New York City, December 1930
He went back to Twenty-second Street.
He went on the third day, alone, and told her he was going for cigarettes, which was the first lie he ever told her, and it was so small and cost him so much that he stood on the corner for ten minutes afterward with his hands shaking.
He walked the block four times, slowly, on both sides, looking for a seam. For a mark. For some thinning in the world where two men had been standing when it took them.
There was nothing. A fruit stand, a barber's pole, a hydrant, a grating breathing warm air up out of the subway, and a place on the sidewalk about four feet from the curb where Spock had raised his hand.
He stood on it, in the cold, with the city going past on both sides, and closed his eyes, and knew he was doing something foolish, and did it anyway.
"Guardian," he said.
Nothing. A man went past and glanced at him and kept going.
"Guardian. I know you can hear me. You spoke to me in this street, in that hour, and you did not have to, and a thing that speaks when it does not have to is a thing that is listening."
Nothing at all. Two blocks up a newsboy was calling something, and the words did not carry.
James Kirk stood on a piece of sidewalk in New York with his fists in his coat pockets, and said:
"Please."
And then:
"I'll do it. I'll do whatever you want. I understood you in the street and I have understood you every hour since, and I'll spend the rest of my life doing it. But take me with you when I'm finished. Just let me see them again. At the end. Not now, I'm not asking for now. Forty years from now, fifty, when it's done and she's gone and it doesn't matter anymore, open the door for four seconds and let me look at them. That's all. That is the only thing I am ever going to ask you for."
The wind came up Twenty-second Street and went past him.
He stood there another twenty minutes. Then he opened his eyes and bought a packet of cigarettes he did not smoke, because he had said he would, and walked back to Twenty-first Street and threw them in the ash can in the alley before he went in.
"Did you get them?" Edith said.
"They were closed," said James Kirk.
And that was the second lie.
* * *
He went back six more times over the next four months, at odd hours, and stood on the same square of sidewalk and spoke to a rock on a dead planet four hundred years in the future, and it never answered him, and by the spring he had stopped asking for anything and was simply going there to stand.
The last time was in April. He did not say anything at all. He stood on the spot for about a minute and a half, then nodded, slightly, the way a man nods at a grave, and walked away, and never went back.
That was the day he understood that he lived here.