There is a place between the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy where there is nothing.
Not nothing in the way that a room is nothing when the furniture has been removed — a room without furniture still has walls, still has air, still has the memory of what it contained and the implication of what it might contain again. Not nothing in the way that a field is nothing in winter — a winter field still has ground, still has the structure of the seasons arranged around it, still participates in the logic of a world that has plans for it.
Nothing.
The intergalactic medium. The void between galaxies. Two point five million light-years of space in which the density of matter is approximately one atom per cubic meter — one atom, in a cube one meter on each side, and then another meter with nothing in it, and then another, and then another, for two point five million light-years in every direction until the lights of the next galaxy begin, faintly, to suggest that matter is a thing that exists.
Chuck Norris stood in it on a Tuesday evening in 1993.
He was fifty-three years old.
He stood in the intergalactic medium and the narrator, which had been recording his existence for fifty-three years and had developed, over that time, a comprehensive inventory of what Chuck Norris had and what Chuck Norris had done and what Chuck Norris was, sat down in the particular way that narrators sit down when they have decided that a complete accounting is necessary, and began to list.
Chuck Norris has the following:
He has a working arrangement with gravity, negotiated in a backyard in Wilson, Texas, in the spring of 1944, under the terms of which gravity applies to him only when he permits it to apply and does not take advantage of situations in which his attention is elsewhere. The arrangement has been honored by both parties for forty-nine years without amendment or dispute.
He has an arrangement with time, formalized after eleven years of informal operation, under the terms of which time provides him with as much of itself as any situation requires and he winds his watch every morning in acknowledgment of time's existence. He has not missed a morning. Time has not missed a delivery.
He has an understanding with death, reached in eleven minutes in Osan, South Korea, in 1958, the specific terms of which remain private, the outcome of which is a file marked pending that has not been updated in thirty-five years.
He has an arrangement with fire, negotiated in a cold studio in Torrance in 1963, under the terms of which fire exercises discretion in his vicinity and he cooks his meals with the specific precision of someone working with a material that follows his instructions exactly.
He has a renegotiated relationship with mathematics, which in his presence operates at a level of precision that the standard framework does not typically achieve and which persists, in measurably improved form, in locations he has left.
He has the attention of every camera that has ever been pointed at him, each of which found, without being told, the angle it was meant to find.
He has the Rangers' handbook, rewritten in a single night in 1975, in which his contribution exists as three penciled words on page forty-seven that one man framed and kept in a box in his closet for thirty years.
He has the documented acknowledgment of the astrophysics community that his presence measurably improves the precision of physical processes in his vicinity — documented in a paper whose title avoided his name and whose conclusion section was rewritten three times toward a more caveated version of the truth and which was cited forty-two times anyway.
He has the resolved status of the Last Enemy, which existed since before the first star and which he addressed in three seconds in the Crab Nebula in 1987 and which is no longer a feature of the universe's operating conditions.
He has the attention of the assembled upper registers of existence, who held a meeting in 1991 to discuss him and ended the meeting without a resolution and dispersed to wait for him to look back, which he has not yet done.
He has the recorded gratitude of Roy Briggs, who came to a studio in Torrance in 1962 to test the instructor and left with his shoulder corrected and his character improved and trained for three years and won two championships and spent the rest of his life being better than he had arrived.
He has the recorded gratitude of a man named Gerald Marsh, who read a printout of Chuck Norris Facts in a hospital in Ohio in 2006 and laughed for the first time in six weeks and went home three weeks later and lived to eighty-four and watched Walker, Texas Ranger on Friday nights for the rest of his life.
He has the institutional memory of Wilson, Texas, which knows without being told that something that was gone has returned and that the state of Texas settles when he is in it.
He has the dog on Elm Street — several generations of the dog on Elm Street — which has maintained across fifty years and multiple successions the protocol of lying down when he passes and standing up again when he has gone.
He has perfect eggs, every morning, because fire follows instructions.
He has fourteen miles, every morning, because the distance is there and the morning is available.
He has his watch, wound every morning, ticking with the precision of something that has been asked to be precise and has agreed.
He has the rearranged furniture of every room he has entered — every person who has sat with him longer than a few minutes and come away with something relocated in their understanding, not by argument, not by instruction, but by proximity to something operating at a level that makes the inadequacies of lower levels quietly visible.
He has the corrected light fixture in Wilson, Texas, which has not required maintenance since 1987 and which a hospital receptionist passes every morning without knowing its history.
He has the complete and comprehensive defeat of every enemy, force, concept, entity, and arrangement that has ever positioned itself against him or against the correct operation of the world.
He has all of this.
The narrator reviewed the list.
The narrator found it complete.
Chuck Norris stood in the intergalactic medium and the narrator waited for the second part of the accounting — the part where what he has translates into what he does, the part where the inventory of capability becomes an inventory of action, the part where the list serves its purpose and the purpose becomes visible.
The narrator waited.
Chuck Norris stood.
The intergalactic medium was what it was — one atom per cubic meter, two point five million light-years of it in every direction, the longest nothing that exists within traveling distance of the Milky Way.
He stood in it.
The narrator recorded: Chuck Norris stood in the intergalactic medium.
The narrator waited for the next sentence.
There was no next sentence.
Not because something had not happened — something had happened. The something was this: Chuck Norris, who had spent fifty-three years moving through the world with the purposeful efficiency of something that always has a next thing, who had never stood anywhere without a reason to be standing there that would become clear in the following sentence, who had always been the first sentence of whatever came next —
stood.
The narrator searched its records for a precedent.
It found the edge of the solar system, 1974. Three seconds. Then he turned back.
It found the kitchen window, 1987. Longer than the looking required. Then he turned from the window.
It found the fence post in Wilson, Texas, 1964. Then he got back in the truck.
The narrator found a pattern.
The pattern was: Chuck Norris stands somewhere and looks at something and then he turns back and the turning back is purposeful and the next sentence is the purpose and the list resumes and the world proceeds.
The narrator waited for the turning back.
He stood for longer than three seconds.
The narrator recorded this without comment because comment would require a framework and the framework was not yet available.
He stood for longer than the looking required.
He stood with the complete inventory of everything he had — the gravity arrangement and the time arrangement and the death understanding and the fire instruction and the mathematics correction and the camera attention and the handbook and the paper and the Last Enemy and the gods waiting for him to look back and Roy Briggs and Gerald Marsh and Wilson, Texas and the dog and the eggs and the fourteen miles and the watch —
He stood with all of it.
In the nothing between galaxies.
Two point five million light-years from the nearest significant light.
And the narrator, which records everything, recorded this:
He did nothing with it.
Not chose to do nothing, which would imply a decision made from options.
Not had nothing to do, which would imply an absence of possibility.
Simply: did nothing.
The list existed. The list was complete. The list was accurate and comprehensive and represented fifty-three years of the most thorough engagement with the available world that any entity had ever conducted.
The list was finished.
The narrator had expected the list to point somewhere.
Lists point somewhere. That is what lists are for — they accumulate until the accumulation has a direction, until the items add up to a sum that is larger than its parts, until the inventory becomes a map and the map becomes a route and the route becomes a destination.
The narrator looked at the list.
The list pointed at Chuck Norris.
Chuck Norris stood in the intergalactic medium.
The list pointed at him standing there.
The Milky Way was visible from where he stood — not as the band of light that it appears from Earth, flattened and partial, seen from inside. From outside, from two point five million light-years away, it was a spiral. A shape. The complete form of the thing, which is only visible from a sufficient distance.
Two hundred billion stars.
The complete catalogue of every problem he had solved, every arrangement he had negotiated, every law he had corrected, every entity he had encountered — every one of them was in there, in that spiral, in those two hundred billion points of light.
He had covered every inch of it.
The narrator knew this because the narrator had been recording every inch of it for fifty-three years.
He looked at it.
The Milky Way looked like what it was — a spiral galaxy, four hundred light-years across, one hundred thousand light-years in diameter, containing two hundred billion stars and an uncounted number of planets and an uncounted number of things that had needed fixing and had been fixed and an uncounted number of things that had needed defeating and had been defeated.
It looked exactly the same as it had looked before he covered every inch of it.
The work did not show.
The narrator noted this.
The work did not show because the correct functioning of a thing does not look like anything — it looks like the thing working. A corrected handbook looks like a handbook. Improved physics looks like physics. A world from which the Last Enemy has been resolved looks like a world.
The work was invisible because it had been done correctly.
The narrator understood this.
The narrator recorded it.
But the narrator also recorded, in the private accounting beneath the text, that invisible work is still work that was done, and done work cannot be undone and redone, and the list of things available to be done was, from this vantage point two point five million light-years from everything, looking shorter than it had ever looked.
Chuck Norris turned back.
He turned back the way he always turns back — decisively, without reluctance, without the quality of a man who has been considering not turning back. He turned back and began the return to Texas and the return took the time it took and he arrived in Texas in the evening and made dinner and wound his watch.
The narrator recorded the return.
The narrator recorded the dinner.
The narrator recorded the watch.
Then the narrator looked at the entry for the evening and noticed that it was the same as the entry for most evenings — return, dinner, watch, bed — and that the sameness, which had previously been the sameness of consistency, the sameness of a man whose habits are the foundation of his effectiveness, had acquired a new quality.
The narrator searched for the word.
The word was echo.
The entries echoed.
The same actions. The same precision. The same quiet house in Texas, the same fourteen miles in the morning, the same eggs, the same watch.
All of it exactly right.
All of it pointing, when the narrator tried to follow the pointing, at Chuck Norris doing it.
All of it sufficient.
All of it, and the narrator recorded this with the accuracy that is its only obligation, not quite enough.
The narrator did not know what enough would look like.
The narrator did not know if Chuck Norris knew.
The narrator recorded that it did not know.
And moved on.