The Topeka School_A Novel by Ben Lerner

Author:Ben Lerner [Lerner, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 1783785721
Amazon: B07MYXB26N
Goodreads: 43684787
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2019-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Adam had visited him once at St. Francis, where Klaus kept pretending to be at the Foundation, making jokes about being admitted against his will, addressing Adam as “Dr. Gordon”—“You’ve got to get me out of here, Doctor”—but within the space of a week Klaus was at home, in hospice, sleeping more or less continuously in a morphine haze. “What a pointless organ, the pancreas.” And yet, when his parents left him to say goodbye at Klaus’s bed, when he announced his presence a few times loudly, Klaus smiled faintly, raised his eyebrows, although he did not open his eyes. How amusing to be playing the part of a dying man in this amateur film, his eyebrows implied. Whether in Berlin or Topeka, Adam knew it was a triumph to die in your bed in a room that did not smell exclusively of urine and bleach, to die untethered to machines, although there was an IV on a wheeled stand, pale blue drip. He could hear the hospice nurse talking to his parents in the living room, although he couldn’t make out the words.

He looked the room over so as not to stare at Klaus, whose consciousness had quickly retreated from his face. He looked for a clock so he could know when he’d been there long enough to leave without guilt, but there was no clock, although one of the three framed photo-collages hanging on the wall featured a watch face, the hands replaced with mustaches, maybe the Kaiser’s. In the collage, it was 3:50, the perpetual end of a clinical hour. In the far corner of the large room there was a small writing desk; on the wall above it, a postcard of the Duccio Madonna and Child affixed with a single silver tack (on the other side of the card: a message from Jonathan written in a shaky hand). Atop a large dresser, among pill bottles: small photographs of family in oval frames—photographs so old that even from a distance Adam could see or sense that particular kind of innocence expressed by subjects in the early days of the medium; they wore a veil of ignorance; they couldn’t quite imagine how their image would survive them, circulate, how they might end up in Topeka in 1997, snow falling beyond the window.

He imagined that instead of sitting on a wooden dining room chair brought into the bedroom for visitors he was on the glass cube in the clock tower basement and that he could, if he concentrated, alter the electromagnetic field around Klaus’s body. Maybe if he really willed it, he could help Klaus die. He shut his eyes to try this the way a child might—a kind of serious game, you just rub the plant between your palms—but instead of influencing Klaus, Klaus began to speak through the channel Adam had opened with his mind. (Little webs of light floated across the black screen of his lids.) He had to tune out some noise—Tupac and Evanson and grainy piano recordings—to make out what Klaus was saying.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.