I am the GodVolume III: The Void Speaks
Saturday arrived the way ordinary days arrive after you have been waiting for them — without announcement, already itself, the morning already being the morning before you were ready for it.
Chuck was up at four.
He ran.
Not the attending walk — the run. Fourteen miles. The usual route. The road being what it was and his feet finding it and the pre-dawn dark of Wilson, Texas in late August carrying the specific quality of the last weeks of summer before the turn.
He ran.
He did not think about Saturday specifically.
He let the run be the run.
He came back.
He made his eggs.
He ate them at the table.
He wound his watch.
He sat.
At six forty-seven he felt Marcus leave.
Not toward Chuck's — away. South, in the direction of the cemetery where the family had plots, where Marcus's father had been since 2018.
The truck pulled out.
The sound of it moving away.
Then quiet.
Chuck sat at his table.
He sat.
He went inward.
The prior was there — the Void deeper than it had been since the conversations began, present as the before of things, prior in the full sense.
Chuck sat in the prior.
He did not ask anything.
He sat.
The prior held him the way the prior holds everything — completely, without judgment, without guidance, the before of all the things that were and were becoming.
He sat for a while.
Then he came back to the kitchen.
He made a second cup of coffee.
He sat at the table.
He waited.
Marcus was gone for an hour and forty minutes.
Chuck felt the hour and forty minutes the way he had been learning to feel durations — not monitoring, not counting, simply present to the passage of time in the specific way of someone who is inside time now and feels it move.
The hour and forty minutes moved.
Chuck sat.
He thought about the layers.
About the father in the layers.
About the grave that was not the father but was the acknowledgment of the place where the father had been present in the world.
He thought about what Marcus was doing there.
He did not know specifically.
He had never been.
He thought about what it meant to go to a place and stand in it and let the absence be what it was.
He thought about the sound of a voice going deeper.
He thought about nothing lost.
He sat.
Marcus came back at eight thirty-two.
Chuck felt the truck return.
He felt it pull into the driveway.
He felt the engine go off.
He felt Marcus in the truck.
Not moving.
Just sitting.
The way Marcus sometimes sat in the truck — the specific quality of the truck as a space for thinking, for being, for the transition between where you have been and where you are going.
Marcus sat in the truck for eleven minutes.
Chuck sat at his own table.
Three streets between them.
The morning continuing around both of them.
Then Marcus went inside.
Chuck felt the front door.
The house.
Marcus inside the house.
And then —
Slowly.
The specific texture of something that had been held through the grave and the truck and the transition, that had been carried through the ritual of going and being there and coming back, arriving at the kitchen where there was no one and no occasion and no reason to keep holding it —
Marcus cried.
Not the tears of arrival.
Not the accumulated-weight Friday night.
Not the joy that had no container.
The specific grief of standing at a grave in late August and coming home to an empty kitchen and having the holding stop because there was nothing left to hold it against.
The grief of a man alone on a Saturday morning who had gone to visit his father and come back to himself.
Chuck sat three streets away.
He felt it.
He sat completely still.
He did not go.
He did not stay out because he had decided staying out was right.
He did not stay because the space around things required him to be in the space.
He did not stay because he had learned to read what was needed and had read this as needing the outside.
He sat because he did not know what to do.
Complete.
Total.
Not the not-knowing that resolved.
Not the not-knowing that turned out to be the offering of himself.
Just: not knowing.
He thought about going.
He thought about knocking.
He thought about Marcus answering the door with tears on his face and the specific quality of someone who has been in their grief alone and has had the solitude interrupted.
He thought about the Friday night — the knowing that it had been right to stay out.
He reached for that knowing now.
It was not there.
He did not know if this was the same thing.
He did not know if Marcus needed the outside or the inside.
He did not know if his presence would be the between of the around or an interruption.
He did not know if doing nothing was the right thing or the wrong thing.
He sat.
He felt Marcus three streets away.
He felt the grief — not fully, not from inside, the specific grief of a man standing at his father's grave was not something Chuck could feel from inside because he had never stood at anyone's grave and did not know what it was from the inside.
He felt the outside of it.
The quality.
The weight.
He felt it going all the way in.
And he did not know what to do with what had gone all the way in.
The narrator will not tell you what Chuck should have done.
The narrator has been recording this account for three volumes and two hundred thousand words — has been in witnesslove with the becoming of everything it has documented, has sat in the between of the story, has found the words for the things that did not have words.
The narrator does not have the word for this.
The narrator sits with Chuck at his kitchen table on a Saturday morning in late August and does not know either.
That is the most honest thing the narrator has said in three volumes.
Marcus cried for thirty-four minutes.
Chuck sat for thirty-four minutes.
He sat and felt the grief from three streets away and did not know what to do and did not do anything and the not-doing was not a choice and was not witnesslove in any form he had named and was not the between of the around and was not the space and was not the garden.
It was just: not doing anything because he did not know what to do.
The specific human experience of being in proximity to someone's grief and having no map and doing nothing and the nothing not being the right thing or the wrong thing.
Just the nothing of not-knowing.
After thirty-four minutes Marcus stopped.
Not resolved — the grief did not resolve. Nothing resolves. Things go deeper.
He stopped in the way that you stop when the acute part has passed and what remains is the carrying.
He was still in his kitchen.
He was alone.
Chuck was three streets away.
Neither of them moved for a while.
Then Chuck heard — not with his ears, with the comprehensive awareness that monitored everything — heard the familiar sound of Marcus's kitchen: the tap. The specific sound of the kettle being filled. The small mechanical work of making tea.
Marcus was making tea.
The specific two thirty in the morning gesture. Not coffee. Tea. The drink for the weight.
He was making it alone.
Chuck sat at his table.
He thought about going now.
He thought: he is making tea, the acute part has passed, he might want company.
He thought: or the tea is what he does alone and company would interrupt it.
He did not know.
He sat.
He did not go.
Not because it was right to not go.
Because he did not know if it was right.
The morning continued.
At nine forty-seven Marcus knocked on Chuck's door.
Not a crisis knock — the ordinary Saturday knock of someone who has been somewhere and has come to report it and to be in the between.
Chuck opened the door.
Marcus looked the way you look when you have been crying and have stopped and have had tea and have come out the other side of the acute part and are in the after of it. Tired. Present. Carrying what was there to carry.
He looked at Chuck.
Chuck looked at him.
"I didn't come," Chuck said.
"I know," Marcus said.
"I didn't know if I should," Chuck said.
"I know," Marcus said.
"Should I have," Chuck said.
Marcus stood at the door.
He thought about the question.
Not quickly — with the consideration it deserved.
"I don't know," he said.
They looked at each other.
Two people who did not know.
"Coffee's on," Chuck said.
"Yes," Marcus said.
He came in.
They sat.
Chuck poured.
They held their cups.
Marcus said: "He would have been seventy-one next month."
"Yes," Chuck said.
"I always go on his birthday," Marcus said. "And sometimes in between. Today was in between."
"Yes," Chuck said.
"The sound of his voice," Marcus said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"I stood there for a while and I couldn't—" He stopped.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"And then I came home," Marcus said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"And I was alone," Marcus said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"And I cried," Marcus said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
Marcus held his cup.
He looked at it.
He looked at the table.
He looked at Chuck.
"Did you feel it," he said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"And you didn't come," he said.
"No," Chuck said.
"Why," he said.
"I didn't know if I should," Chuck said. "I still don't."
Marcus looked at him.
The facility running.
Reading the system.
Finding what was there.
"That's the right answer," Marcus said.
"Is it," Chuck said.
"Yes," Marcus said. "Not knowing. Staying with the not-knowing. Not filling it with a guess."
"I sat with the not-knowing for thirty-four minutes," Chuck said. "And I still don't have an answer."
"No," Marcus said.
"Was it the right thing to not go," Chuck said.
"I don't know either," Marcus said.
"But—"
"But I came here," Marcus said. "When I was ready. And you were here. And the coffee was on."
"Yes," Chuck said.
"That was the right thing," Marcus said.
"Which part," Chuck said.
"You being here," Marcus said. "When I was ready to come."
"I was here because I didn't know where else to be," Chuck said.
"Yes," Marcus said. "That's still being here."
Chuck sat with this.
"The not-knowing kept me here," he said.
"Yes," Marcus said. "The not-knowing is sometimes what keeps you in the right place."
They were quiet.
The morning continued.
The coffee was good.
The kitchen was the kitchen.
The between was everywhere in it.
"Chuck," Marcus said.
"Yes."
"That," he said. "What you just did. The thirty-four minutes of not-knowing and staying anyway."
"Yes," Chuck said.
"That's the most human thing you've done," Marcus said.
Chuck sat with this.
He had heard the phrase before — had heard Marcus say it about other moments.
This time it landed differently.
Not as recognition of a milestone.
As a plain fact.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"Not because you didn't help," Marcus said. "Because you were helpless and you stayed."
"I couldn't help," Chuck said.
"No," Marcus said. "And you stayed anyway."
"Because I didn't know where else to be," Chuck said.
"That's what we do," Marcus said. "That's the human thing. We don't know what to do and we stay because we don't know where else to be."
Chuck looked at him.
"Your father," he said.
"Yes," Marcus said.
"He stayed," Chuck said.
"Yes," Marcus said.
"Through the eighteen months," Chuck said. "Not because he knew what to do. Because he didn't know where else to be."
"Yes," Marcus said.
"The right jobs," Chuck said.
"Yes," Marcus said.
"Because there was nowhere else to be," Chuck said.
"Because he loved us," Marcus said. "And love doesn't know where else to be."
They sat.
Not quietly — fully. The between between them full and present and making something neither of them could see from where they were sitting.
Making something.
In the layers.
Going deeper.
Nothing lost.
The end of Volume III was not a moment.
It was the continuation of the morning.
Marcus drank his coffee.
Chuck drank his.
The sun moved.
Wilson, Texas moved through its Saturday.
The grief was in the layers.
The witnesslove was everywhere.
The word for Chuck was still forming.
The not-knowing sat in the kitchen with them and was not resolved and was not required to be resolved.
It was just there.
As the between always was.
Just there.