Brooklyn, 1970
It was an ordinary Tuesday.
That is the whole of it, and it needs to be said plainly, because there was nothing else about it. It was an ordinary Tuesday in the spring of 1970, and James Kirk was seventy-four, and he got up at seven, which was late for him, because his back was bad and because he had begun, in the last two years, to be tired in a way that did not go away when he slept.
He shaved. He made the coffee, because he always made the coffee, because he had done it every morning for thirty-eight years and was insufferable on the subject. He read the paper. He fixed a toaster for Mrs. Ruiz on the fourth floor, at the kitchen table, in about eleven minutes, and refused to take anything for it, and she left a whole tray of something on the counter as she went, and Edith found it and said, "That woman is going to kill us both," and ate three.
He went out at ten and walked to the shop, which he had sold in 1966 and which was now a laundromat, and he did this most days and had never once explained it to anybody. He stood outside it for about four minutes. Then he walked to the library and returned two books and took out three. He came home. He read in the chair by the window until about two, and slept for forty minutes without meaning to, and woke with the book on his chest and was annoyed about it.
In the afternoon the Ruiz baby came up, because her mother had an appointment and there was nobody else, and she was four months old and her name was Rosa, and he sat in the chair by the window with her along his forearm and looked at her for two hours.
She could not do anything. That was what he told people, over and over, for the entire four months of her life, with an enormous and entirely unfeigned delight: she cannot do anything. She could not sit up. She could not roll over. She could not focus on a face further than about eight inches away. She was, in every measurable respect, the least capable human being he had ever met.
"You are useless," he told her, in his front room, in the sunlight, on an ordinary Tuesday. "You are absolutely no use to anybody at all."
Rosa blew a bubble.
"Yes," said James Kirk. "Exactly."
* * *
At six o'clock Edith made supper. They ate at the kitchen table, the two of them, because the Ruiz baby had gone back down to her mother, and they talked about the boiler, which had been failing for eleven years and which he had rebuilt four times and which was going to have to be replaced, and about the Costello boy, who had children of his own now and still came by on Sundays, and about nothing much at all, the way two people talk who have said everything there is to say and go on talking anyway, because by then the talking is the whole of the point.
She said the thing about the boiler that she had been saying since 1961. He said the thing he always said back. She laughed.
He did the dishes. She dried, because he washed too slowly and she had never been able to stand it, and they had been doing it in that order in that kitchen for thirty-eight years, and neither of them had ever once discussed it.
And afterward she went into the front room and turned on the lamp and picked up her book, and he stood in the kitchen doorway a moment and looked at her.
She was seventy-two. She was in the second chair by the window with her feet up on the low stool, in her cardigan, reading glasses on the end of her nose, hair almost entirely white now, frowning at a page, a pencil in her hand because she wrote in books and always had and it had appalled him for four decades.
"Stop hovering," she said, without looking up.
"I'm not hovering."
"You are hovering in my doorway, and it is very unnerving, and I have asked you not to do it since the Truman administration."
He came in and sat down in his chair. He picked up his own book, and found his place, and did not read it. He sat in a chair by a window in Brooklyn on an ordinary Tuesday evening in the spring of 1970 with a book open on his knee, and looked out at the fire escape and the water tower on the building opposite and a rectangle of sky going pink, and listened to his wife turn a page.
And he thought, the way you think a thing you have thought ten thousand times:
This is it. This is what I bought. Four hundred and thirty people. A ship. Nine hundred worlds. A galaxy with my name in it somewhere. And I traded all of it for a kitchen and a boiler and a woman who writes in books. And I would do it again. God help me, I would do it again tomorrow, and I would not even have to think about it.
Edith Keeler turned another page.
"Jim," she said.
"Mm."
"You are not reading."
"I am reading."
"You have had that book open on page ninety-one for twenty minutes, and you have not moved, and I can see you out of the side of my eye, and you are doing the thing."
"What thing?"
"The thing," said Edith Keeler, "where you sit in that chair and look out that window and think about whatever it is you have never told me."
The lamp hummed.
And James Kirk, seventy-four years old, sitting in a chair in a room in Brooklyn, on an ordinary evening in the spring of 1970, said:
"Yes."
"Well," she said. "Carry on. But do it with the light on. You'll ruin your eyes."
And she went back to her book. And he sat there.
And that was the last evening of his life.