The Topeka School

by Ben Lerner

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. In each house she or someone like her was in her bed, sleeping or pretending to sleep; legal guardians were farther down the hall, large men snoring; 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 elements of the painted scenes might vary, but not the level of familiarity and flatness; if you opened any of the giant stainless-steel refrigerators or surveyed the faux-marble islands, you would encounter matching, modular products in slightly different configurations. He was in all the houses but, precisely because he was no longer bound to a discrete body, he could also float above them;

He was furious. He could not admit that he’d been scared, couldn’t say he’d been unequal to managing the boat, or that he’d almost confronted the wrong young woman in another house. He demanded an explanation, What the fuck is wrong with you?

It would take Adam twenty years to grasp the analogy between her slipping from the chair and from the boat. He asked her some questions about her dad and she answered them. He considered telling her about entering the wrong house—maybe he could bring out the poetry of it—but he did not tell her, didn’t want to risk it. To protect himself (from what, he wasn’t sure), he imagined that he was looking back on the present from a vaguely imagined East Coast city where his experiences in Topeka could be recounted only with great irony.

He found the high schools strangely altered on the weekends, the spaces transformed when emptied of students and teachers and severed from the rhythms of a normal day. The classrooms, with their hortatory posters, BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE, their rows of empty desks, equations or dates or stock phrases left on chalk- or dry-erase boards, made Adam think of abandoned theatrical sets or photographs of Chernobyl. He could occasionally pick up traces of Speed Stick or scented lip gloss or other floating signatures of a social order now suspended.

she is attempting to “spread” their opponents, as her opponents will attempt to spread them in turn—that is, to make more arguments, marshal more evidence than the other team can respond to within the allotted time, the rule among serious debaters being that a “dropped argument,” no matter its quality, its content, is conceded.

they practice reading evidence backward so as to uncouple the physical act of vocalization from the effort to comprehend, which slows one down.)

These types of disclosure were designed to conceal; they exposed you to information that, should you challenge the institution in question, would be treated like a “dropped argument” in a fast round of debate—you have already conceded the validity of the point by failing to address it when it was presented. It’s no excuse that you didn’t have the time. Even before the twenty-four-hour news cycle, Twitter storms, algorithmic trading, spreadsheets, the DDoS attack, Americans were getting “spread” in their daily lives; meanwhile, their politicians went on speaking slowly, slowly about values utterly disconnected from their policies.

Senator Bob Dole appeared, the seventy-three-year-old Russell native who was less than a month away from being crushed by Bill Clinton, a landslide victory for the Democrat that would confirm that cultural conservatism was giving, had all but given, way to the reign of more liberal baby boomers. It would confirm that history had ended.

(Who is this unsmiling seventeen-year-old boy whose hair is drawn into a ponytail while the sides of his head are shaved, a disastrous tonsorial compromise between the lefty household of his parents and the red state in which he was raised?

he would suddenly lay into the whole notion of a men’s group with vicious eloquence, although his arguments were contradictory. That’s Robert Bly machismo bullshit, he’d claim, having heard mocking summaries of Iron John around the house, but when his dad said calmly, You’ve got that wrong, this is, as you know, a group of pro-feminist friends, he’d accuse them of being a bunch of emasculated yuppies who thought floating platitudes about fatherhood made them enlightened. You guys probably should go perform improvised masculine rituals in the woods.

body.) 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 would happen to the past if you brought those involuntary muscle memories under your control and edited them, edited them out?

May break my bones but words. Bounces off me sticks to you. The grown-ups had equipped him with weak spells to cast back against the insults. But the need for the sayings disproved them and as he grew they would if anything just feed the laughter. Nice comeback, Darren. If he still sometimes said those things or other private phrases to himself, it was only to interrupt the harmful thoughts before it was too late and he had set some trap for an enemy on a highway or country road.

(Ziegler is unremarkable, “not stupid but not gifted,” a man who respects money and science above all things, “one of those people we see every day on the street, whose faces we can never really remember, because they all have the same face: a collective face.”)

My theory was that, under conditions of information overload, the speech mechanisms collapse—but, as Jane was quick to point out, this was more a basic description of the driveling than its explanation.

Intelligent people would not want to destroy those hard-won accomplishments in technology or medicine, or to throw away the very valuable advantages we gain from them.

He’d come to understand the tongues of beasts at the cost of his reason, while I was destroying human language to reveal the river of nonsense coursing just beneath its “good, sound rules.”

it was a move against the sacred, a step toward paintings becoming objects of aesthetic contemplation, detached from religion, detached from altars, free or doomed to circulate in museums, in the marketplace.

“Those thousands of generations of technical progress” obliterated ritual, emptied out all meaning, glossolalia without divinity.

Like most of the staff at the Foundation—which was in fact a world-famous psychiatric institute and hospital—we initially thought of Topeka as the affordable and almost exotically boring backdrop to our professional lives. Most

This kind of thing sickened my radical brother—“You’re great at making fascists feel heard”—but it was what my practice as a therapist was based on, finding a way to get people, especially reticent Midwestern boys and men, to talk.

a nonthreatening representative of a threatening counterculture that both drew on and attacked the canons of psychiatry.

Milieu therapy was based on the notion that patients and staff should mix, collaborate on treatment;

I was also encountering more and more patients whose suffering wasn’t clearly related to their circumstances, or whose circumstances were most notable for their normality—intelligent middle-class white kids from stable homes who were fine until they weren’t: the lost boys of privilege.

How much easier it would be if when you played them slowly in reverse the lyrics really did, as some hysterical parents feared, reveal satanic messages; if there were a backmasked secret order, however dark, instead of rage at emptiness.

On the one hand, Klaus, surely the only man in Topeka outfitted in white linen, could not take these kids—with their refrigerators full of food, their air-conditioning and television, their freedom from stigma or state violence—seriously; 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?

is true, profoundly so; so, too, that life is joy; 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.

He had in the same drawer with cash and knives a Crosman pellet gun he had often claimed was an actual revolver and once pointed at the half-breed Jason Davis, prompting Davis to open a cut above Darren’s eye.

All these innumerable moments are present whenever one is, little mimic spasms around the corner of his mouth reflect that.

No because particles of Stan’s anger would get in him. The girls all say they want nice guy sensitive types then bang the whole team is that not right Darren. I’m no racist Darren but do they not chase after them and beg for it.

kindergarten, she only lived three blocks away. They have no idea how hard it is to taste your own blood, cut-grass smell, and not go home and get your knives or gun or flip their cars over in your mind. And when Stan’s anger got in him Mandy just was a whore who held the banner the others jumped through. Understand it could be days in his mind before she wasn’t. Dr. J was not angry about the job, he had no particles of anger in him period. More than once Darren wondered if this made Dr. J a pussy. It was no trouble on my end,

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.

sounds like parody, but that was the reality. Working with Sima felt like a form of resistance to that culture, a way that I could come to terms with aspects of my past without those terms being set by the Foundation’s unexamined Freudian tradition, which pathologized women’s experience when it didn’t fit the great man’s theory.

Grandma and my father

Obviously, this was unconscious, irrational—even if I didn’t trust my father I wouldn’t have been worried in that context—but I just couldn’t leave the two of you together out of my view.

for her. —You keep calling him “my father” instead of “Grandpa” even though you say “Grandma” and not “my mother”—like you’re still protecting me from having any relation to him.

grandparent a kid would ever run toward. The stroke turned out not to be that severe, but it was the beginning of the long process of trying to figure out how to deal with aging parents, so there was a lot of tension in the air.

No, it was that “Oh my”—it was my mom coming into the room, seeing a child before a scene of sexual violence, and expressing her surprise in the exact same tone and with the exact same level of mildness that she used when she looked at a price tag on a pair of shoes. I was enraged and couldn’t account for my rage;

this wasn’t a carefree exchange in the sense that, especially against the backdrop of my father’s stroke, our talking about where the art might go was also a way of talking about mortality.

She just sat there smiling that very beautiful and also very sad and understanding smile and what she did, in part by doing nothing, was let me hear how my upset was not self-evident, how my rage at my mom’s failure to “protect” you from the video or my rage that stealing the painting was to her mind the worst thing she’d ever done had not yet been integrated into a coherent narrative. Sima made a space for me to hear that there were depths beneath what I was saying that I hadn’t sounded yet.

I couldn’t really take them seriously, or only took them seriously as specimens of the ugly fragility of masculinity. (Of course, if we’ve learned anything, it’s how dangerous that fragile masculinity can be.)

(There were also the faxes the Phelpses starting sending out: one had my picture with horns drawn on it, called me a “Jezebelian switch-hitting whore,” explained I used my “pulpit” to encourage sodomites who were worthy of death; I think we still have it somewhere. But then, the Phelpses attacked anybody from the Foundation who got attention since we refused, as an institution, to acknowledge the evil of homosexuality.)

was clear that you were picking up on all the toxic masculinity swirling around. Dad also wondered if you felt he couldn’t protect the family or something, if you were starting to contrast Dad’s gentleness with the Marlboro Man culture around us, a contrast made worse by the fact that I was now the chief breadwinner, getting

famous, and people were always asking what that was like for Dad, as if it were obviously emasculating, as if it were his loss.

Dad felt this was just a kid exploring his body and that was it. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was a kind of simulated castration thing, an attempt not to be a boy, a man, one of the Men.

People say of a person that “fame has changed her,” or praise her by saying that it hasn’t, but the trouble with that formulation is that fame or notoriety of whatever sort changes everything around the person, every relationship in which she is embedded, no matter what the person in question does.

if one of the Foundation’s old boys or his allies showed up in the Times, it was because his work was transcendent, but when a penis-envying

virago like me received attention, it was because I’d reduced everything to a kind of psychological chick lit.

a face you know intimately is most disturbingly altered when it’s altered only slightly;

It wasn’t a big deal, but I suddenly felt paralyzed: if I insisted we defer to Jason, Sima would feel patronized; if I suggested something that seemed to favor your desires, that would be evidence of my narcissism; if I thought we might separate for a while and meet up later, Sima could feel dropped; so I just became quiet and passive, which probably came across as sulking.

in a flash I went from seeing you and Jason as kids to seeing you as young men, how there was real strength coiled in you guys, real rage, real violence.