The Fifth Wall: A Novel

by Rachel Nagelberg

  Mal clears her throat. “So you think this violence is a good thing? This poor woman—albeit a stupid fucking idiot for thinking she could walk into McCormick’s wearing Google Glass—deserves to be beaten up for the sake of modern day society? Isn’t that always the argument for violence against women—we become this sort of archetype that’s useful in storytelling later on?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying at all. I don’t see it as good or bad.” Dustin looks at me for help, and I signal him a brief look of commiseration. “It’s just very telling, is all. The whole fact that this was all caught on camera.”

  “And from a first person point of view,” I add, quietly.

  Mal gives me the look.

  I shrug.

  “Exactly.” Dustin nods. “It totally changes how the media presents information. This is a really exciting time to be alive.”

  I watch Mal bite her tongue, her face reddening. I think about how interesting of an addition to The Last Art this video would be, if mounted in the “Distraction” room, as part of one of the thousands of other moments caught in real time. Just a week ago I was helping install the work of a video artist who worked for Microsoft’s Bing Maps Platform, which allows organizations and developers worldwide to create applications for their businesses layered on top of licensed map imagery. His job was to compile data from images taken by aerial cameras and satellite sensors to build 3D city models and terrain. A “virtual topologist,” they called him. A “geospatial engineer.” He was present throughout the installation, adamant in overseeing the process. He stood behind me as I measured out spaces on the wall for the flat screen monitors that would project his designs.

  We are recording the whole world, he had said to me.

  And I said, You are literally putting people ‘on the map.’

  This is what art’s become, he said. A virtual simulacrum, an information rig.

  I had wanted to reply that the notion of art was changing—that to be a contemporary artist was not necessarily to identify yourself with the medium, as a painter, or sculptor creating something unseen—as a recluse from society—but now as a revealer of what was already there, in new combinations of forms and images, a person both inside and outside of space and time. He was writing the history of the world in his art, which, to him, was not art.

  But I was busy trying to mount a thirty-pound flat screen to the wall, while he just stood beside me and watched.

  People are still surprised by the 3D aspect, how much it looks the same. How much it looks real, he just kept on going. I was once a filmmaker, you know.

  Oh yeah? I grunted.

  And now a replicator of worlds, he said.

  “Anyway.” Dustin gathers his iPad and makes for the door. “It’s back to work for me.” He slinks awkwardly out of the room.

  I look over at Mal solemnly. She approaches me with a welcomed embrace. I fall into her body like a lump of melting clay. The ride back with Adam had been severely uncomfortable—something between our energies was severed; the air in the truck felt sparse and stale, congested with pockets of awkward silence, shortening the length of my breaths, like we were competing for oxygen. He dropped me off at my house with an engine idling and a quick “talk to you soon.”

  “Poor Sheila.” Mal sighs and rubs my back with solid, heavy strokes. “You got what you wanted, didn’t you dear? How horrible.”

  Strawberry Way winds up a raised plateau in the illustrious Berkeley Hills; trees and shrubs and wild messes of dark yellows and greens connect large properties, hug the houses with natural softness, project an image of suburban well-being.

  I approach my own Ground Zero cautiously, while heaving from the steep incline.

  Here, Sheila, is your very own hole. A glorified, materialized Monster Lack.

  I plop down in front of the plot of hollow land, contemplating the absence of the house, and still not believing it—still somehow processing the change as temporary.

  It’s as if a glitch is happening in the landscape before me, a flicker of an image. A white rabbit in a magician’s hat.

  Now you see it, now you don’t.

  It’s similar to how I felt when the beheading videos surfaced online in 2004. I heard about them and I thought, this is the most terrifying thing I can think of to witness (though it isn’t anymore). This is inhuman, I thought, despicable, power-driven madness. I will not watch that. Never ever, cross my heart, fucking bastards.

  But then I thought, I can’t believe that this exists. I can’t believe that people are watching these accounts of violence, these archival shorts of terror. Why do they keep watching them? What do they think they’ll see?

  What people are looking for on the Internet these days are signs of familiarity. Evidence that they exist. Bing Maps is the extreme state of this. A new temporality. An accelerated stasis of the present.

  A cloud blocks the sun, and for a second I’m covered in its shadow. Chirping swallows. Rustling ferns. A lawn mower stirs in the background. A car’s engine. A man shouting to his wife.

  Why is it that I cannot experience this setting as real? What is different now that wasn’t before? What is so off about this scene?

  The truth is when you have the option to see something that you think you know you’d never want to see, you will watch it anyway. The mystery is too much to handle.

  People go crazy searching their own homes on the Internet, the Bing Maps guy went on. They get hard-ons the second the image of their lawn pops up on the screen. Like they’ve never seen it before. Like somehow their lawn was shrunken to a miniature size and they’re now God looking down from heaven. Like it’s magic, or something.

  What happens is you click the link that’s right there in front of you, underlined and bolded, and blinking swollen red. You click the link and before you opens a page with a rectangular black box formatted like a viewfinder, with a circular symbol in the center, a text that reads loading… You click and the image flickers to a surprisingly well-lit room. It is a room like any other room. The camera focuses straight-shot on the victim affixed to the chair in center stage. The victim recites his name and the names of his family members, his voice effortless and monotone. It’s like he’s staring straight at you but not actually seeing you, or acknowledging that you’re there. The image is cropped so that at the bottom of the screen is the victim’s torso, the sides about a half a finger’s length of empty, gray space.

  The night before her suicide, I picture my mother brushing her teeth. She stands in front of the mirror, straight-faced and still, except for the movement of her wrist sliding the toothbrush back and forth across her teeth. Her skin is pale under the three bright bulbs that align the mirror’s top edge. Her pupils are dilated. Her eyebrows trimmed. Her hair up and parted slightly to the left.

  I don’t know why I see this particular image. It is just what comes to mind.

  Scene change to the same room but now the victim is sitting on the floor, his hands and feet secured. Five masked men stand behind him, only their eyes visible. The one in the center recites something from two stapled pieces of paper. There is a time marker on the bottom right hand screen.

  You know what’s going to happen before it even begins.

  You walk in the door and there she is.

  The staging’s constructed. The set-up is calculated. The reciting continues, and you note from the video that it is five-and-a-half minutes long, but since you are only on minute one-and-fifteen-seconds, you have a while to go. But still your eyes are peeled.

  She just pauses, drops, and smacks on the floor.

  You think, I am watching this and I am starting to cry but I don’t understand this feeling in my body, because it’s not that I’ve never seen anything like this, it’s not surprise or astonishment or anger or fear or even guilt. It’s more like a type of dread, the knowledge inside you that you’ve seen this before, millions of times, in movies, on TVs, on the Internet, on screens. It’s the feeling that you are literally having to te
ll yourself the entire time that this is really happening—rather, this has really happened, in real life, that someone has actually died this way, experienced the kind of fear you realize you’ve only seen and experienced from afar, and that it’s a whole different type of fear that you can’t comprehend, because it’s the format that seems to be tricking you, the characters, and staging, the removal of setting, and space, and time.

  While you wait for the ambulance, you pace around. From one room to another and back around again. The house has been reduced to a state of ruin. Every object is broken down, every part now labeled in your mind. This is a table, Sheila, this is a leg. The house loses all function without her. This material is wood, a combination of oak and chestnut. This is a square. This is a screw. Like the space of a bedroom, an office, a studio—the more space you have, the more chaotic it becomes. Four bedrooms, two-and-a-half bathrooms, a living room, dining room, kitchen, breakfast nook, foyer, garage, garden, portable greenhouse … every object is coded, now, with the presence of the dead.

  The masked men begin singing and chanting. The tension increases. Suddenly there’s quick movement. The victim is sideways and the men surround him. One man holds the boy’s body from behind; the other saws his neck. The camera zooms in so that his head fills the screen.

  Someone is zooming in with the button on a camera. Someone is aware of how to capture a close-up—the tension that a close-upcreates.

  This, says my mother’s doctor, pointing to an X-ray, is the Glioblastoma Multiforme—what we like to call the “white elephant” of tumors. It’s situated between the frontal and temporal lobes. The doctor uses his fingers to encircle my mother’s brain. They are unfortunately often asymptomatic before reaching maximum size, as was the case with Deirdre. He looks at me gravely. I sat down with her and discussed all the treatment options—maximal surgical resection of the tumor, chemotherapy, and also even experimental Gamma Knife radiosurgeries and boron neutron therapies … there was a whole list we talked about. We sat down and systematically created a road map of plans …

  You are equally surprised and not surprised at how long it takes to saw off his head. You wonder at what point does the victim actually stop feeling the pain, and at what point he actually dies. Because his mouth is open and his eyes are peeled, fixated on nothing and nowhere, arrested in a state of fear.

  This is the corner where I, Sheila, age ten, tripped on Tracy (our old Maine Coon), and twisted my right ankle. It swelled to the size of a baseball. For a week I gave my parents hell.

  This is where Caleb practiced the cello.

  Here is where my mother cried when my dad’s father died.

  This is my mother’s favorite chair.

  This is a chair.

  As you walk through the house, you notice how different the rooms look once familiarity begins to dwindle, the objects becoming solely functional, their existence black and white.

  Is this really a synthetic fabric? My mother didn’t care for synthetic fabrics.

  When the masked man finally cuts his way through, after almost twenty seconds of torment, of visible process, honest and brutal action captured in real time, and raises it up by the hair, beaming faceless with defeat, when the mantras become deafening, and the body behind the camera begins shaking so that the image destabilizes, its focus unsteady, the culminating energy spasmodic, all-consuming, when the video just stops and leaves you stranded in the moment, all you’re left with is a feeling, an odd sense of detachment. You are here but you’re somehow changed, you’ve been through something, experienced a horror that is no longer part of you (and never even was to begin with), and that it’s left you, abandoned you like a lover.

  Oh, Sheila, why can’t you just mourn already? Here you are, now—sitting in front of the foundation of the dwelling you spent eighteen years and change in, wishing you were feeling more of a sense of loss. But you know very well that the house was barely recognizable to begin with—it disappeared right with the bullet. She created her own tomb.

  Up in the Marin Headlands, riding is a different experience. The air is denser, thick with molecules you can feel as you push through them. The scents of tea tree and eucalyptus, fresh salt and dirt.

  After you cross the Golden Gate Bridge and move beyond the places most tourists can’t reach without rented vehicles, or walking—it becomes an elevated expanse of natural, embodied slithering. Saturated greens amidst the bay’s sapphire vastness. Up and down and once you’re set in motion it’s like the pedals are what’s moving you forward, the quadratic burn only a reminder from your body that you are here, enveloped in air.

  The best route is to bike around the entrance towards the tunnel that leads to the valley of the headlands. The tunnel is one consistent incline, but once you’re through, it’s like you’re in Kansas, or the projection of. Simple houses separated by fences and thicket, with dense, clinging dew. And then up the winding hills you go.

  The wind is stronger the higher and higher you get. But just keep pedaling—pedal as fast as you can, the wind through your ears like bellowing, deep breaths, until it feels like too much oxygen. Gasping and gasping and pedaling and pedaling until the ground releases you from its stronghold, disappears so that you fall.

  The late afternoon sun pierces the bay’s skyline, forming retinal dots along the tops of soft, rippling waves. Below deck, my father and I sit across from one another on plush leather seating in the booth of the boat’s compact kitchenette, eating fresh seared codfish and sautéed vegetables over hearty brown rice. Pozzo curls up in his doggie bed beside me, his stump an odd composition of bulbous tissue, hair and skin.

  “Tumors aren’t genetic, Sheila—this is not something that you should be worrying about.” My father meticulously examines a bite of codfish, making sure all the tiny bones are picked out. I sip his homemade pinot noir and stare at the tall stacks of books lining the walls behind him. I knew I shouldn’t have even tried.

  “Your mother took all her vitamins, she practiced yoga, she meditated—she hardly ever touched red meat. She smoked a little pot in college, sure, but so did everyone. We both enjoyed cocaine for about three minutes before it got old. She caught a lot of colds working at the hospital, but that’s to be expected, which probably made her even stronger. What I mean to say is that she did everything right. Your mother was neurotic, but for the most part she really took care of herself.” He chews the cod and swallows. “What’s more likely is you’ll get arthritis starting in your early thirties—,” he points his fork at me, “I have it, my mother had it, my mother’s father had it—my uncle has it. There’s some heart disease in the family, but once you get old, the heart gets old, and malfunctions are perfectly natural. Cancer is different—there are so many factors that can contribute to it that have absolutely nothing to do with genetics. If I remember correctly the house she grew up in was right near a nuclear waste site …” He looks up but then shakes his head at the notion. “Anyway, my point being: you can’t catch a tumor.”

  I watch my father pour himself some more wine and shift uncomfortably in his seat. I notice his body’s grown slimmer, more muscular—he appears larger, his size perhaps compromised by the dimensions of the boat. He’s grown a bushy beard, multicolored, scraggly. He wears cargo pants and a mesh parka.

  I ask him if he read Caleb’s most recent lengthy text.

  “Of course I read it. The kid’s having some experiences out in places that have the tendency to seep into your head. I took LSD in the sixties—I’m not a foreigner to blasting off. But there comes a point where you have to distinguish between what’s real and what’s useful. I knew I was raising sensitive children from the day each of you was born. And the real fact of the matter is that the kid needed to find an alternative to heroin—at least this new nonsense is more sustainable.”

  “The kid you’re speaking about is thirty-five, Dad.”

  “Which is exactly my point.”

  I breathe in deeply, feel tension forming in my throat. My e
yes search the room for another focal point—piles of neatly coiled ropes, a fire extinguisher, life vests, inflatable rafts, cases of spring water. It’s as if my father’s preparing for the apocalypse. His life has become a practice of efficiency, a series of tasks and tests asserting some form of concreteness, some reassurance of humanity. It is at times like this, as the light wanes through the ship’s portholes, and the air becomes cooler, that nature takes over our senses, blinds us from sensibility, our relation to the outside turning foreign and gray. Anxiety sets in, slithers around my organs.

  “Now tell me about what happened at the museum,” he says.

  I place my utensils down, pausing to think carefully about my response. “I’m not exactly sure.” It’s at times like these when I want to turn to him and scream.

  “Oh you’re not fooling me. I could recognize that expression from a mile away, even in my old age.”

  It’s been inside of me forever, I wish I could explain. I feel it every day—death, like a vital organ. My body constantly on the verge of some sort of terror. How her death only brought it to the surface. The feeling of my brain exploding with a bullet—how the life inside me could blacken out in an instant.

  How does one exist, with this constant awareness? How does one choose to live?

  “I don’t … I don’t seem to have the right language to explain it,” I say.

  My dad sighs and lifts up a forkful of food. “You know, language was born in Tragedy—it started with the monologue. The actor spoke directly to the audience, even when addressing another actor, from which of course dialogue developed and corrupted everything. But in a monologue, there’s no co-ownership of words, no displacement of direction or meaning—the actor’s perspective is the whole world.”