MY FAMILY DISTRIBUTED various tokens of advice before we parted ways again. As we hugged good-bye in Alamo Square, Prachi told me to call Keya, who was capable and cute and had (against all odds) liked me. As I dropped my parents at SFO the next day, my father reminded me about the existence of law school, and I shook it off before he could offer to pay for it with money he did not really have. My mother whispered into my hair that she was going to do some “health research,” which meant she’d go digging through Ayurvedic remedies for malaise; she would fall asleep with her face on my horoscope and implore her cousins in Mysore to visit the family sage. (She had begun to swear on his precognition. “Rusyendra has foreseen this,” she’d said of Prachi’s match to Avi. “He said Prachi would choose outside of her community.” “He’s Indian, Mom,” I said. “Punjabi, Neeraj,” she’d replied. “Entirely different.” “What about me?” “Rusyendra says you are very difficult to perceive, Neeraj.”)

A few days later, on the eve of my appointment with Wang, I got a terse email from him reminding me that I still had not sent over any new work. Making your adviser chase you down is less than ideal, he wrote. I was forty milligrams of Adderall into my day. I opened my two projects, the sober and the intoxicated. On one hand: Mythologies of Money in the Gilded Age.docx—it was fragments and bullet points, full of my notes to myself, “ADD LATER” and “NEED MORE ON THIS.” On the other: Snider-draft-8.rtf—full paragraphs. Images. A human, breathing on the page, speaking, wanting, accounting for time’s passage. An argument about history. I remembered Wang, during our last meeting, telling me my sentences had an overboiled-spinach quality—tasteless, unappetizing. Remembered him accusing me of having a surface-level relationship to my material.

I chose the second document, then went out to buy more protein bars, and crashed late.

When I woke up before our meeting, my head thudded with regret and embarrassment.

In his office, Wang chewed the inside of his cheek and smoothed the T-shirt he wore beneath a light navy blazer. He pushed his glasses atop his head and frowned as he paged through a printout of my Isaac Snider chapters.

A few uncannily quiet minutes passed. The only sound was the scuffle of Wang’s archless sneakers on the floor as his feet tapped.

“I wasn’t aware,” he said, “that you had an interest in writing fiction.”

“I, well—”

“It isn’t a terrible side hobby.” He tented his fingertips, the veins in his sinewy forearms popping, and in a nauseating moment, I saw that he was offering me a way out. “I’d be happy to see more people in the academy thinking about art alongside their work.”

“Yes,” I said, in a very small, very breathy voice.