The Fifth Wall. Rachel Nagelberg
holed up in my windowless studio, fully consumed by thesis work and attempting to teach undergraduates how to look at art. But I know it was something deeper—some sort of panic under the body current, a pull that was unmistakably biological, as if my DNA itself were communicating with me, drawing me westward, calling me back to her. I needed to fly home.
My visit would be a surprise—a quick trip of about four days. I’d see some friends in San Francisco, then hop on over to the East Bay to visit her. I thought it possible that an unplanned visit could excite her—force her from her comfort zones, her self-created limitations. The sight of my face would shock her into some accidental joy, even if just for a moment.
I still think my father must have, somehow, known.
A house is like a body. It has an interior, an exterior. A complex system of interworking parts. It stores things, holds things, deteriorates when deserted. It requires constant upkeep, becomes more and more familiar with time. A house is a massive living artifact, the most private of moments stored in the deep crevices of its creaking floorboards, in water stains and pencil marks, in tiny cracks in the ceiling, in chipped paint in the corners of rooms, in microscopic collections of dust and skin.
Lathe, plaster, dropped ceilings, ductwork. Wiring and tendons, insulation and blood. You deconstruct a building in order to continue the lives of the materials, the purpose being to salvage the maximum amount of those materials for their highest and best re-use. It’s all about the process. The collating and associating, the intention, the patterning.
The and… action!
Again, let’s rewind.
It’s the end of January, two days into my surprise trip. I borrow my friend Mallory’s flashy ten-speed, which I carry onto BART to head over to my parents’ house, only a short ride from the downtown station. It’s an unseasonably warm day, thick with sunlight and a calm ocean breeze. I remember it so distinctly that it’s almost like I’m back there on that day, entering the house with the bicycle over my shoulder. The bicycle is painted a neon pink and covered in glitter, with multicolored streamers dangling from the handlebars, and of course one of Mal’s furry fabric trademarks sewn onto the frame. I turn the knob and the door’s open, like it’s always been on the weekends when my mother’s home tending to the garden. I walk in sweating and panting from my recent lack of exercise; my thighs and calves are straining. I open the door and my mother’s right there, poised in the foyer, facing a mirror, a gun in her mouth.
She’s dressed normally, in jeans and a black crew-neck tee. Her hair is pulled up into a loose bun of faded gray-brown—I immediately notice that she stopped dyeing it blonde. I believe she is wearing canvas slippers.
I realize that I’ve never before seen an actual gun.
It happens in a second. I walk in and I see her, and for the life of me cannot remember and will never know, if she saw me or knew I was there, had heard me roll up on the stone pathway.
I open the door and the gun goes off and the bullet flies out the back of her and into the wall. Just like that. I hear the actual cracking of her skull. I watch both the gun and her body fall to the floor in a dead stillness. She pauses, drops, smacks on the floor. It sounds horrifically familiar, like a heavy schoolbag or a full laundry basket. Her body a heap of limbs reduced to weight. Dark blood pools around her, expands. It happens so fast that the moment is almost dissatisfying—like there should have been more build-up, more raw emotion, more immediate tension. Like the whole situation is somehow too real.
But the shock of the gun surprises me and causes me to jump back, which proves difficult because I’m still holding the bike, which I immediately drop, but because of its size and furriness and placement on my shoulder, it falls slanted, and the front wheel knocks me sideways. The whole bike crashes on top of me and twists my right knee to the point where I’m crying out more from the pain in my leg than from what I’ve just witnessed, which I still haven’t fully processed yet, and which sends me into a whole new level of distress—guilt, untimeliness, self-hatred at my own clumsiness, unforgiveable, targeted self-pity. It turns the whole thing into an appallingly awkward moment. It confuses the subject of my reaction, prevents me from focusing.
I remember, while I lay on the floor, disheveled and sobbing from shock and embarrassment, smelling, suddenly, an overwhelming onslaught of her perfume. I remember thinking it doesn’t make any sense that she is dead if I can smell something so distinctly familiar, so recognizable, so normal. It confused me because I couldn’t recall smelling it before I fell down. I wanted to know how that could work scientifically—if when someone dies somehow their smell intensifies, rushes out of their pores or something. I needed it to make sense.
There was a fly buzzing in a corner of the foyer that would not for its life desist. I heard a TV on in the background, the ideal consistency of cupcake icing. The creaking hinges of the front door. Everything and nothing was keeping me from focusing.
I wanted it to feel different. I wanted to feel more.
I remember lying there as the blood escaped and coagulated, formed a halo around her head—her face, at that point, still shielded from me, facing the wall, leaving my own body and seeing the scene from above, watching it and replaying it as if on a screen, judging myself and my actions, wishing to go back.
Perhaps I installed the camera because I know I’ll want to recall the deconstruction later, as it actually happens, in real time. It’s depressing how memory doesn’t seem to be enough anymore. I need an image to verify what’s happening outside of the screen.
“I thought your art was about constructing things,” Mal says to me when I show her some of the footage. I’d dropped out of the program my last semester, subletted my apartment in Ithaca for a year, and moved in with Mallory in the Mission District.
Art, I shake my head at her. This is definitely not art. I ask how could it be? This is my real life that’s happening. How can this possibly be art?
Just knowing that the house existed gave me terrible anxiety. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. Masturbating was just out of the question. At work I almost spilled my coffee on a Takashi Murakami paper dress—I just walked right into the mannequin. I’d been picking up art preparator shifts at SFMoMA, where I worked all throughout undergrad. The principal exhibit tech—my boss, Robby, a longtime friend of my father—actually ordered me to take a nap in the conference room.
Something had to happen. Together, the house and I could not exist.
Now watch it come crashing down.
The house becomes a series of rooms, becomes compartmental units, becomes an arrangement of objects, becomes a composite of materials. It is a construction in reverse—you dismantle from the inside out.
It’s like an autopsy.
I pick up the axe. Then everything disappears.
ACT ONE
The Real itself, in order to be sustained, has to be perceived as a nightmarish unreal spectre.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK, Welcome to the Desert of the Real
I awake in a trembling bedroom on an unusually sunny morning in a house that takes me six long and agonizing seconds to discern must belong to the contractor, Jesse, as the floor rumbles, the furniture shakes, the light fixture rattles, and the body beside me faintly stirs amidst a deep slumber, his calloused fingers twitching by my exposed thigh as the structure around us prepares for takeoff. It’s a sobering feeling—the movement of the Earth. Even growing up with these quick moments of terror doesn’t prepare you for the next one; each earthquake instills a slight shift in consciousness, as if parting the amnesiac fog of reality—a cosmic reminder that we exist on a complex living organism that is much, much larger than us, blindly orbiting in a universe that is wholly undiscovered. I quietly climb out of bed and tiptoe naked out of the drafty bedroom to find the toilet, the layout of the living room rendering subtly familiar, as I begin to recall flashes of the previous night’s ravenous activities from a cold, porcelain seat.
Right after