The Fifth Wall. Rachel Nagelberg
woman with a thick accent and burly presence, from whom he ordered two double margaritas. We sat at a round table next to a jukebox blasting Thriller, sipping the sour and salt as he told me about an experience he’d recently had while working at a site on some remote, woodsy location right up north next to a river, building a solar panel roof for a wealthy client. He’d brought his dog along, an ancient creature suffering from cataracts and some form of Alzheimer’s, whom he didn’t like to leave alone for more than a few hours, and the fresh air always calmed her. At some point he’d heard splashing and a high-pitched yelp, and he ran sprinting to the water to find old Maddie twenty feet deep into the river, unable to swim. He said his heart almost dropped out of his body. Without thinking twice, he rushed into the freezing cold after her, with clothes, boots, tools—everything—and reached her just as her legs gave out. Both of them panting, he pulled her towards the shore, threw her in the car, drove straight back to his house in the city and right into the hot shower—both of them shivering under the pressure and steam. He said nothing had ever terrified him more, nothing except for what had happened earlier that day, when I tore down the lawn towards my house, a giant axe raised in my palms like a crucifix.
I sensed less of a concern than a sparking interest. Jesse was gaping at me with an intensity I hadn’t experienced before. Our playful flirting the past week had been merely a tease at most, nothing to this degree. He listened intently as I—still partially in shock—told him I still had no recollection of what happened before he tackled me to the ground. I recalled standing in front of the house in deep contemplation when all of a sudden a bizarre feeling came over me—all-consuming. It was like a severe case of déjà vu, where everything around me looked both familiar and foreign at the same time. Oddly depthless. As if the landscape was lacking something vital for me to process as “real.” Jesse’s weight had shifted closer to me, his concentration stark and aggressive. I quietly told him about the secret tumor, and then the gun. How I found my mother dead in the hallway. At least that’s how I decided to tell it. I still haven’t been able to admit the whole truth out loud. I must still have a lot of anger bottled up, I tried to joke, although it wasn’t very funny. I’m always demeaning everything I feel strongly about. Is it out of some sort of embarrassment? Some flawed characteristic—a lack of conviction? It did concern me that that I had nearly killed myself with a very sharp, heavy object in some sort of unconscious state. I did distinctly remember waking up from it—seeing the actual fissures in the plaster in front of me, a heavy burning object in my hand, feeling a tight hold on my wrist. I remember that the heat was not from the axe but from my body’s elevated temperature. I remember rage unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, a feeling so foreign to me, and yet shockingly exhilarating. I had felt dangerous, beautifully and horrifically alive. I wanted, consciously, to destroy, to completely obliterate. To kill. I knew I was being filmed.
I also knew, as I returned Jesse’s gaze, that I was witnessing the innate attraction of this much older male to an acute madness inside me. It was a power I had felt only a handful of times. And I immediately loved it. Every second of it.
After one margarita I was smashed, but effectively hiding it, and we ordered two more and huddled closer together. Jesse, a young forty-seven, with a fit, trim body in his paint-splattered canvas Carhartt workpants and scuffed Timberlands—a dog lover with grit-encrusted nails, the energy of a stallion.
“Most people I work for want to build up,” Jesse raised his muscular arms, “like the whole of civilization, always reaching for the stars. The nature of progress. But you—you called me and said I want to unbuild, to alter the course of evolution. I was like, who is this woman?”
I sipped my sour drink and smiled.
“You’re lucky the house was beyond any sort of affordable repair. The termite damage was insurmountable. And the house was never fully secured onto its foundation in the first place—it would have been impossible to sell in its condition.”
“Yes, we’re doing everyone a favor,” I said. “The materials that aren’t damaged will become embedded into new projects in a continuous cycle of inevitable decay.”
Jesse laughed. “Your morbidity is terribly sexy.”
“The treacherous life cycle of a building—like a body with thousands of organ transplants and plastic surgeries, being kept alive by machinery.”
“I’m absolutely loving this.”
“I’m glad somebody is.”
“Most people take buildings for granted,” he said. “They think of them as permanent fixtures—as if they weren’t created by human hands.”
“They create stability. They’re always here, witnessing our lives.”
“You wouldn’t believe the panic attacks I’ve seen over trivial matters like a broken toilet, a hole in the roof, a basement leak … you’d think these people’s lives were ending. And here you’re literally taking it apart.”
“Well, you’re literally doing it. But yes, I’m extinguishing its power. Eradicating its history. There’s a dangerous power to spaces. They hold certain energies, like bodies. They trigger memories. I mean—the idea of ghosts haunting houses has existed for thousands of years, in different cultures across the globe. I think there’s something potent in this idea—in thinking about a house as a body-organism, a living structure designed to hold things, programmed for attachment.”
“Okay, so I see you’ve thought through this all theoretically. But what does the rest of your family think about all this? Are they even in the picture?”
I told him about my parents’ divorce when I was fifteen. How my dad, a tenured professor at Berkeley, lives now on a sailboat docked in Marin. For the past few years he’s been making calculated steps to ultimately moving “off the grid”—what I see as just a glorified way of disappearing. He removed his name from the lease years ago—he and my mother having rarely spoken in the past decade. She lived in that house all alone. Then there’s my brother, Caleb, who’s been traveling in Peru for the past couple of years studying shamanic plant medicine with a tribe of indigenous Shipibos. We hear from him infrequently—usually in the form of heavy-handed emotional correspondence often emailed or texted directly after some drug-induced state. He flew home for the week of the funeral, and then hopped right back on a plane to Lima. And all my grandparents are dead, with some aunts and uncles scattered around the country living separate, private lives. I am pretty much a lone wolf.
“It’s like you’re living the movies,” he snickered.
“Cinema does love the dysfunctional.”
“Why’d your parents get divorced?”
“I think that when two emotionally unavailable people couple, it can either be oddly functional or disastrous.”
Jesse moved in closer. “So what you’re saying is that the sex was terrible.”
“It always comes down to men and sex.”
“What can I say? It’s biological. We have absolutely no control.”
This was a man who had six chickens, was known in his neighborhood for leaving fresh eggs on doorsteps in recycled cartons decorated by his four-year-old niece. He sat inches from me, his knee just barely grazing my shin. He radiated a vibrant youthfulness, smiling with his whole body, seeming to speak a special language embedded with playfulness, laughter. But his intensity was alarming. His deep interest felt genuine, but also as possibly that of a predator who preys on the weak—one who gets off on playing the role of the knight in shining armor. But he lifted a heaviness in me I realized right then I’d been carrying without feeling its full weight. It escaped from me like sand bursting from an hourglass, scattering around me with shards of broken glass. I felt light, buoyant, incredibly alive.
We both knew where the night was headed, but pretended to be blind. After another round and some horrible Ethiopian, I told him I wanted to meet his chickens, so we headed for his place—right around the corner, no doubt—with buzzing bodies exuding a sexual tension that was sure to be catastrophic.