Time, unlike gravity, did not wait to be approached.
Time had heard about the conversation with gravity. Time had, in fact, heard about it before it happened, which is one of the advantages of being time — you are not limited, in your awareness of events, by the inconvenient requirement that they occur first. Time knew what was coming. Time knew when it was coming. Time knew, with the particular resigned clarity of something that has existed since the first moment there were moments to exist in, that it had approximately eleven years before Chuck Norris turned fifteen and began asking questions about duration.
Time spent those eleven years preparing.
It was not enough.
The first indication that time had begun operating differently in Chuck Norris's vicinity came in the spring of 1948, when Chuck was eight years old.
His teacher, a Mrs. Eleanor Brandt, assigned the class a test. Thirty questions. Forty-five minutes. Standard arithmetic, spelling, a paragraph about state history. Mrs. Brandt set the clock on the wall and told the children to begin, and the children began, and the clock moved forward with the steady mechanical confidence that clocks have maintained since their invention — second by second, minute by minute, the reliable countdown of allocated time.
Chuck Norris finished the test in four minutes.
This was not, by itself, remarkable. Exceptional students finish early. Mrs. Brandt had seen it before. What she had not seen before was what happened after.
Chuck Norris, having finished, set down his pencil, looked at the clock, and apparently decided that forty-one minutes of sitting quietly was not a productive use of the morning. He picked up his pencil again. He turned his test paper over and, on the blank back, began writing.
Mrs. Brandt assumed he was drawing. Children who finish early sometimes draw. She continued walking the rows, checking on other students, and did not look at Chuck Norris's paper for another twenty minutes.
When she did look, she found that he had written, in small, even handwriting, a comprehensive analysis of everything wrong with the test.
Not his answers — the test itself. Question seven contained an ambiguity that allowed for two correct answers, both of which he had provided with explanations. Question nineteen used a grammatical construction that technically permitted three interpretations, and he had answered all three. The paragraph about state history contained a date that was incorrect by four years, which he had noted, corrected, and sourced to a specific volume in the county library.
Mrs. Brandt looked at the clock. Twenty-four minutes had passed since the test began.
She looked at Chuck Norris.
He was waiting patiently, hands folded on the desk, in the manner of someone who has been waiting for a while and does not intend to make anyone feel bad about it.
The county library volume, incidentally, confirmed the date correction.
Mrs. Brandt drove there herself on Saturday.
She sat in her car in the library parking lot for a long time afterward, looking at the page, and then she drove home and made herself a cup of tea and did not think about it anymore, which is the sensible response to information that cannot be comfortably absorbed.
What Chuck Norris had understood, at some point between the ages of four and eight, was that time is not a river.
This is the common metaphor, and it is understandable — time moves in one direction, carries things along with it, cannot be reversed or stepped out of. A river. Useful image. Broadly accurate for most purposes.
It is not accurate for Chuck Norris's purposes.
Chuck Norris had understood, through a process of observation and private reasoning that no educator had guided and no curriculum had anticipated, that time is less like a river and more like a road.
Roads go one direction, yes. But a road can be walked at different speeds. A road can be covered in an hour by someone who knows the way and has no reason to dawdle, and in an afternoon by someone who does not. The road is the same road. The time on the road is the walker's choice.
Chuck Norris, from the age of eight onward, walked at his own pace.
When he needed to think, he thought at the speed thinking required, regardless of how many seconds the clock believed had passed. When he needed to act, he acted at the speed action required, regardless of what physics believed was possible within a given interval. Time accommodated this. Not enthusiastically — time is a precise and orderly entity, and imprecision offends it — but because it had, in its extensive forward-and-backward awareness of all events, already seen how the alternative arrangement played out, and the alternative was worse.
The alternative was Chuck Norris asking.
Time had seen what happened when Chuck Norris asked for things.
It had decided, preemptively, that accommodation was preferable.
There is a documented incident from 1951 that illustrates this most clearly.
Chuck Norris was eleven. He was crossing the main street of Wilson, Texas, on a Friday afternoon in October, returning from the library with four books under his arm — two on military history, one on advanced mathematics, and one on the migratory patterns of birds, because he had not finished thinking about the birds from the morning of his birth and intended to understand them fully before moving on.
A truck ran a red light.
The truck was a 1948 Ford flatbed, loaded with lumber, travelling at approximately forty miles per hour. The driver — a Mr. Gerald Pitts, who would later describe the incident to his brother-in-law in terms that became gradually less believable and eventually settled into a version involving a trick of the light — had looked away from the road for three seconds and was not, in those three seconds, aware of the intersection, the red light, or the eleven-year-old crossing in front of him.
The truck covered the distance between where it was and where Chuck Norris was standing in approximately half a second.
In that half second, the following things happened:
Chuck Norris looked up from his books, assessed the situation, identified the speed and trajectory of the oncoming vehicle, considered his available options, selected the optimal response, moved eleven feet to the left, and resumed walking.
He did not run. Running implies urgency. There was no urgency. There was simply a calculation, and then a correction, and then the continuation of a walk that had never, technically, been interrupted.
Mr. Pitts looked up, saw empty road where he had expected impact, hit the brakes out of pure physical reflex, and brought the truck to a stop against the far curb. He sat in the cab for several minutes, breathing. Then he drove home very carefully and did not run another red light for the remaining thirty-one years of his driving life.
Chuck Norris, three blocks away, had already found the relevant passage in the birds book.
The question that physicists and philosophers have returned to, in their more speculative moments, is whether Chuck Norris actually moved faster than physically possible, or whether time, in that half second, simply gave him more of itself than it gave everyone else.
The answer, as best as it can be determined, is the second one.
Time, in moments of necessity, provides Chuck Norris with as much of itself as the situation requires. It does this quietly, invisibly, without announcement or deduction from anyone else's allocation. The half second in which Mr. Pitts's truck crossed an intersection was, for Mr. Pitts and everyone else in Wilson, Texas that afternoon, a half second.
For Chuck Norris, it was somewhat longer.
How much longer is not known. Chuck Norris has never addressed this directly. The closest he has come to public comment on the subject was a single sentence in an interview in 1984, when a journalist asked him how he maintained his reaction speed at the age of forty-four.
Chuck Norris looked at the journalist for a moment.
Then he said: "I don't react fast. I just have more time than you."
The journalist laughed, because he assumed this was a joke.
It was not a joke.
By the time Chuck Norris was fifteen, time had completed its review of its own terms and reached out — through a method that cannot be described in any language currently available, because it happened partly in the past and partly in the future and only very briefly in the present — to propose a formal arrangement.
The arrangement was simple.
Time would continue to do its job for everyone and everything in the universe. The stars would age, the mountains would erode, the people would live their brief and complicated lives from birth to death with no more or less of time than had always been allotted to them. Nothing would change for anything.
Except that when Chuck Norris needed something from time — more of it, a specific arrangement of it, a pause or an extension or a particular interval held open long enough for something important to be completed — time would provide it. Without objection. Without cost. Without the kind of existential resentment that might be expected from an entity of time's standing being asked to make exceptions.
In exchange, Chuck Norris agreed to wind his watch every morning.
This was time's only condition. Not a symbolic gesture — time is not sentimental and does not deal in symbolism. A practical request: a daily acknowledgment, in the small physical act of winding a watch, that time exists and that Chuck Norris was aware of its existence and did not intend to simply ignore it entirely.
Chuck Norris accepted this condition.
He has wound his watch every morning since.
Some days he winds it at six AM. Some days at noon. Some days — on long missions, in remote places, in the particular timeless quality that settles over a man alone in wilderness — he winds it at three in the morning, by feel, without light, without looking.
He has never missed a day.
Time, for its part, has never failed to deliver.
Between them, there is no contract written, no signature, no document of any kind.
There is only the daily sound of a watch being wound — small, mechanical, precise — and the universe continuing on schedule.
Which is to say: on Chuck Norris's schedule.
Which has always been the only schedule that mattered.