(urth) Seven American Nights Forgery

[Dave Tallman]

Matthew King wrote:
> Dave, I've been reading your arguments with great interest.  Please
>don't let our collective lack of response dissuade you from continuing.

Thanks for the encouragement, Matthew.

Rereading with the forgery plot in mind, here are some new thoughts.

1) The woman who helped Nadan get the curator into bed supplied him with the
chemical with which he dosed the egg. It becomes highly likely that this was
poison. He was expected to take it and die that night, with any letters he
wrote that day still unmailed. His game with the eggs was real Russian
Roulette.

It threw the police off, too. Is he smarter than he appeared to be? What has
he done with the bottle? If he dies some other way and the poison is found
it may expose the plot. Therefore they must protect him until they can
figure out what is going on. They saved him from the werewolf, and also from
a dog-pack attack in the park. The hotel manager warned him that one man
with a pistol would not be safe. When Nadan heard the howling of dogs behind
him, he assumed they were "mourning their fallen leader." More likely, the
police were killing more of the dogs.

2) The curator's idea of scent as the primal form of communication is
interesting. He smokes a pipe in the theater, possibly to mask his own scent
of excitement. He example of the scented letter falsely declaring passion is
exactly paralleled when Ardis leaves a scented note in Nadan's hotel room.
Did the curator suggest this idea to her?

3) The curator had two documents to show Nadan. One was the machine-written
forgery, an example of a "closed curve" in which all original meaning was
lost. The second was a blank piece of paper. I suggest this was the simplest
possible example of an "open curve." No matter to what level of abstraction
you go, a blank paper's information is not lost, because there is nothing to
lose. Mathemeticians like these zero cases. I think this was a line of
baloney intended to make Nadan think the curator was a harmless academic.
It's also a nice little joke by Wolfe. To him, a story which conceals
nothing is no story at all.

4) Now that we have mapped Nadan's week to Holy Week, here are some more
parallels:

a) The ruined city suggests Jerusalem. One part is described as "occupied."
(As in 'Jesus Christ Superstar' -- "We are occupied. Have you forgotten how
put down we are?"} The police act like the Roman soldiers.

b) The first real entry into the city is on Palm Sunday. Nadan describes
crowds and music.

c) The authorities plot against Nadan and try to kill him.

d) Nadan is followed by beggars and people needing healing.

e) A sacred place (the Washington Monument) has been converted into a den of
thieves, selling stolen rings.

f) Ardis becomes Judas, the disciple who betrays him and dies herself. (She
is certainly in on the police plot. She knew Terry would be absent, for
example). "I asked her if she loved me, and she stopped my mouth with a
kiss."

g) The meal of sandwiches (bread) and fruit-flavored beverage (wine) recalls
the Last Supper.

h) Red and purple garments in the city. Scarlet and purple robes were put on
Jesus.

5) With so many parallels, it's time to move the arrest to where it really
belongs: late Thursday night. All of Friday needs to go into the forgery.
This is where the exposition gets really obvious, as Ardis lays out the
story of treasures in the interior and the creatures there. It lays the
foundation for the false ending. Nadan becomes much more love-sick and his
determination to see her is stated several times, again telegraphing the
ending.

The real ending of what Nadan wrote is on p. 377. His last two words are
"the end."

Roy C. Lackey wrote:
> If the F.E.D., for reasons unexplained, wanted Nadan dead, and in fact
> killed him, they would have to have gone to extraordinary lengths in
forging
> an account no one else had reason to believe even existed, and in so doing
> do something pointless and stupid. If Nadan had been killed by the U.S.
> government, the government would have no reason to suppose that a private
> investigator would eventually be hired by his family to investigate his
> disappearance, so there would be no need to "plant" a false account. Nadan
> would simply have disappeared without a trace, or been the victim of a
> random "crime" or "accident" in a rough and violent land.

Yes, it does seem extraordinary to go to such lengths, but the stakes were
very high and Nadan seems to be related to royalty (Uncle Mirza, where Mirza
means "prince"). My theory includes an initial simple plan to kill him that
went wrong because of his strange game with the eggs.

As for the idea that nobody at home knew of his journal, we can't be sure of
that. He bought it at a bazaar at home, so he may have showed it to his
family and promised them he would bring it back full of tales of adventure.
He contemplates giving them an expurgated version, never just chucking the
whole idea. The police could know this if one of the letters they
intercepted included something like "As I told you before I left, I am
keeping a journal..."
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