Mariana said simply, “He needs you. He needs you to help him finish his life’s work, a healing fiction.” Mariana took his arm in hers and began to steer him toward one of the rooms.
“Fuck fiction,” Ted said. “I would think now is the time to face the facts.”
“Not a novel he’s actually writing down. He’s rewriting it in his mind, the novel of his life.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t sound too insane.”
“There are a million ways to tell a life story, Theodore.” Chipmunk ref? Let it pass… “As a tragedy or a comedy or as a fairy tale with baseball teams that can keep you alive like magical warlocks. He is trying to tell you his story his way.”
“I’m trying to appreciate what you’re saying, but you can’t just rewrite history,” Ted protested. “You can’t just rewrite the past. There are such things as facts that get in the way. Pesky facts.”
She stopped him in front of room 714, Babe Ruth’s career home run total. She pulled him a little closer, dropping her voice to a whisper, fixing him with her deep brown eyes. He felt her breath land on his face and ear. He lost his mind momentarily. This was probably as close to a woman he’d been in three years without paying for it. The Dead sang something again from “Sugar Magnolia” about coming up for air, trying to tell him something. Keep it down, Bob, Jerry, guys…
“The way your dad sees it,” she spoke, “he’s been the villain, he’s been the victim, and he’s been the goat. Now he wants to die a hero.” A man’s voice, ruined and harsh, vibrating on its few remaining vocal cords, came from within the room.
“Ask for her card, you moron!” was what his father called out.
8.
“Hello, Marty,” Ted said as he entered. He hadn’t seen his dad in some years, and this was bad. It was a shock how skinny and gray he was. He had been an athletic and handsome man, and he now seemed to glow, but not in a healthy way, like he’d been irradiated. He had tubes going up and around his withered arms and legs. His skin looked thin as a greyhound’s, like it might tear. “And you are?” his dad said.
“Good one.”
They immediately fell into an old toxic rhythm.
“You look like shit, Lord Fenway.”
“Thank you. You, too.”
“No shit. Yankees win?”
“Yeah, they did.”
“Fuck me running. Twelve Seconal. Ten Quaalude. And yet here I am. Immortal till October.”
“Yeah, you’re the new Mr. October, I’m told.”
Marty nodded at Mariana. “Mariana’s a spic, Teddy.” Oh boy. Ted looked apologetically at Mariana. “Like Luis Tiant, like Juan Marichal and Roberto Clemente. Spics got more juice than whitey.”
Ted shook his head. “Don’t say that word.”
“What word? ‘Juice’?”
“No, not ‘juice.’”
“‘Whitey’? You prefer ‘honky’?”
“No. Not ‘whitey.’ You know what word.”
“Oh, ‘spic,’ that’s just an abbreviation for Hispanic. If you say it fast, that’s what you get-hspnic, hsspic, spic…”
“That’s not how, that’s not an abbreviation. It’s a racial epithet. Am I right, Mariana, it’s offensive, right?” Ted was aware that he had just rolled the r in Mariana like he was trying to honor the Spanish, and how stupid that must’ve sounded.
“Well,” Mariana said, baring her white teeth again, “asking me if the word’s offensive is more offensive than the word itself. Being oversensitive betrays a hidden bias and underlying insensitivity.”
“Preach,” Marty said.
“‘This city is crawling with spics.’ That would be offensive. But, say, ‘Mariana-mira mira, my beautiful spic,’ can be nice to hear from a charming man like your father. Among friends, words take on private meaning. You’re a writer, right? Context. Tone.”
“All in the way you tell the story?” Ted anticipated.
“Yes,” she said, “all in the way you tell the story, that’s right. That’s exactly right.” And then she added, for good measure, “Whitey.”
“Whitey! Snap! Dass it! Game set match-the glorious spic,” Marty shouted, then laughed, then groaned. “Ow, shit. Laughing’s a motherfucker.”
9.
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.
10.
Ted slept through the light of the day. It was so loud from the street in his apartment, but Ted could sleep through anything. His senses had been numbed over the years by the full-on, 24/7 sensual assault that is New York City. Ted finally awoke in the noisy dark and stirred; an ambulance cried, moving closer, then seemingly under his bed, then moved on. Ted switched on a light, grabbed a pen and a legal pad, and poised to write. Nothing came. He put the pad down, went to the fridge, and pulled out a can of Budweiser and half a hero sandwich of indeterminate age and makeup. Ted cracked the beer, sniffed the sandwich and grimaced, then sniffed the sandwich again and grimaced less, and bit into the bread soggy from whatever yellowish condiment it had been marinating in. Ted waited to barf or choke or die as he chewed, but none of those things happened. He walked to the TV and turned it on. It did not come to life immediately; first, a small, bright circle of gray light appeared in the center of the screen, like the first energy before the big bang, Ted thought. Then suddenly, after a minute or so, the light exploded to fill the screen, and sounds and images came on. That TV was a dinosaur piece of shit.