I am the GodVolume III: The Void Speaks
Waiting is not passive.
This is something Chuck understood in the abstract and was learning in the specific — the way all knowledge shifts from abstract to specific through the lived accumulation of its particulars. He had understood that waiting was active, that it required something, that the between of waiting was its own kind of work.
He had not understood what that work felt like from the inside until June became July and Marcus was still in the middle of wanting and Sarah was still needing time and the waiting had acquired the specific texture of something that was being done rather than something that was happening to someone.
Active waiting.
The specific willingness of staying present with uncertainty while uncertainty did what uncertainty does, which is to persist until it resolves or reveals that it will not resolve.
Chuck was learning it.
Badly. Continuously.
Getting slightly better.
He talked to the Void about it on a Thursday morning.
"The waiting," he said.
"Yes," the Void said.
"I thought I understood it," he said. "Waiting. I've been in the arrangement with time for fifty years. I've had more time than I needed whenever I needed it."
"Yes," the Void said.
"This is different," he said.
"Yes," the Void said.
"This is waiting where I don't control the outcome," he said. "And where the time arrangement doesn't help. Time gives me what I need for my own purposes. It doesn't give me what I need for Marcus's."
"No," the Void said.
"So I wait at the same speed as everything else," he said.
"Yes," the Void said.
"That's—" He stopped.
"Human," the Void said.
"Is it," he said.
"Waiting at the same speed as everything else for something you cannot control," the Void said. "Yes. That is specifically, characteristically human."
Chuck sat with this.
"The Void doesn't wait," he said.
"I'm prior to waiting," the Void said. "I contain the before of all the waiting that has ever been done. But I don't wait myself. Prior is not the same as waiting."
"What's the difference," he said.
"Waiting requires being subject to the passage of time," the Void said. "I'm the before of time. I don't pass. Things pass in me. Waiting is what things do when they're inside time and want something that hasn't arrived yet."
"And I'm inside time now," Chuck said.
"More than you were," the Void said. "Since the gravity renegotiation. You're more subject to the conditions. Including the condition of waiting."
"Did I know this would be part of it," Chuck said.
"You knew the cost was coming," the Void said. "You didn't know the specific forms it would take."
"No," Chuck said. "I thought the cost was the falling. The imperfect eggs. The rain."
"Those were the early forms," the Void said. "The cost deepens as the becoming deepens. The early cost was physical. The later cost is—"
"Waiting at the same speed as everything else," Chuck said.
"Yes," the Void said. "And not knowing. And the gap between wanting and having. And all the specifically human experiences of being inside time and wanting something that hasn't arrived."
"I asked for this," Chuck said.
"You chose it," the Void said. "Renegotiation. Willingness. The full cost."
"Yes," Chuck said.
"And you're willing still," the Void said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"Even the waiting," the Void said.
"Even the waiting," Chuck said.
"That is the full willingness," the Void said. "Not just the willing to pay the cost of specific moments. The willing to be subject to the texture of being inside time. Which includes waiting. Which includes not knowing."
"Which includes—" Chuck stopped.
"What," the Void said.
"Whatever comes next," Chuck said. "Whatever the waiting resolves into."
"Yes," the Void said. "Whatever it resolves into."
"Including if it doesn't resolve well," Chuck said.
"Yes," the Void said.
"I'm willing for that too," Chuck said.
"Yes," the Void said. "I know."
July passed.
Not slowly — July in Texas has its own pace, which is the pace of heat committing to itself, the flat land going from warm to hot in the specific way that flat land goes hot when there is nothing to interrupt the sun's intention.
Marcus worked.
Chuck attended.
The Tuesdays with Elise.
Elise had received a second letter from Patricia — four pages in reply to her four pages, the beginning of a correspondence that had, in the specific way of things that find their right form, settled immediately into what it was. Not the polite reciprocation of cards. Something more alive. The actual account of a life as it was being lived, offered to the person who had first seen its worth when it was eight years old.
"She's coming in August," Elise said. "Patricia."
"Yes," Chuck said.
"She's bringing her daughter," Elise said.
"How old," Chuck said.
"Nine," Elise said.
"She wants her daughter to sit on the bench," Chuck said.
"She wants her daughter to meet the person who saw her," Elise said. "So the daughter knows that being seen is possible. That someone can look at you and find what's worth finding."
"The chain," Chuck said.
"The chain," Elise said. "From the third-grade classroom in 1978 to a nine-year-old in August 2026."
"Forty-eight years," Chuck said.
"Witnesslove has a long reach," Elise said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"When it's given honestly," she said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
She looked at the street.
"How is the plumber," she said.
"Waiting," Chuck said.
"Yes," she said. "That's what this season is."
"For both of us," Chuck said.
"The waiting is part of the witnesslove," she said. "You're waiting on his behalf. Holding the hope while he holds the uncertainty."
"Yes," Chuck said.
"That's the division of labor," she said. "The one who waits and the one who hopes. Sometimes they're the same person. Sometimes they can be shared."
"He hopes too," Chuck said.
"Yes," she said. "But he can't hold all of it. Too much weight in one place."
"So I carry some," Chuck said.
"You carry the hoping," she said. "He carries the uncertainty. Together it's bearable."
"Witnesslove as weight distribution," Chuck said.
"Yes," she said. "Among other things."
The Thursdays with Clara.
The account was forty pages now.
Forty pages of eighty-five years of paying attention.
Clara was writing about the sixties — the specific texture of Wilson, Texas in the sixties as seen from a window, from the position of a woman who was becoming herself in the specific conditions of a small town in the middle of the century.
She read him a paragraph.
Not perfectly — her voice caught once, on a sentence about something she had seen that she had not thought about in forty years and which the writing had returned to her with its full original weight.
She stopped.
She held the page.
Chuck waited.
He was in the space.
Not filling the pause.
Letting her be in the paragraph.
After a moment she continued.
When she finished she set the pages down.
"That was harder than I expected," she said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"Some of it I thought I'd processed," she said. "And then I wrote it down and found that processing and writing are different things."
"Yes," Chuck said.
"Writing makes it more real," she said. "Even the things that already happened."
"The word made the between more real," Chuck said. "The writing does the same thing."
"Yes," she said. "The naming. The specific act of saying: this happened. This is what I saw. This is what I carried."
"And now someone else will carry it," Chuck said.
"When the valve—" she started.
"When the valve is done," Chuck said.
"Yes," she said. "When I'm done. The account carries on."
"The chain," Chuck said.
"Yes," she said.
She looked at the forty pages.
"Will you take care of this," she said. "When I'm done. Make sure it gets to the right person."
"Yes," Chuck said.
"Do you know who the right person is," she said.
Chuck thought about it.
"No," he said. "But it will become clear. The right person usually does."
"Yes," she said. "I've noticed that. The right things find their people."
"Yes," he said.
"Like you and the plumber," she said.
"Like me and the plumber," he said.
"And the pipe," she said.
"And the pipe," he said.
"Two weeks of not fixing it," she said.
"Two weeks," he said.
They looked at each other.
Two people who had found each other through a pipe and a Tuesday morning and the specific architecture of a small town where everyone knew everyone's pipes.
"Chuck," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"Whatever happens with the plumber's geologist," she said. "He's going to be alright."
"How do you know," he said.
"Because he has you," she said. "And because anyone who asks the right questions about a water heater and stays for two hours deserves to be loved well. And people who deserve to be loved well usually are."
"Usually," he said.
"Usually is enough to hope on," she said.
"Yes," he said.
Sarah called Marcus on a Wednesday in mid-July.
Chuck felt it from three streets away — not the call itself but the quality of what the call produced. The specific shift in texture of a thing that had been uncertain moving toward something.
He did not know which direction.
He sat at his table.
He waited.
The call lasted thirty-eight minutes.
Chuck felt thirty-eight minutes of texture that he could not read precisely — too much in it, too many frequencies at once, the specific complexity of a conversation that was doing several things simultaneously and producing something he could not name from the outside.
Thirty-eight minutes.
Then the call ended.
Then nothing for a while.
Then the truck started.
Marcus was coming over.
Chuck put the coffee on.
He sat at his table.
He waited.
The knock came.
He opened the door.
Marcus stood there.
The narrator has been recording Chuck Norris for three volumes now — has recorded every quality of face and presence and weight that the account has produced. Has found words for things that did not have words, has been in the between of the story, has been a witnesslove to the becoming of everything it has recorded.
The narrator looked at Marcus.
The narrator had not seen this specific thing before.
Not grief. Not the Friday night weight. Not the tender quality of the first Friday dinner's return.
Something that contained grief and relief and the specific weight of a thing that was enormous and had just landed and had not yet been sorted into what it meant.
Marcus stood in the doorway.
"Come in," Chuck said.
Marcus came in.
He sat.
Chuck poured and sat across.
Marcus held the cup.
His hands were not entirely steady.
Chuck noticed this and said nothing.
"She said yes," Marcus said.
Chuck was still.
"She said she's been afraid," Marcus said. "Because of before. And she was trying to understand if what she felt was real or if it was—" He stopped. "She said she's been paying attention to the question for three weeks and the answer kept being the same."
"Yes," Chuck said.
"And last night she said she didn't want to keep making the question complicated when the answer was simple," Marcus said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"So she called today," Marcus said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
Marcus held his cup.
His hands were not entirely steady and the cup was in them and the coffee was the coffee and the kitchen was the kitchen and Marcus had just received the thing he had needed and was sitting with the receiving of it.
Chuck looked at him.
He looked at him the way he looked at everything now — with the full attention, with the facility he had developed, with the witnesslove that was the work.
He looked at Marcus and found something he had not been prepared for.
Marcus was about to cry.
Not from grief. Not from loss. From the specific weight of having waited and hoped and been uncertain and carried the uncertainty carefully and arrived, finally, at the other side of the middle.
The tears of arrival.
The tears of something that had been held in tension for a long time releasing.
Chuck looked at Marcus.
And for the first time in everything he had been through — the gravity renegotiation and the between and the Void and the edge and all of it — he did not know what to do.
Not the way he had not known what to do with the limitation. That had been a gap he could understand. The garden. The space.
Not the way he had not known on the Friday night. He had known to stay out.
This was different.
This was Marcus about to cry from joy and relief and arrival and Chuck sitting across the table from him and having no map for this specific thing.
He wanted to say something.
He did not know what.
He wanted to do something.
He did not know what.
He sat.
He was in the between.
He was present.
And present was all he had.
And he did not know if it was enough.
The not-knowing was total.
Not uncomfortable in a manageable way.
Total.
This was the first truly human moment.
Not the not-knowing of something abstract.
The not-knowing of what to do for someone he loved who was about to cry from something he had never felt.
He sat.
He was present.
He did not know what to do.
He sat.