28 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 18, 2019
brain of some thought or emotion. For
the first time that night, I considered
the possibility that he was going to sur-
vive it. There was a logic, an implaca-
ble, animal logic, in hanging on, in dying
only when you could hang on no lon-
ger. I saw that now as clearly as yester-
day afternoon—it felt like a thousand
years ago—I had seen the implacable
logic of our mercy.
I reached down to stroke my father’s
hair, something I had not done or even
contemplated doing in the fifty-five
years of our acquaintance. The contact
felt strange. It was not that we never
touched. We hugged to mark arrivals
and departures, and over the past year,
as his passing began to feel more im-
minent, I had started, when saying good-
bye, to sneak in a hasty kiss that was
ninety per cent sound. But I wondered
how long it had been since I had touched
my father’s head, and if that span—half
a century, say—was normal or weird.
“This is some crazy long hair you got
going on here, Dad,” I said aloud.
Over the past year, as the effects of
lifelong improvidence had begun to im-
pose a final reckoning, my father had
been obliged to liquidate the vast col-
lections of stamps, coins, trading cards,
autographs, comic books, and histori-
cal ephemera that he had amassed with
methodical recklessness since his boy-
hood visits to the stamps-and-coins de-
partment of Abraham & Straus. He
was no longer able to boast, with a plea-
sure untainted by accuracy, of having
been prescient in all his investments,
correct in all his predictions, wise when
all others were fooled. Even the sad
form of entertainment that had enliv-
ened his decline—out-doctoring his
doctors, burying nurses and therapists
under encyclopedic blizzards of facts
(lest anyone begin to suspect that his
mighty Spock brain should be added
to the list of his failing organs)—was
now denied to him. His magnificent
hair was the last of his vanities. It was
beautiful: thick, flowing, the hair of a
bard or a Romantic virtuoso. One of
the many things to have broken my
heart during the past year was the sight
of him at the bathroom mirror in the
step-down facility that had been one of
the steps of his long journey down,
brushing his Brahmsian hair with an
old-fashioned bristle brush, the kind
that his mother had used to brush mine
when I was a little boy.
“Dad,” I said. “O.K., I really need you
to hear me.”
I put my other hand to his head. I
stood there, trying to find or feel my
way into the darkness inside his skull.
As the world first learned in “Dag-
ger of the Mind,” Spock, like all Vul-
cans, possessed an ability, albeit limited,
to share thoughts, memories, sensations,
and, somewhat paradoxically, emotions
across short distances, by means of a
“mind meld.” This procedure generally
required that he place one or both of
his hands against the face or head—as
near as possible, presumably, to the
brain—of the being with whom he in-
tended to meld minds.
It’s O.K., I told my father, through
the contact of my fingertips to his fe-
brile skin. You can let go. It will be O.K.
We will be O.K.
Good for you, my father said. I’m with
the Horta on this one.
In “Devil in the Dark,” which my
father had ranked among his Top Five,
the Enterprise came to the rescue of a
mining colony on the planet Janus VI,
where a terrible monster, the Horta,
was preying on pergium miners, pick-
ing them off one by one. The episode
rises above the banality of a premise as
old as Grendel, and some creature
effects that are truly risible—even to
a ten-year-old in 1973, the homicidal
Horta looked like an ambulatory slice
of Stouffer’s French-bread pizza—by
making an honest effort to imagine
nonorganic life and then, in the char-
acteristic turn that gives the “Star Trek”
franchise its enduring beauty and power,
by insisting that fear and prejudice were
no match for curiosity and an open
mind, that where there was conscious-
ness there could be communication,
and that even a rock, if sentient, had
the right to life, liberty, and the pur-
suit of happiness. It was, in its way, a
near-perfect example of what had drawn
my father, and me, and fans around the
world, to “Star Trek” and its successor
shows for more than fifty years.
But, as I stood by my father with my
hands on his head, vainly pretending
that the silence that prevailed between
fathers and sons, as profound and mys-
terious as the silence of elevators, could
thus be subverted and overcome, I sud-denly remembered the crude three-word
sentence that the acid-secreting Horta
burned into the surface of a rock, after
mind-melding with Mr. Spock: “NO
KILL I.”
Point taken, I told my father, abruptly
letting go of his head, and then, aloud,
“Dad, I’m so sorry.”I
’m not sure what my father’s last words
were—possibly “I can’t believe you
guys had breakfast at Kenny & Zuke’s
without me”—but I know that, apart
from one more whispered “goodbye,”
those were mine to him. I had never in
my life been more desperately sorry
about anything.
My father hung on for six more in-
terminable days without regaining con-
sciousness. When he died, he managed
to do it during a scant five-minute in-
terval when one of my half brothers,
both of whom had kept vigil at his bed-
side all that week, in a round-the-clock
rotation with my stepmother, happened
to step out for a much needed cup of
coffee. Later, someone told me that this
is not uncommon, that the dying, even
when completely unconscious, often
seem to choose a moment when they
have been left alone to set out across
the final frontier.
In the days and months that fol-
lowed, I tried to find ways to mourn
my father. I said Kaddish. I talked about
him to my own children. I posted boy-
hood photos of him to Instagram. But
mostly I wrote episodes of “Star Trek:
Picard,” through and over which mor-
tality and loss played like musical
themes. The truth, I’ve sometimes had
the nerve to tell someone who knows
how much, in spite of everything, I
loved my father, was that I had been
grieving his loss since I was twelve years
old; it was definitely easier the second
time around. When I miss him, I find
comfort—just as I did forty-four years
ago, when he first left me behind—in
his perfect, constant, undiminished
presence in my imagination; his voice
in my head, anytime I want it; his opin-
ions, his jokes, his enthusiasms and
vanities and lies. But sometimes, still,
I wake up in the middle of the night,
trapped in the broken elevator of in-
somnia, haunted by the cruelty of mercy
and its logic, and by the pleading of
the devil in the dark.