I am the GodVolume II: The Question
Marcus Webb knew the following things.
He knew the plumbing systems of approximately three hundred and forty homes and businesses across Wilson and the surrounding three counties, each of which he carried in his memory the way a doctor carries patient histories — not as a list, not as a database, but as a living knowledge, updated on each visit, organized around the specific personality of each system and the specific needs of each person who depended on it.
He knew which customers called at seven AM and which called at noon and which waited until the problem was undeniable and called at three. He knew which of them would have coffee ready and which would stand over him while he worked and which would disappear into another room and trust him to find them when he was done. He knew the ones who asked questions because they wanted to understand and the ones who asked questions because they were nervous and the ones who did not ask questions at all because they had decided, somewhere along the way, that trust was more efficient than supervision.
He knew the land south of Wilson — the specific behavior of groundwater in the clay soil, the way old pipes moved in the freeze-thaw cycle of a Texas winter that was never quite cold enough to be predictable, the particular corrosion patterns that came from the mineral content of the water in the second county over.
He knew his truck. He knew the engine — intimately, in the way his father had known it, in the way that three weeks of working on something until you understood it rather than just fixed it produces knowledge that is different in kind from the knowledge you get by reading the manual.
He knew Wilson, Texas. Not as a fact — not the population and the founding date and the historical register of significant events. As a place. The specific quality of the light in the late afternoon. The sound the wind made in the particular configuration of buildings on Main Street. The way the town felt different in summer than in spring, different on a weekday than on a Sunday, different when it had rained than when it hadn't.
He knew how to be by himself, which is a different kind of knowledge from knowing other things and which takes longer to acquire and is not always comfortable in the acquiring.
He knew about his father. Not everything — nobody knows everything about their parents, the full person behind the role is always partially obscured — but enough. The way he ate, quickly and without ceremony. The three weeks on the engine. The thing about knowing whether you were making a choice or meeting an obligation. The specific laugh, which Marcus occasionally heard in himself and which surprised him every time.
He knew that he had not been in a serious relationship in four years, and he knew why, and he knew that knowing why and doing something about it were different activities and that he had been engaged in the first and not the second.
He knew about loss. Not abstractly. From the inside.
These are the things Marcus Webb knew.
The narrator records them because they are relevant, and they are relevant because Chuck Norris had been spending a week in Marcus's kitchen finding them out, and what he had been finding out was more significant than he had yet fully understood.
Thursday morning.
Chuck knocked at eight.
Marcus opened the door with the expression of someone who has stopped being surprised by this and has moved on to simply incorporating it.
"Coffee's on," he said.
"I'm not staying," Chuck said. "I have something to do today."
Marcus looked at him.
"Okay," he said.
"I wanted to ask you something first," Chuck said.
"Come in then," Marcus said. "Coffee's on."
They stood at the counter — not at the table, not in the settled way of a long conversation, but at the counter in the way of something quick, something that had a shape and a destination.
Chuck held his cup.
He was quiet for a moment in the way he was quiet before he said something he had been thinking about — not hesitation, not the gathering of courage, but the specific pause of someone who has been precise about language their whole life and intends to remain precise now.
"The job yesterday," he said. "The farmhouse."
"What about it?"
"When you found something different than you expected. When the job changed."
"Yeah," Marcus said.
"You were bothered by it," Chuck said. "Even though it wasn't your fault. Even though Bill was fine about it."
"Yeah," Marcus said. "I said that."
"I know," Chuck said. "I want to understand it better. You knew you were right. You knew the change was real and not something you had missed. But it still bothered you."
Marcus drank his coffee.
"Because I told him one thing," he said. "And it turned out to be another thing. Doesn't matter whose fault it is. I told him something and it wasn't right."
"Because your word means something," Chuck said.
"Yes," Marcus said.
"To you," Chuck said. "Not just to him. To you."
Marcus looked at him.
"Yes," he said, more slowly. "To me."
Chuck was quiet.
"What happens," he said, "when you tell someone something and you are right. When the job is exactly what you said it would be, exactly the price, exactly the time, exactly the outcome. What does that feel like?"
Marcus thought about it.
"Good," he said. "It feels good."
"Because?"
"Because—" He stopped. "Because I said it would be a certain way, and I made it that way. Because what I said and what happened were the same thing."
"Your word and the world," Chuck said. "Matched."
Marcus looked at him.
"Yeah," he said. "That's it exactly."
Chuck drank his coffee.
"Thank you," he said.
"You're thanking me for explaining why I like being right," Marcus said.
"I'm thanking you for explaining what it means to give your word," Chuck said. "They're not the same thing."
Marcus looked at him.
He thought about this.
He thought about the distinction — between liking to be right, which was about the self, and giving your word, which was about the space between yourself and another person. The commitment that lived in that space. The specific responsibility of having said something and being the person who made it true.
He thought about seventeen years of jobs.
He thought about which ones had felt good.
The ones that had felt good were not the ones that had been easy. The ones that had felt good were the ones where what he said and what happened were the same thing. Where the commitment held.
"Huh," Marcus said.
"Yeah," Chuck said.
He put his cup in the sink.
"I'll be back tomorrow," he said.
"Okay," Marcus said.
Chuck left.
Marcus stood at the counter.
He looked at his coffee cup.
He thought about giving your word.
He thought about what it meant that Chuck Norris — a man who had appeared at his door one Tuesday morning and fixed his pipe and come back twice more and followed him to a job and sat on a fence for four hours and was in some way that Marcus could not yet articulate completely unlike any person he had ever met — had come to his door at eight in the morning to ask him what it meant to give your word.
As though Marcus Webb, plumber, Wilson, Texas, was the person who would know.
As though the question of what a word meant between people was something you asked a plumber about.
He stood at the counter.
He thought about whether that was strange.
He decided it was not.
He decided it was, in fact, the most sensible thing about the whole week.
If you wanted to know what it meant to give your word to someone specific in a specific place about a specific thing — if you wanted to know what that weight felt like and where it came from and why it mattered — you did not ask a philosopher.
You asked someone who had been doing it for seventeen years and felt it every time.
Marcus finished his coffee.
He went to work.
Chuck went upstream again.
Not as far as Tuesday — not to the edge of the inside of everything. Somewhere between Wilson and the edge, in the space where distance lost its ordinary meaning and the thinking that was too large for kitchen tables could be done in the scale that required.
He went there and he thought.
He thought about the list.
He had been thinking about the list since the intergalactic medium — since the narrator had spent two pages assembling it and found that it pointed at him standing there. He had thought about it at the edge of the inside of everything. He had thought about it on Bill's porch.
He thought about it now with new information.
The list was accurate.
The list was complete in the sense of containing everything it had been intended to contain.
The list was incomplete in the sense that what it had been intended to contain was the wrong thing.
The list was a list of what he had done.
It was not a list of who the doing had been for.
He went through it again.
The gravity arrangement: for the world, in the general sense. For the ground to be cooperative. For things to stay where they were put. No specific face.
The time arrangement: for himself, primarily. More time when he needed it. The watch wound every morning as acknowledgment. No specific face.
The death understanding: for himself. The meeting in Osan. The eleven minutes. The file marked pending. No specific face — though he thought of Corporal Whitfield, sitting outside the barracks, and what Chuck had said, and Whitfield looking at the sky every Tuesday for the rest of his life. There. A face. Incomplete, but present.
The fire instruction: himself, primarily. The perfect eggs. No face.
The mathematics correction: the textbook revised, the students who used it, Mr. Fry who spent a decade reading philosophy and wrote a letter. Faces there. Not sought — arrived at through the work.
Roy Briggs. A face deliberately engaged. The shoulder corrected, the two championships, the rest of his life. That one had a face from the beginning.
Marcus's father, in the way Marcus talked about him — not in the list but present in what the list was pointing toward. The shape that loss makes. The specific weight of a person who was and then wasn't and whose absence changed the arrangement of things.
He went through every item.
He found faces.
Not always sought. Not always the point of the action. But there — in the aftermath, in the persistence, in the things that had continued after he moved on.
Dr. Fitch, who slept well every night for the rest of his life.
Sergeant Cole, who ran the obstacle course every morning and revised his curriculum.
The nurses in 1940 who had sat on the hallway floor and felt something they could not name and carried it anyway.
Gerald Marsh.
Whitfield.
The man from the gas station in New Mexico.
Ruth Calloway, who made her mother's chicken and dumplings on a Tuesday in October 1964 without knowing why.
Bill.
Marcus.
He went through the list and found them.
They had always been there.
He had not been looking at them.
He had been looking at the work.
The Question was present.
What is it for.
He sat in the space between Wilson and the edge of everything and looked at the faces he had found in the list and felt the weight that Marcus had described — specific, personal, real.
Bill's water working.
Marcus's shoulder on Tuesday mornings saying you'll be the first.
Mr. Fry reading philosophy for a decade because a thirteen-year-old had asked a question about unknown quantities.
He sat with the weight.
He had felt small at the edge of the inside of everything.
He felt something different now.
Not small. Not large. Something that was not organized around scale.
The narrator searched for the word and found it after some time.
Connected.
Not the connection of things that are linked by proximity or arrangement. The connection of something that has been part of something else — that has had its hand in the shape of another person's life, that has left something in the places it has been that continued after it left.
He had been to the edge of the universe and felt small.
He was sitting in the space between Wilson and the edge and feeling connected.
The two feelings were not opposites.
They were the same feeling from different directions.
The narrator wrote this down.
He came back in the afternoon.
He did not stop at Marcus's.
He went home and made his eggs and sat at his table and looked at the Question with the specific quality of someone who has found something and is now sitting with the finding before they know what to do with it.
The finding was this:
The list was missing names.
Not because the names hadn't been there. Because he hadn't been looking at them. Because he had understood the work as the point and the names as the context — the incidental circumstances in which the work occurred, the backdrop against which the fixing happened.
The names were not the backdrop.
The names were the point.
The work was how you got to the names.
He sat with this.
He sat with it for a long time, in the way that things need to be sat with when they are both obvious and new — obvious in retrospect, as though they had been visible all along, new in the sense of having just been seen for the first time.
He thought about the Question.
What is it for.
He thought about what it would mean to answer it.
Not the answer itself — he did not have the answer itself, not yet, not completely. The answer was still forming, the way the water in a pipe forms around what it finds, finding the shape of the space before it fills it.
But the direction of the answer.
The direction was: names.
The direction was: weight.
The direction was: the specific, personal, real thing that happened when you gave your word to a person with a face and then you made your word true.
He wound his watch.
He looked at the ceiling.
He thought about Marcus saying: let me know when you figure it out.
He thought about having said: you'll be the first.
He thought about what it would mean to go to Marcus's kitchen and say: I think I'm beginning to figure it out.
He thought about what Marcus would say.
He thought Marcus would pour coffee.
He thought Marcus would listen.
He thought Marcus would say something practical and accurate and sideways-true, the way he always said things, the way someone says things when they have been paying attention to the world through their hands for seventeen years and the world has taught them things that they do not always have words for but which emerge, when the moment calls for them, in the language they have.
He thought about that.
He thought about looking forward to it.
He had not, in a very long time, looked forward to a specific conversation with a specific person.
Not as a means. Not because the conversation would yield information or resolve a situation or produce an outcome on the list.
Simply — looking forward to it.
The specific, personal, real anticipation of a thing.
The narrator recorded this.
The narrator recorded it in the category it had made three chapters ago.
The category that said: after.
This was also after.
It was a different kind of after than the one that had started the category.
That after had been the after of everything finished.
This after was the after of something beginning.
Marcus Webb, three streets away, was filing invoices.
He was filing them at the kitchen table, which he had cleared of the stack that had been there since Tuesday, which he had been meaning to clear since Tuesday and which he had cleared tonight for no reason he could articulate except that it needed doing and he had the time.
He filed them in the order he kept them — chronological, by county, by customer name within county. A system his father had used and which he had inherited and which worked.
He filed Bill's invoice.
He held it for a moment before he filed it.
Bill's name, the farmhouse, the job that had been different from what he expected, the coffee on the porch, the eight years in the way a name was said.
He filed it.
He finished the stack.
He looked at the table, now clear.
He looked at the two cups in the rack, which were there because he kept not putting them away and had stopped trying to decide why.
He left them where they were.
He went to bed.
Outside, Wilson, Texas was doing what it did.
Three streets over, Chuck Norris was lying in the dark of his house thinking about names.
The Question was patient.
The answer was forming.
The narrator did not rush it.
Some things need the time they need.