Twisting Topeka, Page 2

  When you finally hear the mic in the command module engage, everyone inhales in unison. “Houston, this is Columbia. Eagle is…” Michael Collins, the lone crew member left behind in the still-orbiting module, sobs. It’s the first time in your life you’ve ever heard a grown man cry. “They’re gone. I repeat. Eagle is gone…”

  The room behind you fills with gasps and wails. Your dad’s head falls forward until his chin nearly hits his chest. He hides his face behind his hands. They shake. Your mother cries quietly, one arm wrapped around herself. Tommy scrambles into his mother’s lap and hugs his G.I. Joe with all the strength his little eight-year-old body possesses, like it’s his teddy bear.

  A hand finds yours, cold and damp from a bottle of Coke, and holds on so tight your fingers might break beneath it. You don’t care. Yours are squeezing just as tightly back.

  “I don’t think I want to go to space anymore,” Claire whispers.

  “Me either.”

  In the background, “Bad Moon Rising,” starts to play. You’re still too young to appreciate the irony.

  Native Son

  Marian Rakestraw

  John Steuart Curry paused for a moment, brush raised, ready to add another black line to the fresh expanse of plaster. He could feel the visitor. Not see him, but feel him. It was odd how fast he’d developed this sixth sense that let him know when he was being watched. It was useful, too.

  None of them ever actually came into his space. He had come to feel that the second floor of the rotunda was his personal space. They came to the boundaries. They edged up to the brass-railed limit of the third floor, outside the house and senate chambers. They peeked in as they scuttled from the elevator to the governor’s office. He was surrounded by the low hum of people and the shotgun activity of government all day. The walls of the rotunda, though, and the ten foot ring of floor surrounding them, were a country unto themselves these days. He was their king and sole citizen.

  It wasn’t supposed to have come to this. He was supposed to have come home to Kansas in a rosy glow of acceptance and to have felt the admiration and respect of the home state crowd. He’d started wearing overalls, for Christ’s sake, and looking jolly in photographs. He’d remade himself into the ideal of the country boy made good but still happy down on the farm. It had worked well enough, had gotten him this commission. It just hadn’t been enough. A pair of overalls hadn’t dispelled the suspicions of the people of Kansas. Right off the bat they’d started criticizing his work – bulls didn’t stand correctly, pig’s tails didn’t curl in the accepted fashion, a Prairie Madonna’s skirts were on the short side. Then there was the painting of John Brown, the lodestone for qualms. Curry had no idea how the figure had gotten quite so big, quite so wild, so clearly mad. Placing it right outside the door to the Governor’s office now seemed a slightly less brilliant idea than it had at the time.

  So here he was. Still painting. Still being seen producing murals on the sacred walls of the state house. Bringing the gift of art - as he’d been hired to do by the people. Except now he was doing it in an atmosphere that could most kindly be described as poisoned. He’d almost walked off the job when the legislature had threatened to block the removal of the marble slabs covering the lower walls of his work space, marble that made his envisioned frescos an impossibility. It was ugly marble - pretentious and gaudy and in no way representative of the spirit of Kansas. The Capitol was the house of the people, not a snooty country club. He’d tried to bring some of the energy and spirit of the state into the Capitol and been brought to book like a school boy caught slipping frogs into the teacher’s desk.

  He should have left. He should have refused to sign his work, and stormed off in a fit of artistic pique. But he hadn’t. Instead he’d presented cartoons of his proposed work, let them pass through committees which had vetted them for insidious political ideas and “corrected” the content. He’d smiled and nodded and chewed on his pipe and waited.

  Now all of the walls, minus this last one, were covered in cheerful, bright, harmless paintings of healthy settlers with muscular forearms (the men) and apple cheeks (the women) going about the business of bringing prosperity and corseted civilization to their clear-skied home. It made him want to break all of his own fingers.

  He chewed his pipe. He sketched the rough outlines of the last scene. The proposal passed by the committee showed that this was to be a scene of hog judging at the state fair. And all of the hogs were going to have Marcelled tails. As he sketched, he could feel the watcher leaving. The examination had lasted long enough to assure the visitor that John Steuart Curry was still behaving just as he ought. He was working in a reverse Panopticon, with one prisoner and many guards; there was nowhere in the rotunda that was out of sight. So he’d had to create that space.

  Curry climbed down from the scaffolding and set to work erecting a canvas walled tent around his work space. The same construction that had obscured him while he worked on each of the other walls in turn. He’d made sure early on, casually, to mention to a janitor that the enclosure helped the newly painted walls to dry evenly. It was designed to help the paint sink into the plaster, to help make the frescoes permanent. Complete hogwash, of course. But he was sure the comment had made the rounds of the building, and no one had been by to challenge him about it. After the walls were up he checked for gaps, slipped inside and set to work, painting.

  *****

  Another early morning, three weeks later, and John Steuart Curry wiped the paint from a final brush and packed up his things. He stretched and his back gave a satisfying crack. Crouching on a scaffolding day after day was not easy, even in overalls.

  He stepped outside the canvas tent and listened. Nothing. It was the golden hour when the building was clean and ready for the new day, but the earliest of the secretaries had yet to arrive. There was a night guard downstairs, but he never came up. Too many stairs for old knees. For another thirty minutes the Capitol belonged to Curry and no one else. There was time, but much to do.

  He turned and started disassembling the tent, folding the canvas neatly and rolling the scaffolding out of the rotunda and into a side hall. There was no time to take it all down, but he didn’t want it to obscure his work. His masterpiece.

  With that done he turned to the other walls, surveyed the satisfied paintings a last time, and fitted his nails under the very corner of the nearest one. He pulled, gently, holding his breath, but there was no need to worry. The canvas that covered the fresco underneath peeled cleanly away.

  He’d been worried that his little game might fail, that covering the newly made murals with canvases painted to match the approved panels might not work. That the paintings would stick to the walls or that the murals would not. He’d spent months before beginning on the rotunda painting all of the canvases, and given each finished wall a week to dry before tacking the canvas on top. A week while he lay on the scaffold and chewed his pipe, read, and ate ham sandwiches. The extended length of time he’d spent on each wall was not really an issue. There were some advantages to being an artist. No one in the building had the remotest idea how long it took to produce works like his.

  In fifteen minutes, it was done; and he could look on his work as a completed thing, a whole thing. He was pleased. No, he was exhilarated. He turned in a slow circle and stopped chewing on his pipe. The murals spread around him in a swirl of color and activity. Released from their hiding places, they burst forth in a maelstrom.

  Rather than the dozen discrete scenes promised in the plans, a single continuous parade of people looped around the rotunda. Carrie Nation stormed a saloon, hatchet raised. Clyde Cessna flew loops through the blazing sky, trailing smoke. Charles Curtis sat, placidly observing Carrie Nation, with his hand resting on a law book while Fred Harvey poured him a cup of coffee. The Dalton gang lay on a table, bullet holes much in evidence. James Naismith played a game of basketball with John R. Brinkley as a herd of goats grazed nearby. There was no beginning or end to the panorama of life.
It eddied and churned around the rotunda and in the eyes of each of the figures was the fire of certainty, the conviction of the righteous.

  Curry realized that this was the first opportunity he’d had to see his vision in reality and all at once. This was how God must have felt when the first sun rose on his creation. This was why he had come home. It was the Kansas he’d loved as a farm boy, the Kansas he’d nurtured in memory while struggling and starving as an artist in the East. This was a Kansas of individuality and passion. Kansas as it was, and as it most feared being seen.

  John Steuart Curry smiled. From the pocket of his overalls he withdrew a check equal to every penny every school child had collected to pay for his work on the murals and taped it, not without the smallest of pangs, to one of the marble door surrounds. Done. Or almost. He still had to sign his work. With a final dip of a brush into a last pool of paint, Curry stepped to his masterpiece and wrote:

  To the People of Kansas, a gift. From a true Native Son.

  John Steuart Curry, 1941

  John Steuart Curry as illustrated by Lana Grove

  The Printed Word

  Miranda Ericsson

  The timeline of my childhood is constructed around images of well-worn covers and lines memorized from favorite reads. Reaching back in memory, I can’t recall a time when I wasn’t surrounded by books. My parents were both avid readers, and the colorful spines of their collection, lined up in no particular order, were shelved and stacked in every room of our old house in the Potwin neighborhood of Topeka. I was an only child, and I think my parents decided to make up for my lack of playmates with piles of colorful picture books and classic children’s novels. I learned to read the way that most children learn to speak, through immersion. I went from one book to the next without breaks in between, and read whatever titles I wanted.

  Even my name was borrowed from literature, though Mom said I was named for Dickinson and Dad said it was Bronte. We laughed and agreed that either way, I was an Emily!

  We visited the library every week, because we couldn’t buy everything we wanted to read. I knew all of the children’s librarians at the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library by name, and they always sent me home with a bag full of recommended reads. I knew even then that I wanted to be a librarian, because I wanted to help people find books, too.

  I didn’t start out as a book collector. I wasn’t trying to gather books, at first, they just appeared through opportunities. Garage sales. Library sales. Gifts. Once I had them, they became a part of me, and I rarely got rid of them. When I lost my parents, their collection became mine. Our shelves interlaced throughout their home, now mine again. When I was alone with my books in the house where I had grown up, I could close my eyes and breathe in that smell and feel close to my mom and dad again. I could pick up a book that had been a favorite of my dad’s and find his notes in the margins. I opened my mother’s books and traced my finger over her signature on each inside front cover. It made me feel close to my parents to read the books that they had read. My favorite books were often paired in my memory with a setting, too, like the comfortable chair by the window, or the soft grass near the garden, where I had first read them. Printed books can connect me instantly to the past.

  I had only been a librarian for about three years when the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library announced its decision to get rid of the print collection. I couldn’t believe that it was actually happening—my own library, bookless! Well, not bookless, but that’s what we call it when a library goes all digital. Our library would still offer books for download, 24/7, but the printed books would be gone for good.

  I didn’t want to accept it. EBooks are convenient, sure, and they inspire and entertain. They’re still books, after all. Reading a printed book is something more, though--a sensory experience. It means heft in your hands, fingers sliding on paper, the sound of flipping pages, and that smell of ink and paper that makes me feel soothed and excited all at once. How could anyone give up all of that, for good, in exchange for pages on a glassy screen, swiped with one finger?

  I thought that our library was safe. Digital libraries had been trending for several years, but so far it had been mostly academic and medical facilities, and I had to agree that it made sense, there, with the most current, accurate information being all digital anyway. The few public libraries that had gone bookless reminded me of the computer labs from my undergrad days, or of Apple stores: rows of LCD screens instead of rows of books, clean sight lines, the hum of devices and clicking of keys. They looked like nice places to study, but they didn’t quite look like libraries, to me.

  But Kansas was completely bankrupt. Library funding had been slashed big time, and a lot of librarians were let go. Topeka’s library had to pick between digital or print, and decided that providing technology to bridge the digital divide was more important than retaining the traditional stacks. I was a technology advocate, and I was as stuck to my smart phone as anyone else, but I hated the idea of getting rid of print completely.

  I took to Facebook and Twitter to get folks interested enough to speak out, and I tried my best to convince the board to reconsider a hybrid collection. I cited studies showing that our brains have a different response to words in print, as opposed to words flashed across the glowing screen, and I argued for preservation in print, as an option, just in case digital access failed somehow. There was nothing I could do, though. The money just wasn’t there, and hard choices had to be made.

  The Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library became bookless back in 2026, and survived the budget cuts, and thrived as a house of tech-mages and a hub for community engagement—and it turned out that I loved my job just as much as I had before. I helped people learn how to use the newest tech, gave advice on cover letters and resumes, hosted book discussions, and recommended great reads. I was still a librarian.

  I missed the books, though. I remembered walking down the aisles, trailing the tips of my fingers along the spines, and checking out stacks of new books to carry home in a tote bag. I missed the quiet feeling of being surrounded by books in the stacks.

  It turned out that our library was on the cutting edge of things to come. Print went by the wayside in other libraries and in retail faster than anyone had predicted it would, despite upswings in print sales here and there. Digital was just so easy, and took up so much less space. That’s when I truly became a collector, a gatherer. I rescued as many books as I could, from yard sales and thrift stores, and the big chains and used book stores, before they closed for good. I saved a lot of the books that the library discarded, too, buying them on the cheap from the library bookstore. I invested in built-in, floor to ceiling shelves, and I finally spent some time weeding and organizing my collection. My library.

  I’m ready now, for whatever finally brings down the grid. I’m not wishing for a technology crash or a return to simpler days, truly. I never want to see my community turned upside down, or my friends and neighbors struggling. But I feel it coming, anyway, an inevitable collapse that has nothing to do with my wishes.

  Shelves full of colorful covers and flippable pages greet me when I enter my home. Standing in my living room, I close my eyes and breathe in the familiar smell of paper and ink, and I feel hopeful. I know I’m not the only one who held on to the past. There are others out there like me, keepers of the printed word, and we have something to share. Each of us, with our own ark of books, possess something that will connect people back to the world that was lost.

  Tovarishch O’Sullivan

  Craig Paschang

  The cold winter wind whipped through Grigory O’Sullivan’s thick red beard as he darted from the tramway. He wouldn’t be out at this hour or in this weather on a normal evening. But duty called; the Party came first.

  The city center was mostly dark; a café ahead on the right was still inhabited, casting a pale warm wedge of light in futile resistance to the bitter night. A man behind the counter stared back at Grigory as he passed; his eyes were
black and dull.

  Grigory pulled his fur-lined collar closer about his neck as he turned the corner onto Tenth Avenue—no, onto Brezhnev Avenue, he reminded himself—and the wind caught him square in the face. If only it had been snowing, he might have been able to call someone at the Committee and beg the evening off, to return home and crawl back under the covers with Katya and watch whatever was on the First Channel at this time of night.

  But it was not snowing, and he was expected to show that he was made of tougher stuff.

  He cut the corner at Holliday Avenue; though the rules were closely followed in Lewellingrad, and information about rule-breakers a commodity of its own, he didn’t think anyone would mind him jaywalking or cutting across the lawn so late at night. And he loved seeing the People’s House from that angle, where the limestone columns and sharp rooflines tugged at each other like dancers.

  He let himself in through a ground-floor entrance; and up to his office through the back stairs. He sat at his desk in the dark for just a moment. He loved this view. His office was in the attic, and he knew that was the second-worst place to have been assigned (besides the basement), but it didn’t feel like it, not with that view. Across the street, illuminated from below with ground-level spotlights that lent its concrete edifice a beautiful harshness, stood the Justice Center, a strong Brutalist structure that predated the Revolution but unintentionally presaged the Party’s arrival. The narrow pillars of its façade seemed too small to carry the weight of its cantilevered floors, much as the proletariat once seemed too small to carry the weight of the capitalist’s yoke. But the building endured, and the proletariat triumphed.