Brooklyn, 1954 to 1957
The car came in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon in March, eight months after, and it had Pennsylvania plates, and it sat at the curb before anybody got out of it.
Kirk watched it from the shop window for twenty minutes. He did not go out.
The man who finally came up the steps was twenty-three years old and wearing a civilian suit that had been bought for somebody with wider shoulders, and he took his hat off before he knocked, which almost nobody did anymore.
"Mr. Kirk. My name is Ray Ostrowski. I was Sam's lieutenant."
* *
Edith put him at the kitchen table. She gave him coffee he did not drink and a plate he did not touch, and then sat down across from him and waited. Kirk stood by the sink because he could not make himself sit.
Ostrowski said he had been trying to get to Brooklyn since October. He said he had driven down from Scranton twice before, and turned around both times, once at the Holland Tunnel. He said his mother had finally told him that if he did not go he was going to be a certain kind of man for the rest of his life, and that she had been right about it.
"I want to tell you what happened," he said. "All of it. And then I'll go, and I won't ever bother you again, and if you want to throw me out of here in the middle I'll understand that too."
"Tell it," said Edith Keeler.
*
There had been five of them. They had been cut off on the eleventh of July, because the radio was dead.
That was the first thing Ostrowski said and he said it looking at the tablecloth.
Sam had carried the radio. He had asked for it. He had walked into a supply tent in Pusan in the February and talked a sergeant out of the job on the grounds that he knew the insides of a set better than anybody in the company, which was true, and which he had learned in a shop on Flatbush Avenue from a man who was standing eleven feet away from Ray Ostrowski at that moment, and could not breathe properly.
He had kept it running for four months. On parts that were not for it.
And on the tenth of July a mortar round had come down twenty yards away and taken the whole of the front of it off. Sam had spent the night trying, in the dark, with his hands, and had not been able to do it, and had said so, and had been extremely quiet about it afterward.
"He apologized to me," said Ostrowski. "He was still apologizing about it the next morning. I want you to know that. That was the last conversation I had with him where he was just talking."
*
They were taken in the afternoon.
Not a battle. There was no battle. Twenty men came up a draw that Ostrowski had been told was covered, and was not. It was over in about ninety seconds, and nobody fired a shot because there was nothing to fire it at yet, and then there was too much.
They were walked back about two miles, and put in a hole with a roof on it.
Then an officer came. He had good English. He was not a shouter.
*
He asked Ostrowski for the disposition of the line.
He was pleasant about it. He explained, reasonably, that the war was ending, that everybody in that hole knew it, that the talks were down to arguing about furniture, and that nothing Ostrowski told him could possibly matter in a month.
"I gave him my name and my rank and my number," said Ostrowski. "That's what you do. That's the whole of what you do. I said it four times."
The officer heard him out. He was not angry.
Then he said that one of the five would be shot, and that Ostrowski could pick, and that if Ostrowski would not pick then the choice would be made for him, and it would be made carelessly.
"He was polite about it," said Ostrowski. "That is what I cannot get past. He was polite the whole way through."
*
"And I did not say anything," he said. "I want to be exact. I did not choose and I did not talk. I stood there and I did not say one word, and I was going to keep not saying it, and I want you to know that too, because it is the worst thing about me and I have not told it to anybody."
The officer looked at them for a moment, and then walked down the line, and stopped in front of a nineteen-year-old from Bayonne named Petrosino, who had been crying since the draw, and put a hand on his shoulder, and turned him.
And Sam Kirk stepped in front of him. That was all.
*
Nobody had told him to. There was no order, and there was not time for one.
Ostrowski said he did not shove Petrosino, and he did not make a speech, and he did not look at anybody. He took one step to the left, and one step forward, which put him between a nineteen-year-old and an officer with a pistol, and he put his hands down at his sides, and that was all he did.
He did not say anything at all.
"I have thought about that for eight months," said Ray Ostrowski. "I have thought about it every day. He did not know Petrosino. They were not friends. Petrosino had been with us nine days."
*
"And about ninety seconds after," he said, "I told that man everything he asked me. The line, the guns, the relief, all of it. Ninety seconds. Not two minutes."
He was looking at the tablecloth.
"So he did not buy anything with it. That is the part I came here to say. I held out, and your son paid for it, and then I did not hold out. There was no reason for any of it. I have been trying to find a way to say that to you since October, and there is not one."
Nothing happened in the kitchen. Not for a while.
*
And James Tiberius Kirk stood at his own sink in Brooklyn.
He had been the man in that hole. Not that hole. Others. He had stood on a bridge with a screen in front of him and a voice on it saying that it would kill one of his people if he did not hand over the thing he could not hand over, and he had said no, in the correct tone, in the correct number of words, and somebody else had paid it. He had written the letter afterward, and signed it himself, and gone back on shift.
He had done it more than once. He had been praised for it.
He had never once been on this side of the table, and he found that there was no word available to him in Standard or in English, and that thirty-eight years of being the most careful man alive had not prepared him for a boy in a bad suit in his kitchen apologizing for having been given the same choice he had been given, and making the same one.
He put his hand flat on the drainboard.
"Lieutenant," he said, and could not get any further.
*
Edith moved first. She put a hand on Ostrowski's shoulder. He flinched so hard she took it away.
For once she had read a person wrong. She stood there a second, recalibrated, and pulled out the chair opposite him. "All right," she said. "No touching. You will eat something."
"Then you will start again from the beginning, and you will tell me what he was like in the mornings, and what he complained about, and whether he was any good at cards. You will take as long as you like. You drove down here twice and turned around, so apparently you have some things left to say."
Ray Ostrowski put his face in his hands. After a while he ate. He started again from the beginning, and stayed until nine o'clock at night.
He wrote every Christmas until 1969. He named a son Samuel in 1958. He was not able to say why in the letter, and did not try.
*
That night Kirk went down to the shop, and opened the black notebook, and did not make an entry.
He wrote on the facing page, outside the ledger and outside the numbering, in a hand that was steady for the first time since July:
He stepped in front. Nobody taught him that. I never told him one word about what I am and he did it anyway, in about a second, for a boy from Bayonne he had known nine days.
I have spent twenty-four years believing that every good thing in this century was a thing I had to hold still with both hands.
It was already here. It was in my kitchen. I made it and I did not teach it and I was not told.
* *
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 almost nothing: 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, 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.