There is another excited murmur in the audience. Bereyter projects his voice over the uproar: She has embraced her silence, he booms out at us from the lectern, qua white dialogue. Knowing that Hitchcock has placed her in a zone of white noise, he says, she commands her companion to read her lips. At this point Bereyter presses on with his lecture, expatiating on the implications of her utterance. But I am no longer listening. I am still watching the clip on the screen. Bereyter leaves it looping on the canvas behind him, and I cannot tear my eyes from the dead woman. Read my lips, she is saying, it’s Jeff. And when I study her lips, yes, it is obvious, that is what she has been mouthing all along. Read my lips, it is as plain as day. Read my lips, I read, pressing my body against the back of my chair. It’s Jeff, I read, pushing against the edge of my desktop with both hands. Bereyter babbles on at the lectern, oblivious. He has no clue what he has uncovered. The dead woman looms huge behind him—spectral, repetitive, looping her impossible message over and over—and Bereyter gestures left and right, lecturing to his audience. He is incapable of appreciating the significance of his own discovery. For while glancing sidelong at James Stewart—how had I not noticed?—this woman is mouthing, It’s Jeff. She is referring to Stewart, not as Scottie, but as Jeff: his repressed name, his Rear Window name. It is as if some background actor, some extra from Rear Window, has followed James Stewart into the film. As if this woman in her blue suit has herself traveled all the way from New York to San Francisco, from Rear Window to Vertigo, shadowing Scottie-Jeff to Ernie’s. Spotting him there, she identifies him. There is no other explanation. Read my lips: it’s Jeff. This message she is mouthing, directly toward the screen, is meant not for her companion, but for the audience. She is telling the audience—she is telling me—that Scottie is an impostor, that he is actually Jeff, a hybrid or chimerical Scottie-Jeff, she is confirming my theory in the most incontrovertible terms. It is undeniable now: there is no border between these films. James Stewart and this extra have both succeeded in escaping. They have left the Rear Window bottle for the Vertigo bottle. They have abandoned the Rear Window pyramid for the Vertigo pyramid. And what is to stop her, I wonder—regarding her image warily on the screen—what is to stop her from leaving the Vertigo bottle for the Wolfsegg bottle? Now that Bereyter has uncorked her? What is to keep her from escaping through the adit of the projector shaft, and from crawling (slowly but surely, in Clegg’s phrase) out of the movie and into the room? I close my eyes, unable to watch, and by the time I reopen them I have stopped breathing. But she is still sitting there of course, trapped on the flatness of the screen. The dead woman looks into my eyes, telling me again and again to read her lips, repeating over and over that it’s Jeff. I am entirely too agitated to stay. Without taking my eyes from hers, I rise from my chair in a single stealthy motion. Except I must make a noise, for the man a few rows ahead of me turns around. Seeing me standing there, he holds up an index finger, imploring me to wait a moment, then twists in his seat to grab a sheet of paper from his desk. He reaches across the aisle to give it to me. Taking it, I nod my head in thanks and sit back down. I don’t have time for this, I tell myself, even as I am placing the paper on my desktop; I have to get out of here, I think, even as I am smoothing it flat with my hand. It is a column of three photographs, screen captures from Vertigo, with italicized captions printed beneath them. The lip-reader’s transcript. I scan the extras’ faces, looking for any refugees from Rear Window. By the flickering of the projector, I squint down at the captions, straining to read their white dialogues.