Ensign Spock, a young half-Vulcan science officer fresh out of Starfleet Academy and newly posted to the Enterprise, found himself alone in a turbolift with the ship’s formidable first officer, a human woman known as Number One. They were waiting for me to rescue them from the silence that reigns in all elevators, as universal as the vacuum of space.

I looked up from the screen of my iPad to my father, lying unconscious, amid tubes and wires, in his starship of a bed, in the irresolute darkness of an I.C.U. at 3 A.M. Ordinarily when my father lay on his back his abdomen rose up like the telescope dome of an observatory, but now there seemed to be nothing between the bed rails at all, just a blanket pulled as taut as a drum skin and then, on the pillow, my father’s big, silver-maned head. Scarecrow, after the flying monkeys had finished with him. His head was tilted upward and his jaw hung slack. All the darkness in the room seemed to pool in his open mouth.

Hey, Dad, I need a line, I said, breaking, if only in my head, the silence that reigned between us. I’m writing dialogue for Mr. Spock.

I’d tried talking aloud to my father a few times in the hours since he’d lost consciousness, telling him all the things that, I’d read, you were supposed to tell a dying parent. There was never any trace of a response. No twitch of an eye or a cheek, no ghost of a tender or rueful smile. I wanted to believe that he’d heard me, heard that I loved him, that I forgave him, that I was thankful to him for having taught me to love so many of the things I loved most, “Star Trek” among them, but it felt like throwing a wish and a penny into a dry fountain. My father and I had already done all the talking we were ever going to do.

Can’t help you there, said my father, a pediatrician, though long retired from practice. Now, if you were writing dialogue for Doctor Spock . . .

My father had slipped into unconsciousness twelve hours earlier, about an hour after we stopped the intravenous adrenaline that had been keeping his blood pressure up. Until then, he’d been responsive, aware, irritable, funny, querulous, weak, confused, furious, loopy, but recognizably himself. A studied, even militant avoider of exercise all his life, he had been seriously overweight for most of the past forty years, diabetic for a decade. His kidneys were failing. So was his liver. The latest enemy was acute hypotension, which when untreated would drop him into the scary nether regions of the mmHg scale. But the norepinephrine drip that could magically restore my father to a close approximation of the man we remembered was likely to put him into cardiac arrest. His caregivers had gently and regretfully begun to suggest that it might be time to stop treating this particular element among the complex of things that were killing him. A heart attack would be painful and frightening.

It was decided, not easily and not without reservation, to let go of him, and to let him go. It was agreed that, when he went, he ought not to be alone. My stepmother and two half brothers, who had been caring for my father without respite over the course of his decline, were exhausted and depleted. My brother and I, the sons of his first marriage, had flown up from the Bay Area to Portland, hoping not just to spend time with our dad but to give everyone else a break. So I took the first night shift. Following the logic of mercy, I was hoping that it might also be the last.

Back in the turbolift, Number One made the banal observation that people were reluctant to talk in elevators. Ensign Spock conceded her point, but I wondered if this would remain true in the twenty-third century. Once the Eugenics Wars were over, and Zefram Cochrane had invented the warp drive, surely humanity would find a way to eliminate awkwardness, along with war, intolerance, avarice, superstition, and other pressing social ills. I tried to divert myself, with this question, from pondering what it would be like if my father died while I was sitting next to his bed, in a sleeper chair, wearing drawstring pajama bottoms and an “Illmatic” T-shirt, with my stocking feet up on the extendable footrest and my iPad, in its keyboard case, open in my lap, writing a short film about Mr. Spock’s first day on the job. I wondered if I would see or otherwise sense the instant when the hundred billion neurons in my father’s brain abandoned the eighty-year feat of electrochemical legerdemain known as Robert Chabon, and the father I had loved so imperfectly, and by whom I had been so imperfectly loved, pulled off one last vanishing act.

I can give you the exact date of the first time I ever saw Mr. Spock on TV, I said. September 15, 1967.

Hmm, I had just started my fellowship at Albert Einstein. We were living in Flushing. So you would have been . . . ?

Four. I must have sneaked out of bed, or come to ask for a glass of water. I didn’t know that it was Mr. Spock, or that you were watching “Star Trek.” There was just this scary-looking guy with the ears and the eyebrows. A pointy-eared woman, too, with enormous hair. Super-scary music, two guys fighting in a place made out of rocks. One of them got his shirt slashed open. It was just a glimpse, and I completely forgot it until, I don’t know, maybe six years later, when I saw “Amok Time” in reruns. And “Amok Time” first aired on September 15, 1967. The first episode of the second season.

I had looked up the date on Memory Alpha, an indispensable online repository of “Trek” lore, when, as a brief detour from my work on a new series, “Star Trek: Picard,” I began planning to write a short film, “Q&A,” that would feature a youthful Mr. Spock.

“Amok Time,” my father said. The second-best episode.

Of the original series.

There’s only one series, for me.

I knew my father felt this way, and understood why, though I didn’t necessarily share the feeling. There was plenty more “Star Trek” to love. “The Inner Light,” from “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and “Far Beyond the Stars,” from “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” were two of my favorite episodes of television, period. But, when I heard the words “Star Trek,” I never pictured, say, the conflicted Klingon Starfleet officer Worf, or the buttock-headed, avaricious Ferengi, or the sleek, cetacean U.S.S. Voyager, from later series. I thought of the originals: Kirk and Spock and their Enterprise, the NCC-1701.

The best episode, of course, my father continued, No. 1, is “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Then “Amok Time.” Then, No. 3 . . . Ricardo Montalban.

“You’ll have to imagine the melody for this next song, too.” Facebook

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Shopping Cartoon by Evan Lian

“Space Seed.”

Fourth, the Horta.

“Devil in the Dark.”

It was my job, always, to bother with the titles.

And five. Hmm.

Come on, I said. Spock with a goatee.