The Topeka School

by Ben Lerner

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.)