“In the expanding field of Lego Studies,” said Robert Browning later that same afternoon, “there has been a thrilling new development.”
His voice was full of bitter irony, but these days it always was. Defeat came off him in waves, clouding the workshop like ink spreading through water. The class was less than half full. By now Browning had established a rock-solid reputation for never marking the roll. Pamela Scratch, of course, was among the absentees. Fenton was not.
“The master,” Browning told them, “has received a new death threat. Which makes a total of – what? I’ve lost count. And I don’t really care. Anyway, it’s rather a brief threat, as we shall see. And rather aloof in tone. Take one and pass the rest around. Read. Ponder. Prepare to discuss. I’m also meant to warn you that he’ll be using this week’s lecture to inflict on you something he calls his general theory of the death threat. Title? Wait for it. ‘Text as Violence/Violence as Text: Notes Toward a Morphology of the Death Threat.’”
Browning seemed to be getting balder by the week. The core of his bald patch – that central sun-toughened dinner-plate of nude scalp – had been hairless for years. But around it was appearing a widening beach of freshly exposed skin, as pink and tender as a baby’s soles. Outside this area, such frail and limp hairs as remained could almost be counted individually. They stood around in a drunken circle, waiting for the end.
Fenton took a faded photocopy of the death threat. It said:
We regret to inform you that we cannot accept at this time the way in which your novel challenges our preconceptions about literature.
“Let me propose something radical,” Browning said, when the pile had returned to him. “Let’s leave the theoretical stuff to Lego. Let’s try going after the truth instead. Let’s just read the thing. Do I hear any objections?”
He knew that he wouldn’t. He knew that no one in the class ever said a word, with the sole exception of Pamela Scratch. And Pamela Scratch wasn’t here. She was elsewhere, in hiding.
“We’ll start with this first word. ‘We.’ ‘We regret to inform you.’ We. Should we infer that the threat has emanated from more than one person, do you think? That it’s come from a group or collective of some kind? A group which has got nothing better to do than send out a series of oddly worded death threats to Ivan Lego? Threats they seem strangely reluctant to act on, by the way. Or is a trick? Is the culprit actually an ‘I’? An individual, a quiet loner eager to conceal himself behind the cloak of the plural?”
The dull walls absorbed his words. His tone was deliberate, rhetorical. It suggested he already knew the answers to these questions. It suggested that he was moving, at his own slow pace, towards some final revelation. Was this to be it, then? The riddle of the death threats resolved at last? Now, today, just when Fenton had ceased to care about it. Just when he had come to find it infinitely less pressing than the question of the death itself …
“What else can we see here, using the reviled instrument of our common sense? Let’s look at the shape of the text. The mode of composition. Once again it’s a cut and paste effort, isn’t it? Again the evidence of this is ample. Almost too ample. And the typeface is uniform, suggesting that the text has all been cut from the one original source. And the point size is rather small, isn’t it? Such as we might find in a novel, say. Or a book of poems. Or a typed letter, perhaps. Furthermore, the threat has been assembled not letter by letter, but word by word. We see the telltale frame around each word, don’t we? The sort of ghosts of the scissored edges. And if that wasn’t enough, the words have been stuck down at slightly odd angles to each other as well. Like crooked teeth. One would almost say – of course it’s preposterous to think so – but one could almost believe our man has gone out of his way to draw our attention to these things …
“But now look back at the opening phrase: ‘We regret to inform you that we cannot accept at this time …’ The whole phrase runs straight, doesn’t it? No angles, no ghostly line between each word. Suggesting that here, in this case, our man has glued down the entire phrase as one unit. Which means – what? It means he’s inadvertently told us something about himself, hasn’t he? He’s told us he’s the kind of guy who happens to have documents lying round his house containing the phrase, We regret to inform you that we cannot accept at this time … Documents in which this phrase is available ready-made, just sitting there waiting to be cut out and inserted in a death threat. Now tell me: in what kind of document might we expect to find such a phrase? Oh, come on. Speak. This isn’t terribly hard. What sort of prose work might kick off with a phrase like that?”
Fenton said: “A rejection letter.” Maybe it was paranoia, but he was pretty sure that Browning kept looking his way every time he uttered the term “death threat.” Did Browning somehow know where the original threat had come from? Was he about to unmask Fenton as its author? Fenton didn’t find this prospect wholly alarming. Maybe he even wanted it. Maybe exposure by a third party was the about the best result he could now hope for, at this late stage.
“Thank you Mr Bland. Precisely. A rejection letter. Which rather does away, I think, with the idea that this death threat might have come from a collective. Because getting rejected is pretty much a solo experience, isn’t it? Rejection letters are received by writers. By failed writers. And you can’t get much more solitary than that. So in fact, it’s only the source document, this letter of rejection, that has come from an authentic ‘we.’ From a nebulous and faceless ‘we.’ Rejection letters always do. But the recipient of the letter – this guy who’s cut it up and recast it as a death threat – well, he’s very much an I, isn’t he? A ‘me’. A failed artist: like Charles Manson, like Hitler. An unpublished writer who has looked on the foul spectacle of Lego’s success, and is enraged. Vexed to homicide. Or vexed enough to threaten homicide, anyway. Not vexed enough to actually do it, at least not yet. In fact, we’re probably starting to fear that he never will. That he lacks that talent too. That he’s too small, too impotent, too inconsequential, to take it past the territory of the threat. Tell me: can anyone name, off the top of their head, a man who might fit this profile? A man known to be deeply repelled by the success of Lego’s book? A man also known to have amassed a fairly large body of rejection letters over the years? A man, shall we say, who has known the long loneliness of having his work judged by fools.”
Silence.
“Don’t be shy,” Browning said. “I can take it.”
Finally Fenton said it: “You.” Yes, he had an increasingly eerie sense that Browning was putting these questions to him alone. It was starting to feel like a private conversation between the two of them, with nine or ten other parties boredly and somewhat inappropriately looking on.
“In a nutshell, Bland. Me. This is precisely the conclusion the evidence points us to. But this is where the plot thickens. Because I didn’t send them, you see. You’ll have to trust me on that. But it’s true. So: I therefore find myself bound to propose another ‘scenario.’ As preposterous as it sounds, I propose that someone is trying to set me up. Somebody is trying to frame me as the author of these threats.”
Browning held a long silence to let this allegation sink in. “I’m aware it sounds absurd,” he calmly resumed. “It is absurd. And yet the evidence is here. It’s right in front of us. It’s building up, and it all points to me. I’m starting to recognise in these death threats whole phrases, whole sentences, taken from rejection letters I’ve received in the past. One of them had the name of my street in it. And yet when I search for those letters in my files, I find they’ve gone. Someone’s taken them. Things have been disappearing from my office. Documents. A pair of scissors. Books. Things that’ve no doubt got my fingerprints all over them, since I never considered it necessary to wear gloves while handling them.”
Another pause. Silence, except for the stale whispering-in of air through the vent in the floor.
“I further propose that the architect of this project is Ivan Lego. That he’s been concocting all these death threats himself. Maybe with assistance, maybe without. With the aim of discrediting me, smearing me as a pathetic threatener of death. But also, and probably mainly, to heighten the frenzy around his book. To refine the quality of the coverage. To micromanage it. To bring it to the front page, to the head of the nightly news. To create the illusion that his book actually matters. To make it appear, falsely, that his so-called ‘thought’ has resonance in the real world.”
The air vent whispered on. The silences around Browning’s utterances were starting to last longer than the utterances themselves. “And yes. I realise I sound like a madman. Sitting here and saying such things in the middle of the day. To a roomful of people who don’t care. Who might or might not even be listening. I feel like a madman. This is what makes it the perfect plot. Who’s going to believe it? It’s too ridiculous. I feel like a paranoid fool for even describing it. It’s far easier, isn’t it, to simply believe that I must be lying. To believe the threats really are coming from me. Even I can see that. Maybe this is part of the plan. To get even me wondering whether I’ve done it. To push me into finally saying all these things, so you can all sit there and look at me like I’m nuts. But what else am I meant to do? Say nothing? Just sit here quietly and let it all keep happening?”
He conceded them a smile, well aware that he was only succeeding in making himself sound more paranoid by the minute. He tried for a more moderate tone:
“How’s it going to end? I don’t know. Maybe all he wants is my sacking, or my resignation. Maybe he’ll just keep them coming till I really do go mad. Or maybe we’re in a Kafka novel. Maybe one fine morning I’ll be arrested.”
And now, quite unmistakably, he did address himself to Fenton alone. “Of course if Lego does turn around and get murdered,” he said to him, “I’ll be in the frame for that too. But somehow I don’t see it ending that way. Do you?”
Fenton looked back at him calmly, in the manner of a perfectly innocent man. It amazed him, in a mild sort of way, that he was able to manage such an unruffled response. It amazed him that he wasn’t, say, screaming out loud instead, or kicking a large hole in the wall.
“And why me?” Browning went on, turning mercifully back to the class at large. “This is another thing I don’t understand. Because he wants me out of the way? I thought I already was. Why bother taking me down? What is there to take me down from? This?” With a scarcely perceptible movement of his hand he measured the whole width of his present world – the tiny airless room, the half-dozing half-class – as if this was self-evidently about as low as a man could fall.
“Do I know too much? Is that it? But what do I know? All I know is that Lego’s a semi-literate fraud. And really, is that information so top-secret? You only have to look at him with your own two eyes to know it. You only have to read one paragraph of his shit.”
Now there was a knock on the door. Were they coming for Browning already? Or for Fenton? A smallish woman came in. She was the Senior Executive Administrative Facilitator of the department of socioliterology. She carried a cake-thick stack of photocopies. She issued a thinnish section of this pile to Browning, whispered something in his ear, and departed.
Browning rubbed together his hands in mock glee. “More developments,” he announced. “A new threat, hot off the presses!”
The pile circulated, one threat per student. The threat said:
Things are turning out rough. The image of the pitiless beast is everywhere: moving upon the Reel, at That nightmare ceremony, in a vast centre-cradle in the Mundi sun. Surely the man Troubles my sight. Vexed, indignant, full of passionate intensity, I fall apart. Hardly a revelation, Sure; but Slouch, stony lion, the blood tide is Coming! And body and head are loosed, thighs drowned, gaze dimmed at last; centuries of darkness are at hand.
Another cut and paste job, slivers of mutilated text bricked together with festering quiet-loner logic. Browning stayed bent over his copy for a good while. Now and then something in it moved him to utter a dry chuckle. Finally he said, without lifting his eyes from the text: “Yes. Fascinating. You recognise it, of course. ‘The Second Coming.’ Widely known to be one of my touchstones. Yes … Quite ingenious, in a perverse sort of way. The ‘pitiless beast’ would be Lego himself, obviously. Or the monster of his success, perhaps. ‘Moving upon the reel’ suggests reels of film, doesn’t it, or videotape – a reference to his incessant appearances on TV. The ‘nightmare ceremony’ – I imagine we’re meant to think of the televised launch of his book, at which I’m afraid I made rather a spectacle of myself. In front of a whole theatre of witnesses. The ‘vast centre-cradle in the Mundi sun’ – a nice way of evoking – what, a newspaper lift-out perhaps? Some stomach-turning celebrity profile of the man in the ‘lifestyle’ pages? And the rest seems pretty self-explanatory. The blood-tide, the loosed body and head – pretty clear, I would have thought. A graphic threat to separate his scone from his torso. And fair enough too. And the ‘vexed and indignant’ speaker – well, that of course would be me. Or that’s what you’re supposed to think. But again I can assure you, for what it’s worth, that it isn’t. This is not my handiwork. I dare say they’re going to find my fingerprints all over it, though. Because I’m willing to bet it’s been cobbled together from my copy of the Selected Poems, which vanished from my office a couple of weeks ago. I wondered at the time what kind of person would do that. Steal poetry. Theft and Yeats-appreciation: it seemed such an odd combination. Well, now I know.”
He opened his palm towards the door. “You may go now. But let me leave you with the following thought.” Already though his words were being half-drowned by a shameless wave of bag-packings and chair-slidings and awkward creepings to the exit. He pressed ahead with his parting words anyway, aware of the general indifference but well beyond feeling its sting. “There’s a great mistake at the heart of this.” He held his copy of the Yeats threat flappingly aloft. “A huge metaphysical error. If he was a real thinker he’d have spotted it a mile off. Can anyone see it? No? Let me explain. Why do you think I deplore the success of Lego’s book? Because I think he’s an awful shit? No. I do, but that’s not why I hate his book. I hate his book because it’s an affront to art, to human values, literary tradition, and to most of the other unfashionable things I hold dear. Now, call these things my preconceptions if you must. But whatever you call them, I hope you can see it would make no sense to defend these things by sending out death threats. No sense at all. Death threats belong to the abyss, like Lego. To send Lego a death threat would be to surrender to, to dive into, the very sewer of moral chaos that he stands for. Which brings me back to the ‘The Second Coming.’ Only a very poor reader of that poem would chop it up into pieces and turn it into a death threat. Because it’s a poem that deplores that sort of anarchy. It deplores the lumbering and moronic approach of the beast. And so it follows, as the night the day, that I can’t have composed this threat. This threat could only have been composed by a hater of Yeats. A hater of art and a champion of anarchy – like Ivan Lego. Ah – Bland,” he said, with a sudden relaxation of tone. “Just the man I wanted to see.”
Fenton looked around himself: and found that he was the last student left in the room. Everyone else had slipped out during Browning’s speech. Now it was just the two of them.
For a cruel half-minute Browning just moved silently around the empty room, putting things to rights, keeping Fenton in vile suspense. He pushed in some crooked chairs. He gathered up untaken copies of the death threats and stowed them in his soft leather bag.
Finally he came over to where Fenton sat. “You look worried, Bland. Don’t be. It’s just that I happened to come across an old essay of yours in my files. I thought you might want it back.”
He set his bag down on the desk beside Fenton’s. He pulled out a handwritten essay in a clear plastic envelope, and dropped it face up onto the wood. Fenton looked at it, and remembered it well. He had submitted it to Browning several months ago, back when Undeniable Classics was still a going concern. He had been obliged to write the whole thing out in pen, Trixie and Tara having disabled his typewriter by painting correction fluid directly onto its black barrel.
Fenton reached for the essay. But Browning placed a custodial hand on it. Then with his other hand he laid down a second document, also in Fenton’s handwriting. This one said: Don’t despair – Professor Lego will soon be taken care of. The word will was crossed out, and the word might was inserted above it. It was the idiotic note of reassurance that Fenton had felt compelled to slip into Browning’s assignment box a few weeks back. The graphological comparison was damning.
“Explain,” Browning said.
Fenton had a guilty urge to hang his head. But he was still looking down at the irrefutable documents, so in effect he was hanging his head already. He kept doing it. Blood heated his face. Suddenly he was six years old again, summoned to the headmaster’s office for doing something dirty.
“Come on, Bland,” said Browning above him. “Either you’ve been getting a terrorist to write your essays, or …” His voice went serious again. “I repeat. Explain. Speak.”
“It’s kind of complicated.”
“What isn’t?”
Fenton preserved an embarrassed silence.
“All right,” Browning said. “Let’s do it this way. Did Lego ask you to write this?”
“No.”
“You wrote it entirely off your own bat?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Fenton found that he wanted this to be it. His energies were flagging; he wanted it all to end here. He wanted Browning to work out what the whole truth was, and force a confession out of him here and now. Who better to be arraigned by than Browning? It felt right that it should be him. Fenton was still obliged to defend himself, of course. He was still obliged to deflect Browning with half-truths and lies. But he wanted Browning to sense that they were half-truths and lies, and pounce on them, rip into them, make things hard for him, hound him back into a corner until he had absolutely no choice but to come clean. He was in that curious phase of criminality where you craved capture but lacked the wherewithal to turn yourself in. That step was too much for you. Somebody else had to help you with it. Somebody intrepid and external had to come after you, and put you out of your misery. It was like love. You wanted her to know. But you certainly weren’t going to come straight out and tell her.
“Okay, tell me this. Are you behind these death threats to Lego?”
“No.”
“Have you ever sent him a death threat?”
“Well I’d hardly call it a threat, but – ”
“But you have.”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“Just one.”
“When?”
“A while ago. The same day I wrote that.”
“And it was just the one. You’re sure of that?”
“Just the one.”
“And you weren’t stupid enough to write that by hand, I take it?”
“No. Cut and paste.”
“Like the others.”
“Exactly. But I didn’t write the others. I don’t know anything about them. I think you must be right about them. They must be coming from Lego.”
Browning ruminated. “So the following scenario is possible. You send Lego the first threat. And I’ll be asking you why you did that in a minute. You’re not getting away that easily. Anyway: you send him the first threat … and he finds that he likes it. He likes the idea of it. He looks forward to getting more just like it. He looks forward to going public with them. He foresees what they’ll do for his career. He foresees how his celebrity will bloat. So: he waits for further threats to pour in. And the trouble is, they don’t. They stop cold, after just one threat. The dream seems to be ending. And then it hits him: what’s to stop him from fabricating them himself? Nothing except the law, and the basic tenets of human decency. And in fact, a string of fake threats will probably serve his ends much better than a string of real ones. He can control their timing. He can tailor their content to suit his theories. He can improve on your threat, Bland. Also, he knows that his threats aren’t going to culminate in his actual death, doesn’t he? In theory, he can keep them coming forever. And he can make them all point to an implied patsy. To a wrong-thinking old dinosaur who can be tainted with the whole sordid guilt of it, even if it never comes to a formal laying of charges. So: he steals a bunch of my letters and books, he puts on some gloves, and he settles down to work.”
“Yes. I’ve been suspecting this myself.”
“Right. It’s all pretty clear to me now. It’s all pretty much as I thought. Now you. This threat you sent him. What exactly did it say?”
“Something along the lines of his life being in danger. You know. That sort of thing. Run of the mill stuff.”
“Why? Is his life in danger?”
“It was then. At least I thought it was. But it isn’t any more.” If only this conversation were taking place tomorrow, six hours before Operation Aggot instead of thirty. Then Fenton would be rolling over like a dog. Tomorrow he’d no doubt be praying for a way out like this.
“Who was it in danger from?” Browning asked him.
“A group. An organization. But as I say, not any more.”
“What group? Are you a member of it?”
“Not really. Sort of.”
“That accident the other day. That kid who was making some sort of bomb in his garage. That’s part of it, isn’t it?”
“It was,” Fenton said cautiously. How did Browning know about that? “It was, but that was the end of it.”
“Bland, what are you doing mixed up with people who make bombs in their garages?”
“We didn’t know what he was doing. He was rogue.”
“Ah, he was ‘rogue,’ was he?”
“But he’s learnt his lesson now. The police talked to him. It’s under control. Believe me, I don’t want it to get out of hand any more than you do.”
“It seems to me,” Browning observed, “that it’s out of hand already.”
“It was, I’ll admit that. But not any more. That ended it. He’s learned his lesson, like I say. It’s over.” Still he waited for Browning to make this much harder for him: to zero in on one of these piss-weak lies, to whack one of these sitters over the fence. To do his job as a crotchety elder and better.
But Browning was pursuing his own agenda. And he seemed, worryingly, to be just about done. He tiredly sighed. “I hope so, Bland,” he said. There was scepticism in his face. But there was also something else: a willingness not to know. He’d heard what he wanted to hear. He’d made things as hard for Fenton as he was going to. “Because I know all about it now, don’t I? Make sure you tell that to your friend. This ‘rogue’ bomb-maker. Tell him I’m on to you, right? Tell him I know. And tell it to the rest of this organization you’re sort of a part of.”
“I will. I will. But as I say …”
Browning nodded without conviction and slid both documents over to Fenton, the essay and the incriminating note. “I’d destroy that one if I were you.” He spoke as if the scene was now over. He seemed to think he’d done his bit.
“Thanks. I will.” Almost in disappointment Fenton moved to the door.
“There’s nothing you’re not telling me, Bland?” Clearly he knew there was. But just as clearly he didn’t want to hear it. He wanted Fenton to shake his head, and repeat that it was over.
So Fenton shook his head, and repeated that it was over.
“Good,” Browning said. “Just remember what I said about anarchy, Bland. Use violence against Lego, and he wins.”
Fenton nodded.
“And if that doesn’t move you,” Browning added, “remember that I know.”