The Topeka School

by Ben Lerner

out of him would issue an overwhelming barrage of ridiculous but somehow irrefutable arguments about her nagging, her hypocrisy, her failure to abide by the precepts she laid out in her books, her bizarre focus on conventional domestic order over the autonomy of others; again and again, she failed to prove topicality. The dishes remained where they were.

The Foundation’s setting on the northwest edge of Topeka in conditions, depending on your temperament, backward or bucolic, only made the institution more total; there was no big city into which you could flee by carriage or dissolve your workday, your contradictions.

in a word, they are overfed; in a word, they are starving.

One might say this marinara sauce came from a jar; but did not the jar, in a deep, perhaps deeper, sense, receive its identity from the sauce?”),

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.

when Sima did this crying-while-smiling thing—I can see her face illuminated by a cupped flame as she lit another cigarette—it was like that beautiful kind of weather when it’s raining even though it’s sunny,

Reynolds peeling off his sweatshirt in the cold to reveal a six-pack, lats that made his torso appear hooded like a cobra.

One learned to stud a speech with sources the way a politician reaches for statistics—to provide the affect of authority more than to illuminate an issue or settle a point of fact.

A pair of joggers cross to avoid him. To travel by bike after early adolescence is ignominious enough in Kansas; to walk unless you are exercising purposefully in appropriate dress or moving to or from your car is to confess some kind of deviance; how many times have men rolled down a window to remind Darren he’s a faggot?

(I often suspected that people were only going through the motions of reading, or mimicking its stillness; did I pretend to read as a child, maybe as a way of escaping something—my father’s anger? Walking through the library in graduate school, I’d think to myself: Not a single one of you people, if I shut your book, would be able to tell me what you’ve just read. Shadow-reading. And when I myself was reading, I was acutely aware of other people watching me, of how I performed absorption, which of course distracted me from the page.)

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?

He’d had no real experience of the city, which is overwhelming, especially if you grew up in Topeka. The bipolarity of the place: glittering plenitude one instant, an abyss the next. Its lofty and solemn contempt.

Can you believe this shit? he kept asking; he clearly couldn’t. (That it was the most familiar story in the world, an undergrad relationship foundering on a romance abroad, was neither here nor there; nothing is a cliché when you’re living it.)

But there are no grown-ups, that’s what you must grow up to know fully; your parents were just two more bodies experiencing landscape and weather, trying to make sense by vibrating columns of air, redescribing contingency as necessity with religion or World Ice Theory or the Jewish science, cutting profound truths with their opposites as the regimes of meaning collapse into the spread.

His grandfather had been a baseball fan—in the halfhearted way that his grandfather had been anything; some norm of baseball fandom had been placed within him earlier in the century.

Adam heard it as pretension. This was reinforced by the slowness, a patriarch holding forth, convinced that whatever he said, it was of interest.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart, I need to get some fresh to think—air, I mean.” Distress had scrambled her predicates.

The desire to know more and the desire to know less fought each other to a standstill within Adam, making it hard to move.