I am the GodVolume III: The Void Speaks
Marcus slept until noon.
Chuck was at his own kitchen table when he heard the truck start up three streets away — not Marcus leaving, the way Marcus sometimes sat in the truck when he was thinking, the engine running for warmth or comfort or the specific quality of a familiar space. The truck ran for a few minutes and then went quiet.
Then the front door.
Then footsteps.
Then a knock.
Chuck had the coffee on.
He opened the door.
Marcus looked better.
Not restored — you don't restore from a year of accumulated weight with six hours of sleep. But present. The specific quality of someone who has slept through the worst of something and woken up still carrying it but able to carry it again.
"You made coffee," he said.
"It's on," Chuck said.
Marcus came in.
He sat at Chuck's table.
This was new — he had been at Chuck's house before, had come in and stood in the kitchen, but had not sat at the table. The table was the place in kitchens where things happened and this was the first time Marcus had sat at Chuck's.
Chuck sat across from him.
The cups were different from Marcus's — heavier, plain, the cups of someone who had been furnishing a life in Wilson and had chosen things for their function rather than their history. They did not have the specific weight of Marcus's cups. But they were the right cups for this kitchen.
Marcus held his.
"Thank you," he said.
"For the coffee," Chuck said.
"For this morning," Marcus said. "And last night. And the space."
"Yes," Chuck said.
"I've been thinking about it," Marcus said. "What you did. Staying in bed."
"Yes," Chuck said.
"That was—" Marcus stopped. "I keep not having the word for things with you."
"The word will come," Chuck said. "When someone lives it enough to find it."
"Are we there yet," Marcus said.
"Almost," Chuck said.
Marcus looked at his cup.
"What does almost feel like," he said.
"Like this," Chuck said. "Like sitting in a kitchen on a Saturday and being—"
He stopped.
Marcus waited.
"Being—" Chuck said again.
He sat with the word that was forming.
It was forming.
He could feel it forming the way you feel something taking shape in the dark — not visible yet, but present, occupying space, nearly there.
"What," Marcus said.
"I don't have it yet," Chuck said.
"Close?" Marcus said.
"Close," Chuck said.
Marcus looked at him.
"When you find it," he said.
"You'll be the first," Chuck said.
Marcus almost smiled.
More than almost.
It arrived this time — small, tired, real. The smile of someone who has been through something and is on the other side of it and finds, in the first morning of the other side, that small things are sufficient.
"I know," he said. "I'm always the first."
The weeks that followed were the work.
The ordinary work.
Chuck had named it — being in the between — and had been doing it for months, but the weeks after Marcus's Friday night had a different quality. The quality of something that had found its shape.
Elise on the bench on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.
Clara Reeves on Thursdays at two, the coffee on, the account continuing to be read.
The hardware store owner's son — his name was Carl like his father, which produced the specific situation of a man who was himself and also the legacy of a name that had meant something before him, and who had found, in the space where Chuck had sat down and asked what it was like to be both things, a conversation he had not had before.
The woman at the post office.
The man at the diner who had been a rancher for forty years and had sold the ranch and was finding, in the aftermath of having sold the thing that had organized his life, that he did not know who he was without it.
Chuck sat with each of them.
Not systematically — not the management of a program of betweens. He walked through Wilson and noticed and was available and when the available was accepted he was present and the between made what it made and he moved through it.
Marcus watched this.
Not with envy — not with the specific comparison of someone measuring their own life against another's. With something closer to interest. The specific interest of someone who has been a plumber for seventeen years and has always understood the work through the houses and has found, in the months with Chuck, a different frame for the same work.
"You're doing what I do," Marcus said one morning. "With different tools."
"What do you mean," Chuck said.
"I go into houses and find what's actually there," Marcus said. "Not what they think is there. What is. You go into conversations and find what's actually there."
"The system," Chuck said.
"Yes," Marcus said. "You've learned to read the system. Human systems."
Chuck thought about this.
"You taught me," he said.
"I showed you what it looked like," Marcus said. "You figured out how to do it."
"The between taught me," Chuck said.
"The between taught both of us," Marcus said. "It keeps teaching."
"Yes," Chuck said.
They drank their coffee.
"Elise," Marcus said. "How is she."
"Still on the bench," Chuck said. "Still watching Wilson. She has—" He paused.
"What," Marcus said.
"She has stories," Chuck said. "The specific kind that only accumulate over fifty-five years of paying attention to one place. She knows — she knows the shape of how things change. The long slow changes that are invisible year to year and only visible across decades."
"What does she see," Marcus said.
"She sees Wilson becoming," Chuck said. "Slowly. The specific becoming of a small town that isn't growing and isn't shrinking but is changing in the interior. The people who stay and what staying does to them. The ones who leave and what leaves when they go."
"She has a word for that," Marcus said.
"She has several words for everything," Chuck said. "Thirty-two years of teaching. She has the vocabulary."
"What's her word for what you do," Marcus said. "The entering."
Chuck thought about it.
"She calls it attending," he said. "She said good teachers learn that attending is different from teaching. That sometimes you attend and the teaching happens by itself."
"Attending," Marcus said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"Better than 'being in the between,'" Marcus said.
"Different," Chuck said. "The between is the space. Attending is what you do in it."
"You're collecting vocabulary," Marcus said.
"Everyone I sit with gives me more," Chuck said. "That's part of what the between makes. Language for itself."
"The word is coming," Marcus said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"You feel it," Marcus said.
"I feel it forming," Chuck said. "Every conversation adds to it. Elise. Clara. Carl at the hardware store. You."
"The word for what I am," Marcus said. "To you."
"The word for what we are," Chuck said. "To each other."
Marcus looked at him.
"It's a new word," he said. "Not an existing one."
"No," Chuck said. "Not an existing one."
"A word that had to wait for this to exist," Marcus said.
"Yes," Chuck said. "The specific word for the specific thing. The between that includes what we've been in together."
Marcus held his cup.
"I hope I'm alive when you find it," he said.
The weight arrived with the sentence — not sudden, the weight had been there, but named now, given its specific form in the shape of this specific sentence.
"You will be," Chuck said.
"You don't know that," Marcus said.
"No," Chuck said. "But I'll be looking for it in every conversation. And I'll find it before—"
He stopped.
"Before the fact," Marcus said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"Okay," Marcus said.
"Okay," Chuck said.
They drank their coffee.
The morning continued.
On a Wednesday in the third week of May, Chuck went to see Robert's ranch.
Not with Marcus — alone, which was a different thing. He drove the forty minutes and parked and walked the property the way Marcus had described his father walking it. Not looking for problems. Looking with fresh eyes.
The fence they had fixed was holding.
The Hendersons were doing good work.
The cattle were the cattle.
The land was the specific land that Robert had worked for thirty years — not dramatic, not the kind of land that announced itself, just the honest flat land of West Texas that was what it was and had been what it was for long enough that what it was had become settled and true.
He stood at the fence line and looked at it.
He thought about Robert.
He thought about what the Void had shown him.
Not Robert specifically — Robert had not been in the showing. But the quality of what had been made in the betweens that were entered, and what it meant when the people in those betweens were gone.
Robert was gone.
The cattle were still there.
The fence was straight.
The land was the land.
The between between Robert and his land — thirty years of it — had made something that continued without him. The cattle tended. The fences fixed by other hands now. The land that had absorbed thirty years of Robert's work and was, in the way that land absorbs work, more itself because of it.
Chuck stood at the fence and thought about creation continuing without the creator.
He thought about what Robert had made.
Not just the ranch.
The Tuesday morning calls.
Eight years of them.
The specific between between Robert and Marcus that had happened every Tuesday at seven forty-three and which had made, in Marcus, the specific capacity to receive and to give back and to know that the giving back was also receiving.
Robert's laugh that was too loud for indoors.
The specific love that Dorothy the nurse had mentioned when she brought extra pudding.
The things Robert had been that continued in the people who had been in the between with him.
Chuck stood at the fence.
He thought about what he was making.
He thought about the chains extending outward.
He thought about Clara Reeves reading the account she had been keeping.
He thought about Elise on the bench and what it made in her to have the account finally heard.
He thought about Carl at the hardware store finding, in the conversation about what it meant to be himself and also the legacy of a name, a vocabulary for something he had been carrying without words.
He thought about the Void.
Still becoming.
In the prior.
Changed forever by having been inside rather than before.
He thought about all of it extending outward.
All of it continuing without him being present in it.
All of it moving through chains he could not see from where he stood.
He stood at the fence for a long time.
Then he drove back to Wilson.
On Friday Chuck went to Clara Reeves's on Thursday as usual — one day late, because she had called Marcus about a pipe (not the same pipe, a different one, the hot supply line valve Chuck had mentioned on his first visit, which had finally given way two years earlier than he had estimated) and Marcus had come and fixed it and had called Chuck to let him know, and Chuck had decided to go on Friday instead.
Clara opened the door.
"You're a day late," she said.
"Yes," he said. "Your valve."
"Marcus fixed it," she said. "He said you'd predicted it."
"Two years ago," Chuck said. "I was early by a few months."
"You come in and tell me I'm worth noticing and then predict my valve," she said. "Is this what you do."
"Yes," he said.
"Useful," she said.
He came in.
They sat.
She had made the coffee already — she made it before he arrived now, the anticipation of his visit having become a thing she did rather than a response to his arrival.
"I've been thinking," she said.
"Tell me," he said.
"My account," she said. "The one I've been keeping."
"Yes," Chuck said.
"I've been thinking about writing it down," she said.
Chuck looked at her.
"Why," he said.
"Because you said creation continues without the creator," she said. "I've been thinking about that since you said it."
"I said the Void said it," Chuck said.
"You said the Void told you," she said. "It amounts to the same thing."
"And you want to write down the account," he said.
"I'm eighty-five years old," she said. "The account will stop when I stop. Unless I write it down."
"Yes," Chuck said.
"And there's — there's something in it worth keeping," she said. "I didn't think that before you came. I thought it was just — what I'd noticed. The ordinary observations of an ordinary life."
"And now," Chuck said.
"And now I think the ordinary observations of an ordinary life are—" She stopped.
"Worth keeping," Chuck said.
"Worth keeping," she said.
Chuck held his cup.
He thought about the Void.
About the chain from the drain in Clara Reeves's kitchen to the Void learning what inside felt like.
He thought about Clara Reeves writing down fifty years of account.
He thought about the chain that would extend from that.
He could not see it.
That was correct.
"Write it down," he said.
"You think so," she said.
"I'm certain of it," he said.
"Why," she said.
"Because you've been attending for eighty-five years," he said. "The Voids showed me that things made in the between extend in chains. The account you write will be in the chain."
"Of what," she said.
"I don't know," he said. "That's why it matters."
Clara looked at him.
"You're strange," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"I said that the first day," she said.
"I know," he said.
"I still think so," she said.
"I know," he said.
She looked at her cup.
"I'll write it down," she said.
"Good," he said.
"Will you read it," she said.
"Every word," he said.
She looked at him.
Something in her face did the thing that things did when the between was entered — the specific shift of someone who has been seen and knows it and finds, in the knowing, that being seen is not diminishing but is in fact the opposite.
"Every Thursday," she said.
"Every Thursday," he said.
Saturday morning Marcus had no jobs.
Chuck had come over and they had had their coffee and Marcus had said he was going to do the Sunday walk that day — Saturday instead of Sunday, because sometimes the walk needed to happen when it needed to happen rather than when it was scheduled.
"I'll be a few hours," Marcus said.
"Alright," Chuck said.
He went home.
He sat at his table.
He thought about the week.
He thought about what was forming.
The word.
He could feel it closer than it had been — not this morning, not this week, but building. The way you feel the approach of something that is coming through the accumulation of smaller things rather than through a single arrival.
Each conversation was another layer.
Elise's word attending.
Clara writing down the account.
Carl at the hardware store with his double name.
The man at the diner who had sold the ranch.
Marcus on a Saturday doing the Sunday walk because sometimes the walk needed to happen when it needed to happen.
Chuck sat at his table and felt the word coming.
It was not here yet.
But it was coming.
He sat with the coming of it.
He sat with the morning.
He sat with Wilson, Texas doing what it did on a Saturday when the ordinary work of ordinary life was being attended to and the between was everywhere in it and the attending was its own creation and the creation was extending in chains he could not see.
He sat.
He was present.
He was in the between of the around.
He was doing the work.
The narrator sat with him.
The narrator found it sufficient.
The word was almost there.
Not yet.
Almost.