Chapter 22
Beach Or Haystack?
One night a tremendous idea awakens Louis and Seymour out of an identical gray dream (exploring corridors at unprecedented depth). They get up and grope their way in the pitch-dark room toward each other’s bed. They meet unexpectedly at midway point. Their foreheads clunk painfully. Both lose their balance and fall.
“Jesus Christ!” Seymour mutters, rolling over onto his knees and rubbing his forehead.
“Already told you don’t know how many times don’t take the name of the Lord in vain, Stein,” says Louis, already back on his feet, still athletic for his sudden age. “Listen, I got somethin’ real important to tell you.”
“So have I,” says Seymour, picking himself up. “Something really important to tell you too.”
It turns out to be the same very important thing. A funny coincidence, they agree. They switch the light on and start searching. Max hides his head under the tattered blanket and protests. They shake him hard and tell him to help them find the carbon-copy of Rules and Regulations from way back, remember? He keeps his head under the blanket and soon goes back to snoring.
Seymour and Louis poke around and finally come up with the paper under Max’s cot. Stupide never cleans under the cots. It’s illegible. Louis blows away a fifteen or maybe fifty-year deposit of dust, most of it in Seymour’s face, inadvertently. He reads out loud in a strong triumphant voice over Max’s snores and Seymour’s coughs:
Any attempt to reach the Outside without official approval is sanctioned by instant exit.
“That means it can be done,” says Louis.
“Probably means it already has been done. There must be a tunnel somewhere. All we have to do is find it.”
“And if we don’t find it, dig one ourselves.”
“If we look hard enough we’ll find it, all right. Wonder why we didn’t think of this before.”
“Sure is strange we didn’t. All this time. But it ain’t too late.”
“Pretty late, the way we are now. We’d better begin right away, before we turn into wheelchair cases. We’ll tell the others about it tomorrow.”
They go on talking about it all night long.
The morning following their decision to find or dig a way out, they hear Margaret’s joyous cry: “Paris! Paris!”
Three of them hurry into the Common Room. The window greets them with sunrise in a newborn blue and pink sky above the golden domes. They feel like going down on their knees. It’s like a sign, Seymour wants to say to Helen but she isn’t there. He goes into the woman’s room. She’s sitting on her bed reading a big tattered book.
“Helen, we’ve got Paris again. It’s a sign, I think. Don’t you want to look?”
Seymour is sure she’d have preferred to go on reading. But she’s too polite and considerate, he knows, to let her indifference show and minimize the significance of the event to the others. So she responds to his invitation, closing her book but careful to place a bookmark between the pages. (Later Seymour glances at the book-marked pages. They’re covered, in fine print, with statistics of French cotton and coal imports for the year 1886).
Facing the sun rising over the city, most of them smile and say joyful things. Doing that, they discover that the death-mask stiffness is gone too, like the fog that had shrouded Paris. They can smile with no effort. Words of joy come easily to their lips. Or is it because they finally have something to smile about, a reason for joy? At least for as long as they’re able to avoid the thought that they’re simply back to starting point facing the tantalizing window, except that they’re fifteen years older now. That thought had instantly occurred to Helen.
Louis solemnly tells them to sit down at the table, he has important news. Louis and Seymour and Max and Margaret sit facing the window. Helen sits with her back to it. Louis reads from the Rules and Regulations and concludes from it that escape is possible and that’s what they are going to do, escape.
Max explodes with joy and indignation. Escape was what he’d been trying to do right from the start, he yells, and none of you listened, none of you helped me, you all laughed and you stole all my tools and the compass. Didn’t I tell you you can always escape? Like in POW camps, they spend all their time digging tunnels, sometimes they get caught, okay, but then they dig another tunnel and they end by escaping.
Margaret’s face, taking the growing light of the sky, is almost radiant.
They look at Helen who blinks and doodles in the dust covering the table. That’s as far as she’ll ever go to expressing disagreement. But it’s already too far. Irritated, Seymour asks her if she doesn’t want to join them looking for a way out.
“But haven’t you been doing just that all these years?”
She says “you” not “we” Seymour notes. She goes on with it, still pushing the dust with her forefinger.
“I mean, all those doors all this time and nothing behind them except more walls.”
Maybe Helen’s sudden age has changed her. This open skepticism is something new. Seymour tries to combat it.
“We didn’t explore systematically is the problem. We’ll have to be systematic this time, go further, explore more rooms. And if we don’t find their tunnel we’ll dig one ourselves.”
“Dig where? In what direction?”
She shouldn’t be doing this, Seymour thinks. It’s not good for our morale.
“We’ll find the right direction, all right,” says Louis.
“If the others found the right direction so will we,” says Seymour.
“No problem,” says Louis.
Louis and Seymour say that, but secretly they recognize that there is a problem. Even the biggest POW camp had reasonable limits. If the prisoners looked hard enough they were sure to unearth an old tunnel if there was one to unearth. And even if there wasn’t and they had to dig their own tunnel they could be sure of the right direction to dig. They could see beyond the barbed wire and aim their tunnel at, say, a wheat field or (best bet) at a stand of pines. It isn’t that way in this place of blind and perhaps infinite walls.
Margaret, easy to influence one way or the other, is visibly affected by Helen’s skepticism. “That tunnel of theirs, isn’t it like trying to find a needle in a haystack?” she says faintly. Her face isn’t radiant any more.
Seymour too is affected by Helen’s skepticism. He tries to reassure Margaret but thinks that her comparison, the needle-in-a-haystack business, is wildly optimistic. More like trying to find a particular grain of sand in a beach. No, worse, in all the beaches of the world.
“The dirt, tell ’em about the dirt,” Louis whispers to Seymour. ‘Talker’ and ‘New Yorker’ rhyme. Louis knows that Seymour the New Yorker is a better talker than he is.
Dirt. Seymour remembers the point that Louis had made that night. He feels a tiny bit better about it now. Not as easy as finding a needle in a haystack but, still, not as bad as a grain of sand in all the beaches of the world. Say a particular grain of sand in one of those beaches.
Finding a tunnel isn’t as impossible as it seems, Seymour explains, commanding his features and voice into optimism. The great problem for the digger of an illicit tunnel is the byproduct of digging. Any kind of tunnel, even a small hands-and-knees job, produces a fantastic amount of dirt. Dirt that has to be disposed of in such a way that the jailers won’t notice it. So maybe a whole corridor of rooms are filled with dirt, more or less concealed under files and books. Once they find dirt in a room then the room with the tunnel won’t be far away.
In other words, he says, it’s not a needle they’ll be looking for in a haystack but a fair-sized box of needles.
Seymour doesn’t add the thought that has just occurred to him.
Even if a haystack and a fair-sized box of needles in the haystack, how do you go about finding the haystack?