I am the GodVolume II: The Question
Marcus Webb was not having a good Tuesday.
This is worth establishing clearly, because the Tuesday in question was the kind of Tuesday that does not announce itself as significant — it does not arrive with the atmospheric pressure of a day that will be remembered, does not carry the particular quality of light that people describe afterward when they say I knew something was different that morning. It arrived the way most Tuesdays arrive for most people: unremarkably, at six forty-five AM, with an alarm clock and the specific low-grade resistance of a body that would prefer to continue sleeping and understands, with the resignation of long experience, that it will not be permitted to.
Marcus Webb was forty-one years old.
He was a plumber.
He was, by the assessment of everyone who had hired him — which was a considerable number of people across Wilson and the surrounding three counties, because Marcus Webb had been fixing pipes in this part of Texas for seventeen years and had developed, in that time, a reputation for showing up when he said he would and charging what he quoted and not inventing problems that did not exist — a good plumber.
He was not, on this particular Tuesday, a plumber who had fixed his own pipe.
The pipe under his kitchen sink had been dripping for two weeks.
This is the kind of thing that happens to plumbers with a frequency that non-plumbers find ironic and plumbers find entirely explicable: the work you do all day is the last work you want to do when you come home. The leaking pipe of a plumber is the flickering light of an electrician. It is not negligence. It is the specific human capacity for tolerating in your own life what you would address immediately in someone else's, because someone else's problems are the problems you are paid to care about, and your own problems will wait, and the waiting is always slightly longer than you intend.
Two weeks was slightly longer than Marcus had intended.
He knew this.
He was going to get to it.
He became aware of the pipe at six forty-seven AM, when he walked into the kitchen to make coffee and stepped on the mat in front of the sink and the mat was wet.
Not damp. Wet.
He looked at the mat.
He looked at the cabinet under the sink.
He opened the cabinet.
The drip had become, in the night, something more than a drip. Still not a crisis — a plumber's assessment of not a crisis has a higher threshold than a civilian's — but no longer the kind of thing that could wait until the weekend without consequence.
Marcus crouched in front of the cabinet and looked at the pipe.
He had looked at this pipe before. He had looked at it two weeks ago when the drip started and identified the cause — a fitting that had loosened over years of minor thermal expansion and contraction, the kind of thing that announced itself with a drip and resolved itself with fifteen minutes and the right wrench and would not recur if addressed correctly.
He had not addressed it.
He crouched in front of the cabinet in his kitchen at six forty-seven in the morning and looked at a problem he understood completely and had not fixed and he had the specific feeling of a man who is looking at the gap between what he knows and what he has done and finding the gap larger than he had allowed himself to notice.
Today, he said, to no one in particular.
He meant: today he would fix it.
He stood up.
He made his coffee.
He drank it standing at the counter because the mat in front of the sink was wet and he had put it by the back door to dry and there was nothing to stand on and standing at the counter was fine, the counter was fine, everything was fine.
He looked out the kitchen window at the street.
The street was the street it always was — quiet in the early morning, the particular quietness of a residential street in a small Texas town at a time when most people are still in their houses doing the private business of beginning a day. A car moved somewhere out of sight. A bird made the sound a bird makes when it is doing what birds do in the morning, which is to say something between a statement and a question.
Then there was a truck.
The truck pulled up across the street and parked and the engine stopped and the truck sat there.
Marcus looked at it.
He did not know the truck. Wilson was not a large town and Marcus Webb knew most of the vehicles in it the way you know faces in a place you have lived long enough — not consciously catalogued, just present in the background inventory of what is familiar and what is not. The truck was not familiar.
He drank his coffee.
The truck sat.
Marcus looked at it with the mild interest of someone who does not have anywhere urgent to be for another forty minutes and has nothing else to look at.
The truck sat for five minutes.
Then the driver's door opened and a man got out and stood on the sidewalk and looked at Marcus's house.
Marcus set his coffee cup down.
The man on the sidewalk was not the kind of man you look at and immediately categorize. He was the kind of man you look at and take a moment with — not because anything about him was unusual in an identifiable way, not because he was large or strange or doing anything that required explanation, but because there was a quality to his standing there that made the standing there seem like more of a thing than standing on a sidewalk typically is.
Like the sidewalk was where he had decided to be, and the decision had been made with the same weight that most people apply to much larger decisions, and now he was here and the being here was complete.
He was looking at the house.
Marcus became, with the animal accuracy of someone whose house is being looked at by an unknown person, aware of several things simultaneously: that the back door was unlocked, that his phone was in the bedroom, that he was in his kitchen in a t-shirt and socks, and that none of these things were relevant because the man on the sidewalk had the specific quality of someone who is not a threat but is something, and the something had not yet declared itself.
The man looked at the house for a moment longer.
Then he walked up the front path and knocked on the door.
Marcus opened the door.
The man on the other side was — the narrator finds the word and uses it — calm. Not the calm of someone suppressing something, not the performed calm of someone who wants to appear unthreatening. The calm of still water. The calm of something that has no turbulence because turbulence has never found purchase in it.
He had a beard. He was — Marcus would later be unable to give an accurate account of his age, because there was something about the man that made the question of age feel like the wrong question, like asking the age of a mountain.
"Morning," the man said.
"Morning," Marcus said.
"You've got a leak," the man said. "Under your kitchen sink. The fitting on the cold supply line."
Marcus looked at him.
"I know," Marcus said.
"I can fix it," the man said.
Marcus considered this.
He was a plumber. He fixed pipes. He did not, as a rule, require assistance with pipes. He especially did not require assistance from men he did not know who arrived at his front door on Tuesday mornings and announced the location of his plumbing problem with the confidence of someone who had looked through his kitchen wall.
He opened his mouth to say this.
What came out instead was: "You got tools?"
The man looked at his hands, briefly, in the same way Dave from facilities had looked at the ceiling height, which is the look of someone who has been asked a practical question about a thing that is not quite the right framework but is close enough to work with.
"I'll manage," he said.
Marcus stood in the doorway for a moment.
The morning was doing what the morning was doing — the bird still making its statement-question, the air carrying the specific smell of a Texas spring that had decided, overnight, to arrive. The truck across the street sat where it had been parked, patient and old and reliable.
"Coffee?" Marcus said.
"Sure," the man said.
Marcus stepped back from the door.
His name, he said, when Marcus asked, was Chuck.
Marcus made coffee and Chuck crouched in front of the open cabinet under the sink and looked at the fitting with the attention of someone who has looked at many things and understands how to look.
"Thermal cycling," he said. "Loosened over time. Maybe ten, fifteen years."
"Seventeen," Marcus said. "House is seventeen years old."
"Good guess then," Chuck said.
Marcus handed him a coffee and crouched beside him and looked at the fitting and they looked at it together in the companionable way that two people who understand the same problem can look at it together, which is different from the way one person explains a problem to another and is, between tradespeople, a form of respect.
"I was going to get to it," Marcus said.
"I know," Chuck said.
"This week," Marcus said.
"Sure," Chuck said.
There was no judgment in either of these words. No implication. They were simply accurate acknowledgments of what had been said, delivered without the kind of editorial weight that transforms a statement into a verdict.
Marcus found this, without being able to say why, unusual.
Most people, when they said I know in response to I was going to get to it, meant something additional. Something underneath. The something was usually a mild form of the opinion that someone who fixed pipes for a living should have fixed his own pipe before it became a wet mat.
Marcus had been saying I was going to get to it to people for two weeks. He had heard the something underneath every time.
Chuck said I know and meant only I know.
Marcus drank his coffee.
The fixing took eleven minutes.
Chuck used Marcus's tools, which were in the cabinet beside the sink where Marcus kept them, which Chuck appeared to know without being told, which Marcus noted and filed under the category of things that are slightly unusual about this person — a category that had, in the past fifteen minutes, acquired several entries.
The fixing was correct. Marcus watched it happen with the professional attention of someone assessing a colleague's work and found nothing to improve — not because Chuck was working to the standard Marcus would have applied, but because he was working to a standard that made Marcus's standard feel like it had been measured against something larger than Marcus had previously used for measuring.
Not better technique. The same technique. Applied with a completeness that the technique was capable of but that Marcus had never seen it achieve.
Like the technique was being taken seriously in a way it had not previously been taken seriously.
When it was done, Chuck turned the water back on and they both watched the fitting.
No drip.
"That'll hold," Chuck said.
"Yeah," Marcus said.
He meant it as agreement. He heard it come out as something closer to wonder, which he had not intended and which he covered by standing up and taking Chuck's empty coffee cup and putting both cups in the sink.
"What do I owe you," Marcus said.
"Nothing," Chuck said.
"I can't—
"It needed fixing," Chuck said. "It's fixed."
Marcus looked at him.
The morning light was coming through the kitchen window now — full morning, the sun doing its work on the linoleum and the counter and the cabinet door Marcus had left open and the space where the wet mat had been.
"You just drive around fixing people's pipes?" Marcus said.
Chuck considered this with the genuine consideration he apparently gave everything.
"Not usually," he said.
"So why—"
"I was in the neighborhood," Chuck said.
Marcus looked at him.
"You're not from here," Marcus said.
"I am, actually," Chuck said. "Originally."
They stood in the kitchen for a moment.
The narrator records this moment because the narrator records everything, and because this moment — two men standing in a kitchen in Wilson, Texas, on a Tuesday morning in March, one of them a plumber who had not fixed his own pipe, one of them the negotiated exception to every fundamental law in the known universe — is the moment from which everything in the second volume follows.
It does not look like that kind of moment.
It looks like a kitchen.
It looks like two men who have just fixed a pipe standing in the aftermath of having fixed a pipe, which is a very small and ordinary aftermath, the kind that happens in kitchens across the world every day without anyone noting it as significant.
The narrator notes it.
The narrator notes it because it is the first time in fifty-three years that Chuck Norris has been in a room with someone and the room has felt like a room.
Not like a location being visited. Not like a place through which he is passing on the way to something that matters more. Like a room. Linoleum and morning light and two empty coffee cups in the sink and the smell of coffee still in the air and a man named Marcus Webb who had a leaking pipe and did not fix it for two weeks.
The room was small.
Chuck Norris was in it.
He fit.
The narrator did not have a word for this either.
The narrator added it to the list of words to find.
"You want more coffee?" Marcus said.
Chuck looked at the window.
"No," he said. "I should go."
He moved toward the door.
"Hey," Marcus said.
Chuck stopped.
"Chuck, right?"
"Right," Chuck said.
"Marcus," Marcus said, which was unnecessary because Chuck knew his name, but which was the human thing to do and Chuck accepted it as the human thing without indicating that it was unnecessary, which Marcus would later identify, when he thought back on the morning, as one of the things about the man that had been slightly unusual.
He had treated everything as though it was the right thing.
Not merely acceptable. Right.
"You live around here?" Marcus said.
"Close enough," Chuck said.
"Well," Marcus said. "Thanks for the pipe."
"It needed fixing," Chuck said. And then, at the door, turning back with the specific quality of someone who has thought of something and is including it because it is accurate and not because it requires a response: "The fitting on the hot supply line is fine. But the valve itself is getting old. Another year, maybe two."
Marcus looked at the cabinet.
When he looked up, the door was closing.
He heard the truck start.
He heard it pull away.
He stood in his kitchen in the morning light with two empty cups in the sink and a pipe that was no longer dripping and the particular feeling of a person who has had an ordinary morning that is not, on reflection, ordinary at all but which he cannot identify the non-ordinary quality of.
He looked at the cabinet under the sink.
He would check the valve, he decided.
This week.
He meant it this time.