The Fifth Wall. Rachel Nagelberg
others in my vast inability to be in life. Perhaps this is why I still cling to the camera; I’ve always been watching myself from afar.
Emotions from others would just bleed into me; especially my mother’s—when she was upset, I’d feel it. And she was often upset. The most trivial disturbances in life horrified her to points of near madness. My father called it “Deirdre Syndrome”—this emotional upheaval, her apparent biological state of becoming lost in seconds. Her instantaneous reaction to the realization that she, ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, had no control. It’s like she always felt crowded. She constantly needed space and yet, in that space she’d distract herself with technology. Soap operas and sitcoms and detective shows, computer Scrabble, Minesweeper, and other thought-numbing games. Her modes of distraction advanced when my father left, and reached a whole new level once Caleb and I left home. The whole house became appalling. Its necessary upkeep dwindled; various rooms were consistently in the midst of construction, picked up and dropped by either her or various Internet boyfriends; you felt like you were walking into a ruin. Wallpaper that had begun tearing fifteen years ago ripped off into strips and peeled from the walls like hanging flaps of colored skin. Throughout the years she’d acquired cats she rescued from the local shelter (upon cleaning out the house I’d discovered five, and quickly gave them away to neighbors), which clawed up the backs of chairs and furniture to frayed messes. A layer of cat hair coated all objects. Cat beds, cat toys, cat scratchers, empty cardboard boxes and bags for the cats to play in. A stranger upon walking inside might think it was a house for cats, with a person inside of it walking from screen to screen. The television and computer screens got bigger and bigger, and each visit it seemed like she sat closer and closer. By the end they were colossal. Tabletops stacked high with murder mystery and romance novels, local newspapers, popular women’s magazines. It’s as if the material world became secondary to the methods of distraction. The inhabitant moved from one station to the next. The in-between time proved a highly uncomfortable period, bearable only with prescribed marijuana and sparkling white wine on ice. All the furniture was pushed out from the wall in order to not touch the cords that ran behind it—trained by the hypochondriac of the family, my father, who would spend hours checking the house for possible fire hazards before we left for vacation, who once turned us around and backtracked two hours because he thought he left the toaster oven plugged in. The house, for him, seemed more like a responsibility than a refuge. The chaos of possible problems that existed outside of his study, where he’d spend hours reading Aristotle and Bataille into late hours of the night, lost in his own critique, the ice chinking in his tumbler that I heard from my bedroom while trying to fall asleep. The white noise from the television. My father would unwind from a semester by taking a few days to himself, in which he’d unplug and drive up the Northern coast with nothing but a pocketknife and a few other bare essentials, disappearing into the wilderness. This kind of “losing” of one’s self terrified my mother; in the beginning I think she found his sovereignty attractive—probably kept him close to have that kind of power near—but in the end, couldn’t break her fear of living, raised herself by working class parents in New York who lived through the Great Depression—I have early memories of my grandmother at restaurants shoving empty water glasses and ketchup packets into her purse—my mother never being able to release herself from her own holding onto the stable fixtures in her ideas about safety, duty. Mostly she was a private person; she rarely liked to talk about the past. Humor was a way to break her rigidity; never was she afraid to laugh. Often I find myself imagining how life would be if she had told us; composing sitcom-ish dialogues in my head between us. So now that I have a tumor, I have to be babysat? As helpless as she’d feel inside, she’d never want my brother or I to leave our respective lives—some guilt complex she developed from years of suffering from a depression she never confronted. Her body trapping thousands of emotions, writhing and constricting like imprisoned reptiles in the container of skin and bones and blood. This power of the body—its ability to create a foreign object that didn’t come from outside—how the killer entered and possibly changed her brain, corrupted the frontal cortex until there was no compassion left. A gun, the prop, she and my father had bought for protection years ago, kept in a shoebox in the back of a closet, knowledge neither Caleb nor I had until later. Mrs. Ackerman in the Foyer with the Gun in her hand. The players around the table throw down their cards. The game is now over. The truth has been discovered.
At home, I check the live deconstruction cam and watch Jesse pulling drywall with two shirtless, perspiring Mexican men. We’ve planned another rendezvous for later this evening—I’ll bring over a fancy pizza from Mal’s restaurant, and he’ll supply the beer.
With a couple hours of daylight left, I decide to take a short walk to the bustling part of the Mission to the restaurant, to have an early drink at the bar. The air outside is cool and brisk, but tolerable without a jacket. Clouds move swiftly above buildings, the sun appearing and disappearing like lightening, a false threat of rain. I arrive around five, just as they’re opening up. Inside, Mal’s behind the counter pressing her uterus against the pizza warmer. She spots me out of the corner of her eye.
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