Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

Scottie leaves himself behind at the beginning of the movie when he retires from the police. And he does so without regret — when Elster asks for his help, Scottie tells Elster, “I don’t want to get mixed up in that kind of stuff,” the kind of stuff that was once his profession, the kind of stuff he used to do every day. When asked by Judy/Madeleine what he does, he says, “Oh, just wander.” He has gone from a detective with the ambition to become chief of police in the first frames to a flâneur without any particular interests for most of the middle of the movie. Not only this, but he is suffering from acrophobia, an illness he did not have when the movie began, suffering from it to the degree that he has changed his life completely to accommodate it. And yet, on a surface level, Scottie would seem to be the most stable character in the film—”stable” being relative, given his mental instability and his obsession, provoked by Madeleine’s death. He is stable to the degree that that instability and obsession is present more or less throughout the movie, and stable to the degree that at least his actions are explainable. He is, paradoxically, the least frangible of the film’s main characters, the one we, the viewers, can count on to be himself and to remain himself, even though, again, he doesn’t remain himself, and may not, when we meet him, even have a (fixed) self.

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Sometimes coincidences take years to arrive and, at others, come running along in Indian file, one after the other.

(Saramago, The Double )

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I was invited to give a reading in San Francisco. It was the only such invitation I’d received since before my book had come out, and, even though the organizers couldn’t pay, I felt like I couldn’t say no. It was superstition. I told my wife that I thought if I turned this one down, I would never be invited to give a reading again. Besides, the flight to SFO was only an hour and a half, easy: I could fly down in the afternoon, read that night, and then have the following day to myself. My wife had to work and couldn’t come with me — with me unemployed, she said, she couldn’t afford to take the time off. The tickets weren’t expensive, but I was broke. I figured that since I was already going into debt for this trip, I might as well go to stillman.com and request all the information they had on the Gabriel Blackwell who supposedly lived in San Francisco, the Gabriel Blackwell who shared so much information with the Gabriel Blackwell who was me. It’s not as though I was expecting anything.

The report was even stranger than I thought it would be — obviously, something had gone very wrong somewhere along the line. According to the report, I (and it was definitely me: “our” past addresses were the exact same, for one thing, and so were the names of every member of our immediate family; I mean, there has to be a limit to coincidence, right?) had moved to the Castro in San Francisco from an address in Portland I’d left almost five years ago, just before my wife and I got engaged and moved in together. There was no record of our present address. And their records had me down as two years older — I still wasn’t sure what to make of that. My wife and I bought a car just before I found out I wouldn’t be a professor anymore; our credit histories had been checked by finance guy after finance guy — this couldn’t be someone posing as me, at least not for the purposes of financial gain. So what, then? I had “his” address and I was on my way to San Francisco.

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[INT. Mission Dolores (DAY)]

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When Scottie enters the Mission Dolores, Hitchock’s composition puts the two bell-pulls(?) in the background at the center of the shot (the camera also lingers on them, after Scottie leaves the shot). These bell-pulls resemble hanged men, one lower than the other.

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Carlotta Valdes

Dec. 3, 1831 — March 5, 1857

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Though Carlotta Valdes is, by all accounts, a suicide, she is buried in the cemetery at the Mission Dolores, a Catholic churchyard. According to the movie, she was interred in 1857. Catholic views on suicide have changed, of course, and suicides can now be buried in consecrated ground as a result of Vatican II (1962–1965), but prior to that council, suicide was considered murder and the deceased treated as a murderer. So, is Gavin Elster lying about Carlotta’s cause of death? Is Pop Liebel misremembering it? What was Carlotta’s actual fate, if not suicide? What if, in dying through an accident caused by a man obsessed by his image of her, Judy really is reliving Carlotta’s death? What if, in seeking to avoid our fates, we instead ensure them?

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In Basic Instinct , Catherine Trammell, writing under her pen-name Catherine Woolf, writes the novel Love Hurts , describing perfectly the crime that will occur, before that crime actually occurs.

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The bodies of suicides were not interred in consecrated ground because of concern over their resurrection on Judgment Day.

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In the past, according to superstitions that functioned with the force of law [and with barbarous inhumanity towards their families] suicides were interred with a stake through the chest to lay the ghost .

(Jeffrey Pethybridge, Striven, the Bright Treatise )

…

The address I got from stillman.com was on 19 thStreet, an apartment in one of those old Victorians that made me jealous of people who lived in San Francisco. The house was or had been green with white accents, but, unlike the other neat homes next to it, the paint was flaking off and there were garbage cans out front, tagged in illegible white letters: “Lost Boys.” My hand shook when I reached out to punch in the number of the apartment on the keypad. It took me two tries to get it right, and no one answered. As I was walking back down the stairs, I was surprised by a loud buzzing noise. I could feel the vibration of it in my stomach. It went on just long enough for me to collect myself, climb back up the stairs, and open the door.

To the left of the door were five metal mailboxes with numbers on them. My number was the highest of the five (it was number 10, for some reason, not number 5), so I guessed the apartment I was looking for was on the top floor. The door started buzzing again. I looked up and someone with long, wavy blond hair leaned over the railing of the staircase above me and then immediately disappeared back over the banister. I tried to say “Hello,” but all that came out was a wet sound like “hech.” I felt too self-conscious to try again. I debated whether I ought to go up the stairs, but then I felt stupid for standing there, on a stranger’s staircase, not moving, and I went up.

The stairs were narrow and carpeted, with dark oiled wood banisters and a large oval opening down the center. All the lights I passed were unlit, but there must have been a skylight at the top of the stairs because a weak daylight irradiated everything. There was the muffled sound of hammering that could have come from one of the floors above or from another building entirely; apart from that, the house was silent.

When I reached what I thought had been the place where the person had looked over the railing, there was no one there. At the end of a short corridor next to the next flight of stairs, there was a potted plant and a green door. There would have been no reason to knock. It was not the apartment I was looking for. The numbers kept climbing, but I had not reached number 10, so I kept climbing, too.

The carpeting stopped before the stairs did, on the way up to the fourth floor. I felt distinctly as though I was not supposed to be where I was. The skylight in the ceiling let in light through a thick film of dust or decayed leaves or pollen or something, just bright enough to see down another unlit hallway with two doors on either end, both open, neither numbered. I didn’t know what to do. I went back down a flight to the potted plant and the green door to check the numbers of the apartments. One higher than the other, each lower than the number I was looking for. I went back up to the top, feeling lightheaded from all the climbing. Maybe I was holding my breath. I looked into the back apartment first, but the flooring there had been removed. Clearly, it could not be this one, I thought. I looked into the front apartment, which at least had subflooring down. It was dark, but the windows had no coverings and there was enough light that I could get around without bumping into anything (though I couldn’t really see what it was I wasn’t bumping into). Many of the walls had been opened and sheetrock had not yet been hung. Some of the wiring had been done, and some of it hung out of the walls or from the ceiling. I had to use my phone as a flashlight in a couple of the rooms. In what had once been and would possibly again become a bathroom, I found some tools that I guessed were used for plumbing. Like the floors in the other rooms, they were covered in a thick layer of dust. I guessed the owners had begun a renovation and then run out of money, or else just given up on their own project. No one could live here, I thought. I walked through each room again, slowly, looking for any clue, but I didn’t find one.