The Fifth Wall: A Novel

by Rachel Nagelberg

  “It’s a free country,” I sigh.

  He falls into our conjoined seats, sips from the bottle, its label peaking out, Bulleit Bourbon. “Check this out—,” he thrusts the album in front of me, the iconic prism in dark space. “I found this two blocks up, just lying on the street.”

  “Cool,” I nod.

  He shuffles around. “You know, I’m not crazy.”

  I look at him. “I never said you were.”

  His eyes are bright hazel, gaping. “I’m not stupid either.”

  “I’m really not judging you.”

  “You want some?” He holds out the Bulleit.

  I shake my head. “No thanks. It’s a little too early for me.”

  “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know, my phone’s dead. But probably around eight.”

  “You going to work?”

  “No.”

  “You going home from work?”

  “No.”

  “You’re mysterious.” He burps. “Ugh, sorry.”

  The bus halts, honks at a cyclist. The cyclist zooms by. You must all pay your fair share, says the robotic recording.

  “I had a really long night.” He smooths back his shaggy, oily hair.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I don’t really remember much except I’ve been trying to sit down somewhere for a while. Everywhere I sit, people just keep telling me to move.”

  “Sorry.”

  He looks at me with a squinty, boyish smile. “Thanks for listening to me.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “No, really.” His bright eyes become glassy.

  I stare at him.

  “I’m not crazy, you know.” Tears start rolling down his face. The bus halts. The album falls on the floor. He picks it up, sniffling. “I’m not one of those people.”

  The man with the birthmark is looking at us. A woman laughs loudly on her phone.

  “It’s okay.” My body quietly shakes. I feel this guy’s sorrow bleeding into me. He wipes his nose on his sleeve, trying his hardest not to identify with the unsightly manner of his crying. “It’s okay.” I place my hand on his bony shoulder and he immediately starts bawling. He flings his arms around me. “I’m so sorry,” he’s sobbing into my neck. “I don’t mean to be this way. I really don’t.” His stink permeates my nostrils as I awkwardly and unwillingly provide support for this weeping stranger, all my senses heightened and telling me DANGER DANGER DANGER. I hear the teenager in the back slam her foot on the floor, muttering something angrily; she turns up the volume on her phone. A woman in business dress frowns behind sunglasses. The man with the birthmark stares at me without expression. The beats through the small speaker’s static. The body in my arms shakes uncontrollably. I feel his deep sadness in my bones. “It’s okay,” I whisper to him. “Shh, shh,” I close my eyes, rubbing his back in smooth, heavy motions, trying to contain myself. “Don’t worry, now. Okay? It’s going to be okay.”

  Inside the apartment, I find Mallory sitting at the kitchen counter in her pajamas with a cup of tea and her iPad. I plug in my phone and fill a French press with coffee grounds that I first spill all over the counter, then use her leftover hot water to pour over it, which only fills it halfway. I plop down on a barstool beside her, groaning.

  “You look apocalyptic,” she says. A truly fitting description. “I’m worried about you.”

  “I know, I can feel that from you. And I appreciate it,” I say.

  “What’s the status of the whole project now?”

  “Well the deconstruction’s complete, but the camera broke, so I think it’s pretty much over.”

  “What are you going to do with the footage?”

  “I don’t know. Save it, bury it, shoot it up into space?”

  “You never know, it might be the most sought after piece in your retrospective one day.”

  “My retrospective, ha ha.”

  Mal shrugs, yawning. For the first time since sitting down I notice dark circles under her eyes, a paleness to her skin.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  She sips her tea and places it down, biting her cheeks. “I had a really crazy thing happen to me last night.”

  “Oh?”

  She tells me she was walking home late from work—sometime after midnight—with her keys between her fingers like usual (she’d once had a run-in with an intoxicated man who pushed her up against a wall and knew her name—a customer who once sat at the bar for four hours not ordering anything, muttering comments about her body, whom had to be escorted out by the police—who she’d then kneed in the balls, and, out of fear, ran home before she could report it), and she was walking past a Muni stop, when a timid female voice asked her what time it was. Mal says she stopped, checked the time on her phone, and turned to the woman, who was dressed in layers of ripped clothing and smelled like a dead animal. The woman smiled with jack-o-lantern teeth. “Mallory?” she whispered. And Mallory stared into the woman’s eyes, searching for familiarity, while gripping her keys.

  “And I realized,” she says to me, “It was my Aunt Millie.” She grasps her forehead. “My Aunt Millie who spent years in and out of halfway houses, who my Irish Catholic grandfather shunned from the family—my parents used to have her over when I was little once in a while for a meal and a shower, but that ended when she tried to pawn my mother’s heirloom diamond earrings—anyway, I was like, Oh my God, you remember me after all these years? And she just nodded. I asked her if she was okay, and she said yes. She asked how my parents were, and I gave her the basics, and then we just stood there for what felt like a half an hour, just looking at each other, her hands cupped on my cheeks, smiling with this pure joy. When I got home I started bawling.”

  “Wow,” I stare at her. “Did you know she was still alive?”

  Mallory shakes her head. “This city, I tell you—it’s so easy to lose yourself in, but you always turn up somewhere.”

  You might have the concern that you’re walking back in the same direction that you came from, but you’re not.

  “What does the Oracle have to say about it?” I ask.

  She smiles, reaching in her pajama pocket for her phone. “I actually got a really good one earlier this morning.”

  I lean over her shoulder as she reads the text out loud. “What is needed is OBLIVION. This is a time for either total despair, or madness. Create, create, die, and repeat. Then set this language on fire.”

  “The Oracle’s becoming meta,” I say.

  Mallory nods, laughing, clutching the phone to her heart in a gesture of deep gratitude.

  Outside, the sound of a child falling. The consoling murmur of a teacher. The sounds of walking canes.

  “And what about you?” Mallory says. “Weren’t you going to a lecture?”

  It’s about looking at the whole—the here and the void simultaneously. It’s a different way of remembering.

  I look at her, knowing that I have to tell my brother about our house. And perhaps my dad, at some point. They both deserve to know.

  The counter vibrates. My phone returning to life. Suspended messages now recovering, like traces of the dead. The uncertainty and unknowns of Adam possibly only an app away. But, oddly, I find myself disinterested. Adam and I ended that night in the desert; we’d just both been too weak to admit it.

  “Oh—by the way,” Mal reaches over to a side drawer in the cabinet adjacent to the bar. “That hot contractor came by the other day and dropped off something for you.”

  “Jesse?”

  “Yeah, that sounds about right. Little frame, big muscles, a bit too friendly.”

  “That’s Jesse.”

  “I was in a rush out the door, and it looked kind of dirty so I just tossed it in this drawer, and kept forgetting about it.”

  “What is it?”

  She hands me a plastic bag wrapped around a hard, heavy mass. I open the bag and the object is caked in soil. It looks like a metal canister of some sort.


  “He said one of his ‘guys’ found it while digging up one of the shrubberies. He thought you might want it.”

  Confused, I look more closely at the object.

  “Holy fuck,” I say.

  “What?”

  “It’s the time capsule—the one from the video.”

  Mal leans over, inspects the contents of the bag. “Well shit.”

  I stare silently at the sooty object for a few moments, trying to imagine what my mother might have put in it. The video only showed a glimpse of her cutting strips of white paper. What could she have possibly been making? Miniature origami? Some bizarre, blank collage? A fear enters—that whatever’s inside the box won’t be good enough. No physical object could possibly sustain the importance of what should be inside of it—could make any part of what’s happened okay.

  “Are we waiting for some sort of audience?” Mallory holds up her hands.

  I shut the bag, wrap it tightly around the time capsule, and place it on the counter.

  “I’m not ready to look at it,” I say.

  There are coincidences, and then there are consequences. We attract the realities around us by our actions, with our energies and intentions.

  The show is happening all around us.

  We write our own dialogues, record our own voiceovers. We act from bodies with minds we think of as ours, on staged sets we call reality, until a glitch happens, and we lose control.

  But did we ever really have it in the first place?

  I enrolled in a graduate art program to continue a journey of intellectualizing the world—what I’d always considered a raw talent, but now think of as a flaw I was infected with in the womb. A lack of agency, of will, encoded like a glitch in my rebellious organism.

  How to make a life for one’s self now, knowing of the presence of this deep dragon deep within me, awoken permanently from its slumber, breathing fire onto everything I thought I knew?

  I’m not sure that I can go back.

  In a few days I’ll receive an email containing the data translation of my body in organized charts of letters and numbers. The full decryption of my living system; a scientific Oracle handing me my future. I’ll read between the lines for patterns and signs, some indication—some clue to the secrets of my chemistry, of this Lack that permeates my existence—the constant feeling that I’m missing something just beneath the surface—that if I remembered just one more detail, I’d wake up from a great fog of amnesia—a theatrical light falling from an empty blue sky, the glimpse of a white rabbit in the corner of my eye—I’d remember what everything around me has been training me to forget.

  I’ll finally understand. This body will speak.

  It’s the hero who always speaks the last word before dying, I hear my father in my head quoting Barthes. But there are no heroes anymore. All we have are recordings.

  The film furrows and chafes. Black and white lines zigzag on the color image. My mother looks directly at the camera. Her face becomes large and bright, like the sun. Her lips curve up to the left. My dad asks her a question, and she answers it. Both voices are deep, growling hums—robotic, unearthly, alien—the tape’s own language of absence, signals piercing through the noise, waning with each play. My mother looks directly at the camera, as if she’s looking right at me—a face that holds such power over any memory, her ghostly image coordinates drifting in the horizontal streaks, soon to be lost to the static.

  So beautiful in all their terror.

  Acknowledgments

  I am deeply indebted to Stephen Beachy for his dedicated time, interest and guidance at all various stages of this book. His intellectual generosity and spirited intuition were (and continue to be) simply invaluable. I also deeply thank The Lighthouse Works Fellowship for providing me six weeks on an island of winter bliss with an incomparable artist community, during which I rewrote nearly two thirds of the final draft.

  Thanks so much to my agent, Priscilla Reagan, for her hard work and relentless cheer and humor (and to Bill Creighton for our introduction). And many thanks to my editor at Black Sparrow Books, Chelsea Bingham, for her strong support and belief in my work.

  Thank you to Lewis Buzbee and Nina Schuyler for their direction and encouragement during the early stages of this book, and to my fiction writing workshops at the University of San Francisco for their instrumental feedback and discussions.

  I am particularly grateful to Anthony Baab for our many conversations about contemporary art, not to mention the most stunning book cover. And to Courtney Moreno, Tiffany Wong, Audrey Baker, Michael Rebinski, Michael R. Jacobs, Gray Tol-hurst, Ariella Robinson, Bradley Fest, Bill Stubler and Christine Hellberg for their consistent interest, insights and ears. And a special thanks to Robert Lee Haycock for his expert art museum knowledge, and also to Chuck Kinder for his continuous good humor, encouragement and support. Moreover, thank you to countless other friends and family who have supported and inspired me along the way.

  A heartfelt and endlessly expansive thanks to Daniel Martin for his constant care, wisdom and support during much of the process of writing this book; without his involvement in my life, I honestly don’t know where or how I would be today.

  And lastly, thank you from the bottom of my heart to Michaelangelo—his endless love, support, intellect, wisdom and magic have been quite frankly the portal to my wildest dreams.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY ARIELLA ROBINSON

  RACHEL NAGELBERG is an American novelist, poet, and conceptual artist living in Los Angeles. The Fifth Wall is her debut novel.