New York City, 1935
They left Twenty-first Street in the autumn of 1933, because the building went to the bank and there was no arguing with a bank in that year, and they crossed the river into Brooklyn and took two floors of a walk-up on Nostrand Avenue. The Costellos came. So did the widow Ferraro, and the man off the docks with the bad leg who had fixed the plumbing and stayed. Edith found all of them rooms before she found her own, and never once said a word about the building in front of anybody, then or afterward.
His son was born in a walk-up on Nostrand Avenue at four in the morning on the ninth of April, during a thunderstorm. Kirk was not there, because he was working a night hatch on the Brooklyn piers, and by the time the message reached him and he ran the last nine blocks in the rain it was over and the baby was asleep.
Edith was sitting up against the pillows with her hair stuck to her forehead and an expression of enormous, exhausted, entirely private satisfaction, and when he came through the door soaking wet with his cap in his hand she looked at him and said:
"Well. He has your ridiculous chin."
He could not speak.
He had commanded a starship. He had faced boarding parties, and watched a world burn from orbit, and made the kind of decisions a man makes at 0300 with nine seconds left, and had made them cleanly, and had never once frozen.
He stood in the doorway of a rented bedroom in Brooklyn in 1935 and could not move and could not speak.
"Jim," she said, more gently. "Come and look at your son."
She said your son, and she was right, and she would never in her life know that it was the second time a woman had said that to him.
The first had been on a bench outside a medical annexe in the year 2261. The woman had been a scientist. She had said it, then asked him to stay away from the boy, and he had thought about it for two days and done what she asked. There is a photograph he was not supposed to have. He had looked at it a great deal on the Enterprise, and he had not seen it in five years, and he could not any longer be certain of the shape of the mouth.
He was never going to see that boy grown. He had known that in 2261 and he had accepted it then as a thing done for good reasons, and standing in the doorway of a rented bedroom in Brooklyn he found that he had not accepted it at all.
* *
They called him Samuel, for a brother who would not be born for about three hundred years, whom Kirk would never see again, and who was, at that moment, in the strictest possible sense, neither alive nor dead nor born, and would be all three, in an order no language has a tense for.
He wrote the name in the front of a ledger that night, in a small furious hand.
Samuel George Kirk. 9 April 1935.
And underneath it, because he could not help it, because he was who he was:
He is real.
* *
He sat up with the baby that night, because Edith could not, and because there was nobody else.
He sat in a chair by the window in the dark with a six-hour-old infant on his shoulder, and the storm went over, and the rain stopped, and the sky over Brooklyn went from black to gray to a kind of dirty pearl, and the child slept.
And James Kirk sat in the dark and counted it out.
He will be six in 1941. He will be seventeen in 1952 and there will be a war on in Korea and he will want to go. He will be twenty-seven in 1962 and if the missiles fly he will be in this city and I will be able to do nothing at all. He will be thirty-four in 1969 and men will walk on the moon and he will watch it on a television and I will be sitting next to him and I will not be able to tell him what it means. He will be sixty-five in the year 2000. And he will die, probably, somewhere around 2020. And he will be dust for two hundred and forty years before I am born.
He shifted the child's weight, very carefully, and the child made a small sound and did not wake.
And in three hundred and thirty-two years a woman will hand me a personnel file on the bridge of a starship, and I will not know, and I will never know, that the officer whose name is on it is not descended from this boy. Because none of this is going to be in it. None of it.
He looked down at his son.
"You are real," he said, out loud, in an empty room, at half past five in the morning.
And then, because there was no one to hear him, and because he had not said it out loud in five years, and because he had reached, that night, some final wall inside himself and gone through it:
"My name is James Tiberius Kirk," he said, to a sleeping infant, in a rented room in Brooklyn in 1935. "I was born in Riverside, Iowa, in the year two thousand two hundred and thirty-three. I commanded the starship Enterprise. I had four hundred and thirty people under my hand and I knew every one of their names."
The baby breathed.
"And I have a son named David," said Kirk, "who is six years old and three hundred years from here, and I gave his mother my word, and I am never going to see him grown."
He shifted the child's weight.
"And this is my son. And he is real. And that is the whole of the report."
He sat there until the sun came up.