The Topeka School

by Ben Lerner

He could occasionally pick up traces of Speed Stick or scented lip gloss or other floating signatures of a social order now suspended.

To an anthropologist or ghost wandering the halls of Russell High School, interscholastic debate would appear less competitive speech than glossolalic ritual. See the cystic acned first negative speaker from Shawnee Mission—his dress more casual, typical of the rich kids from Kansas City—reading evidence at 340 words per minute to support his claim

The pressures of passing himself off as a real man, of staying true to type—the constant weight lifting, the verbal combat—would eventually reduce him to a child again, calling out for his mother from his bed. The migraines were his periodic full-bodied involuntary confessions that he was soft, a poser.

On the one hand, Klaus, surely the only man in Topeka outfitted in white linen, could not take these kids—with their refrigerators full of food, their air-conditioning and television, their freedom from stigma or state violence—seriously; what could be more obvious than the fact that they did not know what suffering was, that if they suffered from anything it was precisely this lack of suffering, a kind of neuropathy that came from too much ease, too much sugar, a kind of existential gout? And then, on the other hand, Klaus took them very seriously indeed; they are told constantly, the culture tells them, although “culture” is hardly the word, Klaus said, patting his forehead with a handkerchief cut from the same linen as his suit, that they are individuals, rugged even, but in fact they are emptied out, isolate, mass men without a mass, although they’re not men, obviously, but boys, perpetual boys, Peter Pans, man-children, since America is adolescence without end, boys without religion on the one hand or a charismatic leader on the other; they don’t even have a father—President Carter!—to kill or a father to tell them to kill the Jew; they have no Jew; they are libidinally driven to mass surrender without anything to surrender to; they don’t even believe in money or in science, or those beliefs are insufficient; their country has fought and lost its last real war; in a word, they are overfed; in a word, they are starving. These kids, Klaus said, just need a good whipping...

but Klaus’s charm, at least for me, was that his voice already sounded like an imitation of itself; Klaus was an actor bemused to be playing Klaus. And yet the effect of this doubling was generous, self-deprecating; it reminded me of how Charlie Chaplin—when the rich woman he loves enters the bistro—pretends, out of embarrassment, only to be playing a waiter for her amusement.

long, wine-soaked debriefings

who glom on to a new friend with an excitement tinged with desperation.

cupped flame

threw it into relief for her.

“There are no men in there,” I said, smiling to calm you, although I didn’t feel calm, and I opened the glass door to show you, took a gallon of milk from the shelf. And that’s when I heard the voices behind the case. After a moment of vertigo, an echo of your own terror, I realized that there were workers who supplied the cases from behind, that the back of the case was some kind of movable partition that opened onto the storeroom. I don’t know if they laughed at you or even tugged on the gallon of milk you were trying to remove as a joke or if they were just working and talking and maybe laughing among themselves, but now I understood what you’d seen, why you’d freaked out. I calmed down, tried to explain the situation as slowly and clearly as possible. You stopped crying, but you were still upset. What I was describing—that there were men (and women, I insisted) working behind the walls—still sounded plenty ominous to you. And—is this the analyst in me?—I think it was worse for you that it was milk, that you were trying to procure, as you were playing at being grown-up, the nourishment I once gave you from the breast. You had a few nightmares about it in the following months—that there might be men in the walls. Evil men. And then there were these men calling over the invisible wires. Klaus had an elegant and ridiculous Marxist reading of it as evidence of your precocious intuition of alienated labor, but it was clear that you were picking up on all the toxic masculinit...

Then the chewing gum thing happened. I bet you won’t put this in your novel. One night Dad and I are watching a movie. It’s many hours after your bedtime and as far as we know you’ve been sleeping soundly. And then you appear in the doorway, naked, totally calm, and I’m like, “What is it, Adam?” And you say, matter-of-factly, like we’re just chatting, “Oh, I was going to the potty and chewing gum and the gum fell out.” You’d recently been allowed to keep a pack of gum yourself with the understanding that you’d ask us before chewing any of it; you loved gum. Dad had kind of drifted off, wasn’t really watching the movie, and said, without opening his eyes, “Well, did you clean it up?” And you didn’t answer. And I sensed that something was wrong and I switched on the reading light beside the bed and said, “Come here.” When you were next to me I saw that you had carefully wrapped your penis and scrotum in chewing gum. I mean, you must have chewed it, flattened it out, worked deliberately to enclose yourself. Nothing was exposed. “Oh my God,” I said, touching the gum, which had hardened. “What is it?” Dad said, totally awake now, concerned, rolling over. A pause. Then we both started cracking up, we couldn’t help ourselves. And you laughed since we were laughing; you were relieved you weren’t in trouble. “How did this happen?” I asked, picking you up and depositing you on the bed between us. And you had your rehearsed line: “The gum fell out of my mouth and got stuck on my body...

mundane thing cast out of the grammar of daily life can suddenly alert you to the irruption of violence.

There was this long moment when you were looking at her breast, which she seemed to be proffering, then to us, as if for instruction. And Dad and I realized that you were trying to figure out if she was asking you to identify a body part, her breast, which she was basically holding in her hands, or the letter, and you didn’t want to be rude. Dad had to cough his way out of laughter. We could tell that you knew the letter but weren’t sure about the question and we thought you were going to say, “That’s your booby,” which is the word you would have used; but finally you said, very tentatively, “A?” “Right,” she said, and then you looked relieved and answered all the other questions without hesitation. Now I was coughing, laughing; somehow it brought us a lot of relief.

She seemed genuinely happy for me, and at first she was my staunchest defender against the inevitable charge that I’d compromised theoretical rigor for the sake of popular success. Certainly Sima understood better than anyone why I was committed to accessible writing; first and foremost, I believed that I could help a lot of people by describing triangles or sibling dynamics as clearly as possible and that the translation of those concepts into practical advice was my strength as a therapist. I also had, as Sima knew, a deep—a bone-deep—allergy to anything that smacked of mystification, to the way professional jargon—especially, but not only, of the analytical sort—could be deployed to dismiss women as hysterics; this was related to what had happened with my father, all the secrecy and gaslighting abuse involves. Now, the hard-core academics and theoreticians found it easy to dismiss me; if your book is celebrated in The New York Times, then you’re just peddling commercially repackaged ideology; you’re not to be taken seriously. There are of course real arguments to be had regarding what’s gained or lost with one mode of discourse or another, anti-intellectualism can be as bad as snobbery, but it was notable how, if one of the Foundation’s old boys or his allies showed up in the Times, it was because his work was transcendent, but when a penis-envying virago like me received attention, it was because I’d reduced everything to a kind of psychological chick lit.

You’d retreated to a corner of the room and were ventriloquizing some kind of mash-up of masculine gibberish—“I warned you, motherfucker; dude, I said step off”—but you had tears in your eyes, a kid again.

I’m not suggesting any equivalence between what my father did and Sima dropping me; I just mean I couldn’t experience the latter without it being inflected by the former given the nature of our relationship, the blurred boundaries between therapist and friend. We hadn’t spoken in a few years by the time we were forced briefly back into contact by the incident with Darren.

I was having my own experience of depersonalization, no drugs involved—an overwhelming sense of frames of reference giving way, of the past and present collapsing in on one another. I felt like a child who wanted her mom or Sima to protect her from her father and like a mother who was failing to protect her child, who was at risk of becoming one of the Men (I wasn’t keeping the promises I made when you were unconscious; I wasn’t learning to behave); I was simultaneously there with Grandma so the marble might soothe her (“Jane will be fine”) and I was there with Dad in the more recent past as I helped wreck his home and in the present as a famous relationship guru who could no longer relate to any of her own.

Whatever Cody’s inclination he would not defy his father who had wordlessly made it clear you do not fuck with Darren. Sometimes Cody and Darren loaded or unloaded the truck together and Darren felt a brief commonality of purpose, lift on three.

It was his similarity to the dominant that rendered him pathetic and a provocation: the man-child was almost fit for school or work or service, could almost get his license, finally discard the dirt bike; too close to the norms to prove them by his difference, the real men—who are themselves in fact perpetual boys, since America is adolescence without end—had to differentiate themselves with violence, Klaus’s voice.

not only at Darren’s expense, but also at the expense of the therapeutic culture that had failed him, that could not welcome him into the medicalized pastoral of in-treatment (who would pay?) or reconcile him with clinical hours to the larger world.

Of course they knew better, but knowing is a weak state; you cannot assume your son will opt out of the dominant libidinal economy, develop the right desires from within the wrong life; the travesty of inclusion they were playing out with Darren—their intern—was also a citation and critique of the Foundation’s methods; if they were at once caring for and castigating Darren, they were also modeling and mocking their own parents.

He was in the garage because he helped Ron, because Ron had let him help (generosity toward the man-child often took the form of mock employment); he moved to the Jeep as much on a current of alcohol and shared energy as under his own power or the direction of his peers. Resentment and empathy and nostalgia and anxiety lived without their knowledge in their bodies, led them to stand just so, angled their shoulders thusly, opened or closed their faces, cut their hair, entered the prosody of their gestures, speech; no individual choreographed the sequence into which Darren was absorbed.

Then there was their anthropological fascination: he was their Victor of Aveyron, their Kaspar Hauser. Could he learn their speech and customs? Only almost, and by failing, Darren performed a critical social function: he naturalized their own appropriated talk and ritual; Darren helped them keep it real.

He felt there was something effete about the way he was holding the creatine with both arms, cradling it, and he repositioned the tub.

It would have meant, in his own mind, choosing the company of Joannas over Ambers, abandoning the fiction of his manliness.

But what was Evanson, exactly? He always wore khaki Dockers and a yellow, gray, or brown Polo; his face remained boyish, smooth, but the intermittent double chin foretokened middle age; the standard haircut, too, could be read as either juvenile or professional, although his dark red hair had started to thin on top. Evanson sometimes appeared to him as an accomplished elder—the Harvard pedigree—and then suddenly he struck Adam as a species of man-child, a twenty-five-year-old coaching forensics at his former high school because he couldn’t cut it “back East.” As if he were always on camera, being judged, Evanson held very still unless he was executing a purposeful gesture; sometimes this seemed like discipline to Adam; at other times, it betrayed a kind of anxiety, as though all of Evanson’s movements were part of a choreographed, memorized routine without which he’d be lost. One moment Evanson struck him as a precocious young man destined for the corridors of power—a conservative judge, a senator, the president of the NRA—and at other times Evanson seemed fated to drive sleeping debaters, sleeping drivelers, home from Junction City, plash of insects on the windshield of the district-issue van, glow of a single pair of ruby taillights in the distance.

photographs so old that even from a distance Adam could see or sense that particular kind of innocence expressed by subjects in the early days of the medium; they wore a veil of ignorance; they couldn’t quite imagine how their image would survive them, circulate, how they might end up in Topeka in 1997, snow falling beyond the window.

was always with Jane and Adam, both of whom hated flying, were frightened of turbulence. Maybe I was only relaxed when I was with someone who wasn’t, when I knew it would be useful for me to be calm, calming? Alone now, circling the city among the sleepers and fake readers, abandoned by the crew, unmoored by the absence of someone who needed me,

My allowance, a rubber-banded wad of the weak, multicolored currency, a small fortune for the locals. How the servant Lin would silently appear in our vast, white-carpeted living room proffering a silver tray of gin and tonics for the adults, lemonades for the kids. Red jade sculptures of rearing horses flanked the fireplace; on the walls, a hanging scroll of a mountain scene, one of a bird on a branch, a red berry in its mouth, but also some incongruous Impressionist knockoffs we’d had shipped, and my mom’s Chagall print. We had a pool in the back; there’s Lin and his silver tray again, little wooden bowls of candied nuts beside the drinks.

I think my dad’s job was largely arranging visits for more important versions of himself; it fell to him to make sure that Mr. X had everything he needed, the right room at the Grand Hotel, one with a balcony, the most reliable driver, the one with good English, that Mrs. X, when she had the inevitable stomach complaint, was taken to the right clinic, that the couple posed together for the right photos: here we are in front of Longshan Temple, here we are on Dalong Street, at the Confucius Temple (which looks ancient, but was rebuilt in 1939; Such a fine line, Klaus’s voice, between memorialization and erasure). We thought the vagueness of his job was evidence of my dad’s importance; maybe, my brother and I whispered, he was CIA? Certainly some of the other people around were CIA, must have been, including Jim Selkie, who spoke fluent Chinese—a dead giveaway. Jim was almost never around, always traveling for nebulous professional purposes. (Poor Paul Conway, some kind of business consultant, who impressed everybody with his determination to learn the language; he locked himself away to study Chinese from books; when he emerged a couple of months later, he was talking up a storm—but in Cantonese instead of Mandarin; whoops. People just smiled at him politely. His pronunciation would have been unintelligible regardless.)

People were always dropping over, or we were dropping in, sitting beside a pool identical to ours, turquoise water in tiki light. Somebody’s “man” coming out with fresh ice, limes, another bottle of tonic or seltzer. Emptying and replacing ashtrays. Would music be playing? “Unchained Melody”? There were cigarettes and highball or martini glasses in every adult hand. I’m not sure we kids thought of the grown-ups as smashed, but we were aware of their distance, its hysterical edge. Like those Peanuts cartoons where the adult voices are just some kind of “wah-wah” noise, probably a trumpet or trombone; speech was addressed to us every once in a while, but we experienced it as meaningless shaped sound. My brother, maybe on my dare, cannonballing into a neighbor’s pool fully clothed, making a splash that soaked the hosts; it produced only uproarious laughter among the tipsy adults, including my dad, who would have whipped him with a belt in Maryland for that kind of spectacle. Donna Selkie, dark blond hair in a tight chignon, sitting one evening beside my mom; Donna had been given a half-real drink, a thimbleful of gin mixed with soda; what are her plans for college, some diplomat asks, making an effort not to slur, leaning in to hear her better, a hand landing on her thigh.

I never heard mention of the camps or of the bombs—not in the American houses, not in Taipei International School. The collective effort of repression was tremendous, made the alcohol indispensable. An intense but contentless optimism about the future was the only protection against the recent past, in which all the regimes of value had collapsed, irradiated or gassed. Public repression, private repression: What I knew and also didn’t know was that my mom was sick; the official story was that she had been ill in the States, but was better now, that the years abroad would be a welcome rest; but we kids knew she wasn’t cured, although nobody ever—not even near the very end—said the word “cancer” in our presence. Those two years my mother usually looked fine, but her weight fluctuated, her smile was too unchanging—too much of a mask, like a parent hiding how frightened she was of turbulence.

The farmer, whose life, or at least livelihood, was destroyed, showed up, to everyone’s amazement, at the International School the next day, screaming, crying; I was told that what he demanded was not compensation, or that Russell be punished, but that someone apologize, face him and apologize.

spent an hour puking over the side of the boat while the professionals smoked and watched me with that mixture of boredom and fascination I associate with zoo-goers.

Frank claimed he’d already lost his virginity to one of the “fallen women,” a lie so obvious I didn’t bother to dispute it. With more dread than excitement, I felt that I would ultimately have to visit, that there was no way I could avoid it, that I owed it to myself to return to the States a man, that this was the only conceivable way. Frank and I went at least twice to the district for what we decided, after we’d chickened out, was reconnaissance. We were both somber about the whole thing, almost grim, like we were gearing up to fight a battle or submitting ourselves to surgery.

The thin girl, around my age, had long hair in a style intended to be Western, long bangs, and she lay down on her back, wearing a bra and panties, both very white. Or was she wrapped in a towel? I stood there, frozen. Eventually she got up and came to me, gave me head for a few seconds, dizzying, and then embarked on a hand job, very matter-of-factly. I remember looking down at her; I stared at the part in her hair, the whiteness of her scalp. I worried I was too drunk.

The guilt was a surprise, the intensity of it, the impulse to confess—to confess to my mother specifically, who I thought could absolve me.

would fund seventy-two hours of obsessive thinking.

I saw these dynamics, thought seeing them protected me somehow, which is the stupid mistake psychologists make, a very Foundation mistake; we thought that if we had a language for our feelings we might transcend them. More often we fed them.

quietly quoted the pattern on her skirt.

trying to tune out the drunk man at the sushi bar explaining to the young, most likely Korean chef that he forgave him for Pearl Harbor;

How to interact with Amber in a way that at once asserted his good difference as poet, proto-feminist, Ivy-bound alternative to the types without neutering himself in the process?

passed him the invisible mic or conch or talking stick