“Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end of it.” (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)

#

One time there was a woman at a concert. She offered me an autism awareness bag, whatever that was. I guess headphones or cheap fidget toys. A snack, maybe.

In the background, a band I didn’t know screeched and cigarette smoke filtered over the bodies and the bodies were so very warm around me. Ever since I was little, I had to move to release the feeling, the same one that crawls over me now. Restless aching and the actual stomach twisting realization that everyone is a stranger, including me.

You look over stimulated, she said. We can get you to a quiet place if you want to come.

I watched her, flapped my hands. Was I really flapping? Like a noise bath, I couldn’t breathe through the suds. Somewhere in the tightly nestled crowd, my friends were having a great time, screaming to the songs and breathing in the atmosphere. I knew all of the lyrics floating from the stage.

I don’t have autism but thank you, I said. I was crying. Not convincing.

Okay, dear. They’re at the front desk if you need one.

#

Dad liked woodworking and then he liked working out and then he liked classic rock and then he liked jazz. He did not spend his money. He invested his money. Stereo equipment and home improvement supplies. The same shoes all the time and clothes that would last him until he died.

He’s a creature of routine, Mom said when he got up with his walker to make breakfast.

Ten days after brain surgery and he’s cooking. She laughed then, a bell sound.

Eggs on toast and orange juice. He ate every bite.

The fact of his life could be boiled down into that, I believe. That and his relentless interest in the world, in learning and teaching. Something that is so easy to see looking back over his sixty-nine years. But it was even more apparent as I was growing up, many of our habits, our nerouses, our loves, were the same.

He taught me to drive in his fifteen-year-old Toyota. I modeled my speech after his tone. I learned my first swear word from him.

Damn. I said, Damn you, in my preschool voice while Mom was sewing up my dress.

Learned it from Daddy, the excuse.

To emulate him or study him. Or both. Could never decide if he was cool or not. I still miss him.

#

There’s a half-eaten Zebra Cake on my lap, wafting up icing smell and vanilla. My hair is still wet on my back, the Kool-Aid dip dye leaking onto my science camp t-shirt. Cold sending shivers into my shoulder blades. Dad swears at the DVD player and whacks it a few times.

Percussive maintenance, he says.

He knows everything. The noise makes echoes in the TV room. While he condemns the disc to hell, I look at the case. The cover has beautiful pictures of the galaxy and massive letters that spell out: Star Trek Original Series.

These are old discs, Dad mutters.

And then, here comes the orchestra and the rhythm and the woman singing like a violin string plucked. Dad’s presence back on the couch. Eating pretzels and drinking gin. Walrus-type mustache picks up when there are people on the screen. Primary colors, technicolor. Bright, lit from the front and behind. Strange hair piled on the women’s heads, combed to shiny loaves of bread above their eyebrows.

I say, There are men wearing makeup.

It’s an old show. It’s kind of silly. But we have to start with the original. You’ll see the others later. I’ll show them to you.

#

All my life, I hide in a carefully crafted disguise. Overemotional is quirky when there are no boundaries inside of me. Anyone who wants to can take a peek inside. There are notes in my journals and my head of observations, other people. Extroverted, good; boisterous, bad; talkative, good; nagging, bad. I have to be the life of the party. I have to be down for everything. I cannot need alone time. To spend time away from the herd is to make yourself vulnerable. Vulnerable to your own self. All accumulated inside of me, a personality for every one of my friends. Painted faces mashed together. Creating what I want out of myself is the only use for my creativity that I can accept.

#

Every morning, my father fried a single egg in butter and ate it on wheat and nut toast with a thin layer of mayonnaise spread across the top and a glass of orange juice. The brands of all of these foods were very important, but I cannot remember them now. Told me when I asked about it that he had so much more to think about than breakfast. He devoted his mental energy to other things. With a routine, the decisions as made for him.

#

Star Trek’s first series premiered September 8, 1966. My father was twelve at the time. Coincidentally, I was at the same age when he showed it to me. Eventually, the hand-painted set pieces and tin-foil armor don’t even bother me. Star Trek melts me. The joy of it. The hope that humans could one day do this. That there is something out there.

#

Dad’s favorite character is Spock, so my favorite character is Spock. He quotes him sometimes, mouthing the words alongside the television. This strong alien, this valuable member of the Enterprise crew, this man and his quirks and his bowl-cut hair and diagonal eyebrows.

I lick my pinkies and stick my eyebrows up. Mom is not allowed to pluck the wiry hairs.

The sensation is overwhelming.

Dad sees me and laughs a half-laugh. Half-Vulcan and half-human. Spock makes a hand sign, and I stretch my fingers out, mirroring. A secret code. Handshake.

Vulcans prize rationality. Vulcans, as an alien species, replace their emotions with logic. Vulcans see the world through rules and mathematics. I try to listen to Dad talking about them. How their people reject baser feelings and the noise around them. How Spock is different, but his crew mates know that he does a lot for their ship. I can’t make out his words because some guy is fighting an evil alien that really just looks like a man in a lizard suit. Star Trek has a lot of bad episodes, but they’re good, actually, because they’re familiar. Safe.

#

I wondered a lot growing up if other people had to learn as much as I did. I had stacks of notes of nice things to say, compliments I should give out, ways to make and keep friends. Did they practice in the mirror making faces so that they don’t forget how to show happy, how to show

sad? While I rehearsed long lines of dialect like I’m a TV show actor, were they doing the same? Nothing came natural to me. I didn’t feel normal. I didn’t feel human.

#

Pickleball racket in the air. Taking a screenshot to hold for evidence in my cracked iPhone 8.

I don’t know. They make these online quizzes to scare people, I think. I say more, words falling out of me. Doxology. Anyone could get that score if they did it on purpose.

But did you do it on purpose? Her eyes flick down to my bare feet, toes all scrunched up.

Flexible.

I guess not. But anyways, if I go to a psychiatrist and show them an online autism quiz, they’ll laugh in my face. Probably tell me to come back when I have a real problem.

It would help you understand yourself more.

Whatever. I’m just my father’s daughter. I’m done talking about this. Soles scrape the court, and I serve again but she misses, comes to the net. There’s more to it than that. Way more to it.

I know. I know.

#

In my childish daydreams, I wonder if the reason I feel the gauze between me and the world is because I am half-alien. My father, the Vulcan. A space princess from somewhere out there. That old childhood dream that I am actually very special and very important. And no one understands me because they haven’t been taught my ways, my language. So that’s why I sit alone at lunch.

#

Boyfriend: It’s worth it to talk to someone about.

Me: presses face into his shoulder, rubs against it. Catlike.

Boyfriend: Not gonna make a difference in how I feel about you. It would give you a new idea about yourself. Discovery.

Me: That’s a good Star Trek series. Boyfriend: I’m being serious.

Me: I am, too.

Boyfriend: What would your Dad say if he was still alive?

Me: Probably not a lot. He didn’t say much. He was pretty quiet.

#

Would you believe that Dad kept working out, even after his cancer diagnosis? Would you believe that he acted like nothing was different for the longest time? Driving with the windows down. Out eating dinner. He drank beer and squatted his bodyweight with chemo treatments the next day.

Nothing was wrong.

Then, the pain running up and down his legs. Then, the incontinence and vomiting. Then, there was something they didn’t catch because they didn’t know to look for it. No pretending that away.

Unimaginiable, the spinal lesion and the long nights of aching. Our doctor told us not to sue when he diagnosed the mass on his occipital lobe. And Dad knew what the word “occipital” meant before the oncologist had to explain it.

#

I tried to talk to Dad about Star Trek the night before his brain surgery, curled up on the hospital fold-out couch, lines beeping, running all over him. The nurses let me drink the coffee from their break room, since I knew I wasn’t sleeping.

Could be futuristic. Could be the Medbay on the Enterprise, I said. Smaller, my voice: Do you think that there’s actually people out there? In space?

He breathed. Bleached blankets around bony thighs. Declining so fast that none of us can keep up. In his sleep-crusted voice, I think that we never know what’s really going to happen. I think that it’s impossible there’s no one.

And again, I asked him: Are you scared of it? He puffs out his lips. Trying to grow a goatee as a cancer patient.

I think, Dad whispered. I think the logical choice is to not be scared. Why?

He started snoring, then. I stayed up all night watching the shadows change. In the morning, my sisters ask me why I even bothered spending the night there. I said that I wouldn’t have wanted to be alone, either.

#

I was not aware of it until it was screaming at me. Holding my head down under the water of sound, dragging its nails up the soft bits of my arm. A human can function on so little. By now, I have learned to do my best work alone. Make myself a mirror of the room around me. I do want to kill myself sometimes, when I don’t know who is there when I close my eyes.

#

I learned to tube feed Dad. Once I got over the smell, the bubbling, the texture of his formula as it spilled out of the little rectangular bottles, I would stand next to him. Funnel upwards. Giving him dinner. It was a routine that I adapted myself to, caring for him this way. Imagined Dad giving me a bottle. Imagined showing him the future, thousands of years in the future. Meeting him there in the light of a strange sun.

Time with my father was a gift I wish I had known to keep. When I was small, we watched an episode of Star Trek every night. He told me about the actors, the characters, the writing, the development. We discussed each facet afterwards and he paid close attention to my words, my voice, my thoughts.

My sister tells me, now that he’s gone: Dad didn’t bond with us in normal ways. He liked sharing interests. Doing things parallel to each other.

#

So, I’m sitting in this office on a nice, cushy sofa. And my life is read to me off thick, stapled paper pack through the beady lenses of a small, mantis-like woman while I eye the degrees on her wall. I don’t look at her. Never her.

Do you understand how I came to this conclusion?

She has measured me. Dictated the sum of my parts. I reach for the energy drink at my ankle, a sentinel. I guess I get it. And then I pause, breathe in, drink, let the bubbles run down my throat. I know the answer to the next question, but I ask it anyways.

So, there’s not like, anything that can be done. What do you mean?

Like, to get rid of it. I guess.

This is something that will need to be managed for your whole life. You taught yourself ways to get around it before, and you’ll learn better ways to understand it in the future.

I don’t let this woman see me crying. Not even when she scoots the multicolored Kleenex across the coffee table.

Instead, I go home. Lay on my side in my childhood bedroom. Invent a way that my brain could rewire itself. Imagine that I’m an alien in a strange new world, trying to learn its customs and its laws.

Refracted, my life.

#

The flare stare H.H. Andromedae is approximately ten light-years away from our Earth. This means that it takes roughly ten years for the light from this star to reach us and ten years for Earth to reflect our sun’s light back to H.H. Andromedae. If someone were to site near this star and look back on Earth, they would see me, age thirteen.

Looking closer, they would see thirteen-year-old me and my dad. That year was formative for me, largely because of him. From H. H. Andromedae, they would see my dad playing Dark Side of the Moon for me, showing off Star Trek, holding me when my emotions were so huge and daunting. They would see me talking to my dad about physics and philosophy and music and the things that had and still have a hold on my life.

Most importantly, they would see my dad taking me seriously. He always did. It was refreshing. He was a deeply serious man and was often the rock that I needed as teenage emotions grew into adult crisis. We would go on walks and hikes when the noise in my head was almost too much to bear. He was always there for me, always, and I know he still is.

All of Dad’s energy, every vibration and speck of heat, every wave of ever particle of him still remains with us. The warmth that flowed throughout Dad is still here and is still a part of all we are. Just less orderly.

#

“Peace and long life. Live long and prosper.”- Star Trek: The Original Series