Seven American Nights -- The Missing Night

I count seven full nights if Nadan's first day of sightseeing didn't go all the way to the ruined capital buildings. There are a few hints that this is the case:

  1. Early on, he is writing with closed shutters and a candle (p. 340, Orb edition of IODDAOSAOS). Something outside is beating on the shutters (A wild animal? Moths?), which seems to indicate late at night. On the day he visits the ruins, he opens the shutters and the sun is just setting.
  2. He's fearful and homesick that first day. The second day he's brave enough to go out to a restaurant and to the theater at night.
  3. His attitude about going to the park changes. On p. 339 he wants to postpone it until he has seen other things. On p. 344 he is ashamed he didn't go that day. This seems more likely if they are two different days.
  4. He says he spent the whole day at the ruins on p. 347. The other day mentions sleeping late, listening to musicians, and people-watching. His first writing for that day is at about 4:30pm (midnight Iran time with local daylight savings time p. 338) back in his room, which doesn't allow that much time for ruin explorations.

Nadan arrived in Washington on a Saturday (based on the parade being on Good Friday). On Sunday, he headed north to see the National Art Gallery first. (Why would he bypass the place his famous uncle visited and see the old ruins first? The gallery was on his way there.) That night, he wrote of his fears.

On Monday, his second day of sightseeing, he visited the capital building ruins, the Smithsonian, and the theater.

Why did he write so little about that first day, and let it run into the next day with such an abrupt transition? The answer is he removed some pages from the journal after he found it was disturbed. In journaling about the gallery he must have revealed his intention to steal certain "miniatures of our heritage" (p. 382). He excised the pages to protect himself from the police (far too late, alas).

Peter Cash (posting urth.net on August 22, 1997) finds eight nights or more. His gap point is almost the same as mine (the second day does not include the trip to the ruins and the theater), but he uses Nadan's emotional state to find more:

No. On the second day, he ambles around the North of the city, gradually coming to realize how deformed the Americans are. The crucial thing is that the "fear" passage cannot have been written any earlier than the third day. This is because he speaks of the fear as coming on him the previous day. This cannot have been on the first day--the day of his arrival--for his narrative of that day is clearly upbeat. It may have been on the second day, which ends with his realization that the Americans are more deformed than he had thought. There may even be one or more entire days missing here; there's no way to tell. But one thing is sure: the "fear" passage _cannot_ have been written earlier than the third day. Everything follows from this.

Nadan is capable of concealing his feelings from the reader. "In recording these several pages I have managed to restrain my enthusiasm." How "upbeat" is that first chapter, really? By the end of it Nadan has made an enemy in Mr. Tallman, a man with local connections, wealthy enough to afford first-class travel. He has reason to begin to feel uneasy, along with whatever strange things he sees on arrival in the port. But he started writing with the idea that he would show the journal to his mother and Yasmine, so he's deliberately upbeat: "America! America! Dull days are no more!" By the next evening he's so fearful that he changes his mind about letting Yasmin read it and puts down his true feelings. If the arrival day was entirely happy, why does he imagine he was drugged on the ship, rather than by something he ate after getting to shore?

Robert Borski, writing on May 6, 2002 also has a very clever theory about the missing day being caused by excision of pages. But he has the missing part later than mine:

Ardis, in turn, then asks Bobby, "Was it very bad?" To which the actor responds, "It was frightening, that's all. I thought I'd never get out." But if he was arrested late the night before, and released the following day, perhaps being confined, at the most, 16 hours, this hardly seems to warrant a comment about never getting out. In addition, when Bobby says, "I hear you missed me last night," Ardis responds, "God, yes." But if Bobby has actually been confined in jail for a day-and-a-half, Ardis may well be commenting on the poor performance of his stand-in (the fact that Bobby has been missed by her is obviously communicated by someone else).

I think the dialog is well-explained by the original text. Sixteen hours under the harsh treatment of the police is more than enough for Bobby to worry that he would never get out. As for the "I hear you missed me last night" referring to the poor performance of a stand-in, that happened the same night he was arrested: "Bill -- someone you don't know -- tried to go on for him in the third act tonight. It was just ghastly." In the larger context of the story these words become even more significant.

Back to the main Seven American Nights page

function:RenderStopWatch