Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

And so he erases it, the entire book, piece by piece. He worries writing about this woman is exploitative. He worries that taking on so much responsibility for what happened is itself disrespectful to her. First, he erases everything having to do with her. Then, worried he has only made things worse, he erases everything having to do with himself. All that is left are his thoughts on the film, and these are nothing special, he thinks. He erases them, too, one at a time, until he is left with nothing. He has brought himself back to a time before he began writing this book, but he wants to go back even further, to a time when he was still innocent.

If I can make her life better somehow , he thinks, maybe I can make up for all that I’ve done. But I’m a writer , he thinks, which means I’m incompetent to do most things. The only thing I can do , he thinks, is write . So he writes, but now he doesn’t concern himself with “art” and instead writes a thriller as dumb and hackneyed as he can make it. The characters are cardboard and the sentences are wooden. His new book is about a killer who preys on young women. We leave the story of this man to follow the story he is writing.

In the man’s book, we follow a woman. She goes to work, goes to the gym, goes to a coworker’s birthday party, goes on vacation with her boyfriend, etc. When we least expect it, almost eighty pages in, our protagonist is murdered. This — this cycle of being introduced to a character, following her, and then learning she has been murdered — repeats itself, happens three times, with each subsequent murder happening at a random interval so that it will come as a surprise to us. Indeed, one of the writer’s obvious strengths is in convincing us that each woman will make it out alive, that each will defy the pattern being established. The murders are not described; at the end of each of these sections, we see the police arrest a man, an excellent suspect, almost always with motive and opportunity and a history of violence against women. Each time, some piece of evidence turns up exonerating him. It is always a different man the police arrest, but we get the idea that the murderer has been the same in every case.

We leave this book to return to the story of the man writing it. We are told the book has sold to a publisher and has become an overnight sensation. The rights are sold to a Hollywood producer, and now the writer has money to burn. This has been his plan all along: to make money writing so that he can make the woman’s life better. He is shocked that he has been successful in his plan, that things could be so easy, but now his fortunes change. He doesn’t know how to get in touch with the woman anymore. He goes to her friends, asks them where she is, but he can’t get anything out of them, and he can’t find her family — to whom he was never introduced, he realizes. He asks everyone where he can find her, what happened to her, and always the answer is I don’t know, I haven’t seen her, I can’t help you.

He can’t spend the money, and he can’t just give it away, either, he thinks — at least half of it is rightfully hers. She was the inspiration for the book, the reason he wrote it. He says as much in interviews, though he never says how she inspired the book or what her name is, still worried the story isn’t his to tell. She doesn’t come forward, so finally, he hires a private detective. After many, many months, the detective finds the woman, living under an alias. The detective tells the woman the situation, or at least as much as he knows about it: There is a man, a writer, who wants to know where she is and is willing to spend quite a bit of money to find her. She is scared when the detective first approaches her — as it turns out, she is wanted for a crime under a different alias, a fact not even the detective knows, but with which she lives in abject guilt. We are not told what the crime is, only that it is serious. She cannot afford to be in the spotlight, she thinks, and if she comes forward, the story will be everywhere. She’ll be caught. She pleads with the detective not to tell anyone where she is or what name she is now going under. She doesn’t tell the detective about her crime; instead, she tells him the writer abused her, mentally. The detective listens to her story. He seems genuinely sympathetic. He tells her he won’t say anything, her secret is safe with him.

This detective, however, is unscrupulous, or rather, has been made unscrupulous through his financial woes. His wife, a model who works car shows and conventions around Las Vegas, has gambling debts in six figures; to make matters worse, he is still paying child support to his ex-wife. He wonders how much money he can get out of this woman. He can keep the writer dangling for a while longer before he, the writer, goes to another detective, he thinks, especially if he can show a little progress has been made. And while that’s going on, the detective can threaten to give up the woman’s whereabouts to the writer and get money from her .

The woman could pay the detective off if she had the writer’s money, but she doesn’t want to see the writer and can’t face being exposed, so she can’t pay what the detective wants. If the writer knew the position he had put her in, he would feel worse than he already does and would buy the detective off, but he doesn’t know anything, only that the detective is making very slow progress, which is still better than nothing. And the detective’s situation gets worse by the day — the people his wife owes money to have made threats against her before, but now they are incredibly specific threats, threats of ruining her career by first breaking her nose so that it cannot be re-set, then, by breaking her cheekbones. If the debts still aren’t paid off, they will remove her teeth, and then they will scar her face with acid. The detective feels he has no choice: he asks for even more money from the woman to keep her secret. The woman feels trapped. She thinks constantly of the crime she has committed: Is this her punishment? She feels like there is no way out.

In the last scene, we have jumped forward in time. The detective is emailing the writer a link to the obituary of the woman’s alias. He tells the writer, this is the woman you wanted me to find. She’s dead. I’m sorry. We do not learn how the writer takes the news, because we stay with the detective in his office. He initiates a public documents search for a name we recognize from the writer’s novel, the thriller, the one that made so much money.

The end.

…

Failed suicides and people who have suicidal tendencies frequently report imagining the circumstances of their (future) suicide in great detail. Whereas our daydreams about the future are typically vague and lacking in detail, these suicidal fantasies are exact: a particular bend in the road where one will fail to turn; a specific razor, where one will get it from, and just the right temperature of the water; the spot on the bridge where one will climb over the railing. These fantasies are so exact, in fact, that if the person is prevented from visiting the place described or otherwise barred from realizing the exact circumstance they have envisioned, an overwhelming majority of them will simply give up on killing themselves.

When Madeleine tells Scottie about her dream and he insists they visit the place she has described, he is, we would then say, driving her to her death. He is doing just that, in a nearly literal way, except it isn’t Madeleine whom he is driving but Judy — Madeleine is already dead. But later, perhaps, he will drive Judy to her suicide. Having witnessed Madeleine’s body being thrown out of the tower while pretending to be Madeleine, Judy is seeing her “self” die. In being later forced to recreate that day without the aid of Madeleine’s body to stand in for her, Judy must then act out Madeleine’s part. All along, Scottie has been forcing her to recall the events that led up to this death — taking her to Ernie’s, dressing her as Madeleine, taking her to have her hair done as Madeleine did hers, taking her to his apartment, and so on. If Judy’s death is a suicide, it is a suicide that has been caused by the actions of another, a kind of induced suicide.