Yes, I’m aware that he’s been dead for twenty years. Bear with me and I’ll try to explain:
It started the day I lost my wife. (Given that we are talking about Alfred Hitchcock, I suppose I should qualify that statement. I didn’t lose my wife in the sense that she died or anything; I mean that I actually lost her – misplaced her, couldn’t find her, there-she-was-one-moment-vapor-the-next – you know: lost her.)
We were Christmas shopping when I turned around and couldn’t find my wife. She has an uncanny ability to walk in my blind spot – behind me and to my left – so I kept turning around looking for her. I was actually at the point of making myself dizzy when I saw the girl in the red leather coat. She was young – in her early twenties – and reasonably, but not conspicuously attractive and she seemed interested in this strange man who kept turning in circles like a dog. I described my wife to her and asked if she had seen her.
(This, by the way, is one of my new bad habits since I got married. Anytime I lose something, I ask my wife. If she isn’t around, I tend to grab some other random woman and ask her where I put my whatever. The fact that my lost “whatever” in this case was my wife is somewhat ironic.)
The girl in the red leather coat hadn’t seen her, but with a strange, little half-smile, she said something odd – “The Lady Vanishes”, the title of an early Alfred Hitchcock movie. She might not have actually said this, but it sticks in my memory that she did. In any case, I didn’t have a chance to ask her about it, because before I could really process what she’d said, she vanished, too.
My wife never turned up, so I went to another store that we had talked about visiting. I didn’t find her there, but I did run into somebody – the girl in the red leather coat. She didn’t say anything, but gave me that “Hey…” sort of smile, then turned around a corner and was gone. I ran into her again in the next store. And then again when I went back to the original store and found my less-than-amused wife waiting for me. I went to point Red Leather Girl out to my wife, but she wasn’t really in the mood.
The next day, my wife and I took our niece shopping in Boston. As part of our traditional day-in-Boston routine, we went to Haymarket, the large, open-air produce market in the North End. It was particularly crowded, so I was designated as official strawberry buyer and sent into the mob.
There must be some back-story that explains why the little Somali woman in front of me in the middle of the market suddenly turned and screamed in my face. I imagine that she had been telling her young son to stop wandering away and that he’d better stick with her for the rest of the day, or he’d be in big trouble. At any rate, she turned around and screamed, “MOHAMMED!!!!” in my face. I have to confess that I was startled for a second or two, but I was otherwise all right. (My attitude is that if I can pick random women to help me hunt for stuff, she can pick surrogate men to shout at.) This would be fairly unremarkable – one of the dozens of weird things that happen to me in a random week – except for the flash of red leather I saw out of the corner of my eye as I was trying to get my heart restarted.
A couple of nights later, I was walking home through the Mill Yard from having drinks with some friends. It was a cold, clear night with a beautiful half-moon shining over the warehouses. I stopped to look up at the sky - well, okay, to pee behind a dumpster – when I saw the birds. A flock of hundreds and hundreds of seagulls were circling the Mill Yard, looking for thermals to help them fly, or for fish in the river, or maybe for sheer joy of flying around in the moonlight.
I was charmed. I wandered out onto the empty street and stood, watching the innocent, beautiful birds. Until something started hitting the pavement all around me with wet, little plops.
I started walking faster, then running, then sprinting to my apartment a block away. I think I got there just in time. I didn’t see her, but somehow, I knew the girl in the red leather jacket had seen the whole thing.
Okay, now check out my reasoning on all this:
1) Sir Alfred Hitchcock, one of the greatest movie directors of the 20th Century, always tried to shock viewers by putting a twist on an innocent situation. The nice, slightly-geeky boy next door would be the psychopath. Songbirds would be the evil monsters. Just when someone was doing something completely innocent, like taking a shower or shopping for strawberries, they’d be hacked to death.
2) Alfred Hitchcock always put himself in each of his own movies in small cameo appearances.
3) I’m not sure how reincarnation works into this, but Alfred Hitchcock died in 1980, so theoretically, if he came back somehow, he’d be in his early twenties now – just like Red Leather Girl.
I don’t really understand all this, but I’ll tell you one thing – I’m staying out of cornfields and away from Mount Rushmore until I figure it out.
