I am the GodVolume II: The Question
Going upstream, in the literal sense, means moving against the current.
This is not complicated. Water flows in one direction because of gravity, because of the shape of the land, because of ten thousand years of a river finding the path of least resistance and committing to it with the patient certainty of something that has decided where it is going and does not intend to reconsider. Going upstream means reversing that — moving against the commitment, against the certainty, against the full weight of ten thousand years of decision.
It is not complicated.
It is also not easy.
Chuck Norris left Wilson, Texas on Tuesday morning before dawn and went upstream.
He went upstream the way you go upstream when the current you are tracing is not water but causality — when the thing you are following is not a river but a question, and the question is three words long, and the source of the question is outside everything, and outside everything is not a direction but a condition.
He went the way he goes everywhere: by deciding to go, and going.
The first step upstream was the heliopause — the edge of the solar system, the place where the sun's influence thins to indistinguishability. He had been here before, in 1974, when he had stood for three seconds and turned back. He stood here again now and did not turn back.
He went further.
The intergalactic medium.
He had stood here in 1993 — between the Milky Way and Andromeda, in the nothing of one atom per cubic meter, with the complete inventory of everything he had. He had stood here and the inventory had pointed at him standing there and he had turned back.
He stood here again.
The Milky Way was visible from here — the complete spiral, two hundred billion stars, the full form of the thing that is only visible from sufficient distance.
He looked at it.
Then he looked away from it.
Away from the Milky Way, away from Andromeda, away from the Local Group, away from the Virgo Supercluster, away from the observable universe's familiar architecture — away from all of it, in the direction that is not a direction, toward the place the Question had come from.
He could feel it the way you feel the source of a current when you are moving against it — not as a visible thing, not as a thing with coordinates or mass or any property that instruments could measure, but as a pressure. A resistance. The specific resistance of moving toward something rather than away from it.
He moved toward it.
He moved toward it for a long time.
The narrator will not give this a duration, because duration belongs to time and time belongs to the universe and he was moving toward the edge of the universe's jurisdiction and duration became, at a certain point, less applicable.
He moved.
The pressure increased.
Not uncomfortably — not in the way that pressure is uncomfortable when it is a warning, when it is a body's way of communicating that the direction being traveled is wrong. Uncomfortable in the way that effort is uncomfortable, which is to say it was the feeling of a thing being done that was worth doing and required something.
He had not felt this in a long time.
The narrator noted that the last time Chuck Norris had done something that required something was 1987, in the Crab Nebula, with the Last Enemy.
The Last Enemy had been resolved in three seconds.
This was taking longer.
He reached a place where the going stopped.
Not because something blocked him — nothing blocked him. Nothing had ever successfully blocked Chuck Norris and the narrator has no reason to believe that record will change. The going stopped because the place he had reached was the place where the going became a different kind of going, a kind that required something he did not yet have.
He stood at the edge of the inside of everything.
The outside was there.
He could feel it the way he had felt the Question — not through specific senses, but through the comprehensive awareness of something that monitors everything noting that beyond this point the monitoring could not follow.
The Question had come from out there.
It had crossed this edge.
It had arrived.
It was, now, inside everything, patient and present, waiting for an answer.
Chuck Norris stood at the edge of the inside of everything and looked at the outside.
The outside looked back.
Not with the looking of the Question — the Question looked with patience, with the specific quality of something addressed to a recipient. This looking was different. Larger. The looking of whatever had generated the Question, which was not the Question itself but the source of it.
He stood at the edge and looked at it.
It looked at him.
He had, in fifty-three years, looked at everything the universe contained. He had looked at gravity and time and death and fire and mathematics and the assembled upper registers of existence and the Last Enemy and the complete spiral of the Milky Way from two point five million light-years away.
He had not looked at anything that was not inside.
He looked at the outside.
The outside was — the narrator searches every available word and finds them all insufficient and uses the least insufficient — prior.
Prior to everything. Prior to the conditions that made looking possible. Prior to the universe and its laws and its arrangements and its two hundred billion stars and its plumbers in Texas and its Questions.
Prior to Chuck Norris.
The narrator records this carefully.
Prior to Chuck Norris.
He had not, in fifty-three years, encountered anything prior to himself.
He stood at the edge and looked at something that had existed before he had existed and he felt —
the narrator finds the word —
small.
Not diminished. Not threatened. Not in the way that smallness is a negative condition.
Small the way Marcus Webb felt when he looked at the sky.
Small in the way that requires something vast to produce — the specific smallness that is only available to something that has found, at last, a scale large enough to make itself feel like a part of something rather than the whole of it.
Chuck Norris stood at the edge of the inside of everything and felt small and the narrator records that this was the first time and that the first time felt, from the outside, like a beginning.
He turned back.
He turned back not because the outside was too much — it was not too much, nothing had ever been too much, and the narrator does not imply that it was. He turned back because he understood, with the directness he brought to everything, that the edge was not the answer.
The source of the Question was out there.
The answer to the Question was not.
The answer to the Question was back the way he had come — back through the intergalactic medium and the heliopause and the solar system and the atmosphere and Wilson, Texas.
The answer was somewhere in the things that the Question had been asked about.
What is it for.
You do not find the answer to what is it for by going to the thing that asked.
You find it by going back to the it.
He turned back.
He arrived in Wilson at four in the afternoon.
He came back the way he always came back — the return taking the time it took, arriving at the particular quality of a Texas afternoon in late March, the light going long and golden across the flat land, the kind of light that does not make things beautiful so much as it makes them exactly what they are.
He drove past Marcus's house on the way home.
He was not going to stop.
He had been upstream and had stood at the edge of the inside of everything and had turned back with a direction and the direction was toward the answer and the answer was in the it and there was thinking to be done before the next conversation.
He drove past Marcus's house.
He slowed.
He stopped.
Marcus was in the driveway.
He was sitting on the front step of the house with his elbows on his knees and his coffee cup — empty, by the look of it — held in both hands, and he was looking at nothing in particular in the specific way that people look at nothing in particular when they are looking at something particular that is not available to be looked at.
He had the expression of someone who has had a day.
Not a bad day in the catastrophic sense — no emergency, no crisis, nothing that the word bad in its severest application would cover. The expression of a day that had accumulated. A day that had been, item by item, the kind of day that is fine in each individual component and becomes something heavier in the sum.
Chuck pulled the truck to the curb.
He sat for a moment.
He had been to the edge of the universe.
He had stood at the place where everything ended and looked at what was outside it.
He had turned back because the answer was here.
He got out of the truck.
Marcus looked up.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey," Chuck said.
He walked up the path and sat on the step next to Marcus without being invited, which is a thing you do when you have known someone for a short time but the short time has had a certain quality, and Marcus moved over without being asked, which is a thing you do when someone sits next to you on a step and their sitting there is not unwelcome.
They sat.
The afternoon was the afternoon.
"Rough day?" Chuck said.
Marcus looked at his cup.
"Medium," he said. "The kind that feels rough by the end because nothing went wrong exactly, it just all went slightly sideways."
"Slightly sideways all day," Chuck said.
"Yeah," Marcus said. "New job, different county, guy shows me the problem, I diagnose it, quote him, start the work, and an hour in I find something behind the wall that changes the whole scope. Not my fault, not his fault, just — there."
"How'd he take it?"
"Fine," Marcus said. "He was fine. That's the thing. He was completely fine about it. I'm the one who's—" He paused. "I don't know. I just don't like when the thing turns out to be bigger than I said it was. Even when it's not my fault. I told him one thing and it was another thing."
Chuck was quiet.
"You told him what you knew," he said. "Then you found out more."
"I know," Marcus said. "I know that's how it works. I've been doing this seventeen years. It still bothers me when it happens."
"Because you like to be right," Chuck said.
"Yeah," Marcus said. Then: "Is that bad?"
Chuck thought about it.
"No," he said. "Wanting to be right is fine. The question is what you do when you find out you were working with incomplete information."
"You adjust," Marcus said.
"You adjust," Chuck confirmed.
"And you tell the customer," Marcus said.
"And you tell the customer," Chuck said.
"Which I did," Marcus said.
"Which you did," Chuck said.
They sat.
The afternoon light moved the way afternoon light moves in Texas — slowly, then suddenly, the long gold going to the longer gold that precedes the going of the light entirely.
"So what's the problem?" Marcus said.
"I don't think there is one," Chuck said.
Marcus looked at him.
"You went through all that," Chuck said, "adjusted when you found out more, told the customer, and he was fine. The job is bigger than you thought. The job will get done. The thing in the wall is fixed."
"Yeah," Marcus said.
"So the day went slightly sideways," Chuck said. "And you stayed straight."
Marcus was quiet.
He looked at his empty cup.
He looked at the street.
He looked at the truck across the road — the old truck, twelve years, his father's truck — in the long afternoon light.
"That's a generous reading," he said.
"It's an accurate reading," Chuck said.
Marcus said nothing for a moment.
Then he said: "You want a beer?"
"Sure," Chuck said.
They sat on the step with their beers as the afternoon became evening.
The narrator records this with the same care it records everything and notes that there is a quality to this particular recording that is different from most of what the narrator has recorded in fifty-three years.
Most of what the narrator has recorded is Chuck Norris doing something.
This is Chuck Norris sitting on a step.
With a beer.
Next to a man who had a medium day.
The beer was cold. The step was concrete. The evening was doing what Texas evenings do in March when the day has been clear — going through its colors with the unhurried thoroughness of something that does this every day and has not gotten bored with it.
Marcus talked.
Not about anything large — about the job, about the customer, about the thing in the wall which had been a junction fitting that had corroded unevenly and which Marcus had replaced with something better than the original and which would not need attention for another twenty years. About the drive back, which had been long and had taken him past the town where he had gone after his father died to settle the estate and had not been back to since.
About his father.
He talked about his father the way you talk about someone eight years gone when you are sitting on a step in the evening light and someone is sitting next to you and you have had a medium day and the evening is the right kind of evening for it.
Not grief. Something past grief. The specific quality of memory that has been lived with long enough that it has become furniture — present, familiar, occasionally moved by the light into a prominence that surprises you.
Chuck listened.
The narrator watched Chuck listen and recorded what it saw.
He was not assessing.
He was not planning.
He was not formulating the response or identifying the correct thing to say or running the comprehensive inventory of the situation.
He was listening to a man talk about his father in the evening light.
He was present.
He was small, in the way he had been small at the edge of the universe, and the smallness was the same smallness — the specific smallness of being a part of something.
The something, in this case, was an evening.
On a step.
In Wilson, Texas.
With a beer.
The narrator records that this was sufficient.
Not a way station. Not a pause between larger things. Not a moment of rest before the resumption of the actual business.
Sufficient.
The Question was present — it was always present now, patient and three words long — and Chuck was sitting on a step listening to a man talk about his father, and the Question was not diminished by this and the evening was not diminished by the Question and both things were true at the same time and both things were fine.
What is it for.
The narrator looked at the step.
At the two men on it.
At the beer and the light and the truck and the empty cup set aside and the evening doing its colors.
The narrator did not write anything in the private accounting beneath the text.
The narrator simply watched.
Marcus finished talking about his father.
They were quiet for a while.
"You ever lose anyone?" Marcus said.
Chuck was quiet.
"Not the way you mean," he said.
Marcus looked at him.
"What way do I mean?"
"Someone you can't get back," Chuck said. "Someone whose absence changes the shape of things."
Marcus thought about this.
"Yeah," he said. "That's what I mean."
Chuck looked at the street.
"No," he said. "Not yet."
Not yet, the narrator noted. Not no. Not I don't lose people. Not the answer that fifty-three years of standing outside every human limitation might have produced.
Not yet.
Marcus nodded slowly.
He did not ask about the yet.
He understood, with the facility that had served him for seventeen years, that the yet was honest and was not an invitation.
"It changes you," he said. "Losing someone like that. Not bad, necessarily. Just — changes the shape."
"I believe you," Chuck said.
"You'll know when it happens," Marcus said.
"I know," Chuck said.
They drank their beers.
The evening finished its colors and became dark and the street lights came on one by one down the road and a dog somewhere made the sound a dog makes when the night has begun and it has opinions about this.
"I should go in," Marcus said.
"Yeah," Chuck said.
They stood up.
"Thanks for stopping," Marcus said. "You didn't have to."
"I was passing," Chuck said.
"You live three streets away," Marcus said.
"It was on my way," Chuck said.
Marcus looked at him.
"Where were you today?" he said. "You look like you went somewhere."
Chuck picked up his beer bottle.
"Upstream," he said.
"Find what you were looking for?"
Chuck looked at the street. At the truck. At the evening that had finished and become night and the stars beginning in the particular way that stars begin in Texas when there are no clouds, which is all at once and without announcement.
"I found out where to look," he said.
"Progress," Marcus said.
"Yes," Chuck said. "Progress."
He walked down the path.
He got in the truck.
He drove three streets.
He went inside.
He made his eggs.
He sat at his table.
The Question was present.
He looked at it — not at the outside, not at the edge, but at the Question itself, the way you look at a question when you have found out where to look for the answer and the answer is in the things the question is about.
What is it for.
He thought about the evening.
The step. The beer. The man talking about his father. The light going through its colors. The not-yet. The shape that changes.
He thought about what Marcus had said: you'll know when it happens.
He thought about sitting on a step and being sufficient.
He thought about what it meant that sufficient had felt like something — like a discovery, not like settling, not like the consolation prize of someone who could not do more. Like something that was itself, and was enough, and was not diminished by the scale of what else existed.
He sat at his table.
The watch ticked.
Outside, Wilson, Texas was quiet in the way it was quiet — with all the small sounds that constitute quiet, the breathing of a town at night, the dog, the distant road, the particular nothing that is not empty but full of the ordinary life of a place continuing to be itself.
The narrator turned the page.