I am the GodVolume II: The Question
The gods came back on Sunday.
Not to Wilson, Texas — the gods had, since the meeting of 1991, maintained a respectful distance from Chuck Norris's immediate vicinity, partly out of the institutional caution of entities that had ended a meeting with the word wait and intended to honor that word, and partly out of something that none of them had named but which operated, in practice, like the feeling of not wanting to knock on a door when you are not certain what will answer.
They came back to each other.
Another meeting.
Not called — convened, in the way that the first one had been convened, through the mechanism of sufficient collective awareness reaching a threshold. The threshold, this time, was the Question.
They had all felt it arrive.
The oldest entity spoke first.
"You felt it," it said.
This was not a question. It was the acknowledgment of a shared experience, the verbal equivalent of the look two people exchange when they have both heard the same sound in the dark.
Every entity in the assembly had felt it.
The feeling had been — the narrator searches for the word and finds that no single word is adequate, and settles for a description — the feeling of a door opening in a wall you had not known contained a door. Not threatening. Not hostile. Simply the sudden, irrevocable awareness that the architecture of the space you had been occupying was more extensive than you had mapped.
The Question had come from outside everything.
Everything, in this context, included them.
"It asked him," said the youngest entity.
"Yes," said the oldest.
"Not us," said the entity with the theological literature, in a register that mixed observation with something adjacent to injury.
"No," said the oldest. "Not us."
The room — such as it was — absorbed this.
"What does it want?" said one of the unnamed entities.
"It wants an answer," said the youngest.
"To what?"
The youngest entity was quiet for a moment.
"You know what," it said.
They did know.
They had felt the Question. They had felt its three words in the same way Chuck Norris had felt them — not through the ordinary channels of perception but through the comprehensive awareness that entities of their nature maintained, the awareness that monitors everything and noted, on a Friday morning in March, that something from outside everything had arrived and addressed itself to a specific recipient.
The three words.
What is it for.
The assembly sat with the three words.
The sitting was long.
Not because the words were complicated — they were not complicated. They were, in fact, the opposite of complicated. They were the simplest possible formulation of the most fundamental possible question, the kind of question that arrives at its simplicity only after every more complicated version of itself has been tried and found to contain more form than substance.
The assembly sat with them because simple questions, in the upper registers, are not easier than complicated ones.
They are harder.
Complicated questions have handles. You can grip them at the complexity. You can work on the parts. Simple questions do not have parts. They are whole. You answer the whole thing or you do not answer it.
What is it for.
"Has he answered?" said the entity with the theological literature.
"No," said the youngest.
"How do you know?"
"Because the Question is still there," the youngest said. "It arrived. It asked. It's waiting."
"What does it look like," said one of the older entities, "when it's waiting?"
The youngest considered this.
"Patient," it said. "Like something that has been waiting since before there was anything to wait for and has not found the waiting difficult."
The assembly considered this description.
"That's familiar," said one of the unnamed entities.
"Yes," said the youngest.
"It's what he looks like," said the unnamed entity.
"Yes," said the youngest. "I thought so too."
The discussion that followed was long and covered ground that the narrator will compress, because the compression serves the account better than the full rendering would.
The entities discussed, in order: the origin of the Question, about which they knew nothing except that it was outside their origin and therefore outside any framework they had for understanding origins; the specific choice of recipient, about which they had considerable speculation and no conclusions; the implications of a question arriving from outside everything and addressing itself to a being who existed within everything but operated outside its constraints; and the question of whether they had a role in what was happening.
The last item occupied them longest.
The entity with the theological literature argued that they had a role — that entities of their nature are defined by participation, that standing apart from a significant event is itself a choice and a choice with consequences.
The unnamed entity argued that their role, if they had one, was the role they had already assigned themselves: to wait.
The youngest entity said something that ended the discussion.
It said: "He's sitting in a kitchen in Texas with a plumber."
The assembly was quiet.
"He felt the Question on Friday," the youngest continued. "He ran his fourteen miles. He made his eggs. He went to see the plumber on Saturday. He listened to a story about a truck engine."
Silence.
"He's not doing anything about it," said the entity with the theological literature, in the tone of someone who finds this fact difficult to categorize.
"No," the youngest said.
"Why not?"
The youngest looked at the assembly.
"I think," it said slowly, "because he doesn't know the answer yet. And because the man in the kitchen might be part of finding it. And because Chuck Norris does not address things he doesn't understand by doing things to them."
"He addresses them by—"
"Sitting with them," the youngest said. "Apparently."
The assembly absorbed this.
"Since when," said the oldest entity, with the careful precision of one who has been observing Chuck Norris for fifty-three years, "does he sit with things?"
The youngest entity looked at the oldest.
"Since Wilson, Texas," it said. "Since the pipe."
There was a point in the meeting — the narrator records this because the meeting has a shape and the shape matters — when one of the entities asked a question that had not been asked at the first meeting.
The entity was one of the older unnamed ones, ancient enough that most of its interactions with humanity had predated language, ancient enough that it had watched the first human being look at the sky and feel the specific feeling that humans feel when they look at the sky, which is the feeling of something vast and the simultaneous feeling of being small relative to it and somehow connected to it anyway.
The entity had watched that first human.
It had watched every human since.
It said: "What does the plumber know?"
The assembly turned to this.
"Nothing," said the entity with the theological literature. "He's a plumber in Wilson, Texas. He knows about pipes."
"He knows about his father," the youngest said.
"That's not—"
"He knows about the difference between fixing something and understanding it," the youngest said. "He said it to Chuck on Saturday. Chuck sat with it for the rest of the day."
The unnamed entity was quiet.
"What did he say?" it said.
The youngest repeated it.
You don't look for the things that are going to be problems. You look for the things that already are.
The assembly was quiet.
"And the other thing," the youngest added. "About his father. Taking three weeks on an engine that a mechanic would have done in two days. The extra two weeks were for understanding how it worked."
"Chuck said that," said the oldest. "Not the plumber."
"Chuck said it because the plumber showed him where to look," the youngest said.
The unnamed entity made a sound that had no human equivalent but which translated, approximately, as the sound of something clicking into place.
"The plumber," it said slowly, "is not relevant because of what he knows."
"No," the youngest said.
"He's relevant because of what he makes Chuck see."
"Yes."
The unnamed entity was quiet for a long time.
"We have been," it said finally, "trying to understand Chuck Norris by looking at Chuck Norris."
"Yes," said the youngest.
"And the plumber is—"
"A mirror," the youngest said. "An ordinary mirror. The kind that shows you what you look like."
The assembly considered this.
"We don't have one of those," said the entity with the theological literature.
"No," said the youngest. "We don't."
The meeting ended differently than the first one.
Not with a resolution — still no resolution. The Question was still there, the plumber was still in Wilson, Texas, Chuck Norris was still sitting with things instead of addressing them, and the assembly was still waiting.
But the waiting felt different.
At the first meeting, the waiting had felt like avoidance — the waiting of entities that did not want to knock on a door. At this meeting, the waiting felt like attention. The waiting of entities that have understood, for the first time, that something is happening that they cannot accelerate or redirect and can only observe.
The oldest entity said, at the end: "We watch."
"We watch," the assembly confirmed.
"Not him," the oldest said. "The kitchen."
The kitchen, on Sunday morning, contained Marcus Webb eating breakfast quickly in the way he had inherited from his father, standing at the counter because the table had a stack of invoices on it that he had been meaning to file, drinking coffee from a cup that was not one of the two cups in the rack.
The two cups in the rack were still in the rack.
Marcus had not put them away.
He was not sure why he had not put them away.
He stood at the counter and ate his breakfast and looked at the invoices on the table and thought about the customer dispute in Mertzon, which he had decided, on Friday evening, to resolve by meeting the customer partway on the price and noting, in his own records, that he had done this as a choice and not a concession, because there was a difference and his father had told him to know which one he was doing.
He had called the customer on Friday.
The customer had been relieved.
The relationship was intact.
Marcus had not entirely felt good about it and had not entirely felt bad about it and had decided that this combination was probably the correct result for a situation that had not had a clean solution.
He ate his breakfast.
He thought about Chuck.
He had been thinking about Chuck in the intermittent way he had been thinking about the conversation since Tuesday — not obsessively, not with the focused attention of someone trying to solve a puzzle, but the way you think about something that does not have a category yet and so cannot be filed and keeps reappearing until it finds one.
I used to think the working was the point. Now I'm not sure the point is something else.
He turned this over while he ate.
It was the kind of thing that sounded, taken out of context, like the observation of someone who was lost. Like someone who had been going in a direction and had stopped and wasn't sure the direction was right.
But Chuck had not seemed lost.
Lost people have a quality — a quality Marcus recognized from the faces of customers who called him at seven in the morning about a burst pipe, the quality of someone whose normal operations have been disrupted and who needs the disruption resolved before they can resume. A particular helplessness. A waiting for someone else to fix the situation.
Chuck had not had that quality.
He had had the quality of someone who was — the facility searched for the word — orienting. Not lost. Deliberately, carefully, patiently orienting. The way his father had oriented toward the engine — not knowing how it worked yet, but choosing to find out, and content with the choosing.
Marcus finished his breakfast.
He looked at the two cups in the rack.
He put them away.
Then he took them back out.
He looked at them.
He put them away again.
He picked up his coffee cup and his invoice stack and moved to the table and sat down to file the invoices, and the kitchen was the kitchen, and outside Wilson, Texas was doing what it did on a Sunday morning, and the Question was outside the window being what it was.
Marcus did not know about the Question.
The narrator notes, in the private accounting beneath the text, that Marcus Webb's Sunday morning — the invoices, the breakfast, the customer dispute resolved at the cost of something that was not quite a concession, the two cups moved and replaced and moved again — contained more information about the Question than anything the assembled upper registers of existence had produced in their meeting.
The narrator does not explain this.
The narrator trusts that it will become clear.
Chuck came on Monday.
Not for a valve or a fitting or any practical justification.
He knocked on the door at eight AM and when Marcus opened it Chuck said: "I was thinking about what you said. About the problems you look for."
Marcus looked at him.
"Come in," he said.
They had coffee.
Marcus had an eight-thirty job and said so.
"I won't keep you," Chuck said. "I just wanted to ask — when you're looking at a system. Pipes, fittings, the whole arrangement. How do you know where to start?"
Marcus thought about it.
"You start where the problem is showing," he said. "The drip, the pressure drop, whatever you can see. Then you work back."
"To the source."
"To the source," Marcus confirmed.
"And the source is always—"
"Not always where you expect it," Marcus said. "The symptom is usually downstream. The source is upstream. Sometimes a long way upstream."
Chuck was quiet.
"So you have to go against the flow," he said.
"If you want to actually fix it," Marcus said. "Otherwise you're just managing symptoms."
Chuck looked at his coffee.
The Question was outside the window.
The narrator watched Chuck look at his coffee and noted that he had the specific expression of someone who has just been given a direction.
Not a solution.
A direction.
"Thank you," he said.
"For what?" Marcus said. "I was talking about pipes."
"I know," Chuck said.
He finished his coffee.
He stood up.
"You've got a job at eight thirty," he said.
"Yeah," Marcus said.
"The pressure drop in the east bathroom," Chuck said, at the door. "It's not the fixture. It's the supply line junction in the wall behind the linen closet."
Marcus stared at him.
"How," he said.
"I was thinking about your system," Chuck said. "While we were talking. It's been a slow drop, not sudden. That points upstream."
Marcus looked at the wall.
He looked at the door.
Chuck was already outside.
Marcus stood in his kitchen for a moment.
Then he went to the linen closet.
He opened the access panel behind it that he had installed when he bought the house and never used because he had never had a reason to.
He looked at the supply line junction.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he went to get his tools, because he had a job at eight thirty and this was going to make him five minutes late, and some things could not wait.
The junction was exactly what Chuck had said it was.
The fix took six minutes.
The pressure in the east bathroom had been slow-dropping for two years.
Marcus had not noticed because it had happened gradually and he had adjusted without knowing he was adjusting.
He stood in the linen closet doorway with his wrench.
He thought about what Chuck had said.
I was thinking about your system while we were talking.
He had been in the kitchen drinking coffee.
He had been thinking about Marcus's pipes while talking about something else.
Marcus picked up his tools.
He went to his job.
He was four minutes late.
The customer did not mind.
On the drive, Marcus thought about a man who could think about your pipes without looking at them and see what you had stopped noticing because it had happened too slowly to register.
He thought about what else that kind of attention might see.
He thought about whether he wanted to know.
He decided, by the time he reached the job, that he probably did.
He was not sure why he was sure of this.
He was sure anyway.