From: StoneOx17@aol.com
Date: Thu, 23 May 2002 22:16:41 EDT
Subject: (urth) Seven American Nights


I think that Robert Borski has brilliantly figured out the mysteries in Seven 
American Nights.  I want to add a corroborating piece of evidence I 
discovered, and try to answer one of the objections to his theory.

The corroborating evidence: If you count backwards from Good Friday, and 
include the missing night, you discover that the last performance of "Visit 
to a Small Planet" was on Sunday night, with "Mary Rose" starting on Monday.  
This is the usual day that repertory theaters end a run.  

Now, to address one of the objections to Borski's theory.  Robert Borski 
writes:

> ("I would therefore like to suggest something else to you. Is it possible 
that 
> what Nadan actually notices by the ignited arrack is the burn caused by 
> his own laser pistol and that Ardis Dahl is the werebeast he attempts, but
> fails, to kill on the night of the first egg?")

David DiGiacomo objects:

> "No, it's not possible, because..."
> "If he had seen the laser burn, it would have been obvious beyond any 
> plausible dissociation that he had *not* killed the thing earlier in the
> week.

Robert Borski replies:

> "What, you expect lucidity at the height of a psychedelic experience? 
> Obviously, you've never dropped, because if you had, you would know 
> that under such conditions, it is not only possible to believe six 
impossible 
> things before breakfast, but that the werewolf you have killed is even now 
> undulating beneath you, attempting to cover the lethal burn mark between 
> her lupine breasts. 

But Nadan has just that instant eaten the egg, and the hallucinogen hasn't 
taken effect yet.  Let me  give an alternate explanation.

Robert Borski doesn't mention it explicitly, but when Nadan shoots the 
werewolf, he seem to stop her in the middle of changing back to human,
leaving a face with a blunt muzzle on a human torso.  When Nadan writes 
"I know now that the thing I killed before Ardis' father's house was real," 
he is still hoping that what he just saw, Ardis's head on the torso of the 
beast he shot Monday night, was a hallucination induced by the fifth egg. 
He knows he didn't eat the treated egg Monday, since he couldn't have 
hallucinated Ardis's torso before he knew what it looked like, and so
the beast was real.  But he's afraid to admit to himself that he might not 
have killed it.

Finally, let me remark that it appears that Ardis may be a con artist who 
takes tourists into the interior and robs and kills them (or robs them after
the werewolf kills them).  If Nadan does kill her--for he is hallucinating 
when
he writes "My dead Ardis," it was well-deserved.

 = Peter (Stone Ox)

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