“And I cannot write it.”
“Why.”
“Because, Reed. The thing I was going to do is the thing I am inside of. I am not in front of disappearance anymore. I am…“
“You’re inside it.”
“I am inside it. I am the disappeared. We are the disappeared. We are going to disappear. We have already disappeared once and we are going to do it again. I am the person trying to write the paper about disappearance from inside the disappearance. The paper is not a thing I can write. The paper assumes a position outside the thing. I am not outside the thing.”
“Okay.”
He looks at me. He does not say anything for a long second. I watch him. I watch him do the thing where he files what I have said, where he is moving it around in his head, where he is looking at it from the angles. He is sitting on my couch in his sweater and he is doing his thinking in front of me and I get to watch.
“Don’t write the paper,” he says.
“I have to write the paper.”
“You don’t.”
“Reed.”
“You don’t have to write it. You can write something else. You can write a different paper. Hellman will let you.”
“Hellman…“
“Hellman will let you. Hellman likes you. You can email Hellman tonight and you can say I have decided to write on something else for the final paper and Hellman will say fine, what. You are spending two days trying to make yourself into a person who can write the paper you had imagined writing two months ago. That person is gone. You are not that person now. You are the person you are now. Write the paper that person can write.”
“What paper can that person write.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know your field. But I know that the paper is not the Sebald paper.”
I look at him.
“I cannot tell Hellman why I cannot write the Sebald paper.”
“You don’t have to. You can email and say I am pivoting. That is a thing graduate students do. It is annoying but it is normal. Hellman will roll his eyes and he will let you. You do not have to explain yourself to Hellman.”
“Okay.”
“You write a different paper. You write a paper about whatever the person you are now wants to write a paper about. That is the paper. You will know it when you start it. You will know because the document will not be frozen. The frozen document is the person you used to be trying to write a paper she cannot write. You let her go. You write the new paper.”
I sit with it.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay.”
“I don’t know what the new paper is yet.”
“You don’t have to know tonight.”
“Okay.”
He puts his hand on my knee.
“Griffin.”
“Yeah.”
