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By Joey Poole

My father wasn’t into Spock ears and toy phasers and such. He hated the term “Trekkie,” and he didn’t have a wall full of still-boxed action figures of Worf in all his different uniforms. We didn’t go to Star Trek conventions or stand in line for tickets to the midnight openings of the new reboot movies, which he thought had forsaken the soul of Star Trek and turned it into popcorn fare for protracted adolescents and mouth-breathers who just liked spaceships and explosions. For my dad, Star Trek was something altogether more vital.

It was so important to him that he’d started a quest to watch every episode of every one of the Trek series in chronological order with me. We made our way through the original series and the entire Next Generation, dad talking to me about what was happening on screen and how it tied in to things from the real world, things I barely understood or cared about from the evening news. He got excited about these life lessons, pointing out how “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” explored racism or “Who Watches the Watchers” exposed how religious belief and superstition stifle a society’s development.

I was thirteen by the time we finished The Next Generation. I knew Picard, Data, Riker, Geordi, and even cloying, earnest Wesley Crusher better than I knew any of my friends from school. I knew that I was supposed to lust after Counselor Troi, whom mom called Commander Cleavage, but it was Dr. Crusher who visited my pubescent fantasies, her auburn hair cascading around her face as she scanned me with her tricorder.

We’d just started Deep Space Nine, dad’s favorite of all the Star Treks, when mom went away for good. Dad left me in the den, watching the first episode, to talk to her on the porch. He’d turned the sound up louder than normal, so I couldn’t make out the words they were saying, but judging by the shadow-puppet pantomime of their movements through the gauzy curtains, it was bad. I imagine this argument went something like every other argument they ever had. They always fought about the same thing: dad’s condescending dismissal of her restless, ever-shifting pursuit of the sublime.

“I’m reading a book on chakras,” she might say, seemingly casually, though now that I am older and know something about the way it is between women and men, I suspect she was itching to pick a fight. What dad said next depended on his mood. If he was jolly, he might poke gentle fun at it. “I got something right here that’ll align your chakras,” he might say, wagging his eyebrows. If he was feeling mean, he’d say something contemptuous, something like “so that’s the new trend in pseudoscience woo these days?” He loathed all her spiritual seeking and railed tirelessly against it, chalking it all up to woo, his whimsical synonym for bullshit.

They’d go back and forth about chakras or aura cleansing or energy restoration or The Law of Attraction or whatever it was she was on that day. Finally she’d tell him that they just weren’t compatible, that she needed to find a man who understood her. Sometimes she would yell, and sometimes she would just cry. Either way, dad would put on his sad little boy face and wrap his skinny arms around her and tell her that he loved her and that she was almost enough to make him believe in woo. She’d give in and sometimes she’d even laugh, and they’d make up, but it was always the kind of making up that just put a silly dinosaur bandage on a boo boo that would never stop bleeding.

That’s how all of their arguments went, at least until Terry, mom’s friend and fellow spiritual seeker, came along. “In our session today, Terry brought up this idea…” mom would say. “Session?” dad would ask, suspicious, and then mom would assure him Terry was just a friend, and then they’d fight the kind of fight that they wouldn’t fight in front of me, the kind that went on behind the closed door of the bedroom, their voices hissing and spitting.

Their last fight, the one I watched in shadow play through the living room curtains as Captain Sisko took command of the space station and met with the Prophets, probably followed that same template, except that it ended with mom telling dad that Terry was indeed aligning all her chakras, which I was just old enough to understand as innuendo. Then she announced that she was leaving, moving to Arizona with him. I heard her tires crunching on the gravel driveway, and there was something in my father’s voice that I’d never heard before when he finally spoke as the credits of the first episode of DS9 rolled.

“It takes an enormous amount of courage to have such a positive vision of the future,” he said. “Just look around at this shitty world and all the billions of people crammed in it. Where’s the vision in all this dystopian bullshit? How easy is pessimism? Fucking Hunger Games? Goddamn Mad Max?” I hadn’t seen either of those, because all we ever watched was Star Trek and we never went to the movies. “That shit’s not even science fiction, it’s just realism.”

Then, for the first time ever, I watched my father get sloppy drunk. He retrieved a bottle of bourbon left over from Uncle Tommy’s Christmas visit and drank it while we watched Captain Sisko negotiate with the wormhole aliens, who existed as pure thought without bodies and could see the whole of time laid out in front of them, everything that had happened and would happen or might happen. “If there’s a god,” said my dad, who’d taught me not to believe in such things, “that’s what it’d be like. And there wouldn’t be any need to worship it, either.”

Then he passed out and I covered him with the afghan that still smelled like mom’s patchouli, and I went to sleep.

*  *  *  *  *

A couple of days after mom left, I left my Biology test lying conspicuously on the kitchen table because it was festooned with a big red A and a smiley face sticker, and there’d been talk of taking away my Xbox if my grades didn’t improve.

“An A!” dad said, picking up the test as we ate dinner, a take-out pizza, the staple of our post-mom diet. His smile slowly faded as he read over the questions. “What the fuck?” he asked, nearly choking on his pizza. He never censored himself in front of me because he didn’t believe in the concept of cuss words and thought that learning how and when to cuss was an important life skill. “Seriously, what in the actual fuck? True or False – Science has not been able to prove the Biblical account of the Creation wrong? And it’s supposed to be true?” He skimmed through the rest of the test, filling the air around the kitchen with a series of what-the-fucks and holy-fuckin-shit-you-gotta-be-kidding-me’s. At first he seemed more amused than angry; finding entertainment in other people’s ignorance was dad’s mechanism for dealing with the absurdity of the world. But as we ate, his anger grew. He stopped making fun of the test questions and sat stewing in silence, reading through the test over and over as we ate. By the time there was nothing but grease left in the pizza box, he’d worked himself into a palpable rage. It wasn’t until much later that I understood what happened that night at the dinner table. He’d finally found a target within reach, a vessel in which to pour everything he needed to feel, but wouldn’t let himself feel, about mom and Terry.

From that moment on, dad had a quest. He made it his goal in life to bring down Mrs. Jones and change the way Babylon Springs Junior High taught science. He was obsessed. He looked up the state curriculum guidelines, collected all my Bio notes, constructed an elaborate Power Point presentation about the evils of anti-intellectualism and slipping science standards. He even friended Mrs. Jones on Facebook so he could stalk her and gather more information about his enemy. He found out, for instance, that her teaching degree with a minor in Life Sciences was from some Bible college in the mountains and that her critical thinking skills were so suspect that she favored snarky memes over real discourse.

When the PTA meeting finally came, though, it was something of a flop. Dad hadn’t thought about calling ahead to get his little quest on the agenda, so he was relegated to the end, when my friend Chad’s mom, the PTA president, asked if there were any other concerns. By that time, everyone was itching to go home or get at the cupcakes and pecan pies sitting on the snack table at the back of the auditorium. There was audible groaning when dad stood up.

“Are any of you aware that our science department is in direct violation of the Separation of Church and State and teaching religion in the biology curriculum?” he asked, looking around the room, expecting a groundswell of support, a cohort of indignation forming around him. But he lived in his own little echo chamber and not in the real world, which for us was Hammer Springs, South Carolina. He really thought the other parents would be incensed, not realizing that, like Mrs. Jones, most of them thought of evolution, if they thought of it at all, as some godless plot to convince us we were just monkeys. I’m sure they also thought of him as that poor man whose wife ran off to the desert with that hippie, bless his heart. The only response he got was some nervous shuffling and murmuring. Even Mrs. Jones stayed in her seat. He began to walk forward, picking his way through the legs of the people seated on our row. “We can’t allow this to stand,” he said, his voice echoing through the auditorium.

Mr. Hanson, our Vice Principal, stood up from his seat and leaned into the microphone. “Sir, Mr. … uh” he said, looking to Chad’s mom for the name, which she whispered into his ear, “Mr. Hill, we can talk about this at our next meeting if you’d like, but we’ll need some time to look into the matter, and I don’t think we can really get into it tonight.” Dad stopped in his tracks, halfway up the center aisle. “Folks,” Mr. Hanson continued, “don’t forget to get yourself some of those cupcakes and pies our Culinary Arts students made. I can tell you from experience these young folks know how to cook.” He patted his stomach as if to poke fun at how fat he was even though he ran marathons and looked like the twisty-tie from a loaf of bread. And with that, everyone stood and began making their way back to the dessert table, glad the awkward part was finally over.

Obviously, we didn’t stick around for refreshments, but I did manage to snag one of the cupcakes on my way out. There was salt waiting for dad’s wound when we got back to the Prius and found he’d locked the keys inside, something he did about once a month. We sat on the curb, dad stewing and me wanting desperately to be invisible, out of phase with the universe like Geordi and Ensign Ro after their transporter accident. But there was no such luck for me in this universe. Becky Morris, whom I’d always kind of liked even though I’d never really talked to her, came over to where we sat by the car.

“Mr. Hill,” she said quietly to my dad. “I just wanted to tell you that I think it’s important for people to stick up for what they believe in. And I wanted to give you this and tell you that I believe Jesus loves you.” She handed him a red-inked gospel tract. He took it from her and there was more sadness in his eyes than I had ever seen anywhere. Something about his hangdog look sparked a protective streak in me. Or maybe it was just my own embarrassment about what had just happened welling up inside of me, desperate to lash out, to make someone else feel what I’d felt. Whatever it was, I turned it on Becky Morris as I stared at the pamphlet. Good News! it read in blood-red ink.

“Good news?” I scoffed. “Let me get this straight. There’s a being powerful enough to create the whole universe, but he’s so petty that he’s gonna let us burn in everlasting torment if we don’t believe some arbitrary, unlikely-sounding bullshit like a certain historical figure who may or may not have even existed is his son? And that’s supposed to be good news?”

It felt good to hurt her, to rend and flay with my words, even though Becky Morris, whose family were members of some backwards church that made her wear long dresses, wasn’t exactly one of the cool kids and was therefore an easy target. It felt like lashing out at all those people who’d sat in the school cafeteria snickering to themselves, mumbling softly to each other about my crazy-ass dad. It felt positively electric to see her eyes well with tears before she turned and ran away. I looked at dad, expecting that he’d high-five me the way some fathers might when their sons hit a home run. My little diatribe had been word-for-word from his take on Christianity, which he held in even less regard than he did Mom’s decidedly shaggier and more eclectic brand of spiritual quackery. But there was nothing in his eyes but disgust.

“Will,” he said. “What’s wrong with you? Why’d you say that to her?”

“But they actually believe that stuff,” I said, striking a mocking tone aimed at camaraderie. I found none.

“Believing in something doesn’t make you stupid,” he said. “It just means you really want the world to make sense even though it clearly doesn’t.” I knew that he was talking about Becky but thinking about Mom.

Then he stood and began walking home.

I trudged behind him, tears of betrayal stinging my eyes because he’d rebuked me when I thought I was doing something that would make him proud. I think it was the first time I ever hated him. We had to walk right past the Dairy Freeze, where several of the families from the PTA meeting were gathering for cheeseburgers and milkshakes, and I saw at least two of the mothers point toward us as we walked past.

“You have to respect people’s beliefs,” he told me when talked about it the next day, “even if you think they’re full of shit.” I nodded, even though this was news to me, since it seemed like everybody’s beliefs were, to him, worthy only of derision. But then, he’d always said those things behind closed doors, not to their faces the way I’d done with Becky. I’d never seen that kind of temperance from my dad. He was more like Captain Sisko, who respected the Bajorans’ beliefs even if he hated being the Emissary, the fulfilment of their ancient prophecies, than I’d ever realized. “But they have to understand,” he continued, “that they can’t teach their beliefs as fact. There has to be a balance.” I wondered then and there if mom would still be with us if dad could practice what he preached, if he could’ve found, like Benjamin Sisko, that balance.

*  *  *  *  *

“You’ll love it here,” mom said the last time I ever heard her voice. It was two weeks after she’d left, and she’d worked it out with dad that I was supposed to spend the summer with her in Sedona, Arizona and then I could decide if I wanted to stay with dad or with her and Terry. I’d already decided I hated Sedona and I was going to stay with dad, partly because I hated Terry for taking my mother away and partly because I hated her for going with him and partly because I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving dad alone to watch Star Trek alone.

The next day, we got the news that my mother had died, roasted to death with six other spiritual seekers, including Terry, as they awaited their spirit guides in a sweat lodge ceremony gone bad. When we got the call, we were right in the middle of a Deep Space Nine episode called “In the Hands of the Prophets” in which Bajoran religious fanatics attack the space station because Keiko O’Brien is teaching her school children that the Prophets are not gods, just aliens who experience time differently, and that their Celestial Temple is really just a natural phenomenon, a wormhole through the very fabric of space.

“See?” My dad said, pausing the episode as Odo picked through the wreckage of Keiko’s bombed-out school room, “that’s exactly why I had to do what I did at the PTA meeting.” He was just getting worked up about the Biology curriculum, likening the self-righteous Kai Opaka to Mrs. Jones, whom he said clearly didn’t understand that freedom of religion meant freedom from it as well, when his phone rang. I didn’t know who was on the other end or what kind of news he was hearing. But I knew from the way his face fell slack that nothing would ever be the same again.

*  *  *  *

For a few weeks after mom’s death, dad didn’t think about the science curriculum at all. Everything had changed, and nothing had changed at all. Mom was already gone. Now she was gone for real.

Then, slowly, everything did change. Dad started drinking every day, for one, and I learned a lot about him as a result, because when he drank, he talked. He’d always been a heavy talker, but he’d always talked about ideas—about Star Trek and space travel and what it would be like on the surface of Neptune, about whether dinosaurs had feathers and the right way to cook a steak and how crunchy peanut butter was inherently superior to creamy, about how the nightly news was more fiction than fact and about how stupid people were for swallowing all the ridiculous shit they had to swallow just to live in this world. But he’d never talked about himself. I learned that he’d been a drinker before, but that he’d quit not long after he met mom. I learned that his parents – they were both dead before I was born—were Mormons, and that he’d grown up in the Latter Day Saints, and that explained a lot. I learned that he loved mom even after she’d started cheating on him, and I learned that Terry wasn’t the first. I could’ve gone without learning that.

We started watching Star Trek again about a month after Mom died. Dad would make his first drink after supper and we’d sit on the couch like we used to, but it was different. He stopped our methodical episode-by-episode march through the franchise. Instead, he hand-picked episodes he wanted me to see, gravitating toward those that featured rational thinking and science putting the smackdown on superstition and religious belief.

We watched “The Apple,” wherein Kirk broke the Prime Directive by killing a primitive society’s computer god to free them from their ignorance. We watched “The Devil’s Due,” in which a very mortal woman posed as Ardra, the planet-of-the-week’s version of the devil, in order to fulfill an ancient prophecy and make herself rich until Picard and Data exposed her parlor tricks and holographic trickery. We watched every single Deep Space Nine episode featuring Kai Winn, who had a perma-smirk so much like the one Mrs. Jones had worn when the vice principal shut dad down at the ill-fated PTA meeting. We watched Kai Winn’s whole story arc, her ambition, her rise to become the Kai, and, finally, we watched her die, engulfed in the flames of the very Pah-wraiths she’d worshipped, who were really nothing more than alien life forms like her precious Prophets, trapped in their own hell.

Once, while we were watching “The Way to Eden,” which he was careful to point out was one of the most laughably dated episodes of the original series even if the point it made was timeless, he lost it. It was about a band of galactic hippies who hijacked the Enterprise to fly to Eden, a mythical planet where everything was supposed to be groovy and idyllic. We’d already watched it once on our first journey through the original series, when he’d used to as a talking point, a history lesson on the sixties and the death of hippie idealism. This time it seemed decidedly more poignant. The episode ends with the leader of the hippie seekers dying because he’s so blinded by his expectations of Eden that he eats the first piece of fruit he finds there without running a tricorder over it to make sure it’s not poisonous. “See,” dad hooted. “That’s the same kind of woo your mom was always falling for.” Then he remembered that woo had killed her, and it wasn’t funny anymore. He made himself another drink and took it to his bedroom. I was worried about him, so I went to my room and pressed my ear against the wall just like I did when he and mom were fighting. I heard him saying her name over and over through ragged, snotty sobs and asking why she’d left him like she did.

That night I cried too, really cried for the first time since mom had died, knowing that two people who loved each other locked away crying in separate rooms was the loneliest thing in the universe.

*  *  *  *  *

Soon the time for another PTA meeting rolled around, and he was determined to go, to make his spiel. I tried to convince him to let it go. “The school year’s almost over,” I pleaded. “We’re not even talking about evolution or creation or anything anymore. We dissected a frog last week, and this week it’s sex ed.”

But he was determined to do what was right. He decided that I should stay home, which was just fine with me. I don’t know exactly what happened at that meeting, but I know that he was drunk and that it didn’t go well. The next day at school it was all whispers and weird looks and somebody slipped a piece of notebook paper with the word atheist scrawled on it into my locker.

Dad didn’t say much about it. He just went down into the basement with a bottle of bourbon and he stayed there for three days, not even going to work. I ordered pizzas for dinner and played Halo and let my homework go to fuckit and I only knew that he’d emerged from his lair at all because the pizza I’d left on the table was gone in the morning. On the third day I heard him emerge. It was just after midnight, and I was nearly asleep when I heard him creaking up the stairs. I figured he was just coming up for pizza, but I heard him open the front door and watched him load something into the back of the Prius before backing out of the drive.

I don’t know why, but somehow I knew he was going to the school, so I set out on foot, retracing the path we’d taken the night of his first brush with infamy when we’d locked the keys in the car. The town was peaceful at night. The Dairy Freeze closed but the giant vanilla cone was still rotating and lit with a light all its own, and the only sound beside the crickets and the whippoorwills was an occasional passing car splashing through the puddles on the side of the street.

When I got to school, the Volvo was in the parking lot, but dad was not in it. I got inside and waited for him to return. I didn’t have to wait long. There was a muffled boom from inside the school, followed by the shrieking of the fire alarm. A strange light began to flicker in the windows of t, the science wing, and it took me a minute to realize it was on fire. Soon the flames grew until they licked up the outside walls and engulfed the whole science wing, lighting up the parking lot like a long, slow strike of lightning. He’d gone and done the same thing Picard had done when he fought the Borg, letting his pain and rage and hate cloud his vision until it consumed him and he became the very thing he hated so much, aiming himself like a cannon at the school and Mrs. Jones and all the woo in the world and shooting his heart out right at it.

I got a sick feeling in my stomach, thinking maybe dad had blown himself up like some suicide bomber, but soon enough he emerged from the shadows and ran to the car. He didn’t seem surprised to find me in the passenger seat, just told me to buckle my seatbelt as he took off, tires screeching on the asphalt. He looked freer then than I’d ever seen him, even after the sirens began to wail and close in on us.

*

*

Joey Poole lives in Florence, South Carolina with his wife and family. His work has appeared in Bull, Cowboy Jamboree, Molotov Cocktail Lit Zine, Scintilla Press, and elsewhere. His story collection I Have Always Been Here Before is forthcoming from Cowboy Jamboree Press in 2020. He is currently working on a novel, The Year of the Possum. He tweets about the writing life, parenting fails, sports, and other passing obsessions @JoeyRPoole.

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