LITMIR.BIZ

      This is

      A Black Sparrow Book

      Published in 2017 by David R. Godine, Publisher

      Post Office Box 450

      Jaffrey, New Hampshire 03452

       www.blacksparrowbooks.com

      Copyright © 2017 by Rachel Nagelberg

      Cover art copyright © 2017 by Anthony Baab

       www.anthonybaab.com

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information contact Permissions, David R. Godine, Publisher, 15 Court Square, Suite 320, Boston, Massachusetts 03452.

      SOFTCOVER ISBN: 978-1-57423-228-8

      EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-57423-232-5

      LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

      Names: Nagelberg, Rachel, author.

      Title: The fifth wall : a novel / by Rachel Nagelberg.

      Description: Jaffrey, New Hampshire : Black Sparrow Books, 2017.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2016050041 | ISBN 9781574232288 (alk. paper)

      Classification: LCC PS3614.a428 F54 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016050041

       for my parents

      The close-up in film treats the face primarily as a landscape; that is the definition of film, black hole and white wall, screen and camera. But the same goes for the earlier arts, architecture, painting, even the novel: close-ups animate and invent all of their correlations. So, is your mother a landscape or a face? A face or a factory?

      GILLES DELEUZE AND FELIX GUATTARI,

      A Thousand Plateaus

       Love can tear anything to shreds.

      KATHY ACKER,

      Blood and Guts in High School

      Prologue

      I imagine the tumor as a dense, dark ball of mass, thick and strangled, icy black, pulsating. There is her forehead, covered with skin, a skin that coats the ivory bone of her skull, a skull that houses her gelatinous, salmon-pink brain tissue, a tissue that envelopes the black.

      I’ve tried many times to visualize its origin—the split second when her body gave birth to terror—to the point where all my memories of her are now contaminated. The tumor is always there, existing invisibly, silently, waiting to attack.

      First you prepare the site. You clear out your workspace, organize a plan. Out with the stone-trimmed gravel pathway, the three-tiered ceramic, solar-powered birdbath, the raised flowerbed you and your older brother, Caleb, helped her install. The budding fairy lilies, the anticipated thistle sage. Make sure to pull from beneath the roots, and then place carefully in the allotted pots and jars. The overgrown barberry bushes. The maidenhair ferns, the needlegrass. Say goodbye to the backyard, to the clover epidemic, the praying mantis mating ground, the labyrinth of cacti and succulents. The turtle sandbox that has growing inside it you-don’t-even-wanna-know. The hanging stars and half-moons, the celestial copper sun. Take a good, long look. Capture it firmly in your mind.

      There are memories that cannot be filmed.

      Set up your demolition fencing, mark your roll-off locations. Organize your tools. Surround everything with yellow caution tape. From now on spaces will be called areas. Watch the walk-ways become entry ramps, the ground become a zone.

      Out goes the interior garbage, the waste of human entropy, of past familial decay. Plastic containers, towering piles of paperbacks, magazines, and stacks of mail. Cardboard storage boxes bulging with old report cards, rubber-banded art projects, graded tests. Dust balls, loose change, long-lost erasers, pencils, pen caps, and pins. Then, of course, the furniture—the oak table, the polypropylene chairs, the mahogany breakfront, the bed frames, the end tables, bookcases, the dozen cat scratching posts, the torn-up leather lounge and loveseat. Into the Goodwill trucks they’ll go—all these objects now lacking context, scattered and abandoned in indeterminate space.

      I seriously considered complete demolition. The idea of using heavy, monstrous machines to attack and destroy satisfies me on a level I can’t quite fully explain. The obvious reasons are of course for the spectacle of it, the energy, the violence—the immediate, crashing results. Why little boys like to set fire to inanimate objects and throw old TVs off the roof. Why we chuck things when we’re angry. Why nuclear weapons exist. But the contractor, Jesse, suggested “deconstruction” as an alternative, greener way to go about it, which wouldn’t make as much press—something I hadn’t really thought about. There were the local Berkeley newspapers to consider, the affluent neighbors on the hills, and not to mention the restoration activists I’d almost definitely be fighting off. Plus Jesse was sexy, and I desperately wanted to please him. I’ve always been this way with men.

      The camera wasn’t intentional, at first. I’d set it up to capture a living moment of the house before it was destroyed, and then just left it on, mounted it more securely to the front lawn by burying the lower half of it like the stem of a beach umbrella into sand. It’s now set up to record 24/7, transmitting the video to my MacBook like a surveillance camera, so that I can keep an eye on the site and monitor its progress, have the ability to see it live before me on a twelve-by-fifteen-inch screen.

      Then go the fixtures, the appliances, all of the windows and doors. You separate the woods from the metals, the concretes, the disposables and the hazardous. The interior fixtures, the interior trim. Everything is placed in correctly marked areas, specified receptacles.

      My art has always been about documentation. My unfinished thesis consists of me assembling entire rooms from my own fantasies, from my projected desires of a romantic future. I create three-dimensional settings filled with emptiness—spaces with no human presence, no narrative, no history. I film the process of each room from start to finish, which I then archive, and plan to display in exhibitions, where viewers will be invited into the makeshift rooms to experience the ghostly absence of a presence that never existed, sort of like walking into an apartment of someone who has just vanished into thin air. Spaces for the living dead.

      I found her, I said for the record, and that was that.

      They nodded with a practiced formality. I watched their pencils quiver.

      For some reason I decided not to tell them—what I had witnessed, what I had seen.

      I thought: how can you even identify someone without a face?

      Let’s rewind a little.

      No one knew my mother was sick. It had been almost two years since I’d seen her—I’d been living across the country in Ithaca finishing up my MFA in Fine Art at Cornell. We rarely talked on the phone—the conversations always felt rushed and uneventful, lacking in drive or interest. My mother, a retired RN, lost from the years of her own increasing neuroses, with a ruthless addiction to television. She’d been living in that house alone for the past decade, having been divorced from my father for years—a professor of dramaturgy at Berkeley and ex-childhood actor. He’d been living on a sailboat docked in Marin for the past few years with a three-legged German Shepherd named Pozzo and terrible cell phone service.

      Why didn’t she tell us? Why didn’t she wait?

      Let’s just say my visit was impulsive—an

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