Ted spent another hour or two in his father’s room as the drugs made their way through Marty’s body and he drifted in and out of a troubled sleep. Mariana filled him in on what to expect in the coming months and infused him with the hope and wish that the inevitable end would come sooner rather than later because of the considerable pain and suffering involved. She expressed no real hope for a cure, as Marty had decided against any more surgery or chemo. She mentioned “pain management” and went over Marty’s pill regimen, which she half joked did not include ten Quaaludes a night. She outlined the faintly quacky, last-ditch alternative methods that she, unbeknownst to the doctors, was allowing Marty to engage in on the side. He’d be taking Laetrile experimentally, eating vitamin C tablets like candy courtesy of Dr. Linus Pauling’s protocol, and might even try some chelation therapy. Whatever the fuck that was. Ted got tired of asking, “What’s that?” and just started nodding after a while, his eyes fixed on the floor. The whole thing was doomed, daunting, confusing, and a huge bummer. What Ted really wanted was to smoke a joint.
Behind the wheel of the Corolla, on the way back up to the Bronx, as the sun began to ascend to his right, Ted pulled the roach out of his pocket, and along with it came his father’s letter to the universe. He managed to coax a couple more tokes out of the stub, then popped what was left in his mouth and swallowed. He unfolded the yellow letter and read aloud to himself as he rode on the easy early-morning traffic in the rising light. “‘I was thinking why you are like me. A writer who does not write. Or a writer who writes compulsively, but from outside himself, not from inside. You are not self-inhabiting, kid. And it occurred to me that you haven’t yet found your subject.’” O shades of Blaugrund, Ted thought, here we go again. Another treatise on the artistic merits of prison ass rape, perhaps. “‘I have a subject for you. I am unable to die until the Boston Red Sox win it all. Even if it takes another sixty years, I will live those sixty years. Do you think that might inspire you to some F. Scott redux, or maybe some Americanized Borgesian fever dream, or, at the least, some minor-league Pynchon? Think upon it, Teddy Ballgame. Think upon it.’”
Ted thought upon it, then crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it out the window. He saw the yellow speck land in his rearview mirror, and then the wind took it away.