“Settle down, Rhymin’ Simon.”
“I don’t know anymore and I don’t care. Don’t wanna know about Yeats or Whitman and what they did with their dicks, don’t wanna know about me. Just wanna…”
“Wanna what?”
“Just wanna fuckin’ be. And I gotta pee. Pull the fuck over, Jeeves.”
70.
They found themselves in a town called Sturbridge. They got a quick meal at a Friendly’s. Even though Ted loved himself some Fribble, it paled in comparison with Mariana’s offering. Ted helped his father bathe and get ready for sleep. They shared a room with twin beds. They watched some local broadcasts discussing the upcoming one-game-winner-take-all playoff. It was all anyone was talking about up here. The Curse of the Babe and 1918. Ted tucked Marty into bed, turned out the light, and got into bed himself.
“That was a fun day, Teddy, thank you.”
“Sure thing, Dad. Walking around that town today, I remembered this recurring fantasy I had when I was a kid.”
“Yeah?”
“Remember we used to take the LIRR out to the island in the summer sometimes and we’d head back on those hot summer Sundays and the AC was always shit and I’d stand between the cars and watch the sleepy little Long Island towns slide by.”
“I remember those days.”
“Mostly Indian names-Islip, Wantagh, Massapequa. And of course the always mysterious and alluring Babylon. Sometimes the train would be moving so slowly, like three miles per hour, I felt like I could just step off unharmed and keep walking. And I’d think about you and Mom back there in your seats oblivious, and I could just step off and walk into a new town and become a new person. Walk up to some nice-looking suburban home and say, Hi, I’m Ted, can I be your son? You don’t have to call me Ted, either, you can call me whatever you want. And I’d become new. They’d give me new clothes and I’d have a new mom and dad, and you guys wouldn’t know I was gone till you hit the city and by then it’d be too late, you’d never find me.”
“That’s not a very nice bedtime story, telling me how you wanted new parents.”
“That’s not it, Dad. I never stepped off. Did I? I never got off the train. I always stayed with you.”
“That’s true.”
They lay in silence, readying for sleep.
“And you know what, Ted, that’s gonna be enough for me. That you never left. That’s more than a man could ask of his son.”
“And you never left me, Dad.”
“No, I guess I didn’t.”
“That’s enough too.”
Marty flicked on the light. “I don’t wanna sleep, Ted.”
“I get it. What do you wanna do?”
“I wanna look for trouble.”
71.
They made their way back out to the car. Ted and Marty just drove around aimlessly. Ted asked, “Should we look for trouble on the map, ’cause I don’t know where I’m going?” There were short bursts of conversation followed by long, easy silences. Around sunset, they went looking for another motel. They weren’t far outside Boston now, but it was still rural and bucolic. They stopped at a nice vantage point to watch the sun go down. Marty said, “You don’t know how beautiful it all is till you’re about to leave. It’s actually not true that if you’ve seen one sunset, you’ve seen ’em all; more like if you see one sunset, you wanna see them all.”
Ted nodded at the still vital truth of that cliché and its corollary.
“What happened with Mariana?” Marty asked.
“Nothing. I think she just sleeps with a lot of people.”
“Good for her. Sex is great. It’s the best. I’m gonna miss it when I’m dead.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You want my advice?”
“Not particularly.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“Noted.”
“Who cares what she does? You like her?”
“Yes.”
“Who cares what she does? I’m dying, buddy, you think I care if your mother fucked your uncle Tim?”
“Mom fucked Uncle Tiny Tim?”
“You’re missing the point. All that personal shit just falls away like meat off a bone, and all you’re left with is love. All I remember is I loved your mom and I miss her. And I love Maria, too. Trust me, when you’re dying, you’re not gonna give a fuck who Mariana fucked. You’re just gonna be thankful that she fucked you, you moron.”
They checked into the Paul Revere Motor Lodge, and got ready for bed. Ted lit up a joint; so much for quitting. Marty partook. “I really feel like I’m compromising my future,” he said.
In the dark, only the ember on the tip of the joint was visible as it passed from bed to bed. Ted took an overly ambitious toke, and coughed. Marty exploded in anger, out of nowhere. “That fucking cough! I hate that fucking cough!”
Ted nearly jumped out of bed. “Jesus, Dad, where did that come from?”
Marty regained his breath and his composure. For a moment, and then he began to cry, “Oh God, oh God, oh God…”
“What’s the matter?”
“I think I figured something out.”
“What?”
“Cough.”
“What?”
“Cough.”
Ted coughed.
“Yes, goddammit, the sound of your cough makes me so angry.”
“You’re angry at me ’cause of my cough? Not ’cause I throw like a girl and I’m better-looking than you?”
“When you were nine months old, you got sick, your first cold-and you’re not better-looking than me, by the way-your mother and I waited to take you to the hospital. We didn’t know. What did we know? We took you and the doctor looked at us like we were fools to wait. We didn’t know.”
“I didn’t know this.”
“No, you wouldn’t remember. You weren’t even a year. They gave you a spinal tap. Stuck a big needle in your tiny back, and I wanted to kill that doctor for hurting you, then kill myself. They didn’t know what it was. Three days you got worse.”
Ted lay in the dark so pitch he could imagine seeing what his father was saying on the blackness before his eyes like a movie.
“The doctors couldn’t figure it out. We stayed in the hospital with you, your mother and I. On the third night, your mother fell asleep and I leaned into you, right up to your beautiful little face, and I spoke to whatever disease or virus or demon that was attacking your lungs, double pneumonia or RSV or the devil himself, whatever, I spoke to it, and ordered it to come out of you and fight like a man, to come out of you and into me. It was all I could think to do. And I knew it was not enough. I knew I was powerless and you would die. And I had a vision.”
“Of what?”
“I had a vision of what the world would be when you died. That there would never be joy again, just an infinite well of sadness and pain, and I started descending into that well, deeper and deeper, and it had no bottom. I began to drown.”
“But I lived, Dad, it’s okay, I lived.”
“Yes, you lived, but today when you were coughing, I just got transported right back to that time and place, and I realized that I got scared. I got scared of that bottomless darkness and pain. And I could never face it again, you dying, and loving you meant facing it again, facing the possibility of that pain again. I was so scared to lose you that I never took you back. I don’t think I ever took you back all the way in again. I got scared to love you.”
“Jesus, Dad.”
Ted didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything. And so, undeterred, Marty kept at it, kept on connecting the dark dots in his mind, on his lungs, in the sky. Ted remembered those old connect-the-dots puzzles they used to give him in grade school, where a bunch of seemingly random points, joined in the right sequence, would reveal a clear picture of something, usually something majestic like a constellation. Ted had the sense his father was close to finishing his puzzle, the dark majesty of his own sky of stars.