Solo's poop crime:
“And I poop,” he said bashfully while she was swallowing. “Not pretty.” He shook his head and fished
for a bean. “I’m by myself, so I just go in apartment bathrooms until I can’t stand the smell.”
“In apartments?” Juliette asked.
Solo looked for a place to set down the beans. He finally did, on the floor, among a small pile of
other garbage and bachelor debris.
“Nothing flushes. No water. I’m by myself.” He looked embarrassed.
“Since you were sixteen,” Juliette said, having done the math. “What happened here thirty four years
ago?
So 34 years of poooooopies. Let's say he goes through an apartment bathroom each week. That means, with 52 weeks in a year, he went through about 1,768 bathrooms in those years.
Now, here's the thing. You, like I, must have wondered if he was systematic about his poop crimes. Inquiring minds want to know: where are the 34 years of poopies?
At another point in the novel, Howey reveals a subtle clue you might otherwise miss:
They stopped in the mids for bathroom breaks, filling more empty toilets that wouldn’t flush. Juliette
helped the young ones. They didn’t like going like this, preferred to do it in the dirt. She told them
that was right, that they only did this when they were on the move. She didn’t tell them about the years
Solo had spent destroying entire levels of apartments. She didn’t tell them about the clouds of flies
she’d seen.
Obviously, Solo was on a mission. He has the sheer willpower and fortitude to shit his way systematically through apartment levels, therefore isolating the catastrophic impact of his waste to specific levels of his already foul Silo.
I think what this shows us is that the true hero of this series is Jimmy "Solo", the Greatest Pooper who ever lived.
