Tennis and the Feral Prodigy (pp. 174–175)
Here is how to set up the electric ball machine at dawn on the days Himself is away living up to what will be his final talent.
Context
Absence rendered as a machine. On the mornings the father is gone — off "living up to what will be his final talent," i.e. making the films that will displace tennis and then his life — the boy sets up a machine to hit against instead. The phrasing is quietly devastating: the father's presence at dawn was itself a kind of ball-feeder, and his art (the "final talent") is what pulls him away and, the sentence already knows, will end him. The son is left practicing against a device on the days the father chooses the work over the court.