2

By many people’s reckoning, including his own, Professor Ivan Lego was the most important and least penetrable theorist working at the University of ——. The unflagging quantity of his output was the envy of his peers. The duration and physical mass of his writings had won him international academic regard. He made multilingual puns, and was known to revel in paradox and wordplay. As founder and head of the department of socioliterology, he had almost single-handedly forged the University’s reputation as a leading centre for the study and partial elucidation of his own thought. The Lego Studies programme, a three-semester course designed to acquaint students with a range of basic issues arising from a generous selection of compulsorily purchased Lego texts, was built around a series of lectures delivered by the Professor himself. He commenced each of these lectures at precisely six minutes past the hour. This subversive practice, he argued with characteristic flair, was no more arbitrary than the general custom of starting things precisely on the hour. For a fuller account of this provocative notion, Lego referred students to his essay “Radical Tardiness: A Polemical Overview,” which was to be found in their copies of The Lego Reader. According to that notoriously difficult paper, radical tardiness (alternatively known as deferred punctuality) had two not unrelated objectives: first, to “execute a strategic intervention in received notions of ‘the real’”; and second, “to interrogate the chronometric hegemony of Greenwich.” Nor did Ivan Lego confine his transgressive tarrying to the lecture hall. He turned up to everything six minutes late: symposia, colloquia, other people’s seminars. By radically deferring his entrances by six minutes, Ivan Lego maintained, he was paradoxically able to save other people’s time, since expounding the concept to them verbally would have taken him ten minutes at the very least, and even longer with puns and wordplay.

It was now two minutes past two p.m., and a healthy babble of anticipation filled the vast theatre into which Ivan Lego, in four minutes precisely, would stride. About a third of the way up the theatre she sat, a drizzle of dark hair descending mournfully over the back of her neck. About another third of the way up it sat Fenton, feeling as bad as he had ever felt without either weeping or groaning out loud. He was a propped-up corpse, a rack of bones festooned with a few tattered scraps of skin. Ninety minutes or so had passed between the end of the Maoist meeting and now. He had spent the bulk of this period being catastrophically ill in a distant toilet block. How he had made it from there to here, and why he had bothered, he didn’t clearly recall. Obscure forces had made his body present itself here, as though the exercise still had some point. Vague instincts had made it turn up here early, as if that still mattered, and install itself – yes – between two empty seats, in the contemptible hope that one of them might get sat in by her. For some reason that time-honoured tactic lived on, like the light of a dead star.

Her and Gus? Gus and her? It still struck him as the single worst thing he had ever seen. It impressed him, in an abstract sort of way, that a person could see something like that and go on living, or half-living. Looking at her body now, he could scarcely credit what he had seen her let Gus do to it. How could she extend such divine privileges to those simian digits, to that primal mouth? And if she let him do that to her in public, what might she let him do to her in private? What was there left for her to let him do to her? Fenton felt, looking at her now, a wounded dog’s impulse to go somewhere private and die. But he also felt an obstinate need to be and remain in her presence, to stake her out, to stay tuned, as though if he stared at the back of her neck for long enough something encouraging would eventually have to occur, some movement or sign that would make him feel marginally less bad.

At 2.06pm sharp the door at the left of the carpeted stage swept open and Professor Ivan Lego came through, subduing the hall to silence. He moved briskly and impassively to the lectern, bearing a glass of water in his near hand and a neat stack of notes, partially obscured by his tall and lean form, in the other. Latecomers slipped respectfully into the nearest empty seats. Ivan Lego’s beige trousers bore so crisp a crease that from side-on they appeared to occupy only two dimensions. The remainder of his outfit was also beige: his collarless shirt, buttoned priest-style all the way to the throat; his fiercely stylish linen coat; the handkerchief that protruded with irony from its breast pocket. In order to problematise the concept of whiteness, Ivan Lego dressed unfailingly in shades that were not quite white. This was a hallmark of the mature phase of his thought. He wore cream, he wore tan, he wore bone, he wore sand, he wore buff, he wore off-buff, he wore almond, he wore bisque, he wore fawn; but never, paradoxically, did he wear white per se. Again the relevant text was to be found in The Lego Reader: “In the dialectic of paleness, where darkness hides without announcing itself, white puts itself forward as the site par excellence of the not-black – black itself having already constituted itself in itself as the irreducible epitome of the not-white. But if white itself is nothing less (that is to say, nothing more) than the effacement of a quality (blackness) in which white is always already present as its own effacement, we will be justified in proposing that white itself can never be purely present, can at best merely be approached, by way of an endless interplay of the lighter hues …”

Ivan Lego’s papers gave an amplified crackle as he laid them on the lectern. He tapped the helmet of the microphone once, and found satisfactory the crisp pop of its reply. Even his hair was white but not quite white: it was the colour of foil, and caught the light in a similar way. He took a single sip of water and set down his glass.

“The dash,” he began. “How has this ostensibly neutral unit of punctuation functioned through history? Whose interests has it served? Whose interests has it suppressed? What rhetorical modes, what habits of thought, what social institutions, has it covertly nourished? What alternative units of punctuation has its privileging rendered mute? In the ongoing subjugation of silence by language, how effectively has it functioned as a tool of repression and control?”

For what it was worth, Fenton wasn’t here entirely by choice. Until a few weeks ago, he had been contentedly enrolled in the rival course: Undeniable Classics of Western Literature II, run single-handedly by a volatile and hippyish lecturer named Robert Browning. Until a few weeks before that, so had she. Robert Browning: embittered humanist, denimmed quoter of Montaigne and Bob Dylan, haggard upholder of the Western Canon, vocal castigator of Ivan Lego and everything he stood for. Remnant of the days when the University had been an institution of the old sort, with departments of things like English and History. Most of Browning’s kind had faded away years ago, when the emerging superdiscipline of socioliterology had rendered such fields of inquiry obsolete. socioliterology: the small s signalling the new discipline’s thorough commitment to equality, its rigorous opposition to all forms of privileging and marginalisation, its refusal to endorse or perpetuate any of those old cultural superstitions by which certain things or classes of things had been mystically deemed to be “better than” or “preferable to” other things. Plainly, a man like Robert Browning had no place in such a forward-looking department. And yet he had distastefully lingered on in it, an anomaly, a revenant, as strange a presence as a flat-earth man in a School of Astrophysics, or a convicted rapist in a Department of Women’s Studies. His lectures in Undeniable Classics had been marked by increasing spitefulness of delivery and decreasing size of audience. Fenton had found them an excellent forum to stare across at her ardently in. Over a desert of declining attendance he had yearned for her. Over a widening vacuum of unoccupied seats he had watched and craved, while Browning paced the stage and sawed the air with his hand and spoke of the great universal themes. Week by week his view of her grew less and less obstructed as Browning ranted and strode down the front, explicating sonnets in which long-dead poets issued frank pleas for immediate sex, dissecting novels in which love-starved noblewomen with muffs dreamed of taking lovers more soulful than their husbands, yet better at riding horses. Week by week the space between them got emptier of students, fuller of the electricity of hope. The odds that she would soon register the fact of his being alive were improving rampantly with each new lecture. Another session or two and he’d practically have been dating her in there, with Browning as their fiery chaperone …

But then the week had come when she wasn’t there. He’d told himself she might be ill, or keeping some other appointment. But when the next week came and she wasn’t there again, he knew that the inevitable had come to pass. She was gone. She had joined the exodus. She had transferred to Lego Studies II. Later that same day, so had he. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. At the time, it had seemed like the only thing to do. But at the time he hadn’t seen her use the cock of a fat Maoist as a piece of furniture.

Now, on the other hand, he had. He kept watch on the back of her neck, waiting for some mitigating sign. She chewed with brief vexation on a fingernail. Maybe she and Gus were just friends. Maybe they were just very close friends. With the hand she wasn’t biting the nails of she took cursory notes. Ivan Lego was discussing the phallic nature of the dash now. Did he really have to talk about phalluses? Now, today? Some mature-aged guy in the front row kept issuing hearty peals of forced laughter, as if to make it clear to everyone else that Lego had just delivered a multilingual pun, or engaged in wordplay, or revelled in a paradox. Listening to Lego talk, Fenton was beginning to see the point of Robert Browning. He had seen some of the point of him before. He saw a lot more of the point of him now.

But here was the irony. Here was the comical twist. It was too late to see the point of Robert Browning now, because Undeniable Classics had ceased to exist. It was defunct. It had been declared unviable. Its enrolments had finally slipped below the level required to justify a course’s existence. And here was the punch line. This fatal slippage had occurred, as far as Fenton’s frantic researches into the matter had enabled him to determine, at a point very close to his own withdrawal from the course. Conceivably, very conceivably, it had occurred at precisely the same instant, in direct consequence of that withdrawal. Conceivably, in other words, Fenton’s switch to Lego Studies II had triggered the collapse of Undeniable Classics, and occasioned the end of Robert Browning’s career. For a weekly glimpse of the back of her neck he had maybe pulled the plug on a whole tradition of humane higher learning. There seemed to be no way of establishing this point for sure. All he knew with certainty was this: it was entirely possible that he, Fenton Bland, held the smoking gun. And because it was possible, and very bad, he knew that it was almost definitely the case. The hand of fate wouldn’t pass up such a splendid opportunity to flip him its rigid middle finger. In a world in which someone like Gus could get someone like her, what wasn’t allowed to happen?

So even if he wanted to leave now – and he didn’t – but even if he did, there was nowhere else to go. He was stuck with Lego Studies II now, whether he liked it or not. And no doubt he’d be stuck with Lego Studies III as well, and with a mandatory make-up semester in Lego Studies I. A whole year more of lectures like this one. A whole year more of this verbal chloroform, of this savage and epic boredom …

Furthermore, he could quite plainly never allow himself to be seen by Robert Browning again.

All around him people were furiously taking notes, for all the world as if they understood and cared about what Lego was saying. For all the world as if they wanted to preserve it, so they could come back and enjoy it again later. It amazed Fenton, in his current mood, that they were doing this. It amazed him that they weren’t rushing the lectern instead, storming the mike to inflict great physical suffering on the man. But it had amazed him last week too. And Lego’s books: he wrote as if he held a deep and bitter grudge against you, and was able to inflict revenge only through the medium of prose. Reading him, you began to wish for death: preferably his, but if necessary your own. His sentences went on for so long. It took you such a very long time to get to the end of them. There were so very many words in them. And the words, though in many cases familiar enough on their own, meant so very little in the order Lego chose to put them down in that they might as well have been thrown together at random. What, even roughly, was the man trying to tell you? Could it possibly be as pressing as he seemed to think? If it was, why didn’t he say it a lot more clearly? If it wasn’t, why was he saying it at all? And at the end of each sentence like that there was another sentence like that waiting to start. And the paragraphs they were in were big and brutal and went on for an unbelievably long time until for no clear reason they suddenly stopped so that another big and brutal and unbelievably long paragraph just like them could begin. And the books they were in cost so very much money, and you could think of quite literally nothing on the planet that these sums of money couldn’t have been better spent on …

But the deed was done now, and couldn’t be reversed. He was here now, and so was she. So really there was nothing for it but to dig in, and get on with staring at the back of her neck and thinking about the rest of her body and considering how fine life would be if he could one day make it his. In a world where Gus could have her, anything was possible. Even that.