Part 39: Blackwell Convergence - Update 14

Update 14

Last time, the Countess took Rosa into her own Nodespace, fortunately leaving Rosa unharmed. There Rosa met Madeline, the Countess' former spirit guide, and the two of them went to root of all the problems regarding the Countess to see if they could put a stop to them.

I'll apologise in advance - this update is heavy on my own speculation and theories about what has happened. Convergence will do a reasonable job of answering the various questions it, and Unbound, have posed for us, but in many cases things will be left up to interpretation. I'm keen to hear your own thoughts about what has happened, or any issues you have with my own speculation!

A Strange Diner



The source of the problems appears to be... some kind of diner? What?



Rosa and Madeline rematerialise outside the diner, with Rosa finding herself somewhat disoriented.

This is where the link originates.
Link?
The bond between your Countess and her hosts. Part of her is trapped here. You must remove it.

Somehow the link between that binds the Countess to the Meltzer brothers is in this cheap TGI Friday's knockoff.



Rosa is still spellbound by Madeline. Obviously she likes the Victorian garb. This line is a little awkward considering Rosa is around 4 inches from Madeline's face when she says it, though.

Madeline? Could I talk to you?
Of course.

Let's see if we can shed some light on what the hell is going on here.

Where are we?
You have been to this plane before. You have brought many lost spirits through here.
Well yes, but there was never a diner before.
I can understand your confusion, but it is not a real diner. It is... metaphorical. As you know, there is a bond between the Countess and her current host. And the bond is represented by this diner. You will find out more inside.

It seems that entities in Nodespace which seem physical can actually be metaphorical. I guess that adds credence to the theory that the devil back in Legacy was not literally the devil, but rather a metaphor for the Deacon's own inner demons.



That's a good question. Why a diner? The Deacon saw a devil because he spent a lifetime preaching about that imagery. What does the Countess have to do with diners?

The Countess used to spend lots of time in placed like these. You will find out more inside.

That's all we'll get out of Madeline on the topic. It's a bit of a weak explanation, but it'll have to suffice for now. Let's ask what we need to actually do.

This bond. How do I break it?
Part of the Countess is trapped inside. You must find it and remove it.

You know, some more details would be helpful here, Madeline. Why are spirit guides always so bad at providing useful information?

How did the Countess break the bond between you?
She did not break the bond, but moved it. To be rid of me, she had to form a bond with someone living. Someone who could, in essence, become her guide. How she acquired this knowledge, I do not know. I only know that it was accomplished.

It must have been difficult for her to gain the knowledge without Madeline watching, since they had to remain within 30 feet of each other at all times. Still, a more pressing question than how she did it, is why she did it? Was it intentional? Did she mean for all of this to happen?

Instead, though, Rosa ask a different question altogether.

Who did she pass it to?



Joe Gould. So that's how he fits into this story.

Upon Gould's death, it was passed onto Joseph Mitchell.
And now Charlie Meltzer.
Yes. It must be broken, if this is to end.

So now we get a bit more of the timeline, though not the mechanical details. Somehow the Countess transferred her link to Joe Gould, presumably by spending a fuckload of time in a diner with him. The link passed to Mitchell after he spent a bunch of time with Joe Gould. And then after Mitchell died, the link moved to Charlie.

It's not clear here whether the link passed through someone else first before Charlie. It seems that a lot of time in close proximity with someone is required to pass the link on, and Charlie only knew Mitchell because they worked in the same building. Also, it seems unlikely that Charlie didn't write any names down in the ten years between Mitchell's death and Meltzer Foundations being formed. Perhaps there were some intermediate hosts we haven't even heard of yet?

How did the Countess get so...
Insane?
Yes.
Like you, her mind is a door to another plane of existence.

I don't like the way Madeline starts of answering this question with the words "Like you..."



She essentially has the universe inside her head. And no human mind can contain that. It broke her. She sees everything but understands nothing. If she didn't banish me to this place between worlds, I might feel more pity than I do.

That explains the Countess' comments in Unbound about seeing everything, and it hurting. Madeline's comments about being banished are interesting, as well. Presumably she's been sitting around here in the infinite void for the last forty years or so with little hope of ever moving on to the next world. I know I'd be pretty damn bitter by now.

Did you know her when she was alive?
Of course. We spent almost thirty years together.
What was she like?
Different. Happier. She loved helping those in need. But it no longer matters. She is the one who needs help, now.

Wow, thirty years. Only to have it all go so badly Whatever cosmic force is responsible for creating the link between mediums and spirit guides left some very serious flaws in the system. It's time to put an end to this sorry affair.

Thanks, Madeline. I'm going to see what I can do.
I will be waiting right here.

With no idea what awaits her, Rosa enters the diner.



Inside, she finds two men whose identity is immediately obvious to her, despite never having met them before.

Show some pity! At least lend us a cigarette.
Ahem. I believe we've got company.
Ahh!

Excited at the new arrival, Joe Gould turns his attention to Rosa.

Miss, could you perhaps spare a few dollars for the Joe Gould fund?
*sigh*

Rosa beholds the two ghosts before her.



And Mitchell...

He's on the elderly side, but his eyes look sharp and alert.

Charlie's spirit is not here, so presumably only dead hosts find themselves here in this diner. So if there have been any intermediate hosts between Mitchell and Charlie, they're still alive.



Rosa decides to speak with Joe Gould.

Hello! The name is Joseph Ferdinand Gould. I am graduate of Harvard, magna cum difficultate, and chairman of the board of Weal and Woe, Incorporated. In exchange for a drink, I'll recite a poem, deliver a lecture, argue a point or take off my shoes and imitate a sea gull. I prefer gin, but beer will do.

Gould is a rambler, that's for sure. This introductory speech is taken, almost verbatim, from interviews with the real-life Joe Gould.

I've been hearing a lot about you, lately.
My reputation precedes me!
I saw your portrait in the Minetta.
The Minetta! Yes, I am quite famous there you know!
I gathered.

You know, this brings me back to something I haven't thought about for a while. When Frank's ghost was haunting the Gothic Bridge, he kept having what appeared to be schizophrenic episodes where he would adopt the persona of Joe Gould. There doesn't seem to be a good reason for this to have happened. Charlie was the host of the Countess by then. It's possible that somehow, some of Gould's essence ended up imprinted on Frank's, but it doesn't seem to have happened to any of the other ghosts we've found. A bit of a mystery. Unfortunately, while we will get some answers, plenty of questions will remain unanswered by the end of Convergence.

It's all thanks to Mitchell, of course. The Joe Gould fund filled its coffers nicely when he wrote his article.

But then Gould died shortly afterwards. Back in Unbound, Mitchell mentioned there was a "man in a bar" he wrote about before Isaac and Mavis who died after he wrote his article. It's possible, in retrospect, that Mitchell was talking about Joe Gould. If so, the link must have been passed on while Gould was still alive, and Mitchell's article quickly led to Gould's death.



I don't quite know myself! We've all got to be someplace. As I understand it, I was mentally linked to my old friend, the Countess. I wish I'd known! It explains everything that my work was trying to prove!

You know, I only just noticed the clock with no handles on it. Very fitting.

Your work?
I have had many callings! I studied the seagulls of the world and learned their language. I spent months measuring the heads of one thousand Chippewaw Indians.

Again, all of this is based on reality. Gould sounds like he was a complete nutcase.

But before I died, I was putting to paper the most important literary work known to Man - the Oral History of our Time! It was a compilation of all the conversations of the city - overheard in bars, subways, street corners and diners. Put together and studied properly, it would revolutionize everything!
How would it have revolutionized everything?
We are all connected. Every single one of us. But HOW? Think of the ramifications if we found out!
It sounds like quite an undertaking.
It was my life's work.

I'm not sure that one link, between the Countess and Gould, would really have proven his theory that everyone was connected, though.



We met in a diner like this one. We'd often spend a week or two walking along the docks to discuss seagulls. She had many interesting theories on seagull linguistics. Then one day she disappeared, but a link had already formed between us. It's everything my Oral History was trying to prove - that we are all linked!

That confirms why the link exists in a metaphorical diner - it's where the Countess met Gould. The relationship between the Countess and Madeline must have been very different than that between Rosa and Joey. I can't see Joey accepting Rosa spending an hour walking along a dock to talk to a crazy man about seagulls, let alone several weeks at a time.

The Countess is killing people.
Murder? No no, I refuse to believe THAT. She couldn't hurt a fly.

Perhaps not wilfully, but she is very much capable of hurting people, Gould

Why is she called the Countess?
That's what she chooses to call herself. Far be it from me to tell her otherwise.
The name doesn't seem strange to you?
When you lived a life like mine, you take people at face value. Who cares about names?

It sounds like she was calling herself the Countess even when she knew Gould in real life. That's a bit odd.



Gould continues with a story about a familiar character to us.

The Deacon? You knew the Deacon?
Oh yes. He was this gloomy career drunk. One summer night, while sitting in a doorway on the Bowery, he caught the scent of sulphur. He looked up, and saw the Devil himself standing over him! Since that night he believed he lost his soul. Not the most charitable drinking companion, if I may say so.
No. No. He wouldn't be.
You knew him?
Sort of.
Fancy that!

As I mentioned way back when we were still playing through Legacy, Gilbert included the Deacon after being inspired by a story he read. Specifically, the story was taken from one of Mitchell's articles about Gould. In them, Mitchell related a story told to him by Gould about the Deacon, a man who believed the devil was going to take his soul, and Gilbert was inspired to use the Deacon in his games. Apparently he expected people to recognise the reference and begin speculating as to how Mitchell and Gould fit into the Blackwell universe, but nobody really did.

Gilbert has since expressed some amount of regret and guilt at casting Gould and Mitchell in this kind of limbo situation, saying that there is something perverse about taking real-life people and making a game about them being stuck in a diner for all eternity. At least with the Deacon we were able to save his soul, although it is never made clear whether it has been saved literally or metaphorically. As for Gould and Mitchell... well, we'll see what happens.



Rosa now asks about the next link in the chain - Joseph Mitchell.

Ah, Mitchell! My benefactor! He made me quite famous, you know! But my goodwill only extends so far.
Why's that?
A cigarette. He has them. He won't give me one. It's demeaning, to have to beg for one measly cigarette.



Rosa asks about Gould's fabled work.

And I'd like you to! But I'm afraid it belongs to the ages, now.
There's also the problem of it never existing in the first place.
Of course it existed! Only not on paper. It was over three million words. Three times the size of the holy bible. The work transcended mere parchment and ink!

Actually, according to Gould lore, he usually claimed the Oral History was over nine million words, not three million. The bible contains around 750,000 words so this statement is a bit flawed all around, but we'll chalk that down to Joe Gould not really being all there upstairs.

What about those essays you published in the Dial?
A passing fancy, nothing more.
You wrote essays?
For the now defunct Dial magazine. I still have the originals. Do you want to see?

The dialogue in this scene is referencing articles that really did exist. In fact, famous 20th century playwright William Saroyan credited an article of Gould's in the Dial as being his inspiration for becoming an author, and actually used some Gould quotes from the article in the play Time Of Your Life that netted him the Pulitzer prize.

I'd like to see that essay.
Here you go.

Let's look at this.



It appears to be an essay about insanity, but the handwriting is so awful I can barely make it out. Just as well. I don't have the time to read all of this stuff.

Jesus Christ, that is practicaly illegible. I've done my best translation of it below:

An Essay on Insanity
By Joseph Ferdinand Gould

Insanity is a topic of peculiar interest to me. Despite my theory that people with strong willpower and a sense of humour never go off their nuts, I almost have first hand information about it. There have been times when the black mood was on me. I needed every bit of self-control that I possessed to refrain from shouting aloud or waving my hands in wild gestures that would have brought a curious crowd around me and eventually have landed me in the police station. I could very easily imagine myself locked up as a maniac. Yet all the time, the real me was not in sympathy with these impulses. It made me feel that perhaps there was a basis or truth in the old idea that insanity was caused by forces external to the soul, such as witchcraft. Science affirmed this once. It may do so again. It seems to me likely that many who are held under observation or in detention are in just this pitiable state. They may be adjudged lunatics because of the unconventional antics of the outer body, with which the mind may not be in accord, and most consider absurd. The grim part of it is that the line which...

That's all we can see. The article reads like the rantings of a madman, which I guess they were. Of course, the article itself is real. If you want to read the rest of it, you can find it (along with some of Gould's other excerpts) on this page, under the title "Insanity": http://home.pacifier.com/~dkossy/gould.html

For now, though, Rosa has no interest in reading the article, so she hands it back to Gould.

Here you go.
Always glad to share.



Next up, she speaks with Joseph Mithcell.

I believe you have the better of me, Miss...?
Blackwell. Rosangela Blackwell.
Blackwell? Hm. I might've known.

Oh yeah, he knew Lauren, didn't he?

You met my auntie.
Your Auntie. Yes, I do see a slight resemblence. I did warn her to leave well enough alone, but she was determined. Let's hope that you can do some good, here.



Mitchell is clearly the more together of the two men trapped here, so Rosa turns to him for answers.

We are echos. Leftovers, if you will. We were linked to the Countess when we were alive. When we died, part of ourselves got trapped here.
So you're not a ghost.
Not fully. I'm not sure what I am. I remember living. I remember dying. But I don't feel like Joseph Mitchell. All I know is that when I thought of death, an eternity with Joe Gould was the last thing on my mind.

Gilbert actually wrote the whole "they're echos" thing in during post-production just because he felt so guilty about putting his idols in this situation. The line about Mitchell not picturing an eternity with Gould reflects his real-life issues with Gould, who he initially found fascinating, but after time found insufferable.

What is your connection to the Countess?
I don't know. I never met the woman. Joe Gould was the one who knew her. He had a special bond with her, apparently. But somehow, he passed it onto me when he died. Next thing I knew, I was murdering people by writing about them. There was no choice. I had to stop writing.

Mitchell says that Gould passed the link on to him after he died, so I guess the "man in a bar" wasn't Gould, though it would fit nicely if it was. In terms of the real-life timeline, Gould died years before Mitchell's book about him was published, but it's possible that Mitchell wrote some material long before it ended up at the printing press.

From memory, Word Of God is that Gould's death was of natural causes, so I guess that's the official version of events, but on the whole this game leaves a number of things fairly ambiguous so you can choose your own preferred version of events.

My own personal preference for interpreting the story is that Mitchell wrote about Gould, who just happened to die of natural causes while Mitchell was writing. Mitchell, rightfully, thought nothing of it. But then the bond with the Countess was passed to him, and the next two people he wrote about died. He then reasoned that all three deaths occurred due to his writings. That's the only explanation I can come up with that satisfies all of the things we've heard so far.



Rosa, being a journalist in New York, probably would have heard of Joseph Mitchell before.

Now that's just foolish. I was a relic, even before I died. The city that I wrote about has long since evolved and changed into something completely different. But that's New York City, isn't it? It wouldn't be New York if it stayed the same year-to-year.

Rosa expresses her sympathy for all that has happened.

I'm sorry you had to stop writing.
So am I. But, what else could I do? Let innocent people die? No. I don't regret the choice I made. Not for one moment.

Next up, let's work out the next link in the chain. Did Mitchell pass the link straight onto Charlie?

Did you know Charles Meltzer?
Yes. I did. He worked at the New Yorker. Back in the late 70s. He would come into my office and ask about the old days, and I was happy to tell him. I knew he would never cut it as a reporter, but he had a very keen analytical mind. I almost forgot all about him, but it appears a link formed between us nonetheless. When I died, my connection to the Countess passed onto him.

He certainly seems to think he did. I wonder what happened in the ten years between Mitchell's death and the forming of the Meltzer Foundation? Perhaps Charlie has actually killed several times without even realising it, or perhaps it was his discovery of this power that gave him the idea to start a risk-free loan business?



Rosa brings Mitchell up to speed on what has been happening.

By accident?
No. On purpose. He sent her after me.
Now that's a shame. I'm aware that, through my actions, I killed a few people. I could forgive myself for it, since I was unaware what I was doing. But many times I thought to myself, I have a weapon. It's untraceable. Nobody knows about it. I can use it. But I did not. I was tempted, but I did not. Not once. You have to stop Charles. Break the link. Destroy this place. No more innocents should have to die.

That's a good idea, but how do we do that?

How do I break the link?
I wish I knew. I'm afraid all this is a bit beyond me.

Oh. That's not very useful.



Rosa asks Mitchell about Joe Gould.

He's a fascinating man. Intolerable company, but fascinating. He exemplified everything about New York at the time. It's artistic expression, it's frustrations, it's joys and heartbreak. His "Oral History" - or the idea of it - energized the work of dozens of writers and intellectuals. But the more I got to know him, the less I wanted to be around him.
Did you ever read Joe Gould's "Oral History"?
That? It never existed. Or if it did, Mr. Gould never shared it with anyone, which amounts to the same thing.
You know why I never wrote it down! People would have died!
You didn't stop telling people you were writing it, did you?

I also like how Mitchell scolds Gould for this, while he was perfectly happy to collect thirty years worth of paychecks without ever intending to write another article himself

What could I say? The truth?
They would have chucked me in a loony bin!

Now we get Gilbert's explanation of why Joe Gould was never able to show any excerpts of the Oral History that contained any subject matter other than himself. Presumably he found out early on that anyone he wrote about was getting killed, and stopped putting it onto paper. When you consider his life's work was about the stories of everybody, it's probably a good thing that he didn't write it down, or New York might have been wiped out

This is a neat way to tie together the mystery of Gould's Oral History not existing, and Mitchell never writing again after his book about Joe Gould. In each case, they recognised the power they possessed and immediately shelved any concept of ever writing another word. Their actions are in sharp contrast to those of Charlie. I'm speculating here, but I think this might be an explanation of how the link was passed. We know that Lauren went crazy when she stopped saving ghosts. My theory is, the link fractures or shifts when it's not used often enough. The Countess spent so much time with Gould, she stopped saving ghosts, and the link moved on. Gould stopped writing, so it passed to Mitchell. When he stopped writing, it ended up with Charles. In each case it might just have been a case of the closest person at that time receiving the link. Of course, if my theory is right, it means Charles has been using it regularly for the past decade



Rosa has one final question for Mitchell.

When you give that man a cigarette or a drink, he likes to talk. And the only subject Joe Gould likes to talk about - at length - is Joe Gould. And the only person for him to talk to is me. So, I do not give him a cigarette.
Would you give him a cigarette if I spoke to him for you?
I might. I might. If you can get him away from me, I might. But we can't leave this diner, and the door to that kitchen is locked.
Can't you just float through the wall?
Believe me, I've tried that. It doesn't work. Not here.
Thanks for talking, Mr. Mitchell. I'll see what I can do.
Thank you, Miss Blackwell.

There really doesn't seem to be much to do in this room besides talk to these two. Presumably the link is elsewhere in the diner.


Join me tomorrow as we look at destroying the link and putting an end to this madness. Convergence is almost at a close!