I’d put it in the refrigerator, is what I would do. The cake would be there for her when she was hungry. Perhaps when I was feeling better I would have a piece, too. Maybe Esther and I could sit quietly together over a piece of cake. I’d skin back my frosting for her, because she liked extra. There’d be no reason to speak. We could enjoy each other’s company in silence, in the kitchen, on her birthday. If I could find a candle, an old-fashioned one, we’d light it up. It’d be nice to sit together, listening to our forks click on the plates. We’d be sure to save a piece for her mother.
17
LeBov died that week. A feature ran on the news, a final piece of television. He was sixty-two. Or he was sixty-eight. An assistant found him at home, where he lived alone. Two of his many children apparently lived nearby. I missed the picture they flashed of him, but then a photo of one of LeBov’s sons, cast up on the screen, showed a suntanned, elderly fellow with a white ponytail. LeBov’s son. There was no mention of a wife. LeBov had been taken to a private facility in Denver where he later expired. This was the language used by the newscaster. Expired.
There would be no funeral.
According to the news, LeBov was perhaps the first researcher, certainly the most outspoken, to identify the threat of language.
All the good it’s done, I sat there thinking.
The editorial assessment of the news program was that LeBov’s death was particularly distressing at this time, given our current situation.
A toxicologist by training, they called LeBov. He had lived mostly in Canada, spent the early years of his career developing his theory of a primary allergen, allergy zero.
Later in his career LeBov focused on the toxic properties of language. Most recently, until his passing, he had been the director of a private research lab in Rochester called Forsythe. He was working closely with health officials on the problem of the viral child.
“Claire!” I called out into the cold house.
LeBov was known for disseminating his views in underground publications. Designed, some said, deliberately to mislead. Filled with false information and historical inaccuracies invented to bolster his theories.
A montage spun together clips of other scientists appraising LeBov’s contributions. He merited scorn, derision, from a pedigreed cohort, doctors, scientists, linguists. But these were old clips, exhumed from an archive somewhere, stitched together to form a portrait. All the footage was from well before his death, before his recent lunge into credibility. These men and women, pronouncing on the now dead LeBov, projected a vital cheer quite terrible in hindsight—sitting in offices or newsrooms while off-loading their expensive opinions about someone they could safely dislike in public.
These scientists had yet to live in these times. Today, yesterday, the past few months. Their short-term futures were going to hurt, and they had no idea. Where were these fine people now? I wondered. Were they hiding yet?
Have you found shelter? Is it finally quiet and safe where you are? I wanted to ask them.
Not a person alive could be made to talk like that now, look so healthy, using language as if it did not break something in us.
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 a misleading, dangerous myth. It had, he supposedly argued, been copied out incorrectly, transmitted from generation to generation with a serious degree of error. Now the myth as we knew it presented a terrible impediment. I saw where Murphy had gotten the idea.