The Topeka School

Darren sits in a police examination room. Two police officers offer Darren a drink, and then ask Darren “to repeat the story” (4). Darren describes “how he’d thrown the cue ball at the party,” though the exact details of the incident are not explained (4). When officers ask Darren to “start at the beginning,” Darren remembers feeling that the cue ball had been “hanging in the air,” waiting for him, throughout his entire life (4).

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).