus pulsates, takes a detour around a closed off street with some outdoor urban market. The doors open. 16th and Mission BART Station, the epicenter of the Mission District’s wasteland. I watch through the window. Bodies missing teeth, missing limbs, arched backs, yelling, shouting, smeared with dirt and sweat, urine and feces, a conglomeration of human decay. A city worker in a gas mask sprays a hose into the public restroom. A Mexican woman shouts into a microphone attached to a portable speaker—Jesus Cristo! Tu salvacion! She’ll stand in this horrific intersection all day, screaming. The pauses in her rough voice where she gasps for air. Wondering, where is this all coming from? This energy, this belief, this drive to engage the outside world through violence.

  A riled teenager mounts the rear steps blasting rap music from her smartphone, fills the bus with her disturbed energy, takes a seat in the back with a loud thwack. A small older man wearing a workman’s jumpsuit carries a bright orange hard hat to the seat across from me, revealing a gray birthmark that stretches over almost half the right side of his sunburned face. The bus gears up, throbs with movement. I lean against the window, feeling the vibrations charge through my body. The bus stops and releases.

  Open doors. External movement.

  “Mind if I sit here?”

  I glance up at a wobbly, grinning young male carrying a Pink Floyd album and an open container in a brown paper bag.