I am the GodVolume II: The Question
Chuck Norris fell on Monday.
Not dramatically. Not from a great height, not in a way that produced a sound anyone would have heard from inside a house, not in circumstances that would have been, to an observer, anything other than an ordinary man stepping off a curb wrong and going down.
He stepped off a curb wrong.
He went down.
It was six forty-two in the morning.
He had finished his run — the fourteen miles, the usual route, the pre-dawn dark giving way to the specific early light of a Monday in late March that had decided to be grey. He was three blocks from home, on the return leg, passing the corner of Elm and Third where the sidewalk had a raised section from a tree root that had been pushing up through the concrete for years and which the town had been meaning to address and had not yet addressed.
He had passed this corner forty times.
He had never caught the raised section because the road had always, in the cooperative arrangement, presented its best surface to him. The most navigable angles. The most honest account of itself.
Not anymore.
He caught it at the same moment he stepped off the curb to cross to the other side and the combination — the raised section, the curb, the specific angle of a foot that had always been met by ground that tried harder and was now met by ground that simply was what it was — produced the result that physics had always been prepared to produce and had, for fifty years, been asked to withhold.
He went down.
The ground came up.
He hit the road on his left side — knee, hip, palm braced against the asphalt, the specific sequence of a fall that has been partially caught and is therefore neither a full fall nor a clean one but something in between, something that distributes itself across more of the body than a complete fall would.
He lay on the road for a moment.
The moment was not long.
The narrator records its duration as approximately four seconds, which is not long in any absolute sense but which is longer than Chuck Norris had spent on the ground involuntarily since March 10th, 1940, which is to say it was the longest such moment in his life.
Four seconds.
He lay on the road in the grey morning light and the ground was the ground — neither cooperative nor hostile, simply present, doing what it did, which was to be there when things fell onto it and to not do anything about it afterward because that was not its job.
He felt the asphalt against his palm.
Rough. Not uniformly rough — varied, the way surfaces are varied when they are old and have been through many seasons, the specific texture of something that has been what it is for a long time without apology.
He felt his knee.
Not injured — the fall had been partially caught, the damage was surface, the kind that stings and will be gone in a day. But present. The specific presence of a body part that has been in contact with something harder than itself and is registering the contact.
He felt his hip.
The same.
He lay in the road.
He looked at the sky.
The sky was grey. Not the grey of a sky that was going to do something about it — just grey, the specific non-committal grey of a March morning that had not yet decided whether it intended to be a day or a backdrop.
He looked at it.
Four seconds.
Then he got up.
Getting up was different.
Not harder, exactly — the getting up was the getting up, the ordinary physical process of returning to vertical from horizontal, which he had performed in controlled circumstances thousands of times in training and in film and in demonstration. He knew how to get up.
But it felt different.
It felt like the getting up of someone who went down and is now getting back up, which is different from the getting up of someone who is simply changing position. The difference is in what the getting up means — not just the movement but the meaning of the movement, which is: I was down, and now I am not.
He stood on the road.
He looked at his palm.
The asphalt had left a specific pattern on it — not a wound, just a reddening, the skin's record of contact with something rough. He looked at it the way he had looked at the apple on the fence post in 1944, with the full attention of someone examining something for the first time.
He had never had a mark like this before.
Not from falling.
He stood on the road and looked at his palm and felt something that the narrator searched for the word for and found after a moment.
Surprised.
Not shocked — not the shock of something catastrophic or unexpected. The specific surprise of someone who has understood something intellectually and is now experiencing it in the body and finding that the body's version is different from the mind's version. Different in the way that reading about cold water and stepping into cold water are different.
He had understood that the arrangement was over.
Now his palm understood.
They were the same understanding.
The body's version had weight.
He walked home.
Not running — he had finished the run before the fall, the fall had happened in the ordinary transit from run to home, and the walking home now was ordinary walking. He walked and his knee registered the contact with each step and he felt the hip and the palm and he walked through Wilson, Texas in the grey morning and nothing in Wilson, Texas noticed that anything had happened.
The town did not know.
The ground did not know.
The three houses he passed on the way home did not know.
He had fallen and gotten up and was walking home and the world had continued exactly as it always did because that was what the world did when things fell and got back up — it continued.
He found this, without being able to immediately say why, significant.
He thought about it while he walked.
The world had not paused.
It had not marked the moment.
It had not — the narrator found the word — acknowledged.
In fifty-three years of existence, everything Chuck Norris had done had been acknowledged in one way or another. Gravity had acknowledged his position. Time had acknowledged his needs. The camera had acknowledged the correct angle. The ground had tried harder. The world had arranged itself.
The fall had not been acknowledged.
It had simply happened.
And the world had continued.
And he had gotten up.
And the world had continued.
He walked home.
He stood at his kitchen counter.
He made his eggs.
They were not perfect.
He had known they would not be — had known since Sunday, had made peace with it, had understood it as part of the cost and the cost as part of the rightness.
But the first morning of imperfect eggs was the first morning of imperfect eggs and there was a difference between understanding that something would be true and finding it true on a specific Monday morning in a specific kitchen in Wilson, Texas.
He ate them.
They were the right thing.
His palm stung slightly.
He ate his imperfect eggs with a palm that stung and looked at the grey morning outside the window and felt the full weight of himself — the same weight that had hit the road at Elm and Third, the same weight that had gotten back up, the same weight that was now sitting at the kitchen table eating eggs that fire had made at the level fire made things when it was not following instructions.
He was the weight he had always been.
He was carrying it differently.
He went to Marcus's at eight.
Marcus was in the kitchen when Chuck knocked — already dressed, already at the counter with his own coffee, already in the orientation of someone who expects the knock and is not surprised by it.
He opened the door.
He looked at Chuck.
He looked at his palm.
He said nothing about the palm.
He stepped back.
"Coffee's on," he said.
"I know," Chuck said.
He came in.
He sat.
Marcus poured and sat across from him and they had the first coffee of Monday morning in the kitchen that had become the kitchen it was.
"How was the run?" Marcus said.
"Good," Chuck said. "I fell on the way back."
Marcus looked at him.
"Curb on Elm," Chuck said. "The tree root section."
"That section's been like that for three years," Marcus said.
"I know," Chuck said. "I've run past it forty times."
"And today—"
"Today the ground wasn't helping," Chuck said.
Marcus looked at his palm.
"Does it hurt?" he said.
"Stings," Chuck said. "Not badly."
"You've never—"
"No," Chuck said. "First time."
Marcus sat with this.
He looked at Chuck's palm with the facility — not assessing damage, reading the system. Reading what it meant.
"How was it?" he said. "The falling."
Chuck thought about how to answer.
He thought about lying on the road and looking at the grey sky.
About the four seconds.
About the world continuing.
About getting up and the world not marking it.
"Instructive," he said.
Marcus looked at him.
"Instructive," he repeated.
"The world didn't notice," Chuck said. "I fell and got up and the world continued."
"The world doesn't usually notice," Marcus said.
"I know," Chuck said. "Now I know what that feels like."
"And?"
"And," Chuck said, "getting up was something. Not because anything was watching. Just — in itself. The getting up."
Marcus nodded slowly.
"Yeah," he said. "It is something. When nobody's watching."
"When nobody's watching," Chuck confirmed.
They drank their coffee.
The grey morning continued outside.
"The eggs weren't perfect," Chuck said.
"No," Marcus said.
"First morning."
"How were they?"
Chuck thought about it.
"Like something I made," he said. "Not like something that happened correctly."
"Is that bad?"
Chuck held his cup.
"No," he said. "It's different."
"Good different or bad different?"
"Just different," Chuck said. "I'll need some time with it."
Marcus nodded.
"The first morning of anything new is just the first morning," he said. "It doesn't tell you much. Ask me again in a week."
"Alright," Chuck said.
"Alright," Marcus said.
The week passed.
The narrator does not record every day in detail because every day does not require it and the narrator has learned, in the company of a plumber who worked efficiently and without excess, to use the minimum required.
What the week contained:
Chuck fell twice more. Once on Wednesday, stepping off the back step at his own house when the step was wet from overnight rain. Once on Saturday, in a way that was not a fall but a stumble — a near fall, a recovery, the specific experience of a body that is now in negotiation with the conditions rather than excepted from them, learning the limits by approaching them.
The eggs improved. Not to perfection — perfection was over. But they improved in the way things improve when someone pays attention to them, when the attention is not the attention of something directing an outcome but the attention of someone learning a material. By Friday they were good. Not perfect. Good.
The palm healed.
Chuck ran his fourteen miles every morning. The runs were the same miles but different running — the ground was what it was, the surface varied, the corners were corners and not accommodations. He adjusted. He paid attention in a different way than before — not the comprehensive monitoring of something that monitors everything and allows nothing to affect it, but the specific attention of something that can be affected and is therefore watching.
He caught the Elm and Third corner correctly on Wednesday.
He did not catch it perfectly on Thursday.
He caught it correctly again on Friday.
This, the narrator notes, is what learning looks like.
On Thursday evening it rained.
Not heavily — the specific quiet rain of a spring evening that has decided to water things without making a statement about it. The rain that gardeners are grateful for and everyone else barely notices.
Chuck was walking home from Marcus's — he had started walking more and driving less, not by decision but by the organic accumulation of small choices that produce changes without announcing them — and the rain began while he was two blocks from home.
He got wet.
This is a small fact.
The narrator records it because to Chuck Norris it was not a small fact. He had not been wet from rain since 1944. The fire arrangement, adjacent in some ways to the rain situation, had ensured that weather made appropriate adjustments in his vicinity. Not dramatically — he had not walked in perpetual sunshine while rain fell around him. But the rain had been considerate. It had waited. It had let him pass.
It did not wait on Thursday evening.
It rained.
He walked in it.
He felt it on his face — specific, cool, the specific sensation of water that is falling because of the conditions and not because anyone has directed it. He felt it on his hands. He felt his shirt go from dry to damp in the specific irreversible way of things that have gotten wet and will not be dry again until they are dried.
He walked.
He looked up at the sky while he walked, the way people look up at rain — not checking whether it will stop, not assessing, just looking at the thing that is happening.
The rain fell on him.
He walked home.
He stood in his kitchen in his damp shirt.
He changed.
He sat at his table.
He thought about the rain.
Not about being wet — being wet was not the point. The point was the not-waiting. The rain had not waited because the rain did not wait for things anymore. He was not a thing the rain waited for. He was a thing the rain rained on.
He was rained on.
He was also — the narrator searched and found the word — included.
Not special. Not accommodated. Included.
Part of the conditions. Subject to what everyone was subject to. Rained on because it was raining and he was outside and that is what rain does to things that are outside when it rains.
He sat in his dry shirt after changing and thought about being included.
He had not expected it to feel like this.
He had expected it to feel like loss — like something taken away, like the subtraction of a quality that had been his. He had understood it intellectually as cost and had accepted the cost and had been prepared to carry it.
It did not feel like loss.
It felt like something else.
Relief, the narrator wrote.
Then crossed it out.
Not relief.
Something prior to relief.
The feeling you have when you stop holding something apart from yourself and let it be part of you. When you stop managing the distance and close it. When you let the thing — whatever the thing is — just happen.
The rain had happened.
He had let it.
He sat at his dry-shirt kitchen table and looked at the window where the rain continued and felt the feeling he did not yet have a name for.
He thought he might ask Marcus what it was called.
Marcus would know.
Marcus had been rained on his whole life.
Friday morning he asked.
"What do you call it," he said, at the kitchen table, second cup, the grey Friday morning doing what grey Friday mornings did. "When you stop managing the distance. When you let the thing happen."
Marcus looked at him.
"What thing?"
"Any thing," Chuck said. "The rain. The fall. The imperfect eggs. When you stop — when you stop making it not touch you."
Marcus thought about it.
"Surrender," he said. "Some people call it that. But that's not quite right."
"No," Chuck said. "What's the right word?"
"Acceptance," Marcus said. "But that's also not quite right. Acceptance sounds passive."
"It's not passive," Chuck said.
"No," Marcus agreed. "It takes more than passive."
"What does it take?"
Marcus turned his cup.
He thought about his father.
He thought about the Sunday walk.
He thought about looking at the fence not-quite-right for two years and then fixing it.
He thought about the things in the house his father had fixed in eighteen months — the fence, the steps, the window, the gate. The tired evenings. The not sorry.
"Willingness," he said. "It takes being willing. Not just resigned. Willing. There's a difference."
"Resigned is—"
"Resigned is when you accept something because you have no choice," Marcus said. "Willing is when you accept it because you want what it comes with."
"The cost," Chuck said. "You're willing to pay the cost because you want what the cost is for."
"Yes," Marcus said.
Chuck held his cup.
"I got wet in the rain last night," he said.
"I know," Marcus said. "I saw you walking. I was going to offer you a ride."
"Why didn't you?"
"You looked like you were somewhere," Marcus said. "Like the walking was the point."
"It was," Chuck said.
"Were you willing?" Marcus said. "Or resigned?"
Chuck thought about the rain on his face.
The not-waiting.
The inclusion.
"Willing," he said.
"Good," Marcus said.
"Willingness," Chuck said.
"Willingness," Marcus confirmed.
They drank their coffee.
The grey Friday became, around nine, something less grey — the sun finding a gap and coming through it in the specific way of sun that has been absent and has returned, not dramatic, just present again.
The morning continued.
On Saturday something happened that the narrator had not scheduled and does not place in a category but records with the specific attention of things that matter in ways that do not announce themselves.
Marcus was telling a story.
Not an important story — a work story, the kind that accumulates over seventeen years of being in other people's houses and seeing the specific variety of human relationship with plumbing that produces situations that are funny in retrospect and occasionally during. A story about a customer in the second county who had attempted to fix his own water heater using instructions he had found on the internet and had produced, through the specific combination of confidence and incomplete information that this category of repair tends to generate, a situation that was not dangerous but was spectacular and which had taken Marcus two hours to untangle.
The story was funny.
Not profound. Not weighted with the specific gravity of the conversations about fathers and fences and the cost of willingness. Just funny — the specific comedy of human confidence meeting the specific indifference of pipes and instructions and the gap between them.
Chuck laughed.
The narrator records this because the narrator has been recording Chuck Norris for fifty-three years and has extensive documentation of him being precise and calm and occasionally expressing the dry acknowledgment that passes in his register for humor and has, across all of this documentation, very little record of him simply laughing.
He laughed.
Not politely. Not in the controlled way of someone expressing appreciation for something amusing. He laughed the way Marcus laughed — fully, in the body, the specific uncontrolled quality of something that has caught you off guard in the best possible way.
He laughed at a story about a water heater and a man with internet instructions.
Marcus stopped mid-sentence and looked at him.
Chuck became aware of being looked at and the laugh finished and he held his cup.
"Sorry," he said.
"Don't apologize," Marcus said. "It's — I haven't heard you laugh like that."
"No," Chuck said.
"It's a good laugh," Marcus said.
Chuck looked at his cup.
"It was a funny story," he said.
"I have better ones," Marcus said.
"Tell them," Chuck said.
Marcus told them.
Chuck laughed at two more.
The morning went on for longer than mornings usually went.
Neither of them was in a hurry.
The narrator wrote it all down and noted that the writing felt easy — not the easy of something simple, but the easy of something in its right place, moving at the right pace, saying what it was supposed to say without being asked.
The narrator looked at the record.
The record said: two men in a kitchen on a Saturday morning in March, drinking coffee, telling stories about water heaters.
The narrator looked at the Question.
The Question was present.
The narrator looked at the record again.
The narrator thought about what Marcus's father had said.
A right job feels like you were supposed to be there. Like the thing couldn't have happened without you specifically.
The narrator looked at the kitchen.
The narrator wrote, in the private accounting beneath the text, for the first time with something that was not observation but conviction:
This is the answer forming.
Not the words of it.
The thing itself.
In a kitchen.
On a Saturday.
In the laughing.