New York City, June 1932
They were married on a Saturday morning by a clerk at the courthouse who had done nine of them already that day and would do six more before lunch.
It cost two dollars. There were two witnesses, because the law required two: Mrs. Ferraro from the second floor, who wept, and a man named Abe Sorkin who happened to be in the corridor and whom Edith had known for four minutes and who was, by the time they reached the steps outside, apparently a friend of the family.
She wore a blue dress. It was not new. She had cut the collar off it and sewn a different one on, badly, on purpose, because, as she pointed out on the way, a person ought to be able to see where a thing has been repaired.
They had been in the same building for nineteen months and had not touched each other once. That was not a decision either of them had made. It had simply become true, in the way things become true between two people who have agreed not to say something, and it had gone on so long that neither of them any longer knew how to end it. And in the spring of 1932 Edith Keeler had solved the problem the way she solved every problem, which was directly.
She had come into the kitchen on a Tuesday and said: "We are going to have to get married, because Mrs. Ferraro has been telling the Costellos that we already are, and I have been letting her, and it has gone on for a year and I am tired of it."
"Is that a proposal?" Kirk had said.
"It is a notification," Edith had said, and gone out to see about the boiler.
* *
The clerk asked for his name.
And James Kirk stood at a wooden counter in a courthouse in the summer of 1932 with his hat in his hands and understood that he had come, at last, to the final door.
He could give a false name. It would be sensible. It would be the correct operational decision, and he had been trained for fifteen years by the finest institution the human race had ever built to make correct operational decisions, and the correct one was to lie. He had a dozen names available. He had built a life out of nothing in the winter of 1930, and there was a clerk on Chambers Street who would make him a birth certificate for forty dollars.
He turned the argument over in about two seconds, the way a man turns a coin.
If you put your real name in a public register, you are a man from the future writing himself into the record. You do not know what that touches.
And then:
And if you do not, there is no document anywhere in this world that says I was here. Not one. I will live eighty years and die and there will be nothing.
He looked at her. She was standing beside him in a blue dress with a badly sewn collar, chin up, in a corridor that smelled of floor wax and cigarettes, thirty-four years old, looking at him with an expression of such enormous and undefended patience that he could not breathe.
"James Tiberius Kirk," he said.
The clerk wrote it down without looking up.
And that was the whole of it: nine letters and a middle name, in blue ink, in the marriage register of the City of New York, filed in a box, on a shelf, in a basement, in a building that would stand for another ninety years, and that no living soul would ever have any reason to open.
* *
Outside, on the courthouse steps, in the sun, Edith Keeler took his arm.
"Tiberius," she said.
"Don't."
"Tiberius."
"My father had a sense of humor," Kirk said, "and no sense at all."
"I am going to use it, at moments of my own choosing, for the rest of my life."
And she did.
And she was buried with the right to.