I am the GodVolume II: The Question
Chuck Norris came back on Thursday.
This requires no justification in the telling of it, but it received considerable justification in the private accounting that Chuck Norris conducted between Tuesday morning and Thursday morning, which is the kind of accounting that takes place below the level of deliberate thought — in the background, running without announcement, producing its results in the form of decisions that feel, when they arrive, less like choices than like corrections.
On Tuesday he had fixed a pipe.
The pipe had needed fixing.
He had fixed it and driven away and returned to his house and made his eggs and wound his watch and run his fourteen miles on Wednesday morning and stood in his kitchen with his coffee and looked out the window at the street, which was the street it always was, and the accounting had completed and the result was: Thursday.
He went back on Thursday.
The justification, such as it was, was the valve.
He had mentioned the valve at the door on Tuesday — the hot supply line valve, getting old, another year maybe two. He had mentioned it because it was accurate and because accurate information, when available, should be provided. He had not mentioned it as a reason to return.
Standing in his kitchen on Wednesday morning he had found himself thinking about the valve.
Not with urgency. The valve was not urgent. A year, maybe two — that is not urgency, that is the comfortable distance of a future problem, the kind that sits on the horizon and can be approached in an organized way when the time is right.
The valve was not the reason he thought about it.
He thought about it because thinking about the valve required thinking about the house, and thinking about the house required thinking about the kitchen, and thinking about the kitchen produced, in the background accounting, a quality of attention that the narrator recognized and noted without comment.
He was thinking about the room.
The small room. The linoleum. The morning light. The two empty cups in the sink.
The room that had felt like a room.
He went back on Thursday.
He told himself it was the valve.
The narrator recorded both things.
Marcus Webb opened the door with the expression of someone who is surprised and is deciding, in the moment of surprise, whether to show it.
He showed it.
"You're back," he said.
"The valve," Chuck said.
Marcus looked at him.
"The valve," Marcus said.
"Hot supply line. I said a year, maybe two. I wanted to check the fitting while I was thinking about it."
Marcus stood in the doorway.
He was a plumber. He understood valves. He understood that a valve getting old was a real thing and not an invented thing and that checking a fitting was a reasonable activity for a person concerned about a valve.
He also understood, with the professional instinct of someone who has spent seventeen years diagnosing problems by looking at them, that the man on his doorstep was not here because of the valve.
He did not say this.
He stepped back from the door.
"Coffee?" he said.
"Sure," Chuck said.
The valve was fine.
Chuck checked it with the same complete attention he had given the fitting on Tuesday — the attention that made ordinary technique look like what it was capable of being — and determined that it was fine. Not deteriorating faster than expected. Not developing secondary issues. Fine.
"Fine," he said.
"Good," Marcus said, from behind his coffee cup.
Chuck closed the cabinet.
He stood up.
He drank his coffee.
Marcus drank his coffee.
The kitchen was the kitchen — linoleum, morning light coming through the window at the angle it came through at eight in the morning on a Thursday in March, the specific quality of a room that is lived in and knows it.
"You do this a lot?" Marcus said. "Go around checking other people's plumbing."
"No," Chuck said.
"Just me."
"So far."
Marcus looked at him.
"Why?"
Chuck considered the question.
The narrator watched him consider it, because the narrator watches everything, and noted that the consideration was genuine — not the performance of consideration while a prepared answer waited, but actual engagement with a question that did not have a prepared answer.
"It was on my way," Chuck said.
"To where?"
Another consideration.
"I'm not sure yet," Chuck said.
Marcus looked at him for a long moment.
Marcus Webb had, over seventeen years of plumbing in Wilson and the surrounding counties, developed a facility for people. Not psychology — he was not a psychological man and would have rejected the description. A facility. The specific competence of someone who enters stranger's houses regularly and must quickly determine, for practical reasons, what kind of person he is dealing with. Whether they will be home when they said they would. Whether the problem they have described is the actual problem. Whether the estimate he is about to give will be met with good faith or with the particular bad faith of someone who intends to dispute it after the work is done.
He had been wrong about people occasionally.
He was not wrong about Chuck.
Chuck was — the facility found the word and produced it — honest. Honest in the specific complete way that made dishonesty not a temptation that had been resisted but a thing that simply did not exist as an option. The I'm not sure yet was not evasion. It was the accurate account of someone who did not yet know where he was going.
Marcus found this, without being able to say why, the most interesting thing about him.
Most people, in Marcus's experience, knew where they were going.
Or they thought they knew, which produced the same behavioral pattern and was harder to distinguish from the real thing.
Chuck did not know.
He was standing in a kitchen in Wilson, Texas, on a Thursday morning, with his coffee, and he did not know where he was going and he was saying so.
Marcus drank his coffee.
"You from here originally, you said," he said.
"Wilson," Chuck said. "Left when I was eighteen."
"Long time ago."
"Yes."
"Family still here?"
"No."
Marcus nodded. This was the shape of many people's relationships with small towns — the leaving, the long absence, the return to a place that remembered you in its bones even when the people who knew you were gone.
"What do you do?" Marcus said.
Chuck looked at his coffee cup.
"Various things," he said.
"Plumbing?" Marcus said, with the small dry inflection that constitutes humor between people who do not yet know each other well enough for larger humor.
"Not usually," Chuck said. "But I can."
"Yeah," Marcus said. "I noticed."
They stood in the kitchen for a while.
Not awkwardly — the narrator is careful about this. It was not the awkward silence of two people who have run out of things to say and are waiting for permission to end the conversation. It was the comfortable silence of two people who have found, without planning to, a pace that suits both of them.
Marcus refilled his coffee.
He held up the pot.
Chuck held out his cup.
This is a small gesture. The holding out of a cup for a refill is not a significant act. It is the kind of thing that happens in kitchens between people who are comfortable enough in each other's presence to make the gesture without narrating it.
They had known each other for eleven minutes on Tuesday and approximately twenty minutes now.
Chuck Norris, who had negotiated with gravity and time and death and the assembled upper registers of existence, held out his cup.
Marcus Webb, who had a leaking pipe he had not fixed for two weeks, refilled it.
The narrator recorded this.
The narrator found it, in the private accounting beneath the text, the most significant thing that had happened in the second volume so far.
Not because of what it was.
Because of what it was not.
It was not Chuck Norris doing something for a reason that served a purpose on a list.
It was Chuck Norris standing in a kitchen on a Thursday morning accepting a cup of coffee from a man who offered it.
That was all.
That was everything.
"What's it like," Marcus said, "coming back after that long?"
Chuck looked at the window.
"Different," he said. "The same."
"Both," Marcus said.
"Both," Chuck confirmed.
Marcus nodded.
"I left once," he said. "Three years. Lubbock. Thought I'd see if somewhere else suited me better."
"Did it?"
"No," Marcus said. "Came back. Bought this house." He looked at the kitchen. "The pipe was already old when I bought it. Didn't notice."
"You weren't looking for it," Chuck said.
"No," Marcus said. "You don't look for the things that are going to be problems. You look for the things that already are."
Chuck was quiet for a moment.
"That's true," he said, in the tone of someone who has just heard something accurate said simply, and is acknowledging the accuracy with the respect it deserves.
Marcus looked at him.
He had said this — the thing about problems — hundreds of times, in various forms, to various customers who were dealing with the gap between visible and invisible damage. It was a practical observation. It was the observation of a plumber. It was not, by any measure he would have applied before this morning, a profound thing.
Chuck Norris had received it like it was profound.
Not performed profundity — not the exaggerated response of someone trying to make the speaker feel good about what they had said. Genuine receipt. The taking in of something accurate and the acknowledgment of its accuracy.
Marcus drank his coffee.
He felt, without being able to name the feeling, slightly more like himself than he usually felt at eight in the morning on a Thursday.
Chuck left at eight thirty-seven.
Marcus watched the truck pull away from the window above the sink, standing where he stood on Tuesday when the truck had first arrived.
He stood there for a moment after the truck was out of sight.
Then he turned to the sink and washed the cups — both cups, the one he had used and the one Chuck had used — and set them in the rack to dry and looked at them in the rack and thought about the conversation.
He had had a lot of conversations in his kitchen.
He was not sure what made this one different.
He stood at the counter and tried to identify it.
He had asked where Chuck was going and Chuck had said he didn't know yet.
He had said the thing about problems and Chuck had received it like it mattered.
Chuck had checked a valve that was fine and drunk two cups of coffee and not explained himself and been honest about not having an explanation.
That was the conversation.
Marcus tried to find the thing in it that made it different.
He could not find it.
He went to get his jacket and his tools because he had a job at nine and the drive was twenty minutes and he needed to go.
He went.
He thought about the conversation on the drive.
He thought about it at the job, in the intermittent way that thoughts recur when you are doing something that occupies your hands but not your full mind.
He thought about it driving home.
He did not arrive at the thing that made it different.
He arrived at his house.
He went inside.
He looked at the cabinet under the sink.
The fitting held. No drip. The mat was dry.
He made dinner.
He sat at his kitchen table and ate it, and the kitchen was the kitchen it always was, and there was nothing different about it.
Except the two cups in the rack, which he had washed and set to dry and which were still there, and which he had not put away.
He looked at them.
He ate his dinner.
He did not put them away.
Three streets away, Chuck Norris was in his own kitchen making his eggs.
The eggs were perfect.
He ate them at his own kitchen table and looked at his own kitchen window and outside his window was Wilson, Texas, which was the same as it always was.
He wound his watch.
He sat for a moment.
The narrator, which records everything, recorded that he sat for slightly longer than usual after winding it — not long, not in a way that would be visible to anyone watching, but longer than the sitting required.
He was not, as far as the narrator could determine, thinking about gravity or time or death or the assembled upper registers or the Last Enemy or the intergalactic medium or the complete spiral of the Milky Way.
He was thinking about something a plumber had said about problems.
You don't look for the things that are going to be problems. You look for the things that already are.
The narrator noted this.
The narrator noted that Chuck Norris, who had spent fifty-three years fixing the things that already were problems, was sitting at his kitchen table at nine PM in Wilson, Texas, turning over a sentence spoken by a man who fixed pipes.
As though the sentence had something in it he had not yet found.
As though he was looking for it.
Outside, Wilson was quiet.
The night was the night.
Somewhere, far beyond the edge of the solar system, in the dark between galaxies, in all the vast and corrected and precisely calibrated space that Chuck Norris had covered and left better than he found it —
something was moving.
Not toward him.
Not away.
Simply moving.
The way things move when they have been in one place for a very long time and have finally decided that the time for being in one place is over.
The narrator did not yet have a name for it.
The narrator made a note.
The note said: incoming.