New York City, February 1931
He understood it in a kitchen, on a Tuesday, with a knife in his hand.
He had been peeling potatoes for three months, and had gotten so good at it he could do it without looking, and this was the trouble, because it left the whole of his mind free.
She was across the table doing the register with Ellis, going down a column of names, and she said, without any particular emphasis:
"There's a room on Fourteenth Street. Twice this size, and the boiler works, and the man wants forty dollars a month, and I do not have forty dollars a month."
Ellis said something.
"Not from Sorkin," Edith said. "Sorkin has already given us more than he has. No. What I want is to go and stand in front of the Board of Aldermen, and take a hundred of these men with me, and sit them in that chamber in their own coats and be looked at." She turned a page. "They're going to build a subway to Queens. Sixty million dollars. And there is not one alderman in this city who has ever been in a room with two hundred men who have not eaten. I have decided that is the whole problem, and that I am going to fix it."
And James Kirk sat with a knife in his hand and a potato half peeled and felt the whole of the future arrive on top of him like a building coming down.
There it is. That is the first sentence. It is starting now, this afternoon, in this kitchen, over a column of names, and she does not even know she is doing it. She will take a hundred men to the aldermen and it will work, because she does not build and she does not perform, she explains, and one of those men will remember it for the rest of his life. In two years a newspaper column. In four, a committee. By 1936 a movement, the most persuasive and completely correct political argument anybody makes in that entire filthy century, and it reaches the White House, and it keeps this country out of the war three years too long. And in those three years a man in Berlin finishes something. And there is no Federation. No Enterprise. No moon landing, no ship, no crew, no Bones, no anything. Not a worse future. None.
He put the knife down, carefully, on the table, which was a thing he had learned at the Academy, because a man about to lose control of himself should first put down whatever is in his hand.
"Jim?" said Edith.
"I'm all right."
"You've gone the color of the wall."
"I'm all right."
He got up and went out into the alley and stood in the cold with his back against the brick and his eyes shut.
* * *
THEN YOU MUST DO IT INSTEAD.
He had told himself for three months that he did not know what it meant. He had let himself believe it was ambiguous, that it might mean live a good life, or make it right somehow, or any one of a hundred soft and survivable things.
It meant none of them. It meant: her death was never the point.
He had been told that Edith Keeler had to die, and he had believed, because he was a soldier and soldiers are stupid in one particular direction, that what mattered was the dying. It was not the dying. It was the movement. The universe did not need her heart to stop. It needed her silent, and death had merely been the cheapest available method, and he had refused the cheap one, and so now there was only the expensive one, and the expensive one had to be paid by hand, in installments, every day, for the rest of her life.
By him.
He was going to have to take it from her. Not once, in a single terrible conversation he could brace for and be ruined by cleanly. Every day. In the small hours, in the kitchen, in a hundred conversations about aldermen and rooms on Fourteenth Street, for forty years, and she was going to fight him, and she was going to be right, and she was never going to stop being right.
He was going to have to be the thing that stood in her way. He, personally. The man she had taken in and fed and given a room to. The man she loved. He was going to be the hand on her chest for the rest of her life, and one day she was going to wonder about it, and one day she was going to hate him for it, and she would be correct to.
James Kirk stood in an alley in Brooklyn in February of 1931 and understood, finally, what he had bought. He had thought he was buying a life with her. He had bought forty years of standing between a woman and the only thing she was for.
And he was going to do it.
That was the part that finished him, standing in the cold with his eyes shut, and it was the truest thing he ever knew about himself, and he never told anyone, not her, not in forty years:
He was going to do it, and he was not going to leave. He was going to hold her back from the whole purpose of her life, and stay, and be loved for it.
And there was a word for that, and he knew the word, and he made himself say it out loud, into the freezing air, once, so that at least one human being in the universe would have said it:
"Coward."
Then he went back inside and picked up the knife and finished the potatoes.
END OF PART ONE