I am the GodVolume II: The Question
Chuck did not renegotiate with gravity on Wednesday.
Or Thursday.
He ran his fourteen miles on both mornings and the road was cooperative beneath him and the turns were smooth and his feet found the ground and left it with the reliable efficiency of fifty-three years of an arrangement that had worked in both directions — he had not fallen, and gravity had not been asked to catch him, and between these two facts a kind of peace had existed that neither party had found reason to disturb.
He ran and thought.
He had always thought well while running.
Not because the motion produced thought — the thought was there regardless, running continuously the way all his processes ran continuously, the comprehensive inventory of everything always updating. But running gave the thought a rhythm. A pace. The specific quality of thinking that is done while the body is occupied and the mind is therefore free to move at its own speed, which is not the speed of conversation or of sitting at a table but the speed of something that has been given room.
He thought about what Marcus had said.
You are not deciding it for the Question. You do it because it's the right thing.
He turned this over.
The turning was careful and honest, which is the only way worth turning something. He applied the same facility Marcus had applied to the systems in the walls of other people's houses — not looking for what he wanted to find, looking for what was there.
What was there was this:
He could not, at present, separate the rightness of renegotiating from the usefulness of renegotiating.
They were entangled.
Renegotiating with gravity was right because it would allow him to live the answer.
Renegotiating with gravity was useful because living the answer would allow him to give it to the Question.
The rightness and the usefulness were pointing in the same direction.
Marcus had said: when it's the right thing you'll know.
He ran.
He did not yet know.
On Friday morning he went to the backyard of the family property.
Not his current house — the old one. The house that had been sold and resold and painted and repaired and which had been occupied, most recently, by a family with two young children whose bicycles were in the driveway and whose garden was better maintained than his had been.
He did not go to the front.
He went around the back.
The backyard was different from what it had been — the old shed was gone, replaced by a newer one, the tree line at the back was denser with thirty years of growth, the fence was newer and straight. The family had put in a small vegetable garden in the corner where the apple tree had been.
The fence post was gone.
Of course it was gone. Fifty years of weather and replacement and the ordinary erosion of things that are used and used up and replaced. The post he had set an apple on in 1944 was gone.
He stood in the backyard of the house where he had been born and looked at the place where the fence post had been.
The vegetable garden was there now.
Something was growing in it — early spring, so just the beginnings of something, the specific tentative emergence of things that had been planted in faith before the season was certain.
He stood and looked at it.
Gravity was present.
Not as a force to be negotiated with — just present, the way it was always present, the way everything Chuck Norris had renegotiated with was always present, not absent but conditional, operating within the terms they had agreed to in 1944 in this backyard.
He had been four years old.
He had set an apple on a fence post and watched it fall and decided he had not agreed to the terms.
He had been right.
The terms had been made without his consent, the universe's initial negotiations having occurred before he existed to be consulted, and his objection had been valid and gravity had heard him out and agreed to modified terms and in the eighty years since nothing had fallen on him that he had not permitted to fall.
He stood in the backyard.
He thought about what it would mean to go back.
Not to revoke the arrangement — nothing Chuck Norris agreed to was revoked, because his word and the world matched and that was not negotiable in either direction. But to amend it. To say: I have new information. I have been in this arrangement for fifty years and I understand now what the arrangement costs that I did not understand at four years old.
I did not know then what falling meant.
I know now.
The question is whether I am renegotiating because it is right or because it is useful.
He stood in the backyard and asked himself honestly.
He did not answer.
He went home.
Saturday morning he went to Marcus's.
He knocked.
Marcus opened the door.
"Coffee's on," he said.
"I know," Chuck said.
He came in.
They sat.
The cups were on the table.
"You've been thinking about it," Marcus said. Not a question.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"The fence post backyard," Marcus said.
Chuck looked at him.
"I drove past," Marcus said. "Thursday morning. On the way to a job. I saw your truck."
"You didn't stop," Chuck said.
"Didn't seem like the kind of thing you stop for," Marcus said.
Chuck held his cup.
"No," he said. "It wasn't."
"And?" Marcus said.
"I don't know yet," Chuck said.
"Still," Marcus said.
"Still," Chuck confirmed.
Marcus drank his coffee.
He was quiet for a moment in the way he was quiet when he was working something out — not absent, present, just doing the work inside before bringing it out.
"Can I tell you something?" he said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"When my father was sick," Marcus said. "Not the end — before the end. There was a period where he could still do most things but he knew, and we knew, that the doing was going to get harder. And he had a choice about how to spend that time."
Chuck listened.
"He could — protect it," Marcus said. "Stay inside what he could still do. Not push toward the things that were getting difficult. Keep the arrangement he had with his body on the terms that were working."
"Or," Chuck said.
"Or he could go back to the things he hadn't finished," Marcus said. "The things he'd been putting off. Harder things. Things that might cost him."
"What did he choose?"
"He spent the last eighteen months fixing everything in this house that had been not-quite-right for years," Marcus said. "The fence. The back steps. The window in the second bedroom that had never sat right in the frame."
He paused.
"He was tired every night," Marcus said. "More than he needed to be. He could have rested. But he fixed things."
"Why?" Chuck said.
"I asked him," Marcus said. "He said—" He stopped. "He said he wanted to leave the house right. He said he'd been looking at things that needed doing for years and always saying later. And later was running out."
"Was it for you?" Chuck said. "The fixing."
"I asked him that too," Marcus said. "He said: both. It was for me and it was for him. He wanted to do the right things before he was done. And he wanted to leave the house right for me to live in."
Chuck was very still.
"Both," he said.
"Both," Marcus confirmed. "He didn't think they were separate."
Chuck looked at his cup.
He thought about rightness and usefulness pointing in the same direction.
He thought about what Marcus's father had said.
Both.
He thought about whether both was an answer to the question of which one he was doing.
"Marcus," he said.
"Yeah."
"Your father's house. The fixing."
"Yes."
"Was it the right thing or the thing that produced the right outcome?"
Marcus looked at him.
"Yes," he said.
Chuck sat with this.
"That's not an answer," he said.
"Yes it is," Marcus said. "The answer is yes. Both. When they're the same thing they're the same thing. You don't have to choose between them."
Chuck held his mug.
He thought about the fence post.
He thought about a four-year-old who had set an apple on it and looked at it and decided he had not agreed to terms made without his consent.
He thought about what that four-year-old had not known.
He had not known what falling meant.
He had not known what it meant to have a name on something.
He had not known about weight.
He had made a decision at four years old from the available information and the decision had been valid and the arrangement had held and he had not fallen for fifty years and he had been, in ways he was only now beginning to understand, not falling in more ways than the gravitational one.
He thought about Marcus's father spending eighteen months fixing what needed fixing because later was running out.
He thought about the fence.
Straight now.
The gate no longer leaning.
He thought about what it would mean to spend whatever time he had left — not of his life, the file was pending and would remain so, but of this chapter, this particular arrangement with the conditions of his existence — fixing what needed fixing. Not from above. From inside.
From inside the conditions.
From inside the cost.
He thought about Marcus saying: when you know, you'll know.
He sat at the kitchen table in Wilson, Texas on a Saturday morning in March.
He knew.
Not immediately obvious to him was that he had known for several days.
The knowing had been present since Wednesday, since the backyard and the vegetable garden growing where the fence post had been, since the tentative emergence of something planted in faith before the season was certain.
He had been checking the knowing. Testing it against the question Marcus had asked — right thing or thing that produces the answer — and finding each time that the knowing held. That it did not waver under the testing. That it was the same in the morning and after the run and at the kitchen table and in the backyard and wherever he took it.
Knowing that holds is different from knowing that needs to be convinced.
He had been convincing himself for three days.
He did not need to convince himself anymore.
"I need to talk to gravity," he said.
Marcus looked at him.
"Now?" he said.
"Not this morning," Chuck said. "I need to think about what to say first."
"What do you say to gravity," Marcus said, "when you want to renegotiate."
"The truth," Chuck said. "The same thing I said the first time. Here's my position. Here's what I understand now that I didn't understand then. Here's what I'm asking."
"And if gravity says no," Marcus said.
Chuck thought about this.
"Gravity has been in this arrangement for fifty years," he said. "It agreed the first time because the argument was valid. If the new argument is valid it will agree again."
"And if it's not valid?"
"Then I'll know I'm not doing the right thing," Chuck said. "I'll know I'm doing the thing that produces the answer."
Marcus looked at him.
"You're going to use gravity to check your own reasoning," he said.
"Gravity is very honest," Chuck said. "It doesn't agree with things that aren't true."
"It agreed with you at four years old," Marcus said.
"Four-year-olds are also very honest," Chuck said.
Marcus almost smiled.
More than almost this time.
"When," he said.
"Sunday," Chuck said. "I want one more day."
"Doing what?"
"Thinking," Chuck said. "And I want to ask you something before I go."
"Ask," Marcus said.
"Your Sunday walk," Chuck said. "Your father's habit. Looking at everything with fresh eyes."
"Yes," Marcus said.
"Would you do it tomorrow," Chuck said. "Before I go talk to gravity."
Marcus looked at him.
"You want me to do my father's Sunday walk," he said.
"I want you to do it because you should have been doing it," Chuck said. "Because the fence tells you what happens when you don't. Because he was right about it and you know he was right about it."
"And," Marcus said.
"And I want—" Chuck stopped. "I want to see what it looks like. Someone who does that. Who looks at what they have with fresh eyes. Before I go."
Marcus looked at him.
"You want to see it," he said. "Before you go."
"Yes," Chuck said.
"Because—"
"Because it's the kind of thing I need to have seen," Chuck said. "Before I understand the cost. Because the cost is — it's about what you have to lose. And the walk is about what you have."
Marcus was quiet.
He looked at his cup.
He looked at the window.
He looked at the kitchen — the linoleum, the morning light, the table, the two cups that had been in the rack and were now always here, the invoices filed, the space where things had accumulated into a life that was specific and weighted and his.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay," Chuck said.
"Sunday morning," Marcus said.
"Sunday morning," Chuck confirmed.
They finished their coffee.
Chuck went home.
He sat at his table.
He did not think about gravity.
He thought about the walk.
About what it would look like — Marcus moving through his property on a Sunday morning the way his father had moved through it, looking at everything as though for the first time, not looking for problems but not looking away from them either.
The specific quality of someone taking inventory of what they have.
Not the kind of inventory Chuck had assembled in the intergalactic medium — not the list of what he could do, what he had done, what arrangements he had made with what forces. The other kind.
The kind that looked at the ordinary things.
The truck in the driveway.
The fence, now straight.
The kitchen with its morning light.
The cups on the table.
The weight of a specific life in a specific place with specific names on specific things.
He thought about what it would cost to have that.
He thought about what it would cost to lose it.
He thought about Marcus's father, eighteen months, fixing what needed fixing, tired every night, not sorry.
He thought about both.
He thought about Sunday.
He wound his watch.
He looked at it ticking.
Gravity was patient.
It had been patient for fifty years.
It would be patient one more day.
Sunday morning arrived the way the Saturday had promised it would — clear, the sky committed from the beginning, the kind of morning that presents itself fully rather than gradually.
Chuck was up at four.
He ran.
He came back.
He made his eggs.
They were perfect.
He ate them.
He looked at his plate.
He thought: this is the last morning the eggs will be perfect in this way. After Sunday they will be the right thing instead. He thought about whether the right thing and perfect could coexist and decided he did not know and that not knowing was part of the cost and that the cost was the point.
He wound his watch.
He put it on.
He walked three streets.
Marcus was already outside.
Not waiting — doing. He was in the driveway at seven AM looking at his truck with the specific quality Chuck had imagined — fresh eyes, the Sunday walk, the looking that did not look for problems but did not look away from them.
He was looking at his father's truck.
Chuck stopped at the end of the path.
He did not go up.
He watched from the street.
Marcus ran his hand along the side of the truck — not checking for damage, not inspecting. The way you touch something familiar. The way you touch something you have touched so many times that the touching has become unconscious and you are now, this morning, making it conscious again.
He stood back and looked at it.
Then he moved to the fence.
The new fence. The straight gate.
He ran his hand along it too.
He moved around the yard this way — slow, unhurried, the pace of someone who has given themselves the time the walk requires. He looked at the garden. At the shed. At the tree.
He looked at everything he had.
Chuck watched.
He watched the way he had watched Marcus work at the farmhouse — with the complete attention of someone taking inventory. Not of the things. Of the weight of the things. The specific gravity of a life that has been lived in a place long enough that the place has become part of what the life is.
He watched Marcus stop at the back corner of the yard.
The corner where the old fence had leaned before they fixed it.
Marcus stood there and looked at the straight fence and the narrator records that his expression had the quality of someone seeing something simultaneously as it was and as it had been — the lean, two years of not-seeing, the morning they fixed it, Chuck holding the gate while he reset the hinge.
He stood there for a long time.
Then he turned and saw Chuck at the end of the path.
He did not look surprised.
He looked like a man who has done something that needed doing and has been seen doing it and does not mind being seen.
"Morning," he said.
"Morning," Chuck said.
"Coffee's on," Marcus said.
"I know," Chuck said.
They went inside.
The coffee was strong.
The morning light was doing what it did.
The cups were on the table.
They sat.
Marcus looked at him.
"You're going today," he said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"To talk to gravity."
"Yes."
"And then?"
"And then I'll know," Chuck said. "One way or another. Whether the arrangement changes."
"And if it does," Marcus said. "What happens. Practically."
Chuck thought about it.
"I'll fall," he said. "If the conditions warrant it. If I'm in a situation where falling is the honest outcome. I'll fall."
"And the time arrangement."
"Will be different," Chuck said. "I'll still wind the watch. But time will — be less generous. I'll have what I have. Not more."
"And the death arrangement."
"Still pending," Chuck said. "That one I'm not changing."
Marcus looked at him.
"Why not?"
"Because death agreed to terms I explained honestly and the terms were valid then and are valid now," Chuck said. "The terms weren't that I was invulnerable. The terms were that death would exercise discretion. Discretion is still appropriate."
"So you can fall," Marcus said. "You can be hurt. But you won't die."
"The file stays pending," Chuck said.
Marcus nodded.
"That's not the same as being like me," he said.
"No," Chuck said. "It's not."
"You'll still be—"
"Different," Chuck said. "Yes. I'll still be different. I'm not trying to be you. I'm trying to understand what you live. From closer."
Marcus drank his coffee.
"Why does it matter that you understand it," he said. "For the answer. Can't you just — say it? You understand the shape of it. Names, weight, cost, the right thing. Can't you give that to the Question?"
"I thought about that," Chuck said. "I thought about whether the understanding was enough."
"And?"
"I don't think the Question is asking for an understanding," Chuck said. "I think it's asking for a demonstration. Not words. Something lived."
"How do you know?"
"Because the Question didn't come with an answer sheet," Chuck said. "It didn't come with criteria. It came open. The way a real question comes. Not a test — a genuine asking. And genuine questions don't want explanations. They want—"
"Evidence," Marcus said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"You have to live the answer," Marcus said.
"I have to live enough of it to know what I'm talking about," Chuck said. "I can't live all of it. I can't be forty-one years old and have a father who died and drive his truck and spend two weeks not fixing my own pipe. I can't be that. But I can be — closer. Close enough to give the answer with some weight behind it."
Marcus was quiet.
He turned his cup.
"How long," he said.
"I don't know," Chuck said. "However long it takes."
"Months," Marcus said. "Years."
"Probably," Chuck said.
Marcus looked at the table.
"And you'll be here," he said. "In Wilson. While you're—"
"Yes," Chuck said. "Here."
"With me," Marcus said.
"If that's alright," Chuck said.
Marcus looked up at him.
The narrator had been waiting for this moment — not impatiently, not with the urgency of a story that needs to move, but with the specific attention of something that has been building toward a point and knows when the point is arriving.
The point was this:
Chuck Norris, who had negotiated with every fundamental force in the universe, who had been to the edge of everything and back, who had felt the outside looking at him and felt small and turned back to Wilson, Texas —
was asking Marcus Webb, plumber, forty-one years old, driver of his father's truck —
if it was alright.
If Marcus wanted him here.
Not as a function. Not as a direction or a mirror or a source of vocabulary for things that needed naming. As — here. Present. In the specific kitchen. With the specific cups on the specific table.
"If that's alright," Chuck said.
Marcus looked at him for a long moment.
The facility ran.
It read the system.
It found what was there.
"Yeah," Marcus said. "It's alright."
"Okay," Chuck said.
"Okay," Marcus said.
They finished their coffee.
Chuck stood up.
"I'll go talk to gravity," he said.
"Let me know how it goes," Marcus said.
"You'll be the first," Chuck said.
Marcus looked at him.
"I'm always the first," he said.
"Yes," Chuck said. "That's the arrangement."
He went to the door.
"Chuck," Marcus said.
He stopped.
"My father," Marcus said. "Eighteen months. Everything he fixed."
"Yes."
"He wasn't sorry," Marcus said. "Not once. He was tired every night. He wasn't sorry."
Chuck stood at the door.
"I know," he said.
"I just wanted you to know that I know that," Marcus said. "That it's worth it. The cost."
"Thank you," Chuck said.
He went outside.
He walked to his truck.
He did not drive.
He stood beside the truck and looked at Wilson, Texas in the Sunday morning light — the town doing what it did, the particular quality of a Sunday that had decided to be itself fully, the sky clear and the air carrying the specific smell of spring that had arrived without announcement sometime in the past week and was now simply here.
He looked at it.
He thought about the migration.
The exact place.
The route encoded before the journey.
He was at the exact place.
He had been at the exact place for weeks now.
The next part of the journey was not away.
It was in.
He walked to the backyard.
Not his backyard — the old one. Three streets in the other direction from Marcus, the house with the bicycles and the vegetable garden.
He went around the back.
He stood in the yard.
The vegetable garden was there.
The tentative emergence of something planted in faith.
He looked at the place where the fence post had been.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he looked up at the sky.
And he began to talk to gravity.
The conversation lasted forty-seven minutes.
The narrator does not record the content because the content belongs to the conversation and the conversation belongs to Chuck and gravity and the specific backyard in Wilson, Texas on a Sunday morning in March.
What the narrator records is the outcome.
At the end of forty-seven minutes, Chuck Norris walked out of the backyard of the house where he had been born.
He walked to the sidewalk.
He stepped off the curb onto the road.
And gravity, for the first time in fifty years, treated him like everything else.
He did not fall.
The road was not trying to make him fall — roads are not malicious and gravity does not hold grudges. But the cooperative arrangement was over. The ground no longer tried harder. The air no longer made adjustments. The world was not, going forward, going to arrange itself around his movement.
He would have to arrange himself around it.
He stood on the road.
He felt the full weight of himself.
Not more weight than before — the same weight. But differently weighted. The weight of something that was now, like everything else, subject to the conditions rather than excepted from them.
He stood there.
He thought about Marcus's father, tired every night.
He thought about not sorry.
He walked back to Marcus's house.
He knocked.
Marcus opened the door.
He looked at Chuck.
He could tell.
Not because anything was visibly different — Chuck looked the same, stood the same, had the same beard and the same quality of stillness that had been there since the first morning. But Marcus had the facility. He read systems. He saw what was there.
"Done?" he said.
"Done," Chuck said.
Marcus stepped back from the door.
"Coffee's still hot," he said.
Chuck came in.
He sat at the table.
Marcus poured.
He sat across from him.
They were quiet for a moment.
Then Marcus said: "How does it feel?"
Chuck held the cup.
He thought about the answer.
"Heavy," he said.
"Yeah," Marcus said.
"But—"
"But," Marcus said.
"Right," Chuck said.
Marcus nodded.
"Both," he said.
"Both," Chuck confirmed.
Outside, Wilson, Texas was finishing its Sunday morning.
The Question was present.
The answer was forming.
From the inside now.
With the full weight of the conditions.
The narrator turned the page.