Watching Star Trek with Dylan, Part 2

Between Mothers and Sons
by Patricia Stevens

(Page 3 of 3)

So, what can I do to nurture my son, this practically alien being?

One thing I can do is let him watch Star Trek, for what he recognizes in it, I am now sure, is the plain truth about his destiny. Whether I let him watch it or not, he has already pledged himself to the mission. For these are biologically predetermined voyages not even a mother can halt.

A few weeks after Dylan watched his first Star Trek, we sat him down and told him that we would be moving in a month from our home on Cape Cod to Bloomington, Indiana. My husband had been offered a good job at Indiana University. The move meant a better work environment for him, one less fraught with political treachery, and more cultural opportunities for us all. Dylan took the news badly, looking glum at first, then stricken. To him, moving meant abandoning his two best friends: the fair, implacable Ardis, with whom he played a passable, if reluctant, John Smith to her emotionally commanding Pocahontas, and Robin, possessor of an extraordinary collection of Batman action figures, as well as interesting plastic weaponry, with which they joyously whaled away at each other at every opportunity.

"Why?" he wanted to know.

We explained. The new job is better, more opportunity, more money. We would have a new house in a lively college town, good schools, museums, closer to grandparents and cousins. We even went so far as to say that we would have a happier life.

"Okay," he said. "But do we have to?"

Every evening for the next three weeks, we sorted through piles of stuff, packed dozens of boxes, and made phone calls to Realtors and mortgage bankers. Dylan bounced around disconsolately amid the chaos of open boxes and empty cupboards. One night he approached me, wearing the missing packing tape like a Roman warrior's arm cuff, and threatened to bonk me with a cardboard mailing tube. "I'm not moving," he said. "So don't pack any of my stuff."

Each night we explained again why the move was necessary, and even a good idea, perhaps most of all for Dylan. Each night, our explanation sounded more like a big, fat indulgence cooked up by insensitive grown-ups. Each night for diversion, Dylan begged to watch the 7 P.M. rerun of Star Trek: The Next Generation and, each night, lacking a better idea, we consented.

One evening he traipsed into the dining room, which we had turned into a mini-warehouse for dish packs and huge, unwieldy clothing wardrobes, and said, "Dad, I know why you quit your job."

"You do?"

"Yeah. The people at your office are all Ferengis."

"What's Ferengi?"

"Ferengis are opportunists with pointed teeth. They trick people."

"Opportunists?" My husband looked at me. We commenced twitching facial muscles.

"Yeah. That's what the people at your office are, right?"

"Right," his father said. "A bunch of Ferengis."

"You don't want to fight them, so you have to get another job, right?"

"That's exactly right."

"Let's pretend I'm Captain Picard, and I order you to transfer to a ship without Ferengis, okay?" Dylan said.

"Okay. But before I go, I have one final request."

"What?"

"I want you to transfer with me. You can be the commander of our new vessel."

Dylan's face opened itself up to wonder for the first time in weeks. Light shone in his eyes, his mouth was open in the throes of concentration. He had made the decision, finally, on his own terms. "Okay, I'll be the commander. But we can't go yet. I have to pack my equipment!"

Stunned, we listened to his sneakers pound on the wooden stairs.

"Star Trek is cool," my husband said.

A week later, Dylan and I are stuck in the Detroit airport, waiting for a connection to Indianapolis that does not seem to want to connect. Various parts of various planes, including ours and the one that should have departed before us, are being checked and replaced by freezing men in coveralls outside in the brittle, minus-three December evening. This I learn by listening to wisps of private conversation between tight-lipped gate agents who say, officially, only "delay, delay, delay." I try not to dwell on the combination of broken parts and impatient, freezing men as we sit on the cold floor near the drafty Jetway. Every last seat has been taken by members of a large youth orchestra and their instrument cases and various Mickey Mouse duffel bags. Their plane is even more delayed than ours. An hour passes, then two. We read every book, color every picture, and eat every snack contained in Dylan's travel pack. I think of my husband, somewhere out on the road in western Massachusetts or Connecticut by now, driving our little car toward Indiana through sheets of rain, while Dylan and I travel in comfort, or so we had planned.

"Why aren't we going?" Dylan asks once, twice, three times in twenty minutes.

I explain, explain, explain.

Suddenly Dylan stands up and looks around. "Data," he announces, "I want a full report from engineering." He points at two uniformed pilots who have paused to greet each other on the concourse. "Why aren't those men at their stations?" he demands.

I try to calm him, order him to stay put, but he is five and trapped like a rat in the Detroit airport. My command has been relinquished, and perhaps rightfully so. From Star Trek, Dylan has learned to know a crisis when he sees one, and to take command if no one else will.

He strides up to the check-in desk and locks eyes with the lone gate agent, who sits nervously amid the baleful hordes.

"You?" Dylan commands him. "I want you in the Transporter Room now!" He sweeps his arm in the direction of the sleepy youth orchestra, curled up in their coveted chairs with their little computer games and teen novels. "I want these people beamed out of here, and I want them beamed out now!"

The man grins at Dylan. "Yes, sir. At once, sir!"

The youth orchestra is giggling, punching one another and pointing. I slip up behind him and wink at the agent, who gives Dylan a set of plastic pilot wings before I haul him back to our spot on the floor. Dylan examines his wings. "This is not a Federation insignia," he mutters. "But I like it anyway."

Star Trek purports to be a lot of things. A voyage, a mission, a human drama, a myth about our future. The fact that it takes place far in the future is reassuring. It answers the question: With our destructive capabilities advancing faster than our consciousness, will we survive much longer? Star Trek assures us the answer is yes. The very idea of Star Trek invites us to imagine that humans have survived because they have somehow gotten better, that they might be capable of evolving beyond biology, beyond the culture of conflict and war. Yet the series never allows us to linger in that fantasy for long. A friend of ours teaches a course at the university on Star Trek entitled "The History of the Future," and I suspect his students discover in short order how much the history of the future resembles the history of the past. Like Earth in our time, the Star Trek galaxy is a dangerous place held together by fragile alliances that sometimes crumble into war. Individuals and entire species, human and otherwise, struggle with the ageless conflicts of territory and tribe. Hate, avarice, jealousy, love, narcissism, and compassion still prevail over logic, and the biology of species still rules the day. Star Trek reminds us who we are no matter where we are, in the midwestern corn belt or on the far edge of an unmapped galaxy. It doesn't deny our destructive qualities; it shows us how much can be accomplished when we opt to use our constructive ones instead. And it doesn't shelter us from the solemn consequences of our many inhumanities; these loom even larger against the backdrop of deep space.

If I ask Dylan why he loves Star Trek, he will not say: "Because it is an elaborate metaphor describing my biological mission to explore the universe by moving objects through space." He might say, "I like the uniforms" or "Captain Picard is cool." Typically, he will just shrug and roll his eyes, indicating what a dumb, parent question it is indeed, for how can a boy describe a love so elemental it dwells in the very shape of his brain?

Some might argue that, by reducing my son to his biological groundwork, I haven't understood him so much as diminished him. But that is not what I intend. I want to honor all that he is, without denying his essential architecture, the structures and circuitry that shape his dreams. He has already earned my deepest respect, having passed upon his birth through the gates of oblivion, down into the darkness of our arms. He is already on the voyage. At the age of five, he has already had to endure fear. He arrived mute, unable to speak the simplest of needs. He has survived thus far our well-intentioned ignorance. He has entrusted himself to us in the faith that we would turn out to be benevolent, even compassionate beings.

Having given up his celestial consciousness for Earth, his cord to the universe frayed, then severed, he soon set about the task of learning everything there is to learn. He has learned hunger, love, attachment, rage, disappointment, ambivalence, indulgence, and deprivation. He has learned trees. He has learned wet. He has learned ancient. He knows about Darwin. He can tell you about tectonic plates. He knows the power politics at his father's workplace. He can explain that his attachment to a stuffed lavender dog with a sparkling pink secret compartment that locks and unlocks with a key is a gender violation that he has chosen willfully to commit. He already knows that materialism is an addiction with a buzz to it like nothing else. He already knows the alphabet. He already knows that the alphabet he knows isn't the only alphabet. He can define "compassion." He knows that gamblers lose more than they win. He has already asked what are probably the most brilliant questions of his childhood.

He is five and goes to sleep each night clutching a stuffed penguin, knowing all this, and, I suspect, feeling vulnerable about how much more he needs to know.

If you ask him what he wants to do, he'll say he wants to watch Star Trek.

He is already on the voyage. We go about our business as mother and son with weird nonchalance, mostly oblivious that we are hurtling through space at unfathomable speeds. I'm under orders to go with him, as far as I can.

Copyright © 1999 by Patricia Stevens

About the Author

Patricia Stevens has written essays that appear in Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul as well as in The Healing Circle: Authors Writing of Recovery. She has received the James Michener Fellowship and the Nelson Algren Short Story Award. She is the mother of two sons and lives in Portland, Oregon.