It is important, before we proceed, to establish something about gravity.
Gravity is not, as commonly misunderstood, merely a force. It is an agreement. A social contract, negotiated at the beginning of the universe between mass and space, ratified without objection by every object that has ever existed, from the largest galaxy cluster to the smallest grain of sand on a forgotten beach on a planet with no name.
Every object, in the four-point-five-billion-year history of this planet, has honored that agreement.
Every object, that is, until Chuck Norris turned four years old and decided he did not recall signing anything.
The incident occurred on a Wednesday morning in the spring of 1944.
Chuck Norris had been sitting in the backyard of the family home in Wilson, Texas, observing an apple tree. He had been observing it for approximately forty-five minutes, which is an unusual length of time for a four-year-old to observe anything, but Chuck Norris was not a usual four-year-old. He had read three books that morning — not children's books, but a structural engineering manual, a philosophical treatise on the nature of causality, and a cookbook, because he had also decided breakfast — and he was in the particular mood that descends on a person who has consumed too much information before noon and needs to sit quietly and allow the world to arrange itself into something coherent.
The apple tree dropped an apple.
Chuck Norris watched it fall.
He considered this for a long moment.
Then he stood up, walked to where the apple had landed, picked it up, and looked at it with the focused attention of someone who has just witnessed something they find mildly presumptuous.
He set the apple on a fence post.
He took three steps back.
He looked at the apple.
The apple stayed on the fence post.
This was not unusual. Apples stay on fence posts all the time when placed there by four-year-olds. What happened next was unusual.
Chuck Norris stepped back further. Then he looked up — not at the apple, but at the sky, the particular patch of sky directly above the fence post — and he had a brief, silent conversation with gravity.
No one heard this conversation. No one was present. His mother was inside making coffee, and his younger brothers were somewhere near the front of the house engaged in the kind of directionless physical conflict that occupies small children on spring mornings. The conversation between Chuck Norris and gravity was entirely private.
Physicists who have later attempted to reconstruct it, based on what happened afterward, believe it went something like this:
Chuck Norris explained, calmly and without hostility, that he understood gravity's position. He acknowledged that the agreement it had maintained since the beginning of time was admirable in its consistency and useful in its application. He had no objection to gravity as a concept. He simply wanted it noted, formally and for the record, that he personally had not agreed to its terms, had not been consulted at the time of the universe's initial negotiations, and intended to operate, going forward, under a different arrangement.
Gravity, to its considerable credit, heard him out.
There was a pause.
The apple stayed on the fence post.
Chuck Norris nodded once, which is to say he accepted gravity's acknowledgment of his position, and went back inside for lunch.
The renegotiated terms, as best as can be understood by anyone who has spent significant time observing Chuck Norris, are as follows:
Gravity applies to Chuck Norris only when he explicitly permits it. This permission is granted freely and frequently, because Chuck Norris is a reasonable entity and understands that a man who never falls cannot climb. Gravity is allowed to do its job in most ordinary circumstances — walking, sitting, placing coffee cups on tables, the general business of existing in a world that benefits from things staying where they are put.
What gravity is not permitted to do is act against Chuck Norris's interests.
The distinction is subtle but absolute. Gravity may pull. Gravity may not decide.
If Chuck Norris is falling because he has chosen to fall — because he has leaped from something, or been thrown from something by an opponent who shortly thereafter reconsidered his life decisions — gravity may complete the arc. If Chuck Norris is falling because something unexpected has happened and gravity has taken advantage of the situation, it will find that the situation corrects itself with a speed that leaves no room for documentation.
There are no photographs of Chuck Norris on the ground against his will.
There are no photographs because no photographer has ever been fast enough.
His mother noticed, around this time, that Chuck had stopped tripping.
Children trip. It is one of the defining features of early childhood — the body is new, the coordination is developing, the ground is full of irregular surfaces and unexpected edges. Chuck Norris's brothers tripped constantly, spectacularly, in ways that produced bruises and occasional mild tears and the particular laughter that only comes from witnessing someone else fall down somewhere soft.
Chuck Norris, from the age of four onward, did not trip.
This was not because he was careful. It was because the ground, in a manner that cannot be fully explained but has been observed consistently, arranged itself to be cooperative when Chuck Norris walked on it. Not smoothed — not magically flattened into some featureless plane — but cooperative, in the way that a good road is cooperative, presenting its best surface, its most navigable angles, its most honest account of itself.
The ground, in other words, tried harder when Chuck Norris was walking on it.
This is not supernatural. Or rather — it is not merely supernatural. It is the natural consequence of any surface understanding that it is being walked on by someone who has negotiated directly with gravity and emerged from that negotiation with a favorable contract. The ground understood the stakes. The ground performed accordingly.
By the time Chuck Norris was six, he could walk on water.
This is perhaps the most famous of his early childhood abilities, though walk is not quite the correct word. Walk implies effort. What Chuck Norris did on water was closer to what everyone else does on solid ground — which is to say, he simply moved across it, and the water's objections, if it had any, were not registered in a form he was obligated to acknowledge.
He walked across the creek behind the family property on a Tuesday in June, 1946. He was not attempting to demonstrate anything. He needed to get to the other side, the bridge was a quarter mile downstream, and he had decided that the quarter mile was an inefficient use of the afternoon.
The water held him with the resigned composure of something that has just been informed it does not have a choice.
He reached the other bank, continued into the trees, found what he was looking for — a particular kind of stone he had been thinking about since breakfast — and returned the same way.
The creek flowed on afterward as though nothing had happened.
This is characteristic. The world, when touched by Chuck Norris, does not hold the shape of the contact. It returns to itself, resumes its ordinary behavior, continues its ordinary life. The change is not in the world. The change is in the understanding that the world now carries — quietly, somewhere beneath its surface — that it has been visited by someone for whom its rules are, at best, a courtesy.
The neighbors in Wilson, Texas, did not speak of these things.
This is not because they did not notice. People notice more than they say. This is true everywhere but it is especially true in small towns in Texas in the 1940s, where observation was a primary occupation and silence was a considered choice.
They noticed that the Norris boy did not fall.
They noticed that the dog on Elm Street — a large, aggressive animal of uncertain breed that had bitten three children and a postal worker in the past year — lay down quietly whenever Chuck Norris walked past it, and did not get up again until he was out of sight.
They noticed that things in his vicinity stayed where they were put.
They noticed that the air, on days when he spent time outside, felt slightly more organized than usual. Cleaner. Like a room that has just been tidied by someone who understands which things belong together.
They did not speak of these things because some things do not need to be spoken to be understood. The town of Wilson, Texas, in the mid-1940s, understood in its collective bones that something had taken up residence among them that was beyond their vocabulary and beneath their dignity to attempt to explain.
They went about their lives.
Chuck Norris went about his.
And gravity, for its part, went about its work with the slightly more careful attitude of something that has recently had a clarifying conversation and intends to honor the outcome.
It would not be the last such conversation.
There were many laws, and Chuck Norris had time.
He had, in fact, all the time there was — because time, like gravity, had already heard about the conversation, and was currently reviewing its own terms very carefully, hoping to reach a similar arrangement before Chuck Norris came looking for it.
It would not escape that meeting.
Nothing ever did.