The Topeka School

Adam, a teenager in his final year of high school in Topeka, Kansas, is sitting on a boat in the middle of Clinton Lake. Though Adam had been sitting on the boat with his girlfriend, Amber, he realizes that Amber has discretely dived off the boat, swimming to shore. Adam drives the boat to the dock, and then quietly enters what he believes to be Amber’s home. However, as Adam enters what he thinks is Amber’s room, he realizes that the girl asleep in the bed is not Amber, and that he has entered the wrong home. Adam reflects on how the mistake was due to “the sublime of identical layouts”; he has “a sense, because of the houses’ sameness, that he was in all the houses around the lake at once” (10).

Adam quickly exits the house, and gets in his car. Amber emerges and joins him. Rather than give Adam a reason for abandoning him on the boat, Amber tells him about a trick she once played on her stepfather. When her stepfather was giving Adam one of his long dinner monologues, Amber quietly hid under the table, leaving her stepfather to continue the speech without noticing Amber’s absence. Adam and Amber kiss goodbye and Adam returns to his home.

The next day, Adam wakes up early to attend a small debate championship, which he is attending because Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole will be there. Adam is a talented debater who has won numerous championships. Adam and his partner Joanna easily win the championship, partially through their skillful ability to “‘spread’ their opponents” (22). Spreading is a practice where the debaters rapidly make as many arguments as they can, so that the opposing team doesn’t have time to address them all—not rebutting arguments costs points. Joanna and Adam are skillful at rapidly spewing out information and evidence in support of their position so fast that their words “appear less competitive speech than glossolalic ritual” (23).

Adam sees a therapist, Dr. Kenneth Erwood. Adam’s parents are both psychoanalysts who work at the “Foundation” in Topeka, where Erwood also works. Adam first began seeing Erwood for his debilitating migraines and his increasingly volatile temper. Though Erwood is a psychologist, he also studies fringe ideas: “how mental processes influenced physiological responses [such as] a person’s capacity to alter the electromagnetic field surrounding the body” (28). Erwood’s research revolves around the Copper Wall Initiative, a massive “wall-sized electrode made of copper” where he asks people to generate electric charges with their minds (28). In one of Adam’s sessions with Erwood, Erwood invites Adam to see the wall. Erwood leaves Adam in the dark with the wall, frustrating Adam so that he is filled with “rage and language” (33). When Erwood finally re-enters, Adam’s neck is “wet with perspiration” from the activity (34).

Darren believes he has mental powers—that his “harmful thoughts” could hurt people, for instance by “set[ting] some trap for an enemy on a highway or country road” (37). Darren believes he first gained these powers when he was four years old, playing at school with Adam and their other friend Jason. Adam handed Darren a “plant with special powers,” which Adam claimed would make a wish come true (38). Darren wished for a tornado, which appeared later that day.

Jonathan, a psychoanalyst and Adam’s dad, describes a short story he read while in graduate school: “A Man by the Name of Ziegler” by Herman Hesse, recommended by Jonathan’s training analyst Dr. Samuels. In the story, Ziegler goes to a zoo in Berlin after taking a pill that allows him to hear the animals talking. The experience drives Ziegler insane. At the time, Jonathan was married to Rachel, but was starting an affair with his fellow student (and current wife) Jane. In graduate school, Jonathan performed research on speech shadowing, when a person “repeats speech immediately after hearing it” (44). In Jonathan’s experiments, he instructed his subjects to listen to a recorded text and repeat what they heard. Jonathan then “gradually […] accelerated the tape,” until subjects were repeating gibberish without realizing it (44). The Ziegler story and his research led to Jonathan’s own “Ziegler Episode” (46): Jonathan and Jane took acid before going to the Metropolitan art museum, where he hallucinated that the museum’s marble statues had eyes and were staring at him with “contempt […] their mockery specific to me, my hypocrisy” (48).

After graduate school, Jonathan and Jane moved to Topeka to do a two-year fellowship at the Foundation, and ended up settling down. Jonathan quickly ingratiated himself with Dr. Tom Attinson, who had founded the Foundation in 1919 before gaining world fame as a psychologist. Jonathan describes the foundation as a place where “boundaries were always blurred,” due to staff members frequently “undergoing analysis with their senior colleagues” (53). Jonathan soon started a “film and video department,” ostensibly to produce “instructional films about therapeutic topics” (53-54), but actually to pursue his filmmaking hobby. Jonathan’s film department soon becomes integral for Jonathan’s treatment of “the lost boys of privilege” (55): Topeka’s well off, White, male teenagers who are often sullen and withdrawn in spite of their carefree lifestyles. Jonathan makes these boys interns in the film and video department, using the shared activity of filmmaking as a way of “mak[ing] the kid feel heard” (58).

During his nights, Jonathan makes close friends with Klaus, an elder German Foundation psychoanalyst who’d lost his wife and son during the war. Though Klaus’s traumatic experiences sometimes make him feel that his patients in Topeka complain about nothing, he also sympathizes with their struggles. Klaus is well known at the Foundation for writing lengthy and verbose reports on his patients.

Jonathan screens a film at the Foundation based on Hesse’s short story. Jonathan plays the character of Ziegler, and “early twentieth-century Europe lives in [Jonathan’s] body in late twentieth-century Kansas” (63). Klaus narrates the film, which closes with Ziegler having a mental breakdown at the Topeka Zoo before orderlies carry him off to the Foundation.