Page 61 of After His Eulogy
“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 andwhat 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 makea 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.”
