The Topeka School

by Ben Lerner

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.