New York City, 1930
The worst thing that ever happened to James Kirk was the next morning.
He had prepared himself for something. Some kind of arrival, some sense of a door closing behind him, some marker in the world to say that he had crossed a line. He had made a decision that ended a universe, and he expected, at some level below thought, that the universe would acknowledge it.
He woke at half past five in a room he had been living in for six weeks: fourth floor, back, over the alley, a bed and a chair and a washstand and a window that looked at a wall. He had taken it in November for three dollars a week from a woman who had made him fill out no forms and asked him no questions.
He lay in the dark and listened to the building. Somewhere below, a pipe knocked. Somewhere above, a child cried and stopped. Out in the street a horse went past, unhurried, and a man said something to it in a low voice, the way men talk to horses at half past five in the morning.
And nothing was wrong.
That was the whole of it, and it went into him like a spike.
Nothing is wrong. The world has not noticed. I reached out my hand yesterday afternoon and pulled the twentieth century off its foundations, and the milk still came.
He got up. He shaved with a razor he had bought in November, washed in cold water, put on the same shirt he had worn the day before, and went down.
She was already in the kitchen. She was always already in the kitchen. He had come down at five, and at four, and once, in December, at half past three, and found her at the stove in a cardigan with her hair down, and she had looked at him and said, "You can't sleep either," and made him coffee and not asked him a single question about it.
"Good morning," Edith said.
"Good morning."
She was doing the flour, measuring it into the two big enamel bowls that would become, in about four hours, the only meal two hundred men would eat that day. She did not look up.
"You're limping."
He stopped. "It's nothing."
"You went down on that street yesterday like a sack of coal with a hundred and thirty pounds of me under you, and you are limping. Sit down. I'll look at it after."
"Edith."
"Sit down, Jim."
He sat down.
And that was the moment. Not the street. Not the voice in the frozen air. Here, on a kitchen chair at six in the morning in a basement on Twenty-first Street, watching a woman measure flour:
I am going to sit in this chair every morning for the rest of my life. Nobody is coming. She is going to ask me to peel the potatoes in about four minutes. And I am going to do it. And I am going to do it again tomorrow, and in 1940, and in 1955, and there is no ship, and no bridge, and no crew, and nothing at the end of this except more of it.
He put his hands flat on the table.
Edith looked up. She looked at him for a long moment, with the scoop in her hand, and Kirk, who had spent his adult life being looked at by people who wanted something from him, found he had no defense at all against being looked at by somebody who did not.
"You lost them," she said.
He did not answer.
"Your friends. The doctor and the tall one." She set the scoop down. "They did not go home, Jim. Or if they did, you are not going with them. You knew it yesterday in the street, and you have been sitting on it for fourteen hours, and it is eating you alive."
"Edith."
"I am not asking."
"I know."
"I have never asked you anything." She picked up the scoop and went back to the flour, and her voice did not change. "Not where you came from. Not why a man who talks like an officer is sleeping in my back room for three dollars a week. Not why you flinch at the radio. Not why, your first night in this kitchen, you looked at my ceiling as though you had never seen a ceiling before in your life."
She tipped the flour into the bowl.
"I am not going to start now. But I want you to know that I have noticed, and that I am not a stupid woman, and that when you decide to tell me, I will be here, and I will not be surprised."
Kirk sat with his hands flat on the wood.
"Peel the potatoes," said Edith Keeler.
And he did. Forty pounds of them, on a kitchen chair, with a paring knife and a bucket between his knees, the skins coming off in long spirals, his hands very steady, thinking about nothing at all.
It took two hours and ten minutes.
He did it again the next day.