Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

(Deleuze, Difference and Repetition )

…

The staircase up the belltower is, if you take away the walls, a spiral not unlike a corkscrew. The difference being either that its ends have been reversed, with the sharp, piercing end at the top rather than the bottom, or else that it has no top, no bottom, no orientation. Both ends are sharp points. There is no handle.

The other peculiarity in this spiral is that Scottie does not complete it until the very end of the movie. When, in the dream sequence at the middle of the movie, the spiral of Scottie’s descent into the grave appears, it doesn’t echo any literal movements he has made up to that point — instead, it prefigures those he will make at the end of the movie. It isn’t uncanny — he doesn’t, can’t, recognize it — it is oracular. When he reaches the top, either in horror or in triumph, he experiences a moment of déjà vu; he has been here before, even though he hasn’t been here before. What is the experience of déjà vu? It is the experience of touching a parallel reality we have always suspected but never (or only seldom) witnessed. It is as profoundly disturbing as would be catching sight of yourself waiting for the bus from the window of that bus. It is the experience of looking through space but seeing a difference in time.

…

If you or I ever really accepted the moral responsibility for what we’ve done in our lifetime — we’d drop dead or go mad. Living creatures weren’t made to understand what they do.

(Philip K. Dick, Now Wait for Last Year )

…

And I come face-to-face with what I have learned: our lives are a spiral and, though we circle and circle, we never quite come back to where we began.

(Kitchen, Distance and Direction )

…

I was once asked to do voice-over work for a short film because of a reading I gave with the director’s cousin. I thought she’d said it all took place in an elevator in a skyscraper, but I couldn’t be sure because I hadn’t been paying much attention. At the time, I’d thought it was a prank.

A year and a half after the reading, long after I’d forgotten I’d even given this person my email address, I got an email from the director, wanting to know if I was still interested and asking to meet me sometime that week if so. She proposed a coffee shop around the corner from where my wife and I lived; this made me nervous, I remember, but I said yes, at least, after I remembered the reading. Because I barely remembered even that, I didn’t think I would recognize her, but she stood up as I entered the shop — she had recognized me — and I was shocked to find that, in this different light, she looked nothing like what I remembered. Which is to say that, because I could not remember what she looked like, she looked incredibly familiar to me, but not in an expected way. She looked like my wife had when we met — not that my wife looked so different now, but I had become accustomed to the changes in her looks. Now, when I look at photos of that time, I can’t believe how young she looks. And this was how this woman looked.

I couldn’t make sense out of what she handed me, but I didn’t need to — I was assured it would be, at most, a few hours’ work, and would all be done on the same day, whatever day I had free that week: I would say my lines (already highlighted for me on the script), they would be run against a master of the film, and we would do any rerecording we needed to do on the spot. That would be that. I could use my speaking voice, which was perfect, she said — it was the reason she had asked me to do it. I wouldn’t need to memorize anything, and I wouldn’t even need to act — I could just read from the script. “All you really need to do,” she told me, “is show up on Thursday,” Thursday being the day we had just agreed on. I looked over at her, this woman who looked startlingly like my wife, and had to resist the impulse to look into her eyes as I had done with my wife, whose eyes were perhaps her best feature.

In order to avoid doing something I knew would be inappropriate, I decided to focus on the task at hand. I looked over the script. As I read the lines in my head, I kept hearing the graveled voice of the narrator of seemingly every trailer I had ever seen, and then imagining my own voice saying those same words. My speaking voice, even at its lowest, was nothing like that impressive bass. When recorded and played back to me, it always sounded weaker and thinner and higher-pitched than I imagined it as it came out of my mouth. I avoided listening to my own voice or allowing it to be recorded whenever possible, just as I had avoided being photographed for as long as I could remember, and kept no photographs of myself, which drove my wife crazy. The photographs in our apartment were of her alone or of her with other men. I thanked this woman for the opportunity, confirmed the address she had given me, and told her I would see her on Thursday.

The recording studio, as it turned out, was a small room in a building that had been designed to be used as either a self-storage place or a very low-rent office space, depending, I guessed, on the imagination of the person leasing the unit. The only way to get into the building was the elevator, which stood open on the parking lot. The doors didn’t close when I got on. I had been told to key in a three-digit number on the intercom’s keypad, which I did. A dialtone droned for a moment, and then someone picked up on the other end, not the woman I’d dealt with but a man I didn’t know. I told this man my name and the line went dead. A few moments later, the doors closed and the elevator took me up to the third floor. Only some of the doors in the hallway the elevator let me off into had numbers, and the numbers there seemed to have been distributed at random. I went around the entire floor once without seeing the unit I was looking for, and was a little panicked by the time I found it.

Inside, the room was empty except for a microphone, a music stand, and a man seated on a low cabinet, typing very quietly on a laptop. He gestured to the microphone and asked if I was ready. The woman I had met with a few days before was not there, but I decided not to mention this. The man positioned the music stand and adjusted its height, explaining that I should spread out the pages in front of me, as many as would fit, so that the microphone wouldn’t pick up the sound of me moving them around. He said that, when I was ready, I should read the first page of lines once, stop, read it all again, and then go ahead with the rest in the same way, pausing between each line for at least three seconds. “Think ‘One Mississippi, two Mississippi,’” he said. He went out of the door I had just come in through. I was now more convinced than before that this was some sort of joke. Why pick on me, I thought. As I read that first page, my throat betrayed my distrust by closing around certain words. I choked and tears came to my eyes. The line was “One shouldn’t live alone,” which sounded familiar to me, though I couldn’t place it at the time. Later, now, writing this, I realized it was a line from Vertigo , that in fact all of my lines were lines from the movie, though often paraphrased or scrambled or sometimes slightly rewritten. “I was a made-to-order witness,” I said. “I let you change me because I love you.” “What happened to you?”

At the time, I wished I had thought to bring a bottle of water with me. I traced the microphone cable up to the flocked ceiling, but I couldn’t see what it could possibly be attached to. I read through the lines I had been given, then went over to the low cabinet the man had been sitting on and sat down to wait. I wasn’t sure if this was what I was supposed to do. I guessed the man was probably right outside the door or in another office, but, I thought, if he had somehow been listening, he would know to come in, wouldn’t he? Was it all a prank? I pictured the woman, and I wondered if I would ever see her again.