The Fifth Wall: A Novel

by Rachel Nagelberg

  “Like a suicide note?” I say, looking up. “Which she didn’t even have the decency to leave?”

  My father pauses. “Your mother was obviously not thinking clearly.”

  Like the victim being forced to recite his name and the names of his family members into the camera—his last speech to the world. Or the video of my mother’s head talking to the camera, the words drowning out in the incredible static, her face now merely a surface masking actions, her motions fixed and endlessly repeatable. The terror in technology.

  “I’ve been watching this home video I found of you filming Mom—it was dated a few years after Caleb was born. You work this extreme close-up on her face and then ask her a question—which the tape only catches in a low, indiscernible mumble—and then Mom looks into the camera and mouths something that I can’t make out because the tape’s too warped.” I look him in the eyes. “And I feel like it’s something really important. I don’t know how else to explain it. I just have to know what she’s saying. Like the whole world depends on it.”

  My dad sighs. “I understand that you’re searching for clues and signs in all the places you can find—but you have to get it in your head, Sheila, that some things are just left unanswered. There was a tumor, yes. Did we know about it? No. Is that your fault? No. Is that my fault? Certainly not. Is it her fault? Well, there could be some pretty good arguments in favor of that one. But that’s not the point. The point is that it was out of your control. And you have to live in the aftermath of it, whether you like it or not.”

  I slam my fists down on the table. The whole cabin shakes. “There’s no way that you couldn’t have known! I know her, and I know she would have told you!”

  My father’s eyes become wide, bulging.

  DANIEL

  (eyes wide, bulging)

  As much as you would like to pin this on me—which is totally unreasonable and also very beneath you—the fact of the matter is that whether you choose to believe it or not, your mother was a fatalist—and she always had been, since the day I met her. She gave up, Sheila. She couldn’t handle it, and she didn’t want to face it, so there wasn’t really another option for her, was there? And even if she had told me, do you think I could talk that woman out of anything? This was a woman who feared death so much that she became a nurse just to try to have some control over it. She couldn’t handle med school, so she chose an easier route. And here’s something you probably don’t know—when I met her, she was actually enrolled in art school. Yes, art school. Isn’t that surprising? And she couldn’t handle that, either—she could never give herself fully to anything… so in this regard, I’m actually kind of impressed by her willingness to go through with such an abominable act. Actions without practical use terrified her—anything where she had to be alone for a period of time in her own brain. And oh, what a beautiful brain she had, when she could let go and enjoy herself. I knew I married a difficult person in the beginning, but really I had no idea. I thought I’d be the one to relieve her of all those fears—but that’s how we think when we’re young. All we see are mirrors. The being we project onto the other person is never real. Back then I used to take a lot of close-ups. I used to really love the camera—which is of course where you get it from. I always carried that thing around with me—what a magnificent invention! A living time capsule, right there in front of our eyes. And your mother was so beautiful. I just loved her little thin face. And she looked so good on camera—you know, certain people, they just eat up the screen. You’re not old enough to really remember what it was like before cameras, but let me tell you—once we had them, there was no turning back. They hold a mythic quality that the theater never had. Do I think cameras killed the theater? Yes, of course they did. It was bound to happen. But the theater will always be an art of the living, and film an art of the dead. The images look alive, but they’re only fooling you. The problem with you kids today is you make everything more complex than it needs to be. I see it all the time with my students—these young artists who think they’re the first ones to have radical ideas about technology, society—let me tell you something. I was talking to Robby on the phone, and he was telling me about that new Richard Serra sculpture. This is a fucking perfect example. And stop your crying, Sheila—you need to get it together. Simple gestures, simple lines. That’s what the whole multimillion-dollar piece of steel comes down to. I’ll tell you what. A “torqued ellipse” is just a horizontal line that’s slightly bent. The simpler the design, the more complex it is. The more room there is to imagine. I remember you calling me from school. You said Dad, Dad—at Cornell all our seminar discussions are about failure—all anyone’s ever talking about is how the medium of art is inherently a failure to represent reality, that we’re all now creating art with this knowledge of failure already present, already built into our work—you hated it, Sheila, you thought, when can we get to the actual work? In grad school you just talk and talk and talk. And I’ve built my life around it, because I chose to be a historian, because to me, talking about actors and writing about actors is much easier than actually being an actor—so in a sense, I’m a real failure. Do you think I don’t think it wasn’t a nightmare to walk into your mother’s house, hoping to surprise her, and instead finding her brains spilling out? Do you think I wouldn’t have given up everything to have been able to trade places with you—to not have you go through that? I mean, hell—I’m not unfamiliar with trauma—I’ve seen some things in my day—we all see terrible things constantly on the news. But this—I would never wish this upon my worst enemy. Do you think that I think you should be getting therapy? Yes, very much so. I myself have stayed away because it is my nature to do so—I am not very talented at consoling. This is just how I was raised. Your mother was the one who was professionally trained to take care of people. That was never my role. Stop crying, for Christ’s sake. What’s that? No—come on. You’re not afraid of death, Sheila—you’re afraid of the movies. You used to cry every time you watched Peter Pan, for Christ’s sake. Finish your cod, Sheila—you’re as skinny as a fucking seahorse these days. It’s time to start taking better care of yourself. And it starts here, with eating fresh, nutritious food. And—hey, hey—laying a little off of that wine over there. This isn’t that shitty stuff composed mostly of sugar. This is the real deal. This is a recipe I’ve been working on for years.

  Artists act and make choices. They live and they make responses. They absorb the stimuli surrounding them. They don’t justify anything.

  People grow up with a unique set of references, learned belief systems, complex combinations of energies. We form images in our minds about what’s right and what’s wrong, and the possibilities in the gray area in-between.

  Inconsistency within our own processes is important—it allows us to continue to live, to respond. The second we stop responding, we die.

  In San Francisco, when the wind blows harshly, it forces one to ask why it feels like the Earth is punishing—is it the shifting tectonic forces, the dissolving of the ozone, the culminating grief in lost bodies thrashing through the streets?

  There are coincidences, and then there are consequences. The difference depends on the preparation, the acknowledged foresight; the feeling that what is to come might very well be a whole lot worse. Or, perhaps it has already been this bad, but it’s a horror that’s become so familiar that you no longer see it.

  When, then, does the trauma begin?

  And where and when can it end?

  For years I’ve been searching the male body as if there is something to find inside of it. Some tangible mass, some undiscovered organ, the magic rib from whence Eve became cloned. This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh…

  We go through motions, patterns; we make decisions about how to live.

  To tell the truth, I’ve always felt as if I’ve been living in false positions, subsisting without contour. Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to obliteration. A false embodiment—all-consuming, but exceedingly short-last
ing, never amounting to anything tangible.

  But these days I feel a constant inner restlessness—as if I am a hollowed tree, surrounded by nocturnal animals that are foraging discarded objects and storing them inside of me. I feel born of a great absence. The air in my body feels strange. There’s a constant feeling that something’s missing, but what is too vague to really be sure …

  To spend one’s whole life searching for something elusive—something, anything, to cling to. Perhaps that’s when the body makes the decision to create. The tumor, the Lacks, the tinnitus—all born from an absence. From a deep, assembling rage.

  Caleb says he can feel depression deep inside his DNA—has seen visions of himself in the womb enveloped in dark, writhing energy, has felt the sadness of the cavernous body housing him, and how he fed on that sadness—her sadness—the only world he knew.

  There are studies about mitochondria and the passing trauma from a mother to her child—how a body forms within a learned nervous system, the gut, the second brain of the human body that for some reason we’ve devolved in this country to neglect.

  Isn’t the body’s main job to store things?

  Performance artists believe that if you can push the body to its limit without dying, that death is no longer an inevitability, but an eventual consequence. I have never wished for such control. And yet, I’ve created my own ruin.

  It was an appallingly horrific coincidence. I walked in the doorway, and there she was. I never wanted to step foot in that house again. Just knowing it was there made me so anxious I could hardly breathe.

  If I’m a terrorist, then I should want something. I should want death and destruction, to induce fear in others, to brutally fight, to die for what I believe in.

  But I don’t really believe in anything, and I don’t want to die. I used to think I wanted to—even as a little girl. I watched Peter Pan and I cried. I couldn’t control the muscles in my face, my trembling body. To never grow old, to watch the world age around you. For a week I wet the fucking bed.

  Pan, which is ironically the root of panic—to be consumed by it all.

  I have this feeling deep inside me—this rush to get up and lunge at a great distance and purge myself of something that’s not physically in my stomach or intestines, but somewhere lurking in my brain—the scariest part of it knowing that this feeling has been with me all along—this emptiness, this dread—this Lack spreading amongst my insides, throughout my veins and arteries, my organic flowing system, all around me and inside of me, like a desert swallowing me whole, and each day spitting out a copy of a copy of myself …

  The fear that this is all that there is, and it’s all that will ever be. Your life will never reach a certain point—the point keeps receding, like a moving landscape, disappearing into the distance—and you’re always on the way.

  All of history feels like it’s culminating onto the moving image of her body, her face a pixilation of tiny moving pieces—black hole and white wall, screen and camera, always expanding, repeating, playing forever into madness.

  We can’t turn back, and we can never unsee.

  This is something we have to live with.

  The camera’s still recording.

  ACT THREE

  “Do you think of yourself as doomed?”

  ELI MOSCOWITZ, The Fifth Wall

  “Now this was a time when there was no context—there was no hierarchy of history to look at. Making art was what you could do to engage your friends.”

  Richard Serra sits on stage facing the interviewer, Garrett Henderson, the Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMoMA. Both are angled towards one another so that they partly face the audience, directing their conversation outwards, a structural gesture as if to say, “it’s okay for you to listen in.” A small rectangular coffee table rests between the two moss-colored velour high-backed armchairs, illuminated by overhead stage lights. Below them, an oriental rug of deep maroons and greens. Garrett crosses his legs academically, leans back and folds together swollen fingers, nods rhythmically. Richard Serra sips water from a mason jar.

  “I was working for U.S. Steel building tresses. It fascinated me that no one was using steel the way it was used in the Industrial Revolution—for its weight, its durability. I’ve always taken my materials seriously.”

  Adam and I sit in the back of the Phyllis Wattis Theater, the prominent lecture hall on the first floor of SFMoMA. It’s a small auditorium with two levels, the first a ground area seating about one hundred persons, the second a slanted, bleacher-like seating rising up about eleven rows, spanning the room’s back wall. There is a thematic color scheme of taupes and sepias, creating an old-fashioned feel to the architecture—slightly monochromatic, fading with age.

  Two days after the traumatic visit with my Dad, I’d received a voicemail from Robby offering me two tickets to the sold out Richard Serra lecture that coincided with Band’s opening. Apparently the Drog had been found the day after I left, collapsed in a heap of twitching parts, behind the finished partition that originally held it, making the whole horrible experience seem—Robby said—just like one big nightmare.

  “It’s about going back to the primitive way of thinking about the tectonics of building. It’s about going back to the basis of how you form something,” says Richard Serra. “I wanted to make these Torqued Ellipses, but nobody knew how to make them. I went to Korea, then Baltimore, where they ended up miscalculating the drawing. I figured out how to use line heat and oil to bring the steel plates together. Finally a friend found a plant in Germany that said they could make them. Germans take such pride in craftsmanship.”

  O, the mysterious origins of our art. I sip red wine from my Klean Kanteen. Adam jerks his crossed ankle nervously, while his chapped fingers crack each knuckle one by one. Part of my thesis at Cornell involved writing a poetics, or discourse on my work—an investigation of my thought processes, methods, some form of composition tying self-analysis to my own creativity. It was the hardest assignment I’ve ever had to do. It forced me to become a spectator. It severed me from my art.

  I study Serra’s mannerisms closely. To talk about the effect of your art constantly does something to an artist. Creates, in you, a character. A celebrity. Mounted to the wall behind them is an enlarged black and white photograph of Richard Serra close up, his eyes facing the camera—a piercing light gray, his name plastered in all CAPS beneath him.

  You turn into an image of yourself.

  “Thoughts and drawings work in order to portray a sequence of the evolution of things. Looking at a sculpture, you reconsider it.”

  “And what kind of process does that involve?” Garrett asks. “Reconsidering a sculpture.”

  I realize I haven’t even seen the sculpture yet, completed. I’ve been completely avoiding the building.

  Richard Serra looks slightly down past the audience, as if talking to the floor. “I call my sculptures ‘Living Art.’ It’s about having a sense of understanding of the relationships between your body and its location. And not just in relations to other objects, but the spaces in between. The void is as interesting as material form.”

  The audience resonates a combination of contemplative “mmms” and agreeable “mm-hmms.” Garrett continues to nod. Not once have the two, interviewer and interviewee, looked at one another. Adam, expressionless, stares intently at them. Something about him feels far away.

  “It’s like his answers are pre-prepared,” I whisper. “His theory and methodology outlined in dotted lines.”

  “I think he’s fucking genius,” he mutters.

  I take another swig.

  “To experience a sculpture,” says Garrett, “is then to connect with the piece physically. To accept it into your frame of reference as real, and thus allow it to play with space—to let it, essentially, trick you.”

  Richard Serra blinks, his expression unchanging. He continues as if reading from a script. He is fragile with his mannerisms, undoubtedly serene. “You start to question
things such as, ‘what does it mean to round a bend?’ It’s about looking at the whole—the here and the void simultaneously. Place in relation to time and space. It’s a different way of remembering. You don’t just see things; you see things amongst things.”

  The wine surges through my bloodstream. I find my eyes unable to fix onto one single object, my mind unable to concentrate on one single thing. What are we even doing here? I lean closer to Adam in order to feel his energy, trying to gauge his mood, but it’s like he’s behind a wall. I glance down at Mal’s low-cut v-neck that I snatched from her laundry this morning to look sexy and make sure that nothing’s popping out.

  “One of my most precious memories is of watching three hyper children become completely quiet while experiencing a Torqued Ellipse.” Richard Serra smiles. He shakes his head, laughs gently. “They stopped their shrieking, and kicking, and whining, and settled down into true receivers, real explorers of space. You see, kids have no preconceptions of art. They run through and immediately get lost in the piece. They’re naturally inquisitive about space and the world around them. They don’t care if it’s sculpture.” He yawns, takes a sip of water, rests his hand on his knee.

  “What about the experience of Band? How would you describe it to the audience, for those who haven’t experienced it, or who don’t know what to think when perhaps overwhelmed by its structure?”

  “The entire sheet of steel, as it undulates from the space, changes continuously, as does its interior and exterior. You can move outside the band continuously and never stop. You might have the concern that you’re walking back in the same direction that you came from, but you’re not. It’s difficult to tell one space from the other; you sense that they’re similar but they’re all dissimilar. The sculpture creates new spaces in the architecture of the room.”

  Garrett announces that time has caught up with them, and thanks Richard Serra for the talk. The audience gives a round of applause. The artist nods politely, smiles with healthy teeth, and Garrett asks for volunteers for a brief Q and A.