Chapter 26
What The Graffiti Say
One late May day outside (the chestnut blossoms fading) in the third circular year of the quest for the tunnel, that grain of sand in all the beaches of the world, Louis stares at the graffiti on the wall of their room for maybe an hour. His lips move silently. Finally he asks Seymour what he would do if he’d been administratively suspended here all by himself and had discovered a way out.
“Get the hell out of this place as fast as I could,” says Seymour promptly, wondering at the stupid question.
But how about the others? Louis objects. The others to come? Wouldn’t you leave some kind of message for them to say where the passageway is? A little bit coded, maybe, so the zombies wouldn’t understand?
“Yes, I guess I would, at that,” says Seymour, just to improve his image in Louis’ eyes. He knows that if he found a passageway he’d get the hell out of this place just as fast as he could, no time for messages. But maybe, he thinks, his predecessors had been like Louis, better persons than he, Seymour, is.
Then he looks at the scattering of tarred rectangles on the wall and at long last the idea comes to him, as it already has to Louis, that what has been censored aren’t obscene insults but direct reference to the way out for future administratively suspended Americans.
So they agree to analyze all of the scrawled and scratched messages, the enigmatic ones, on the walls. They try to ignore the recurrent OUT IS A DOUBLE CROSS. That one’s all too easy to decipher: the possibility of transfer outside is a lie. For Arrivals in Administrative Suspension, that is, because they’d witnessed indisputably Good Americans transferred into color on the other side of the window.
Less discouraging but a puzzle are all the graffiti that refer to “Independence Day.” Judging by their scribbled reflections on France and the French, their predecessors had been intensely patriotic. But how could they have celebrated the National Holiday here? Where could they have found rockets or firecrackers? And how could they even have known the date was July Fourth in this place without calendars? Twice Seymour and Louis see, in a different hand and followed by a widely separated date: Goodbye Everybody. Work on Independence Day! But you don’t work on a National Holiday even assuming you know when it rolls round.
One night, sick with nostalgia, Seymour half-thinks half-dreams of Independence Day way back then in an impossible time and land. He recalls strings of tiny fire-crackers cracking like pungent machine-guns, also the big ones, Cherry Bombs, banging on your eardrums or Big Boys, like miniature red sticks of dynamite which you sometimes broke in two for a gush of flame that devoured the Chinese characters of the newspaper twisted about the powder. He thinks of Devil’s Tongue, like an eraser which you rubbed against a window-screen and got sulfurous sparks and how once he’d burned himself and was slapped and kissed by his weeping mother, when was that? 1937? July Fourth, 1937, 7-4-37, 7-4-37.
Louis too is dreaming of his mother. She’s serving a cold gnawed corn-on-the-cob instead of cherry pie for dessert. That’s a poor dessert but he’s glad to see his mother and starts asking her why there’s no cherry pie for dessert when he’s shaken out of it and awakes to darkness and Seymour shaking him hard and breathing hard, stammering, Independence Day, Independence Day, it’s a code and I’ve broken it. There’s no 1937 and Devil’s Tongue to it but it’s 74, 74, understand? Get it? July: the seventh month and Independence Day the fourth day. Room 74 it’s got to be and we have to find it.
Louis mumbles something, turns over to the wall and tries to go back to the Sunday meal, this time with cherry pie.
Seymour returns to bed. He thinks of distant happy summers, admiring fiery fountains and comets in the sky with his father and mother and much later, leaning against the Pont Neuf balustrade, with Marie-Claude in 1951. He’s drifting into a dream about it when he’s shaken awake and hears Louis close to his ear saying that his decoding is too complicated. They’ll keep their eyes open for Room 74 but the tunnel’s sure to be in Room 1776. Understand? Seventeen Hundred and Seventy-Six, the date of the Independence of the Thirteen Colonies.
But that’s a year, not a day, Seymour objects drowsily. Louis retorts that Independence Day would be the day they found the door with 1776 on it and the tunnel behind it leading to freedom.
Seymour doesn’t hear him. He’s back with Marie-Claude, watching dozens of rockets exploding in the sky and saying that it’s the best 7-4 he’s ever seen. But she rejects his code number too. “It’s not 7-4, Seymour.” He asks: “Is it 1776, then?” “No,” she replies, “It’s 1951, 14-7, the Fourteenth of July.”
The fireworks vanish and she vanishes too and Seymour is back in his clammy bed. He gets up, shakes Louis and tells him that he still thinks the number of the room with the tunnel is 74, but maybe also 147.
That morning Louis convenes the others in the Common Room and informs them of his tremendous discovery. They all got to keep their eyes peeled for Room 1776, he says.
Seymour cuts in: “Or Room 147. Maybe, too, Room 74.”
Louis ignores the interruption and repeats “Room 1776” three times.
Seymour persists: “Or maybe Room 74 or Room 147, more likely Room 147.”
Margaret is radiant for the first time in years.
Helen pokes her finger in the dust again.
“What’s the matter now?” says Seymour, irritated.
“What’s wrong now?” says Louis, irritated.
“Oh, nothing,” she says, drawing a zero in the dust. She evades their questions with “Nothing,” “Never mind,” and “It doesn’t much matter.”
She’s being good again, Seymour thinks. Doesn’t want to spoil things for us. Chalking up more good points. They insist on knowing what’s the matter now.
Finally, very apologetically, she says that she doesn’t see how knowing the number of the door can possibly help them since in any case they open all the doors they find, have been opening all the doors they find for all these years, tens of thousands of doors it must be by now, tens of thousands of years it seems like too.
Dead silence.
How is it they hadn’t thought of that obvious fact? If they have no map guiding them to it, what good does it do knowing that the tunnel is hidden in Room 1776 (or Room 74 or Room 147 or Room Anything) since they open all the doors they find, have been doing nothing else, as she’d said, all these years?
Helen looks genuinely pained for them and stares down at the table where her finger is drawing a second zero alongside the first one.
Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die Page 27