Brooklyn, 1951 to 1957
The roof came first, in the summer of 1951, on a night so hot that nobody in the building could sleep, and half of Brooklyn was up on its roofs in undershirts looking for a breath of air.
Sam was sixteen. He came up to find his father standing at the parapet with his head back, looking at a sky that over Brooklyn in 1951 had perhaps a dozen stars in it and a great deal of light.
"What are you looking at?"
"The places," said Kirk.
"What places?"
And James Kirk, who had spent twenty years not saying things, stood on a roof with his son and said a true thing sideways, because sideways was the only way he was ever allowed to say one.
"Up there. There are places up there, Sam. Not lights. Places. Worlds, with weather, and ground you could stand on, and horizons. And people are going to go to them. Not soon. But they are going to go, and they are going to build ships to do it, and the ships are going to be beautiful."
Sam looked at him. "How do you know?"
Kirk was quiet a moment. Then he gave his son the truest answer he had, wrapped so that it could pass for a father talking.
"Because I want it to be true," he said, "more than I have ever wanted anything. And a man who wants a thing that badly is either a liar or a witness. And you will have to decide for yourself which one your father is."
They stood on the roof a while longer, not talking, and down in the street somebody's radio was playing, and the heat came up off the tar, and a plane went over, low, its lights blinking, on its way to Idlewild. And Kirk put his hand for a moment on the back of the boy's neck, the way his wife did to him, and did not know, because a man is not permitted to know such things, that he had just been given the last easy summer either of them would have.
* *
Sam wanted to go to Korea in the spring of 1952.
He was seventeen, and the war was two years old, and he came home one afternoon with his jaw set in a way Kirk knew, because it was his own, and said he had been down to the recruiting office on Flatbush and they had told him to come back with a parent's signature.
Kirk was at the workbench with a radio open in front of him. He did not put the iron down.
"No," he said.
"Pop."
"No."
"You don't even know why I want to go."
"I know exactly why you want to go," said James Kirk, and that was the trouble, and he could not say the rest of it, which was: because you are seventeen, and you have never been afraid of anything, and there is a thing men your age carry that has no name and no cure except to be spent, and I have watched it spent, in numbers, on ground I could describe to you meter by meter, and I would rather cut off my hand than sign that form.
He said none of it. He said, "Because I have a bad feeling about that particular war, and I am your father, and no."
And Sam, who was seventeen and furious and right about a great many things and wrong about this one, did the worst thing he could have done, which was to look at his father for a long moment and say, quietly, "You're a coward," and go upstairs.
Kirk sat at the workbench with the iron cooling in his hand.
Edith came in from the kitchen. She had heard. She always heard.
"He'll forgive you," she said.
"I know."
"You will not tell him why."
"No."
She stood behind him and put two fingers on the back of his neck. "He is going to hate you for a year, Jim. And then he is going to turn eighteen, and he will not need your name on anything, and he will go anyway. You know that. And you are going to let him, because there is no version of this where you bar the door, and you have stood in enough rooms to know it."
Kirk did not answer, because there was no answer, and because she was right, and because the thing he had a bad feeling about was not the war in the newspapers. It was a date he did not have. That was the last cruelty the century had saved for him: he knew everything, and he did not know this. He had memorized a war he was not in, and his own son's name was written in no book he had ever read.
*
Sam turned eighteen in the April of 1953, and needed nobody's signature, and enlisted on a Tuesday and did not tell his father until it was done.
They had eleven weeks of letters. The war was ending; everyone said so; the talks at Panmunjom were down to the shape of the table. Sam wrote from Fort Dix, and then from a troop ship, and then from a place he was not permitted to name, in his mother's careful hand, cheerful, full of the wrong reassurances.
He was killed on the eleventh of July, 1953, sixteen days before the armistice, in the last serious fighting of that war, on a hill whose number Kirk learned from a telegram and was never afterward able to stop knowing. The histories, when they mentioned it at all, called it a minor action on a position of no strategic value.
The telegram came on a Thursday. Edith took it at the door, because Kirk was in the back of the shop, and she stood in the front of the shop with it in her hand for a moment before she went to him, and in that moment she aged, all at once, the way people do, and did not stop.
*
He did not weep. That was the thing Edith could not forgive the world, afterward: that her husband, who had wept at radios and at strangers and once, silently, over a bird carved from a bar of soap, did not weep for his son. He went very quiet, and very careful, and very kind, and he stayed that way, and she understood, because she understood him past the reach of the word, that he had gone to the place beyond crying, and had moved his things in, and did not intend to come back.
He wrote it in the black notebook, at the workbench, in a hand that had gone entirely to pieces.
Sam is dead. He wanted to go to a war, and I could not tell him why he should not, and he went, and the thing I feared came for him on a hill I had never heard of, sixteen days before it stopped. I knew that four hundred thousand men would stand where they were meant to stand. I did not know that one of them was mine. I have arithmetic instead of a soul, and it did not have this in it anywhere.
And underneath it, after a while, in a slightly steadier hand, the truest and most terrible line in the whole book:
He was real. Nobody will ever know it but me. And one day, not even me.
Edith found him there, on the floor of the shop with his back against the workbench, the way she had found him once before, over another child who was not theirs. She sat down beside him on the filthy linoleum in her good coat and took the notebook out of his hands and closed it, and she did not tell him that he was not a coward, because they were both too old now for things that were not true.
"He forgave you," she said instead. "On the ship, before the end. He wrote it in a letter I have not been able to give you, and I am going to give it to you now. And then we are going to go home. Because that is what is left, Jim. There is home, and there is me, and there is the going on, and there is nothing else, and it is going to have to be enough, because it is what there is."
And James Kirk put his face against his wife's shoulder, on the floor of a radio shop in Brooklyn in the summer of 1953, and did not weep, and she held the back of his neck with two fingers, and they stayed there until it was dark.
* *
The beep came on the fourth of October, 1957, and James Kirk heard it in the back of his own shop, on a set he had built himself, because he had known the date for twenty-seven years and had made sure, that evening, to be somewhere with a good antenna and nobody to see his face.
It was nothing. That was the thing about it. It was a thin, patient, mindless tone, twenty-odd megacycles, on and off, on and off, coming down out of the sky from a polished metal ball the size of a beach ball, with four whip antennas and no purpose whatsoever except to be up there and to say, to anybody listening, I am here.
And half the world heard it and was afraid.
And James Kirk sat in the back of a radio shop on Flatbush Avenue and listened to the first man-made object ever to circle the Earth go over, beeping, at eighteen thousand miles an hour, and put his face in his hands. Not because he was afraid. Because it had started. The schedule had started, and it was on time. Everything she had told two hundred starving men in a cellar in 1931 was true, and was beginning, on time, exactly as he had always known it would, and he was the only person on the planet who was not surprised, and there was no one, no one at all, that he could tell.
He closed the shop early and walked home under a sky he could not see for the lights, with a thing crossing it that he could not see either, and let himself in, and Edith was at the table with the paper open to the front page, which was black with it.
She looked up at him.
"It's yours, isn't it," she said. "This one. This is one of yours."
He sat down across from her. "It's the first one."
"The first of what?"
And James Kirk looked at his wife across a kitchen table in Brooklyn in October of 1957, and for one moment, one only, came closer to telling her than he had come in twenty-seven years, and then did not.
"The first of all of it," he said.
And Edith Keeler reached across the table and put two fingers on the back of his hand, which was not where she usually put them, and left them there, and did not ask, because she had promised, on a night in the rain in 1931, that she never would.