The Fifth Wall. Rachel Nagelberg
sense to her on some level—albeit she worries, I’m sure, that it’s a lot more work—emotionally and physically—than it’s worth. But Mal’s not one to stop any project halfway; she’s a proponent of taking anything to its end.
Peripheral neuropathy, transient ischemic attack (mini-stroke), hypoglycemia, intoxication, cocaine abuse—I scroll through the virtual hypochondria—lead poisoning, epilepsy, premenstrual syndrome …
Mal hops off the counter. Her short, matted bed-hair sticks up in outrageous places, though appears somehow purposeful, framing her face beautifully, perfectly effortless. Her bare, olive-toned arms and upper torso showcase many visible moles and warped stick-and-poke tattoos, faded and bleeding out from the years. “I’m planning on going up to another retreat at Harbin next weekend, so you’ll have to keep an eye on these babies.”
I stare at the jar-filled cardboard box groggily, caramel sticky in my teeth. “Since when did you become such a retreat junkie?”
“Since I met that woman ‘Astral Sunflower’ a few years ago and she opened my eyes to an invisible world of pure, potential happiness. And extremely hot women.”
Multiple sclerosis, Lyme disease, weeverfish sting, cannibalism in Papua New Guinea. Weeverfish sting? Cannibalism in Papua New Guinea? I shut off my phone. “Isn’t that the woman who gave you herpes?” I say.
She glares at me. “Sheila, everyone has herpes.”
“I don’t have herpes.”
“You probably have herpes. They don’t even test for it anymore.”
“I sincerely doubt that, Mal.”
“Look it up—,” she reaches for my phone, “I’m telling you the truth, I swear!”
Dustin appears in the doorway wearing a Bluetooth headset, slurping a plastic cup caked with a day-old dried burgundy. I watch Mal slightly throw up in her mouth.
He grabs a half-eaten burrito from the refrigerator, speaking numbers quietly into the mic, and slithers back through the doorway.
“What do you even do at these retreats?” I sit at a counter stool and pour another coffee.
“Well, it depends on the retreat. This one’s at a hot springs and is called True Embodiment & the Realization of Self Truth.”
“You know that title uses ‘truth’ twice.”
Mal contemplates it for a second, and then shrugs.
“What does it even mean?” I ask.
“I mean, it’s a bogus title, Sheils, but it’s also pretty irrelevant—it’s like when a bad writer goes to see some really cool fucking art. If the art is legit, it transcends any wording catastrophes that try to box it in.”
I sip my coffee and nod. An image of one Mal’s first installations, Gut Feelings, comes to mind, where she arranged onto walls enclosed boxes of chicken livers and intestines tacked in various positions with hand-sized holes for daring audience members to stick gloved hands inside and feel around for the box’s surprise.
I wonder what my organs would feel like if dissected and rearranged, mounted in dark space.
“Whatever you say,” I shrug. “I know weird shit’s bound to happen at gatherings like that.”
“Weird shit happens all the time, everywhere, around the clock. Especially in this city. I mean, you’re from Berkeley.”
I give her the look.
“Okay, okay.” She concedes, and sits down next to me. “There was this one retreat, a few years ago—it was only my second or third one. It was up at Mount Shasta and we were staying in our own separate yurts, men separated from women, of course. After a week, all of the women’s yurts—mine included—started to reek of urine. We had absolutely no idea why this was happening—the outhouses were closer to the men’s yurts, and we were using a ton of sawdust.” She shakes her head. “Anyway, it turns out that one of the men was sneaking into all the women’s yurts and leaving drinking glasses filled with his own urine underneath our beds—I’m guessing as some sort of fetishistic gesture of leaving his scent…”
“That’s absolutely disgusting.”
“I know.”
“That’s like, even weirder than anything I had possibly imagined you were going to say.”
“Is it really?”
“Positively.”
“Well, you know, I’ve learned to research a lot since then. It’s like finding a gynecologist—you go to the one with the least amount of public lawsuits.”
I lower my head in defeat.
“By and large, you are not one to judge, Sheila Bee.” Mal wraps her arm around me, presses her warm cheek to my own, the sweet scents of peppermint and eucalyptus.
Her phone rings, the theme song to Strangers with Candy. Her aggression is quick and piercing on the phone, as if continuing a heated conversation put on hold. A wild persona reserved for specific people, times, places. “All I’m saying is I got a weird feeling, lady. Plus he doesn’t want to have sex with you, which is hot.” She motions for the doorway. “And your vagina is like Neverland—she loves the lost boys.”
Outside, the wind from the bay rips across telephone poles, knocks over garbage bins, thrusts between buildings in high-pitched resonances. The homeless poke through clinking glass bottles to sell back to the closest Safeway. A muscular woman leads a group of five children down the sidewalk all wearing dark sunglasses. A man walking by shouts HOW ARE MOMMY’S TEETH? into a Bluetooth. Beneath California, the Earth’s crust is preparing to release energy into shattering, seismic waves. The soil is preparing for its transition into sand. The Earth speaks, the city shudders. The smell of Southern Indian leaks through the vents.
An unsettling feeling fills my stomach. That feeling I felt yesterday in front of the house—that depthlessness that came over me, that extraordinary sense, that lack—like a swallowing. Nothing that I can categorize into a WebMD symptom app. The house, pulling me inside its time warp of trauma. It’s not enough to die. You still have to disappear. I read somewhere that in some surviving ancient Mayan cultures, the body of the deceased is sat upright in the shared main space of the family’s household for days, weeks, and sometimes months, so that they can witness the process of decay—the skin, sinew, and muscle sliding from bones, the process of decomposition a communal spectacle, a collective visual mourning—the townspeople often speeding up the process by eating its flesh and meat. These practices are seen as the first burials, the liminal states between life and death. After the body decays, the second burial takes place, where the bones are then buried in the ground, often underneath the floor of the immediate household, becoming literally embedded into its history.
The archaeologist who wrote the article visited this particular culture to observe this extraordinary death ritual. There, a townsperson asked him to account for burials in America, to explain the process of our transition from death to the next world. The archaeologist tried to explain embalming, but before he could even finish, the Mayan turned to the side and vomited, refusing afterwards to talk any more with any members of the team. The archaeologist supposed that the man was so offended by American practices, that he couldn’t even bear to accept their weight. The American Dream: to make the living dead look alive.
But to watch a loved one’s body decompose—at first it seems more honest. To really know and witness death as a part of life. It only seems natural. But where is the ritual when a dense black ball of matter spreads its icy fingers into one’s brain cavities without warning? Where is the ritual in suicide?
We had my mother cremated. Right after the small funeral, per her instructions (in a will she’d written and notarized a few weeks prior to her death), Caleb, my father, and I flew with her contents to an old horse farm in Ottsville,