“Television. Did you hear about Adam Silverstone?”

“What about him?”

“He’s been appointed to the faculty.”

“No, I hadn’t heard.”

“Instructor of Surgery.”

“Nice. What channel is the game on?”

“Five.”

“Would you get it for me? There’s a good girl,” he said.

He spent a lot of time just lying and thinking. One afternoon he saw an announcement in the Massachusetts Physician, and he read it several times with increasing interest as the idea took hold.

The day he was released from the hospital he took a taxi to the Federal Building and had a very pleasant interview with a representative of the United States Agency for International Development, at the conclusion of which he signed the papers for eighteen months of duty as a civilian surgeon.

On the way to the empty apartment he stopped at a jewelry store and bought a red-velvet box not unlike the one in which his father had kept the watch when he was a small boy. When he arrived home he sat in the quiet study with pen and paper and made several false starts, changing My Dear Miguel to My Dear Son and finally compromising:

My Dear Son Miguel:

I must begin by thanking you for giving me more of the joy of loving someone than I have ever known. In the short time of your life you have demonstrated to me all the finest qualities of my family and of myself, and none of the tawdry weaknesses with which, alas, you will discover the world has always been riddled, and we along with the world.

If, at some date when you are old enough to understand it, this letter is given to you to read, it will be because I do not come back from the journey which I now contemplate. For if I return I will overturn the legal world to gain custody of you, and should that world prove impossible to overturn I will arrange to see you regularly and often.

It is possible, however, that you will read these words. Therefore I wish that I were able to make them a creed by which to live, the essence of what a father gives to a son during a lifetime, or at least substantial wisdom with which to ease the precious pain of existence. Unfortunately, I cannot. I can only advise you to try to live your life so as to inflict as little damage as possible. Attempt to make or mend something before you die which would not have existed except for your presence on the earth.