Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

(Solnit, River of Shadows )

…

Film, we know, does nothing to time itself, merely to our perception of it — we can speed it up, slow it down, rearrange it, stop it anywhere we choose. Film makes time appear to repeat, but nothing repeats, nothing comes back, nothing returns, except the feeling of what returns.

(Nick Flynn, The Reenactments )

…

Madeleine E.

This is a book about a woman who has a terrible accident. She goes into a coma, and it is two months before she comes out of it. Every day, a man comes to visit her in the hospital. He brings her flowers — what flowers do they use in Carlotta’s bouquet in Vertigo ? White roses? He brings her white roses. The story is told in third person. Because the woman is in a coma to begin with, we don’t know anything about her, and the man only says, “I love you, Madeleine.” We know that she is blonde. We know that she is beautiful.

The book repeats itself: The man comes to visit, the man leaves. The man comes to visit, the man leaves. A month passes.

The middle third of the book is a very long scene of Madeleine coming out of her coma. She wants to know what she’s doing in the hospital. She remembers being at work, and then. The nurse calls the doctor. The doctor’s daughter is downstairs, in another room, very ill. He is understandably distracted, but he has fallen in love with the woman a little bit, despite himself, and he feels responsible for her. He does a few quick tests. She seems to be functioning normally. He sends the nurse to fetch the man. The man is having something to eat in the cafeteria, but he’s left instructions that he be paged if she wakes up. He has told everyone he is her fiancé. At the exact moment the nurse leaves the room, the doctor is paged and, worried there is something the matter downstairs, runs off without telling the woman what has happened to her. She is alone and confused. There are white roses in bouquets all around the room, many of them dead and now dried, others wilting, the perfume of them all nearly overwhelming. We stay with this woman for a few pages, as she looks at these bouquets and wonders about them. Each bouquet is described. Then the nurse knocks and the man enters. He is so happy and so surprised, he doesn’t know what to say. He can’t speak. He runs over to the bed and collapses onto the woman. He is crying. She immediately recognizes him, calls him by his name, Scottie, and asks what happened to her, why she is here.

He tells her what happened, or what he knows. He doesn’t know everything, he says, and he doesn’t know exactly why what happened happened, but he will try his best to explain and maybe she’ll remember the rest. She was found on the sidewalk outside a chapel in the Mission, an old church that’s being renovated. They’d been to a party near there a week before the accident; otherwise, it wasn’t a neighborhood they went to all that often. The police said they thought she had climbed up the scaffolding and then fallen. No one knows why she would have climbed the scaffolding, but her injuries were consistent with a fall, and there would have been no other way up. It was a miracle she hadn’t died. The last time he’d seen her, he tells her, was the night before, when they’d gone to their favorite restaurant together. They’d had an argument and she’d left on her own. She asks what the argument was about, but he says it isn’t important, that she should just forget about it. She reminds him that he’s just told her it will be good for her to try to remember things. He says that he’s forgotten what it was about, but it’s obvious that he’s not telling the truth. The woman becomes suspicious. Not about the argument, about the man — it occurs to her that she doesn’t even know him, that he looks like the man she remembers seeing, but he definitely isn’t that man. She calls for the nurse and makes a scene, telling the nurse she doesn’t want this stranger in her room. The nurse tells her this man has been to see her every day, spent almost as much time at the hospital as she, the nurse, has, if not more. He must care for the woman a lot. It doesn’t matter, the woman says, get him out of here. The man is surprised and clearly hurt, but he leaves. He doesn’t want things to get any worse. Other nurses are arriving because of the shouting. Security is on its way.

The woman is stuck in her hospital room, under observation, and she has plenty of time to think about things. She can’t remember what happened, but she’s sure this man had something to do with it. Why wouldn’t he tell her what the argument was about? Why was he trying to come off like someone she knew, when he was so clearly a stranger? She calls the police to try to get a better idea of what happened. She speaks to an officer, Detective Ferguson, who tells her he’ll come by to get her statement, and maybe, with the right questions, he can help her remember the rest.

Detective Ferguson is helpful. They talk about the night of her accident. She remembers that she broke up with Scottie that night. That’s why they left the restaurant separately. She still can’t remember where she went afterward or why, but she feels relieved to have remembered something from that night on her own, and thinks maybe the rest will come back, too. The detective asks about the bouquets. Why so many? Funny he should mention that, she says. One of the reasons she had broken up with Scottie was that he was controlling, overwhelming. The roses are exactly his style. She wants them gone, but she feels bad about asking the nurses to do so much work for her. She asks the detective to come back the following day. She is tired. Maybe she will remember more, what happened after she left the restaurant. Already, she remembers a car. Was there a car at the accident? No, says the detective, no car.

Though a detective does come by the next day, she’s sure it isn’t the one who was there the day before. Are there two detectives who look the same, or is this man even a detective? What kind of a trick is he playing on her? Where’s the one she talked to yesterday? There is another scene and the detective leaves, confused and a little heartbroken. He’d put on his best suit, gotten a haircut, was freshly shaved. He wanted to impress her. Instead, he seems to have frightened her. He always comes on too strong, he thinks.

The doctor’s daughter has stabilized and his ex-wife has told him he is not needed anymore. They do not get along, the doctor and his ex-wife. He returns to his rounds. He has several patients his colleagues have been helping out with, but none he is more excited to see than the woman who has just come out of her coma. Who is she? What happened? He wants to know more about her. Even though he isn’t on rounds until the next morning, he visits, tells her what to expect. She listens carefully. She does not recognize the doctor from two days before, and then she does. There is something strange about him. She keeps this to herself. So far, he hasn’t asked any questions, other than the obligatory How are you feeling ? She is beginning to worry that there is something very wrong with this hospital. Where has she woken up? The nurses, the doctors, even the visitors: there is something off about all of them. She wants to get out and to get out, she’ll have to show them that she’s okay. Thinking she’s tired, the doctor leaves her, goes home.

Once the doctor has gone, her ex-boyfriend, Scottie, enters the room. He has brought even more flowers. She tells him to take them away, to take them all away. Then, something about him jogs a memory — this is the man in the car, the man with whom she left the restaurant that night! Not her ex-boyfriend, but someone who looks a lot like him, a man who’d wanted her to pretend to be his girlfriend to make some other woman jealous, or so he’d said. They were in the car because they were on their way to a club in the Mission that night. He was going to pay her a thousand dollars to pretend to be his girlfriend. She was a sales associate at Nordstrom, but, ever since her roommate had moved out, she couldn’t pay rent on what she made. She couldn’t turn down a thousand dollars. It was creepy, but the guy reminded her of her boyfriend, and he seemed harmless enough, so, she figured, what the hell. It is weird that he looks so much like her ex-boyfriend, though, she thinks. She can’t remember where she met this guy. How does she know him? And why is he here, now? Did he push her off the scaffolding? She can’t remember, but she pushes the call button. She doesn’t say anything to the man, even when he asks her questions. When the nurse gets there, she tells the nurse she doesn’t want this man there, doesn’t want him admitted anymore. And could she please do something about the flowers?