Defiant Lego Unbowed by Death Threats
In a sensational twist to one of the year’s hottest success stories, best-selling author Ivan (Empty Pages) Lego has admitted receiving a series of death threats in the wake of the wildfire success of his experimental blockbuster.The 52-year-old iconoclast revealed the development in a statement released yesterday through his publicist.
Describing the threats as "illegal tender, anti-I.O.U.'s which promise the erasure of themselves via the enactment or execution of a second erasure, a second erasure which is at the same time a first erasure, a requisite erasure – in a word, the erasure of their recipient," Lego revealed that the anonymous threats, which currently number six, are now in the hands of police.
Police sources last night declined to comment on the matter, beyond confirming that the original documents are in their possession and that the matter is under investigation.
"Naturally, I leave the public unveiling of the exact lexical content of the threats to the appropriate authorities," Lego said in his statement.
"Moreover, it has never been my practice to stifle any text by issuing ex-cathedra pronouncements on its ‘meaning’," he added.
The death threats are believed to have been sent through the internal mailing system at the University of ——, where Ivan Lego is Professor of socioliterology, giving rise to speculation that their author might be a campus-based individual or organisation personally known to Lego.
Lego’s official statement made no direct reference to this possibility. However, it did confirm that the threats "would appear to have been motivated by a pathological hostility to my ideas in general, and to the sizzling reception of Empty Pages in particular."
Lego’s statement concluded by calling the death threats "inscriptions of the universal desire to extinguish the other (that is to say, the desire to write him into un-Being, to occupy the scene of his reading and thereby eliminate him as an agent of meaning) which is implicit in any postal act."
The self-styled bad-boy of academia was last night unavailable for further comment.
Investigations are continuing, with an official police statement expected later today.
“Hardly the response,” Fenton said evenly, “of someone who isn’t planning to kill Ivan Lego.”
“All right. Don’t get smug. All I’m saying is, okay, maybe he does think he’s going to … I don’t know, ‘do’ something to Professor Lego. But that doesn’t mean he’s actually going to. If you think he’d really go through with something like that …” She trailed off, and favoured the absent psychopath with a fond and dreamy smile. “You know what he said? I asked him what was wrong. Why he was so cross and that. And you know what he said? He said Professor Lego was his favourite philosopher, and it really got his goat that someone would want to do that to him!”
Their eyes met, and they shared a wicked smile at the idea of Gus’s having a favourite philosopher. Then she shaped her mouth around the straw that only just made it out the top of the scandalously large iced chocolate he’d bought for her. Her face narrowed; nimble liquid rose to her lips. This, he thought, is going okay. Mild nausea, but nothing to write home about. A provocatively priced beverage, paid for and carried over by him. One touch on the forearm, and counting. And now this open mockery of Gus … He watched the action of her lips on the straw, and soon enough his focus drifted into the region beyond, where a great yawning gap had opened up between her leaning torso and her sagging blouse. What he saw down there belonged to a category way beyond cleavage. He saw both deep breasts densely swaying in the taut hammock of her bra. They looked simultaneously very heavy and very light. He saw an ultra-faint roadmap of veins buried deep inside flesh that started off brown but got rapidly paler as it dipped down towards that paradise of swollen fabric …
Yes, it was going okay. But why wasn’t it going better than okay? Shouldn’t something more palpable be happening by now, if it was going to happen at all? There had been a time, not long ago, when he’d believed that all he needed to do was get next to her. The rest, he had cretinously supposed, would take care of itself. But the rest didn’t seem to be doing that, did it? Being next to her only let him see what an absurdly long way he still had to go. In erotic terms they were still so far apart that he might as well have been watching her on a TV. And he had this maddening sense of not being able to tell even roughly how he was faring, of not knowing whether he was failing dismally or moving right to the brink of some major breakthrough. Or maybe he was slowly dying between these extremes, not risking enough to arrive at either. Last time, in Gus’s bedroom, there had been a crackling energy between them, an undeniable sense of progress. Where was that sense of progress now? Where was that crackling energy? Instead there was this strange smudgy void between them, this thick and blurry medium made up of her indifference and his incompetence. What did he need to say or do to catapult himself over to the other side, to ram his existence into her mind and make her think about him when he wasn’t with her and start displaying a lot more interest in him when he was? How did you go about effecting a miracle like that? The world was full of people who had done it. Gus had done it. But how had they worked the trick? Where exactly – or even approximately – were you meant to start?
“I wish you’d get something to drink,” she said. “Why don’t you ever have anything?”
“I had a big breakfast.”
“You and your big breakfasts.”
“So Gus didn’t send them then?” he said. “These death threats?”
Her brow rumpled slightly. “I thought you sent them.” She looked put out, inconvenienced. “Didn’t you?”
“Maybe I did,” he reassuringly said, hoping to get a rakish gleam into his eye. But he hadn’t sent them, had he? Six threats? Six? No. The truth, the disturbing truth, was that he had only ever sent one thing to Ivan Lego that had even resembled a death threat. And it hadn’t, strictly speaking, threatened Lego’s death at all. Certainly it bore minimal resemblance to the six documents now being described by the media. He hadn’t, for example, sent it through the University’s internal mailing system, which he had no idea how to use. He’d simply dropped the thing into Lego’s assignment box. Nor had he used it as a forum for the airing of his hostility to Empty Pages. There was only so much cutting and pasting a man could do.
So here was something else to worry about, then. These other threats – where had they come from? Who else might have sent them? Another mole in the Maoist cell? Another leftist organization altogether? Robert Browning? And what about his own quasi threat? Where, if anywhere, did that fit in? Why had none of these news stories made reference to it? Was it really so contemptible that it didn’t rate a mention?
“So now Gus has called an ‘emergency meeting’ for this afternoon,” he told her, factually.
Her eyes widened inquisitively above the straw, inviting him to finish his point. He’d thought he had. He added:
“And I thought … I don’t know. I thought maybe we should talk about my approach. What I should do.”
“Fenton, I’ve told you – ”
“I know, I know. If I tell him I’m not interested in that sort of thing, he’ll back down on it. Well, I’ve told him that. I’ve told him it repeatedly. And now he’s …” He stopped himself right there.
“And now he’s what?”
“And now he’s called this emergency meeting.”
“Well.” Her eyes flashed triumphantly. “You know what that’s probably for, don’t you?”
“Let me guess. To call it off.” They’d done all this before, hadn’t they? The terrorist theme had them going round in circles. “You said that last time, too.”
“Well this time he’s got the right excuse, hasn’t he?” She slapped him on the forearm again. “These death threats of yours. That’s probably just the kind of excuse he’s been waiting for!”
“Hang on. A minute ago you were admitting he was serious about this. Remember? You said he hit the bed.”
“I said he thinks he’s serious. Maybe. But that doesn’t mean he’d actually …”
“He’d actually what? Go on.”
” You know. Don’t be a dick.”
“What, ‘clip’ Ivan Lego? ‘Whack’ him? ‘Smoke’ him? ‘Take him down’?”
“Fenton.” Did he imagine it, or was there a warning-shot of seriousness in her tone here, as if he’d crossed a line and was being politely shown the way back?
“Why would you call an ‘emergency meeting,’” he asked her, “to call something off?”
She shrugged. “How should I know? Want me to ask him?”
With an impudent smile she lowered her lips to the straw again, and let her amused eyes swivel upward to savour his response. He gave her what she wanted, the required smile of submission. So here he was again, at the same old dead end. What a devilishly fine line you walked, trying to make a girl see that her boyfriend was a terrorist! There was only so far you could push your claims before you wound up here, at the jocular or genuine threat to bring the boyfriend in. On the other hand, the more you soft-pedalled the theme, the more you let her think it was all one big joke, the more useless it became as a tool of denigration. But what else could he do? He could hardly tell her about Warren, could he? The bomb in the sports bag, the backyard munitions lab, the looming deadline for delivery … It would be madness to tell her that much truth, to admit her to that level of reality. If he did that, things would never be the same again. It was like having a nuclear device and knowing you could never use it.
“Anyway,” he boldly said, “we don’t always have to talk about terrorism, do we?”
“So what should we talk about then?” She briefly looked at him, then lowered her attention to the dregs of her drink. She aimed the straw at some lingering froth. She applied some cursory suction.
“Can I get you another one?” he asked her, his hand moving spryly to his wallet.
“Nah. Anyway, I’ve got to go in a sec.” She rolled and tilted her glass, looking to free a weathered blob of ice-cream that was wedged at the bottom. She said, “I wonder what Gus’d say if he knew you were buying me all these drinks! He’d probably think we were having an affair!”
She said it as though the idea were self-evidently laughable – as though he were a well-known eunuch or homosexual, or her brother, or a hundred and ten years old. What went on in her head when she said things like that? Or ever?
Fenton said, “I had this dream – ”
“They should give you a spoon with these, shouldn’t they?” She jabbed at the ice cream with her straw. She stole a quick glance up at the wall-clock. “How else am I meant to get this out?”
He said, “I think I had a dream about you last night.”
“Really?” (Still prodding at that pesky blob.) “That’s weird. You hardly know me.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Gus never has dreams, you know that? He says it’s because he’s too busy appearing in everyone else’s!” She glanced up at Fenton’s unamused face. “What? You don’t think that’s funny?”
“I suppose I find it hard to laugh,” he said, “with his death plot hanging over me.”
“Well,” she smiled, “if you want me to have a word with him …” She was jabbing at that fucking ice-cream again.
“I wouldn’t say I ‘hardly know you,’” Fenton reiterated, doggedly. “I think of you – well, I’m starting to think of you” (she stole another glance up at the clock) “as a good friend. I look forward – ” (she looked candidly down at the carpet to establish the whereabouts of her bag) “I look forward to these talks of ours. As unsavoury,” he limply concluded, “as the subject matter sometimes is.”
But she was already shifting her chair back, and didn’t seem to feel called-on to reply. With an air of having already half gone to wherever else it was she had to be, she grabbed her glass and made one final, no-nonsense assault on the chunk of ice-cream, tilting the vessel all the way back and allowing the elusive blob to slide gently down the glass’s inner flank and arrive roundly in her mouth. Fenton watched in silence. He observed the movements of her complicated throat. And he knew with bracing certainty that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, he wouldn’t do to have her. He didn’t just want her more than everything else. He didn’t want anything else at all. There wasn’t anything else. He sincerely hoped, therefore, that it would never come down to a straight choice between her and Ivan Lego. Because if it did, Ivan Lego was finished. Ivan Lego was finished, and so was Fenton. It was good to know this. It was good to have this cleared up.
She was fully into the dance of departure now, scooping up her bag, leaving her chair, smoothly reascending to her full height. Then, abruptly, she stuck out her right hand. She said: “Let’s bet on it. Come on. I say he’s going to call the whole thing off at this thing. At this meeting. Five bucks, I’ll bet you. Come on, Fenton. Put your money where your mouth is, pal.”
Her eyes were smiling. How could objects be so dark and yet at the same time so shiny? And here was her hand in front of him, waiting to be shaken. Patently, this was the moment to come absolutely clean. To tell her that Operation Lego wasn’t the sort of thing they should be making frivolous wagers about. To tell her it had all gone way past that now. To tell her about the looming deadline. To tell her about Warren in his backyard lab, making this bomb that might well turn out to be real. To make her see that this was no longer a laughing matter, if indeed it ever had been. Yes, it would be an act of gross irresponsibility to shake her hand now, and let her keep thinking everything was still okay. If he did that, he would be setting his course irrecoverably towards disaster.
Then again, it would be awfully nice to touch her palm.
He touched it.
“You’re on,” he said.
One of these days he really had to track down that quote, the one by that long-dead Frenchman, the one about how being in love gave you license to behave like a tool.