Chapter 23 Griffin
TWENTY-THREE
GRIFFIN
The paper is due in nine days. It is on Sebald.
The seminar I am writing it for is the modernism seminar, which is technically the wrong category for Sebald, but the professor, Hellman, has decided to bend the category for the second half of the term.
We are reading The Rings of Saturn. I have nine days to write three thousand words on it and I cannot write any of them.
I open the document on Monday morning. The document has a title.
The Disappeared Subject in W. G. Sebald.
I had given it the title two weeks ago, before.
The title is what I had thought I was going to write about.
The title was a way of using Sebald’s hand to think about something else, which is what I have been trained to do.
I look at the title. I do not write anything. I close the document.
Reed stays over Monday night. He has stayed over Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.
Three nights in a row, which is a thing we have not done before.
We had been doing two nights at his and one at mine, alternating, careful, the way we have been careful.
On Saturday after the diner he had said can I just stay, and I had said yes, and he has not left since.
He brings a small bag of clothes on Saturday.
The bag stays on the floor by the door for a day.
On Sunday I look at the bag and I look at Reed.
I move the bag into the bedroom. I open the second drawer of the dresser, the one I haven’t been using because it has been the empty drawer.
I put his clothes in it. He does not say anything.
I do not say anything. He sees the drawer.
He sees what I have done. He puts his hand on the small of my back when I stand up from putting his clothes away, and that is what he says.
The drawer is half full. The half is something I am trying not to look at directly.
On Tuesday I sit in seminar. The reading was Pessoa.
I have done the reading. I do the reading.
The reading is one of the few things I have been able to keep doing.
I sit in the seminar and Pessoa is talked about and I do not say anything for fifty minutes.
Min looks at me twice. Reed does not look at me.
Reed looks at his coffee cup, and at his notebook, and at Hellman, and only at me when somebody else is speaking and Hellman cannot see him.
Reed has been making a thing of not making a thing.
I had thought, after the diner on Sunday, that the seminar would be different. It is not different. Min walks me out.
“You okay.”
“Yes.”
“Griffin.”
“Yes, Min.”
“You did not say a word.”
“I had nothing to add.”
“You always have something to add.”
“Today I did not.”
Min looks at me. Min is a small woman with a sharp nose and a face that has read every face it has ever looked at. Min is not asking me to tell her. Min is asking me to know that she is asking.
“I’m fine,” I say.
“You are not fine.”
“I’m in something.”
“Okay.”
“It’s good. The thing I am in. It is good.”
“Then why are you not saying anything in seminar.”
“Because the things I would say are not about Pessoa.”
“Okay.”
She lets me leave. She watches me leave.
I get to the corner of the building and I look back and she has already gone.
Which means she had decided, before she let me leave, that she had said what she was going to say.
She had walked off without watching me to see what I did with it.
Min decides about a conversation and does not stand around to monitor what you do with it.
I have always liked this about her. Today it is a small kindness.
She has decided not to follow me with her eyes.
I sit in my apartment Tuesday afternoon and I open the document.
The Disappeared Subject in W. G. Sebald.
I write a sentence. Sebald’s narrator walks the East Anglian coast as if walking through a landscape that is itself in the process of disappearing.
I look at the sentence. The sentence is fine.
The sentence is the kind of sentence I have written a hundred times.
I write a second sentence. The act of walking, in Sebald, is the act of registering the disappeared.
I look at the second sentence. The second sentence is also fine.
I delete both sentences. I delete them because they’re fine.
They’re fine in the way the sentences I would have written two months ago were fine.
Fine without me in them. The sentences a person writes when the person is someone who writes sentences.
They’re correct. They’re about Sebald. They’re about disappearance.
They aren’t about anything I’m actually thinking about.
I’m thinking about my apartment in three months.
About what will be in it. About whether I will be in it.
About what I’ll pack and what I’ll leave behind.
About whether the desk will go with me or whether the desk will be sold to a graduate student through a Facebook group.
About whether the bench by the river is something a person can be in for the last time and know it.
I close the document.
I write Reed a text. Hi.
He writes back Hi.
I write I am not getting work done.
He writes I know.
I write How do you know.
He writes Because you said you were going to start the Sebald paper this morning and you have texted me three times.
I look at the text.
I write Come over.
He writes Now?
I write Yes.
He comes over. He comes over and he does not ask me how I am.
He comes in and he takes off his coat and he hangs it on the hook next to mine.
He comes into the living room and he sits down on the couch in the cushion that has become his cushion, even though the couch is at my apartment and he has only been at my apartment cumulatively for maybe forty hours. He sits down. He looks at me.
“Talk to me,” he says.
“I cannot write the paper.”
“Okay.”
“I have been trying since Monday morning. I have written sentences and deleted them. I have been at it for two days.”
“Okay.”
“It is a paper on Sebald. On disappearance in Sebald. I had decided to write on it because I had thought I had something to say about it. I had thought I had something to say about what it means to write about a thing that is gone, what it means to make a literary practice out of registering absence. I had thought I had a relationship to this material that would let me write about it well. I have spent two years writing about absence. I am the absence guy. I am the guy who writes about Holocaust memorial literature. I have been trained to write about disappearance. This paper should be the paper I can write in my sleep.”
“Okay.”
“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.”
“You are doing okay. I want you to know that I think you are doing okay.”
“I don’t feel like I am doing okay.”
“I know.”
“I’ve been the steady one. The one telling you we’re going to figure it out. The one telling you to call Mendez. The one in the kitchen. And now I can’t write a paper.”
“You can do both. You can be the one in the kitchen and you can also be the one who cannot write the paper. They are the same person.”
“Okay.”
“You do not have to be the steady one all the time.”
“Okay.”