The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [52]
Even the newscaster, broadcasting live, wore a bloodless mask, staring, one supposed, at the words on the teleprompter. Eating the vile material for his very employment, each word producing the crushing. You could tell. He seemed to weaken by the second. They’d done him up in television paint. One could see that this man did not have long. For some reason I recall his name. Jim Adelle.
Jim Adelle’s News Hour. A Special Report with Jim Adelle.
I wonder how many more days he had to live.
The feature continued. I settled in to listen as LeBov’s colleagues detailed his work, decried his methods, his results, his person.
“Claire!” I called again. She couldn’t still be asleep. I knew she’d be interested in this.
LeBov’s theory of allergy did not assist his career. One of the desert universities finally offered him a silo, but they kept him away from students. Later he distanced himself from the theory, then finally renounced the idea as dangerous.
Not really a rebuttal, I noted, to call your own idea dangerous. More of a sensationalizing gesture to increase attention.
This would turn out to be a signature method throughout LeBov’s career. He advanced an idea, often a problematic one, beat its drum until everyone was revolted, then turned on himself, often through pseudonym, and attacked his own work. He staged battles in the academic journals between two different versions of himself, argument and refutation coming from the same man.
At conferences LeBov sent imposters to the podium in his place. No one knew what he looked like, apparently. Then he sat hectoring his stand-in from the audience, protesting every idea, sometimes storming out in disgust. He accused himself of fraudulence, plagiarism. In at least some cases it would seem that he was correct.
LeBov’s signature work, in the end, addressed the trouble with language, the word trouble being, in his view, an understatement. He argued for most of his professional life that language should be best understood, aside from its marginal utility as a communication technology—can we honestly say it works?—as an impurity.
Language happens to be a toxin we are very good at producing, but not so good at absorbing, LeBov said. We could, per LeBov, in our lifetimes, not expect to process very much of it.
In answer to his detractors, LeBov asked what it was that ever suggested speech would not be toxic.
“Let us reverse the terms and assume that language, like nearly everything else, is poisonous when consumed to excess. Why not assault the folly that led to such widespread use of something so intense, so strong, as language, in the first place?”
Where was the regulatory body? LeBov wanted to know. Where was the marshaling instinct for speech, for language itself?
It causes the most unbearable strain on our systems, LeBov would say. It is not very different from a long, slow venom.
This idea was never granted legitimacy, evidenced by the battalion of naysayers. He simply had no proof. Witness after witness remarked on LeBov’s lack of evidence, and the word evidence came to indicate something significant that LeBov was missing, like an eye, a limb.
They had some audio for this, a response of sorts. More than anyone else in the world, I wish that I was wrong, answered LeBov, in a voice I felt I had heard before. What a relief that would be, to me, and also to my family.
“Claire,” I called out again, softer. I listened into the house to hear some sign of her. “Come sit with me.”
LeBov had written something, a screed, on the Tower of Babel, apparently, but retracted it before it could go to press. The other version of the story is that LeBov wrote in and protested to his own publisher, demanded they pulp the book. The book was a dangerous speculation, an assault on reality.
“Claire, Honey?” I called.
The Babel document came up a few times in the news interviews, though no one, it seemed, had read it. LeBov had an obsession with this myth. More than that, a bone to pick. He felt that it was