I am the GodVolume II: The Question
The following Tuesday, something broke.
Not a pipe — Marcus would have known what to do with a pipe. Not a fence, not a gate, not any of the physical things that had been breaking and being fixed in and around Marcus Webb's property since Chuck Norris had arrived in Wilson, Texas, and begun paying attention to what needed attention.
What broke was smaller than any of those things.
And larger.
It began the way most things in this account begin — in the kitchen, at the table, with two cups of coffee and the morning doing what the morning did.
Marcus had a phone call at seven forty.
Chuck was already at the table. Marcus took the call standing at the counter, which is where he took calls that were not expected — the specific posture of someone receiving information in real time, back slightly straightened, free hand not quite knowing what to do with itself.
Chuck listened without listening.
Not deliberately — he had, in the weeks since the gravity renegotiation, been paying attention to the ordinary rhythms of other people's mornings and had noticed that phone calls taken standing at a counter had a different quality than phone calls taken sitting down. Sitting down was for calls you had time for. Standing was for calls you did not know yet whether you had time for.
This was a standing call.
Marcus said: yeah. He said: when. He said: okay. He said: I'll be there.
He hung up.
He stood at the counter for a moment with his back to Chuck.
Then he turned around.
His face was the face of someone who has just received information that they understood and did not want to.
"My uncle," he said. "Heart attack. He's alive. Hospital in Abilene."
"I'm sorry," Chuck said.
Marcus nodded. He moved to the table and picked up his cup and held it without drinking.
"He's alive," he said again. Not reassuring himself — processing. Sorting the information into what it meant.
"How serious?" Chuck said.
"Serious enough," Marcus said. "He's stable but—" He stopped. "He's seventy-four. These things at seventy-four—"
"Yes," Chuck said.
Marcus held his cup.
"He was close to my father," Marcus said. "Closer than brothers sometimes are. After my dad died he was—" Another stop. "He checked in. Every week. For eight years he called every week."
"Every week," Chuck said.
"Tuesday mornings," Marcus said. "He calls every Tuesday morning."
The Tuesday morning call that had not come.
Chuck looked at the phone on the counter.
Marcus looked at it too.
"I need to go," Marcus said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"Abilene is an hour and a half," Marcus said. "I have two jobs today. I'll need to—"
"I'll cancel the jobs," Chuck said.
Marcus looked at him.
"You don't know who—"
"Tell me the names," Chuck said.
Marcus told him the names.
Chuck went to Marcus's phone and made the calls — two calls, two customers, the specific language of a cancellation that is honest and brief and does not over-explain. He had not made calls like this before. He made them correctly on the first attempt, which is what you do when you have been paying attention to how Marcus operates and have understood that the way Marcus operates is the right way.
The customers were understanding.
One of them said: hope everything's okay.
Chuck said: family matter. Which was accurate.
Marcus was in the doorway with his jacket.
He looked at Chuck.
"You didn't have to—"
"The jobs are handled," Chuck said. "Go."
Marcus looked at him.
"Come with me," he said.
The narrator records that this was unexpected.
Not to Marcus — the narrator believes Marcus had decided before he said it, in the quick and practical way he made decisions, that the asking was the right thing. But unexpected in the sense that the asking placed something on the table that had not been explicitly on the table before.
Come with me.
Not: will you, or can you, or I could use the company. The plain declarative of someone asking for a thing they need.
Chuck looked at Marcus.
He thought about the Question.
He thought about names and weight and the right job and willingness.
He thought about what it cost to ask.
Marcus had asked.
"Yes," Chuck said.
They drove to Abilene in Marcus's truck.
The twelve-year-old truck that had been his father's, that ran with the reliable competence of something that had not yet been given a reason to stop. Marcus drove the way he did everything — without hurry, with attention, at the pace the road required.
They did not talk for the first twenty minutes.
This was not awkward. It was the specific quality of two people who have been in each other's company long enough that silence is comfortable — who have moved past the stage where silence needs to be managed and into the stage where it can simply be.
The flat land went past.
The sky was the sky Texas makes on a morning that intends to be clear — the specific uncomplicated blue of a place that has room for it.
At some point Marcus said: "He's going to be fine."
Not a question. Not entirely a statement. The specific middle thing that people say when they are trying to make true what they fear might not be.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"You don't know that," Marcus said.
"No," Chuck said. "But the fact that you need to say it is worth something."
Marcus looked at the road.
"Is it?"
"It means you're not ready," Chuck said. "And that's honest. Being not ready is honest."
Marcus drove.
"My father's death," he said. "I thought I was ready. He'd been sick a long time. We had time. And then it happened and I wasn't ready at all."
"No," Chuck said.
"You can't be ready," Marcus said.
"No," Chuck said.
"Then why do we try?"
Chuck thought about this.
"Because trying feels like having some control," he said. "Even when it doesn't give you any."
"That's bleak," Marcus said.
"It's also what you do anyway," Chuck said. "You try. Knowing it won't work. And the trying is still worth something."
"What is it worth?"
"It's worth the trying," Chuck said. "It's worth — it's the willingness again. You can't be ready but you can be willing. And willing is what you have."
Marcus drove.
He drove for a while.
"That's the most useful thing you've said in five weeks," he said.
"Thank you," Chuck said.
"I'm not sure it was a compliment."
"I know," Chuck said. "It still felt like one."
The hospital in Abilene was the kind of regional hospital that exists in the specific geography of West Texas — large enough to handle what the county produced, small enough that the staff knew the regular patients and the regular patients knew the staff. The parking lot was half full. The lobby had the overhead lights of every hospital lobby, present and functional and unenthusiastic.
Marcus went to reception.
Chuck stood back.
He stood in the lobby of a hospital and looked at it — at the chairs and the people in them and the overhead lights and the specific quality of a place that deals continuously with the weight of human fragility and has organized itself around that dealing. The coffee station in the corner. The magazines no one was reading. The child in one of the chairs with a book, not reading it, looking at the middle distance with the particular patience of a child who has been told to wait and has accepted the waiting without understanding it.
He had been in hospitals before.
He had delivered himself in one.
He had fixed a light fixture in one.
He had stood in the lobby of one, fifty-three years ago, and felt for the first time that something had just happened so simply that it was the most significant moment in a very long time.
He stood in this lobby and felt it differently than he had felt those other hospitals.
He felt it from the inside.
Not above, not as a visitor from a different register. Inside. Subject to the specific weight of a place that deals with things that cannot be fixed in eleven minutes with the right tool.
Marcus came back.
"Second floor," he said. "Room twelve."
They went up.
The uncle's name was Robert.
Robert Webb, seventy-four years old, lifelong rancher, the specific physical type of someone who has spent decades outside doing hard work and whose body has the quality of something that has been used hard and honestly and has become, through the using, more itself rather than less.
He was in a hospital bed with monitors and an IV and the specific diminished quality of a large man in a small bed, which is not the smallness of the man but the outsizedness of what has been revealed — the fragility that is always present and which the usual context keeps invisible.
Marcus went to him.
They did not hug — not the family type, the narrator assessed, not because of any coldness but because of the specific register of men who express things through presence rather than gesture.
Marcus sat in the chair beside the bed.
Robert looked at him.
"You didn't have to come," he said.
"Tuesday morning," Marcus said. "You didn't call."
Robert looked at the ceiling.
"First time in eight years," he said.
"Yeah," Marcus said.
"Figured you'd notice," Robert said.
"Yeah," Marcus said.
They sat.
Chuck stood in the doorway.
Robert noticed him.
"Who's that?" he said.
"Chuck," Marcus said. "Friend."
Robert looked at Chuck with the assessment of someone who has been reading people across distances for seventy-four years.
"He can come in," Robert said.
Chuck came in.
He did not sit — there was one chair and it was Marcus's. He stood near the window, in the way of someone who is present without taking up space that belongs to someone else.
"You a plumber too?" Robert said.
"No," Chuck said.
"What do you do?"
"Various things," Chuck said.
Robert looked at him.
"Various things," he said, in the tone of someone who has heard this answer and is deciding whether to push it.
He decided not to.
He looked at Marcus.
"Scared me," he said. "If I'm honest."
"I know," Marcus said.
"Haven't been scared like that in—" Robert stopped. "Since your father."
Marcus was quiet.
"He was there," Robert said. "Your father. When they brought me in. I know that's not—" He stopped again. "I was in and out. But I felt him there."
Marcus looked at his hands.
"Yeah," he said.
"Is that crazy?" Robert said.
"No," Marcus said. "No, it's not crazy."
Chuck stood by the window.
He looked at Marcus.
At the specific quality of Marcus Webb sitting beside his uncle's hospital bed, hearing that his father had been felt in the room, with the expression of someone receiving something they had not known they were waiting for.
The expression was not grief.
It was not joy.
It was the expression of someone who has been carrying something for eight years and has just had someone acknowledge the weight.
The narrator looked at it.
The narrator had seen many things in fifty-three years of recording.
This was one of the quietest.
This was one of the heaviest.
They stayed two hours.
Robert slept for the second hour — the specific sleep of someone whose body has been through something and is taking what it needs regardless of visitors. Marcus sat and let him sleep and Chuck stood by the window and they were in the room together, the three of them, in the specific quality of a hospital room in the afternoon when the emergency has passed and what remains is the aftermath, which is its own kind of work.
When Robert woke he was more himself — the specific returning of a person who has been away and is coming back to their own face.
He and Marcus talked about the ranch.
About what needed doing.
About who would cover while Robert was in hospital — a neighbor, already arranged, the practical infrastructure of a community that knows how to respond to these things because it has had to respond before.
About the Tuesday calls.
"I'll call from here," Robert said. "They have a phone."
"I know," Marcus said.
"Next Tuesday," Robert said.
"I'll be home," Marcus said.
Robert looked at him.
"You don't look like your father," he said. "But you are like him."
Marcus said nothing.
"That's not nothing," Robert said.
"I know," Marcus said.
"Good," Robert said. "As long as you know."
They drove back in the late afternoon.
The sun was doing what the sun did in West Texas in the late afternoon — the long gold across the flat land, everything going to its truest color in the last hour before the going of the light.
Marcus drove.
He did not talk for a long time.
Chuck let the silence be.
Thirty miles from Wilson, Marcus said: "Thank you for coming."
"Yes," Chuck said.
"I needed—" He stopped.
"I know," Chuck said.
"The company," Marcus said. "I needed the company."
"Yes," Chuck said.
"I don't usually—" Another stop. "I'm not usually someone who asks."
"I know," Chuck said.
"It was good that I did," Marcus said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
Marcus drove.
The gold light went with the sun and the grey of evening came and the truck's headlights came on the way headlights come on when someone who knows how to drive knows when to turn them on.
"He said my father was there," Marcus said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"Do you believe that?"
Chuck thought about it.
He thought about what he knew about what persisted.
He thought about the file marked pending and what it implied about the architecture of existence.
He thought about the upper registers and the things that existed in them before and after the conditions that made ordinary existence possible.
He thought about what he did not know, which was considerable.
"I don't know," he said. "But I believe Robert believed it. And I believe it helped. And I think — I think things that help from that direction are worth taking seriously."
Marcus drove.
"My father would have liked you," he said.
"Yes?" Chuck said.
"He liked people who were honest about what they didn't know," Marcus said. "He said that was rarer than being right."
"He was right about that," Chuck said.
"He was right about a lot of things," Marcus said.
"Yes," Chuck said. "He taught you well."
Marcus was quiet.
"He taught me what he knew," Marcus said. "I'm still figuring out the rest."
"That's all any of it is," Chuck said. "What you were taught and what you figure out. And the space between them."
"The space between them," Marcus said. "That's where the work is."
"That's where all the work is," Chuck said.
They drove the last thirty miles in the comfortable silence of people who have said the things that needed saying and do not need to say them again.
Wilson appeared ahead — the specific coming-into-view of a town at night that you know, the lights familiar, the shape of it recognizable in the way that your own town is recognizable from a distance in a way that other towns are not.
Home.
Marcus pulled into his driveway.
They sat in the truck for a moment.
"You want to come in?" Marcus said. "I'll make dinner."
"Yes," Chuck said.
They went in.
Marcus made dinner — not elaborate, the practical dinner of someone who is tired and has been through a day and needs to eat. Soup from a can that he improved with things from the refrigerator, bread, the specific meal of a Tuesday evening that had been more than a Tuesday evening.
They ate at the table.
The two cups were there.
Chuck looked at them.
"When did you stop thinking of those as the cups from the first week?" he said.
Marcus looked at the cups.
"I'm not sure," he said. "They're just the cups now."
"Yes," Chuck said.
"Is that—"
"That's the right thing," Chuck said.
Marcus looked at him.
"The right thing is when something stops being a sign of something and just becomes itself," Chuck said. "When the weight is in the thing rather than in what the thing represents."
Marcus held his cup.
"Like the truck," he said. "My father's truck. It was his truck for years. Now it's just the truck."
"Does that feel like a loss?" Chuck said.
"No," Marcus said. "It feels like — like he's more in it now. Not less. Because I stopped thinking about him when I drive it and started just driving it. Like he drove it."
Chuck held his cup.
"That's—" he started.
"What?" Marcus said.
"That's the answer," Chuck said.
Marcus looked at him.
"What do you mean?"
"The Question," Chuck said. "What things are for. What you just said."
"I said the truck feels more like his now that I stopped—"
"Things are for becoming themselves," Chuck said. "Fully. Not signs of other things. Not representations. Themselves. A truck that is driven. Cups that are used. A fence that is straight because it was fixed. A name on a job that is the name itself and not the idea of the name."
Marcus was quiet.
He turned the cup in his hands.
"And people," he said.
"And people," Chuck said. "People who are fully themselves. Who have lived enough of the cost to be what they are rather than what they're supposed to be."
"Is that what I am?" Marcus said.
"You're closer to it than most things I've encountered," Chuck said. "At any scale."
Marcus looked at him.
"That's a very large thing to say to a plumber," he said.
"It's an accurate thing," Chuck said.
The dinner was finished.
The evening was the evening.
Outside, Wilson, Texas was doing what it did.
The Question was present.
And the narrator, which had been writing for two volumes now, wrote this in the private accounting:
He has the shape of the answer.
He doesn't know it yet.
He will know it soon.
Not because something dramatic will happen.
Because Tuesday morning Marcus's uncle will call.
And Marcus will answer.
And that will be enough.