I am the GodVolume II: The Question
On Wednesday morning Marcus Webb had a job at seven.
This is not, on its surface, a remarkable fact. Marcus Webb had a job at seven most mornings. He had been having jobs at seven most mornings for seventeen years, which is the nature of a trade built on the understanding that other people's problems do not schedule themselves for convenient hours. Pipes burst at three AM. Pressure drops announce themselves on Saturday mornings. The work presents itself when it presents itself and the plumber goes.
Marcus went at seven.
Chuck Norris followed him.
This requires explanation, and the explanation is this: Chuck had driven past Marcus's house at six forty-five and seen the truck pulling out of the driveway and had, in the background accounting that ran continuously and produced its results in the form of decisions that felt less like choices than like corrections, turned his truck and followed.
Not closely. Not in the manner of pursuit. Three vehicles back, the comfortable distance of someone who is going the same direction and happens to be going it at the same time.
He had been thinking, since the evening on the step, about what the answer looked like. He had been thinking about the it — the everything that the Question was asking about — and about how you find out what something is for by watching what it does when it is doing what it does.
He had been thinking about watching.
Marcus's truck turned south out of Wilson toward the next county.
Chuck followed.
The job was a farmhouse twelve miles south of town.
An older property — the kind that had been standing long enough to have accumulated, in its plumbing, the full geological record of every previous attempt to address its various needs, layers of repair upon repair upon original installation, copper giving way to galvanized giving way to PVC in a sequence that told the story of the house's life in the language of materials and their dates.
Marcus pulled up and got out and a man came from the house — sixties, weathered in the specific way of someone who has spent most of his life outside, the handshake of someone for whom a handshake means something.
"Marcus," the man said.
"Bill," Marcus said. "What've we got?"
They walked around the side of the house and the man — Bill — explained, with the specific vocabulary of someone who has been living with a problem long enough to have developed opinions about it, what the water pressure had been doing and when it had started and what he had tried and what had not worked.
Marcus listened.
Chuck parked on the road, a hundred yards back, and watched through the windshield.
He watched Marcus work for four hours.
This is the fact, plainly stated, and the narrator will now describe what four hours of watching Marcus Webb work looked like from a hundred yards away and then, when Marcus moved around the back of the house and Chuck got out of the truck and sat on the fence at the edge of the property and watched from there, from considerably closer.
Marcus did not notice him.
Or Marcus noticed him and filed him under the category he had apparently created for Chuck — the category of things that were slightly unusual about this person and which he had decided, on reflection, did not require active management.
Either way, Marcus worked and Chuck watched.
The problem was, as problems in old farmhouses tend to be, not what it had appeared to be.
Bill had described a pressure issue — low pressure at the fixtures, intermittent, worse in the mornings. Marcus had arrived expecting a failing pressure regulator or a partially closed valve somewhere in the system. He had arrived with the tools for a pressure regulator and a partially closed valve.
He found something else.
The narrator will not detail the plumbing specifics because the plumbing specifics are not the point. The point is what Marcus did when he found something else, which was: he stopped. He put down the tool he had been holding. He stood in the crawl space under the house with his flashlight and he looked at what was actually there, not at what he had expected to find.
He looked for a long time.
Then he came out from under the house and stood in the backyard and Bill came over and Marcus explained what he had found, which was different from what they had discussed, which meant the job was different, which meant the quote was different.
Chuck watched this conversation from the fence.
He watched Marcus's face.
Marcus was not happy about the change — not because of the money, the narrator had enough context to understand that money was not the primary register here, but because he had arrived with an expectation and the expectation was wrong and being wrong bothered him in the specific way the narrator already understood, the way it had bothered him the day before with the other job in the other county.
He was bothered.
He explained it to Bill anyway.
Completely. Clearly. Without the defensive framing of someone who is covering themselves or the excessive apology of someone who is performing accountability. He said what he had found, what it meant, what it would cost, and what it would take.
Bill listened.
Bill said: "How long you known me, Marcus?"
"Eight years," Marcus said.
"Eight years," Bill said. "You think I don't know that sometimes it's different from what you think it's going to be?"
Marcus was quiet.
"Just fix it," Bill said. "I'll put some coffee on."
He went inside.
Marcus stood in the backyard for a moment.
He had the expression of someone who had been carrying something and had just been told, by someone he trusted, that the carrying was unnecessary.
He went back under the house.
Chuck watched him work.
The work was the work — precise, methodical, organized around a logic that was visible to someone watching even without knowing the specific system being addressed. Marcus worked the way someone works when they have been doing a thing for long enough that the doing has become second nature, which is to say without the self-consciousness of someone performing competence, without the hesitation of someone uncertain about the next step.
He worked without hesitation.
He worked without hurry.
He worked with the specific quality of someone for whom the job is the point — not the completion of the job, not the invoice that followed, not the reputation built by completing jobs well, but the job itself, the specific arrangement of problem and solution and the movement between them.
Chuck watched this.
He had watched people work before. He had watched Sergeant Cole run the obstacle course. He had watched Sam Ellroy look at monitors with the attention of someone seeing something he could not fully explain. He had watched Roy Briggs correct his shoulder drop and become something better than he had arrived.
This was different.
The difference was stakes.
Every person he had watched before had been watched in the context of their work improving — their technique corrected, their understanding expanded, their operation elevated toward something better. He had been, in each case, the thing that produced the improvement.
He was not producing anything here.
He was sitting on a fence.
Marcus was under a farmhouse twelve miles south of Wilson, Texas, replacing a failed section of supply line that had been failing slowly for two years and which Bill, the man who owned the house, needed working because the house needed water because the house was where he lived and the land around it was what he worked and the water was what made both possible.
The stakes were clear.
Not cosmic — the narrator is precise about this. Not the stakes of galactic significance, not the stakes of arrangements with fundamental forces or the resolution of things that had existed since before the first star. The stakes of a man who needed his water working, and a plumber who had said he would fix it, and the specific weight of that commitment honored in a crawl space under a farmhouse on a Wednesday morning in March.
The stakes were small.
The stakes were completely real.
Chuck sat on the fence and felt the realness of them and found that it had a quality he had not expected.
The quality was weight.
Not the weight of importance — he had felt important things, vast things, things of cosmic significance. This was different. The weight of something that mattered to a specific person in a specific place for a specific reason that had nothing to do with cosmic significance and everything to do with the simple fact that Bill needed his water working and Marcus had said he would fix it.
Specific.
Personal.
Real in the way that only things with a face attached to them are real.
Chuck sat on the fence.
The Question was present.
What is it for.
He sat with both things — the Question and the weight of specific, personal stakes — and for the first time since Friday the Question felt less like something addressed to him from outside everything and more like something he was standing inside.
He was not yet sure what this meant.
He sat on the fence.
He watched Marcus work.
Marcus came out from under the house at ten forty-seven.
He stood up and stretched — the specific stretch of someone who has been in a confined space for a long time, the body reclaiming its full extent with the particular relief of something returning to its natural state.
He looked at the fence.
He looked at Chuck on the fence.
He looked back at the house.
He looked at Chuck again.
"How long have you been there?" he said.
"A while," Chuck said.
Marcus looked at him.
"You followed me," he said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
Marcus was quiet for a moment.
In seventeen years of plumbing he had not once had someone follow him to a job and sit on a fence and watch him work. He tried to think of how he felt about this and found that the feeling was not, primarily, irritation or intrusion — though it contained elements of both — but something closer to the feeling he had when he found something behind a wall that was different from what he expected.
Not wrong.
Unexpected.
"Why?" he said.
Chuck got off the fence.
He walked across the yard.
He looked at the house — at the crawl space access, at the outdoor faucet, at the visible section of pipe that ran along the foundation.
"I wanted to see what the work looked like," he said.
"Plumbing," Marcus said. "You wanted to see what plumbing looked like."
"Your plumbing," Chuck said. "Specifically."
Marcus looked at him.
"There a difference?"
"Yes," Chuck said.
Marcus waited.
"Most plumbing is about the pipe," Chuck said. "What I watched this morning was about Bill."
Marcus was quiet.
"He needed his water working," Chuck said. "And you knew that. The whole time you were under there you knew that. It wasn't — the narrator searched for the word — abstract. It had his name on it."
Marcus looked at the house.
"Of course it had his name on it," he said. "It's his house."
"I know," Chuck said. "That's what I came to see."
Marcus looked at him with the expression he had been developing for a week — the expression of someone standing next to a thing that is not fully legible but which he has decided, on the balance of available evidence, to trust.
"Did you see it?" he said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"And?"
Chuck looked at the crawl space access.
"I've fixed a lot of things," he said. "I don't know if any of them had a name on them."
Marcus was quiet for a long time.
Bill came out of the back door with two cups of coffee and looked at the two men standing in his yard and said: "Who's your friend?"
"Chuck," Marcus said. "He was passing."
Bill looked at the road, which was empty, and looked at Chuck, and said: "You want coffee?"
"Sure," Chuck said.
They had coffee on Bill's porch.
Bill and Marcus talked about the job — what had been found, what had been done, what Bill should watch for in the next few years given the age of the system. They talked about the land, because Bill asked about the drought conditions and Marcus had driven through three counties that morning and had opinions. They talked about a mutual acquaintance who had recently sold his property to a developer and the various feelings that transaction had produced in the community of people who had known him.
Chuck listened.
Not in the way he had been listening to Marcus's stories about his father — with the full attention of someone being present with another person's experience. With the specific attention of someone taking inventory.
Not of the plumbing.
Of the conversation.
The way Bill said Marcus — with the ease of a name said eight years, the specific sound of a name that has become associated with reliability, with someone who shows up when he says he will and charges what he quotes and tells you what he finds even when it is not what he expected to find.
The way Marcus said Bill — with the ease of a man he had worked for eight times and knew well enough to read, well enough to know that the direct explanation would be received well, well enough to not perform the excessive apology.
Eight years.
Eight jobs.
A specific person with a specific house and specific water and a name that was on the work every time Marcus came out here.
Chuck sat on Bill's porch and drank his coffee and felt the weight of it — the specific, personal, real weight of eight years and eight jobs and a name on the work.
What is it for.
He looked at his coffee cup.
He thought about the complete inventory the narrator had assembled in the intergalactic medium.
The gravity arrangement. The time arrangement. The death understanding. The fire instruction. The mathematics correction. The camera attention. The handbook. The paper. The Last Enemy. The gods waiting.
He thought about each item on the list.
He thought about whether any item on the list had a name on it.
Roy Briggs, he thought. Roy Briggs had a name. The shoulder corrected, the character improved, two more championships, the rest of his life being better than he arrived. Roy Briggs had a name.
The man in the hospital in Ohio. Gerald Marsh. He had a name. Eighty-four years and Walker, Texas Ranger on Friday nights and the printout kept for the rest of his life.
He went through the list.
The names were there.
They had always been there.
He had not been looking at the names.
He had been looking at the work.
Marcus drove back to Wilson at noon.
Chuck drove behind him, three vehicles back, the comfortable distance.
They arrived at Marcus's house and parked and got out and Marcus looked at him.
"You going to follow me tomorrow?" he said.
"No," Chuck said.
"Why not?"
"I saw what I needed to see."
Marcus looked at him.
"Which was?"
Chuck was quiet.
"That the work isn't the point," he said. "The work is how you get to the point. The point is Bill's water working. The point is eight years of showing up and him knowing you'll show up. The point is the name on the job."
Marcus stood by his truck.
"You followed me twelve miles to figure out that the customer matters," he said.
"I followed you twelve miles to see what it looked like when the customer matters to the person doing the work," Chuck said. "I know the customer matters. I didn't know what it looked like."
Marcus looked at him.
"What does it look like?" he said.
Chuck thought about Marcus under the house. About the stretch when he came out. About the expression when Bill had said just fix it, I'll put the coffee on. About the coffee on the porch. About eight years in the way a name was said.
"Like weight," Chuck said. "Like something with real weight."
Marcus was quiet.
"Yeah," he said finally. "It does feel like that."
"Do you like it?" Chuck said.
Marcus looked at him.
"The weight?"
"Yes."
Marcus thought about it.
Thought about it the way he thought about things that were true and did not need embellishment — without performance, without the urge to make the answer more interesting than it was.
"Yeah," he said. "I do. I'd miss it if it wasn't there."
"I know," Chuck said.
He said it the way he always said it — meaning only what it said. Not I know how you feel or I understand or any of the translations that people make when they want to communicate empathy. Simply: I know.
And the narrator, which records everything, recorded that this was true.
Chuck Norris, who had stood at the edge of the inside of everything and felt small for the first time, who had sat on a fence and watched a man fix a farmhouse water supply with someone's name on the job —
knew.
He got in his truck.
He drove three streets.
He went inside.
He made his eggs.
He sat at his table with the Question and the weight of names and the specific realness of a man needing his water working and someone who showed up to fix it.
He wound his watch.
The watch ticked.
The narrator turned to the private accounting beneath the text and wrote one line.
The line said: he is beginning to understand what the list was missing.
The narrator did not write what it was missing.
The narrator did not need to.
It was already in the text.
It had been in the text since Tuesday morning.
Since a leaking pipe.
Since a man who had not fixed it for two weeks because it was easier to fix someone else's.
Since two cups in a rack.
Since a name.