“But between you and me, Neil, I wouldn’t make a habit of passing around your fiction until you’ve earned yourself a stable floor as a historian. Yes?”

I nodded. My mouth was thick with saliva; I couldn’t have spoken if I’d tried.

“And you might explicitly indicate, when you’re sending someone something, that you intend it to be fiction. Otherwise your diligent reader might start looking for citations, and proof, and clear argumentation. Of course, once one lets go of such expectations, this little Tale of Isaac Snider is quite a thrill.”

“It is,” I said. “It was. A thrill, I mean. To, erm, to write.”

“You know, I almost did an MFA myself,” Wang said. “Poetry. In Austin.”

“Really?” Wang always struck me as a hardheaded, practical sort.

“But. You can’t eat poetry. You can barely eat history. It’s a few chunks of stale bread.”

“Do you still write?”

“Of course I still write,” he said, a bit haughtily. “This is a creative pursuit, getting in touch with the past. I used to write letters to the people I was studying, you know? In a journal. I’d say, TO: EUGENE DEBS, 1883. I’d tell young Eugene everything I thought he might be interested in about life today. Which as it happened, was a whole lot. And then I’d hear him talk back to me. And I’d come to understand where I should be looking in his life, in his story, et cetera. That’s a kind of art, though my colleagues from The Harvard Advocate might not agree.” He chuckled. “If you find that you have extra energy for external, ah, diversions, by all means—but if I were you, I’d be sure it wasn’t coming at the expense of the thing you can eat. Understand? You don’t need me to rehash the requirements for you to keep your funding.”

I gulped. I did not.

“Want to catch me up on what you got through this summer, aside from this… story?”

I found my voice and spent the next half hour discussing my incomplete chapter, overstating its readiness and exaggerating my claims about late-nineteenth-century Protestantism; it was xenophobic, capitalistic, a precursor to think-your-way-to-wealth Sandbergian hogwash.

“Sounds better,” Wang said, a little bemused. He gazed out the window of his top-floor Dwinelle Hall office, at the sea of Mediterranean red roofs that rolled across campus. The slender campanile pierced the sky north of us. Gaggles of undergraduates were pouring out of lecture halls, their first classes back. “I’d like to see that and the new chapter by October.”