The Fifth Wall. Rachel Nagelberg

The Fifth Wall - Rachel Nagelberg


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But there is relief in the pain, something dark, and joyous.

      Back in my apartment, I pause the recorded footage. I take a deep breath, and then rewind about ten minutes. I press play.

      There I am, standing motionless, with my back to the camera, the silhouette of my body outlined against the towering, faceless structure. I am a thin frame of near-translucent skin. Wind tousles my hair, whips through branches and grass. The elastic strap of the filter mask hugs the back of my hair; two plastic points of safety goggles stick out from behind my ears.

      To see myself from a third eye point of view. This is the power of the camera.

      Around me, the construction crew prepares for the removal of the house’s non-load bearing walls. A few minutes pass where I do not move. There is something startling in seeing myself from this angle. Like witnessing something I’m not meant to see.

      Oh, but here it begins—oh boy, is it coming. This scene is absolutely incredible. Academy Award-winning. Two thumbs up. It still gets me every time. All right, here we go. Watch it closely. At exactly TC 01:92:14:01 my right hand begins to stir. Do you see it? It’s like watching Frankenstein’s first awakening, or the hand of the wounded alien on the fanatical surgeon’s table in Independence Day—when the camera shot zooms right in to the first sign of life, purposefully directs our focus to its movement. (A typical film strategy for creating tension—movement returns first to the extremities.)

      Here, ladies and gentleman, is me, SHEILA. I point to the screen for an imaginary audience, and circle my body with a fluorescent yellow pen. And here, about two feet beside me, I tell them, is a stray PICKAXE, which I also circle, but in fluorescent blue.

      My hand starts to shake, and soon my entire body. I look like I’m convulsing. Perhaps it’s the lack of transition between my near five-minute paralysis and the sudden awakening, or the sheer dissonance I feel with my image on the screen—but the shock of the moment is terrifying. I watch myself slowly bow my head down and spot the PICKAXE. There is a three-second pause. Suddenly I’m bent down and grasping it, lifting it over my shoulder and into the air—a crazed tyrant, a rabid executioner. I’m sprinting with this heavy object that I’ve never before used down a small grassy incline and across the front lawn past a bunch of busy workers who appear to be in the process of still figuring out that something is not quite right. Jesus Christ—I swing the PICKAXE into the first floor’s outer wall. Look at how it breaks the skin and gets slightly caught, how I manage to pull it out, almost losing my balance, instead catching myself with a half-skip and wobble. It appears almost like a dance. Although I can’t see my face, I am ninety-six percent sure that I’m displaying what is known notoriously as the Sheila B. Ackerman Face—the contorted, pained expression I can’t help but make when I’m thinking hard, which happens often in class and also while creating art, and unfortunately, during sex, which often involves the guy asking if I’m all right, which can get fairly awkward at certain not-quite-the-right-moments. Watch me drive that fucker and hit the metal framing, which I can tell from afar because of the motion’s hard, visible pause. From this distance—if you look really hard—you can also spot the cracking of the second story’s SHEATHING, the slight shaking of the board above me, loosening with each blow. There is JESSE now, running towards me, waving his hands in the air and shouting, it looks like, although there is no sound.

      I pause the video.

      In the kitchen, Mal stands at the counter stirring a ceramic cup of Yerba Mate with her special metal straw. “Did you feel that five-point-seven this morning?” she asks, staring at her iPad.

       “I woke up on a rocket ship,” I say while typing amnesia, paralysis, convulsions, and rage into the WebMD symptom checker app on my iPhone. It’s apparent she didn’t hear me sneak in this morning.

      “This article says we’re in for a series of intense ones within the next couple of weeks.”

      “Is that right?” The website says loading…

      “First the drought, and now this—the planet’s obviously trying to tell us something.”

      Upon moving back to California, I’d been shocked at the desolation of the city—trees that normally brim with lush greens are now brown and sagging, lacking vibrancy, stunted in their natural bloom. A thin layer of dust shrouds all cars and buildings. The air feels drier, deader—a vast thirstiness you can feel deep inside your bones. San Francisco is turning into a desert.

      “They expect the next one to be at least a five-point-nine.” Mal covers her mouth.

      “You better secure those jars.”

      Mal looks up and quietly contemplates the kitchen. “The jars.” Her eyes widen.

      I pour some leftover hot water into a French press lined with local fair trade coffee we get discounted from Mal’s barista friend, and watch the granules steep, while a screen the size of an index card loads all the possible medical threats to my living body. The kitchen looks like the combination between an apothecary and a meth lab. Alphabetically organized bottles of liquid herbal supplements line the counter along with stacked mason jars filled with soaking hemp seeds, raw nuts, lentils, and seaweed. There’s a food processor, a dehydrating oven, two juicers, and a bullet blender. Atop the refrigerator a Saran-wrapped container of homegrown tofu sprouts next to a fermenting kombucha mother hovering in a massive glass bowl. Somewhere during the three years I’d been away Mal had met the Angel Granola and converted to an artistic practice of naturo-pathology. I open a non-GMO Snickers bar and pour my coffee.

      Mal and I met in undergrad at Berkeley in a Foundations art class. This was during a third-wave-feminist phase of hers—years before Miley Cyrus’ conversion—where she dressed in elastic onesies, platform shoes, and bleached her then long, wigishly thick hair as part of some grand, ironic public gesture of female assertion—a walking, talking caricature of herself. She worked in mediums of sculpture and performance, often creating works using solely untraditional materials, such as makeup, hair dye, and once even real menstrual blood in order to create what she called “authentic works of female desecration.” I’ll never forget modeling for her notorious Feminine Product Clothing line, my outfit composed of two hundred maxi-pads sewn together into a three-dimensional chastity belt, a push-up bra shaped with tampon applicators, and a set of diaphragm socks. I still sometimes use a photo from that show as my Facebook profile picture.

      This past year has been a rough one for Mal as well. A gallery job she’d been working towards for quite sometime fell through, so she’d been forced to pick up more hours at an upscale pizza restaurant she’d been working at on and off since undergrad—a funny place to work for the now budding raw foodist. Then, with the rent doubling from the previous master tenant’s surprise move-out, she’d had to quickly find a replacement who could afford the difference—a young but balding Delaware transplant named Dustin who programs some kind of drones for Google, wears baggy JNCO jeans, and drinks beet juice incessantly out of a plastic-lidded cup with a straw. In just a few years San Francisco has turned into a tech scene cesspool, where a studio price now starts at about $1600 per month, and most of our mutual artist friends have moved across the bay to Oakland—now also considered an “up and coming” area that’s quickly becoming unaffordable. But Mal isn’t ready to give up the vibrant, eclectic city life, nor the queer scene she’s been involved with—formed an identity around—for years. Luckily I’ve moved back just in time to turn the awkward living situation into a threesome—we converted the old Victorian’s dining room into a viable bedroom using two thick curtains and a few layered oriental rugs.

      Mal met my mother a handful of times—had joined us once for a wine tasting weekend up north during one of my mother’s unsuccessful attempts to have family time, a trip which proved to be a huge cover for my mother not knowing how to reveal to me that she had been asked to move to Paris by a former lover she’d recently reconnected with over the Internet (a “trained Ethnobotanist with a superior taste for French cuisine”), and that she was planning her move for that following spring. Of course that never actually happened, as the man turned out to be an ex-convict writing to her from a halfway house in Denver—which my mother luckily discovered before


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