The Topeka School

by Ben Lerner

“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...