Habitus

In the memory I am thirteen years old.

It’s a cold night in September, a few months into what my dad and I call my science fiction initiation. I sit on the floor of my parents’ room, my back against the foot of their bed. My dad holds a mug of chai tea. His long legs stretch out on the floor. We stare at the TV that rests on my mother’s bureau and wait for it to warm up. It’s an old TV, the square kind with a curved screen I can rap my knuckles on to produce a satisfying hollow thunk.

The VCR player hums and wheezes, unhappy after a decade of dormancy. When I was little, I used to know how to work it, but then it got shoved into a box in my attic and the knowledge became as hazy as dreams, a casualty of growing older. I didn’t even realize we still had VHS tapes until Dad unearthed his collection at the beginning of my initiation. The tapes’ spines are meticulously labeled: Contact, Independence Day, every Star Trek movie ever made.

It’s the Star Trek movies we’ve been working through for these past months. First was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. We skipped Star Trek I because it was, according to my father, not worth watching. In his opinion, Khan is the best of all the movies—the golden age of Star Trek. But when we watched the old VHS tape, I couldn’t enjoy it, despite my best efforts. Characters I didn’t know ran around in weird shirts (or, in the case of the titular Khan, no shirt). Half the dialogue was mumbled. The special effects were bad. The world didn’t pull me in and grab me the way it did my father, who knew all the lines. He said along with Spock, “I have been—and always shall be—your friend.”

Originally, I asked my father to show me Star Trek because I knew he liked sci-fi movies, so watching them seemed like something we could do together. A way for us to grow closer. That’s why even though I haven’t fallen in love with Star Trek, I haven’t told Dad. As a thirteen-year-old beginning the unsteady stretch from childhood to adolescence, I am terrified that I will grow into one of those teens who fights with her parents, who slams doors and yells, “You don’t understand!” I don’t want my dad to become a stranger, not when my growth spurt and mood swings and bodily changes have made me feel like I’m becoming a stranger to myself.

So I pretend that I like Star Trek more than I do because it’s time I get to spend with my father. Night by night, we’ve progressed through the movies: The Voyage Home, The Final Frontier, The Undiscovered Country. They give Dad and me something to talk about.

(Later, when I am a sophomore in college, I will learn the term common habitus in an art history class and realize that’s what thirteen-year-old me wants: stories in common with my dad, a language to talk to him in.)

Tonight, as I sit on the floor next to the wheezing VCR, we have already worked through seven movies on seven VHS tapes. It’s taken us a few months because we don’t watch them all in one go. We squeeze the time in while my three little sisters are busy with their nightly episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show on the newer TV in the living room. They are deeply uninterested in Star Trek but also will not give us a moment’s peace if we try to watch it when they’re not busy.

Lindsay (who’s ten) sometimes pops her head into the bedroom and says some variation on “Why is that guy a robot?” or “Is that alien eating his face?” before I shoo her away. So my Star Trek experience is chopped into discrete thirty-minute increments, punctuated by the Dick Van Dyke laugh track that bleeds through the bedroom door.

When the TV is finally ready, Dad queues up tonight’s movie. The screen shows an unflattering frame of Picard’s face. We’re resuming Star Trek: Insurrection, which features the cast from the spin-off The Next Generation—Captain Picard, whom I like much better than Captain Kirk, since he’s more prone to quote Shakespeare than to run around blowing things up; and the android Data, whom I love because of his struggles to understand himself as he grows more human. Like me, he doesn’t connect with people very well. Like me, he doesn’t always understand his own feelings.

The Next Generation crew makes more sense to me than the Original Series crew. Maybe that’s why tonight, I press my knees more closely to my chest and stare up at the TV in anticipation. I am, somehow, excited.

“You ready?” Dad says.

“I’m ready,” I say.

The movie springs into motion. Picard jolts from a still image to a living person. He’s on a faraway planet, walking through a village called Ba’ku, which was created by people who have rejected technology in favor of centuries-long lifespans. It’s night. A woman from the village, who is named Anij, walks beside him. They speak about their different ways of life. The soundtrack plays soft behind them. The spicy scent of Dad’s tea fills the bedroom, and I almost believe it is the smell of alien flowers, alien earth.

Anij says of the young people who want to leave her village: “They’re attracted to stories of a faster pace of life.”

Picard replies: “Most of my people who live that faster life would sell their souls to slow it down.”

And Anij says: “Who wouldn't be tempted by the promise of perpetual youth?”

Sitting with my spine pressed against Dad’s bed, staring up at the old TV, I understand. If I could slow time down, I would. If I could stay a kid forever, procrastinate adulthood, I would.

Anij asks Picard: “Have you ever experienced a perfect moment in time?

And Picard says: “A perfect moment?”

And Anij says: “When time seemed to stop, and you could almost live in that moment.”

Picard describes the first time he saw Earth from space. But I am thinking of this moment with my dad and his tea and the hissing VCR. I am thinking of all our movie nights, which have acquired the feeling of ritual, meditation. They make me feel deeply present, as though now is the only time that matters. They connect me to my father. They connect me to myself.

(When I am a junior in college, I will hear Virginia Woolf’s term “moments of being” in a creative writing class and think, “Yes, I know about those! The Star Trek moments!” And I will be amazed that writers across genres and mediums, from Woolf to whoever wrote the Insurrection script, have said the same true thing in different words.)

The characters meander through the village. I draw my knees to my chest. Picard cracks a joke about how even though Anij has been alive for three hundred years, she hasn’t learned to swim. And for the first time, I understand why my dad loves science fiction. Even though it’s filled with aliens and androids and non-human things, it asks us what it means to be a human, to exist in a world that is large and confusing. It reflects us back to ourselves, the way Data and Anij reflect myself back to me.

The scene ends— a cut to a silhouette on a ridge and a sunrise. Dad shifts, leans forward. I don’t understand why until he presses pause on the VCR.

“That was a good scene,” he says. “Wasn’t it?”

Unsure of where he’s going with this, I nod.

“The music, the dialogue, the camerawork,” he says. (He works in video production, so he is attuned to camerawork.) “It just all came together. Do you mind if we watch it again?”

I don’t mind, and I tell him so.

He rewinds the tape. The movie skitters backwards. We watch the scene from the beginning.

And from that scene—that moment when time seems to stop—my future unspools. Once Dad and I have finished the Star Trek movies, we move on to Stargate and Contact. When I am in high school and even in college, we go to the theater to see movies like Interstellar and Arrival. I write science fiction, read friends’ science fiction, go to linguists’ talks about Klingon and the languages of science fiction. I grow up. Growing up turns out not to be so bad. I do not lose touch with my father. I do not lose touch with myself.