The Topeka School

by Ben Lerner

What Darren could not make them understand was that he would never have thrown it except he always had.

Along with the sheer terror of finding himself in the wrong house, with his recognition of its difference, was a sense, because of the houses’ sameness, that he was in all the houses around the lake at once; the sublime of identical layouts.

the faces and poses in the family photographs on the mantel might change, but would all belong to the same grammar of faces and poses;

the last thing one was supposed to do with those thousands of words was comprehend them. These types of disclosure were designed to conceal;

How many of his small gestures and postures in the present were embodied echoes of the past, repetitions just beneath the threshold of his consciousness?

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?

the more profound the statement, the more reversible; the deep truths are sedimented in syntax, the terms can be reversed, just as there is no principle of noncontradiction, no law of excluded middle, governing the unconscious. Then, briefly serious, Klaus would touch my shoulder: A quote like that can save your life.

If you say a thing that when it comes out holds together, that makes it true enough, so he didn’t feel that he was lying, even though he often later felt he had.

But that’s not exactly it, or not only it: I think I’d felt that as long as I avoided looking for the tickets, they would be there; it was only if I searched the archive that they’d disappear, as if the past were up until that point indeterminate, that I might outrun it. Do you know what I mean?

The knowledge was always there, I carried it in my body, but I didn’t know what I knew, although I knew I knew something and that I dreaded knowing it fully, dreaded it as if only coming into the knowledge, into the memory, would make the event that I was repressing real.

It’s hard to explain how seeing a mundane thing cast out of the grammar of daily life can suddenly alert you to the irruption of violence.

It was subtle, but more profound for being subtle—a face you know intimately is most disturbingly altered when it’s altered only slightly;

And that’s when I realized that her face had not returned to normal—she had carried the new face off the stage, had brought that public face into our private exchange.

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.

The parallel with the larger culture was imperfect, but undeniable: the supposedly disinterested policy wonks debate the intricacies of health care or financial regulation in a jargon designed to be inaccessible to the uninitiated while the more presidential speakers test out plainspoken value claims on civilians, a division underwritten by petrodollars.

Desert camo does not in Kansas disappear into the foliage but indicates a semiconscious wish to blend in with the soldiery of an empire whose enemies are so vague they’re everywhere.

Could you call collect from one Topeka to the other?

America was one vast institution; it had no outside.

we thought that if we had a language for our feelings we might transcend them. More often we fed

them.

(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.)

The feeling of a fiction collapsing inside you. A fiction you’d forgotten was there. Frame, crossbeams, slats, braces, joins. Revealing the softer sapwood, which is marked by candle burns.

(Through a fake stethoscope, you can still hear a real pulse; through her fake doctoring, Sonia provided some real comforts.)

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.

Understand he would not have thrown it except he always had.