I am the GodVolume III: The Void Speaks
Clara Reeves was alive.
She was eighty-five years old and lived in a small house on Maple Street in Wilson, Texas, four blocks from where she had grown up and twelve blocks from where Chuck Norris had grown up and in the specific way of a small town had remained within the same few square miles for the entirety of a life that had been, as the Void had shown, fine.
Marcus found this out in fourteen minutes through the specific network of a man who has been a plumber in a small town for seventeen years and has therefore been in most of the houses and knows most of the families and has developed, without intending to, a comprehensive map of who is where and what they are doing.
"Clara Reeves," he said. "Eighty-five. Maple Street. She was a bookkeeper for forty years. Retired fifteen years ago. Husband died in 2011. No children. She volunteers at the library on Tuesday and Thursday mornings."
Chuck held this information.
"How do you know her," he said.
"Her pipes," Marcus said. "I've done her house twice. She makes very good coffee and she doesn't hover."
"High praise," Chuck said.
"Highest," Marcus said.
Chuck looked at his cup.
"I don't know what I'm going to say to her," he said.
"No," Marcus said.
"I can't tell her what I know," Chuck said. "I can't tell her that I watched her from the road as a child and didn't stop and the Void showed me what the not-stopping made."
"No," Marcus said.
"So what do I do," Chuck said.
Marcus drank his coffee.
"You knock on her door," he said. "And you see what's there."
"That's not a plan," Chuck said.
"It's the only plan that works with people," Marcus said. "You go in with a plan and you're managing the thing instead of being in it. You go in with just — yourself. And you see what's there."
Chuck looked at him.
"You've been saying things like that for months," he said. "Where do you get it."
"My father," Marcus said. "And seventeen years of walking into other people's houses and finding what's actually there instead of what I expected."
"The plumber's philosophy," Chuck said.
"It's not philosophy," Marcus said. "It's just what works."
Chuck drank the last of his coffee.
He stood up.
"Today," he said.
"The library is closed on Fridays," Marcus said. "She'll be home."
He walked to Maple Street.
Not drove — walked. Walking had become his default since the gravity renegotiation in the same organic way that other things had become default — not decided, accumulated, the small consistent choices that constitute a changed person without announcing the change.
It was a Friday morning in late April.
The town was doing what it did.
He walked through it.
He thought about what Marcus had said.
Go in with just yourself. And see what's there.
He thought about who himself was now — after the gravity renegotiation, after the between with Marcus, after the answer brought through the edge, after the Void showing him the made and the not-made.
He was the person who had done all of that.
He was also the person who had run past a quiet child's house every morning for three years and filed her under not requiring attention and continued.
Both of those were himself.
He carried both.
He walked to Maple Street.
He found the house.
Small. Well-maintained in the specific way of someone who is organized and reliable and attends to what needs attending to. A garden that was not elaborate but was tended — the specific tending of someone who does not have more than they can manage and manages what they have.
He stood outside it for a moment.
Then he knocked.
Clara Reeves opened the door.
She was eighty-five years old and small — had always been small, had been a small child and had become a small woman, which was the only continuation that was not a surprise. She had white hair and the specific eyes of someone who has been paying attention for a very long time and has learned to read what they see without reacting to it immediately.
She looked at Chuck.
She looked at him the way she looked at most things — completely, calmly, without the specific flutter of someone who found the unexpected threatening.
"Can I help you?" she said.
Chuck thought about what to say.
He had not prepared what to say, because Marcus had told him not to prepare and he had listened, and now he was standing at the door of an eighty-five-year-old woman with white hair and clear eyes and nothing prepared.
He said the true thing.
"My name is Chuck Norris," he said. "I grew up in Wilson. I lived on Elm Street. You were three houses down on the same road."
Clara looked at him.
Her expression did not change dramatically — it shifted slightly, the way expressions shift when something has been placed in a new category.
"Norris," she said. "I remember a Norris family."
"Yes," he said.
"You've been gone a long time," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"You came back," she said.
"Yes," he said.
She looked at him for another moment.
Then she said: "Do you want to come in?"
Her kitchen was the kitchen of someone who had lived alone for thirteen years and had organized the living accordingly — everything in its place, nothing extra, the specific economy of a person who has learned that maintaining the right things is more important than having many things.
She made coffee without asking.
This was, the narrator noted, the third kitchen that had made him coffee without asking.
He sat at the table.
She sat across from him.
"What brings you back to Wilson," she said.
"I'm not sure," he said honestly. "I felt like I was supposed to come back."
"Supposed to," she said.
"The route brought me here," he said. "That's the best way I can explain it."
She looked at him.
"How long have you been back?" she said.
"A few months," he said.
"And you're only now—" She stopped.
"I didn't know about you specifically," he said. "Not until recently."
"What did you learn about me specifically," she said.
He looked at her.
She was eighty-five years old and had clear eyes that paid attention and he had come here because the Void had shown him a between that had not happened and Marcus had said go in with just yourself and see what's there and this was what was there: a woman with a question that deserved an honest answer.
He could not give the honest answer.
Not the full one.
He gave the honest answer he had.
"That you grew up three houses down," he said. "That you've been in Wilson your whole life. That you work at the library on Tuesdays and Thursdays."
"Marcus Webb," she said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"Good plumber," she said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"He talks," she said.
"He knows when talking is useful," Chuck said.
She looked at him.
"Why did you come," she said.
The question was direct in the specific way of someone who has been fine all their life and has no patience for indirection — who has learned that indirection is usually someone managing their own discomfort at the expense of your time.
Chuck thought about the true answer.
"Because I think I owe you something," he said.
She looked at him.
"We've never met," she said.
"We've been in proximity," he said. "For years. In a way that I wasn't — present for. And I've been thinking about what that means."
"You're being cryptic," she said.
"I'm being as honest as I can without being strange," he said.
She looked at him for a long time.
Then she said: "You were always strange."
Chuck looked at her.
"You remember me," he said.
"You ran past my house every morning," she said. "Before school. When you were seven, eight, nine. Before your family moved."
"Yes," he said.
"Children don't run before school," she said. "Not in that way. Not like that."
"No," he said.
"I watched you," she said. "From the window."
Chuck sat with this.
Clara Reeves, quiet child, invisible to the world, had been watching him run past her house every morning.
He had not known.
He had run past her house and filed her presence and continued.
She had been watching.
"Did you ever wave," he said.
"No," she said. "I didn't think—" She stopped. "I didn't think you'd notice."
The weight.
It arrived with the specific quality of something that has been there for a long time and has just been named.
"I wouldn't have," he said. "Then."
"No," she said. "I knew that."
"You knew I wouldn't notice," he said.
"I knew the way children know things about how the world is organized," she said. "I was not the kind of child who got noticed. You were — something else. Even at seven. Even running past at six in the morning."
She said this without bitterness.
The narrator notes this carefully — without bitterness, without the specific weight of old grievance. Simply stating a fact about the way the world had been organized, the way it had organized itself around what it noticed and what it didn't.
"That was not correct," Chuck said.
She looked at him.
"You were worth noticing," he said.
Clara Reeves held her coffee cup.
She was eighty-five years old and had been fine her whole life and had organized herself around being fine and had not expected, on a Friday morning in April, to be sitting across from a man who had run past her house for three years and was now telling her she had been worth noticing.
She was quiet for a moment.
"You came here to tell me that," she said.
"I came because it was true and I hadn't said it," he said.
"Seventy-eight years ago," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"That's a long time," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"You couldn't have said it then," she said. "You were seven."
"No," he said. "I couldn't have. But I can say it now."
She looked at her cup.
She looked at the kitchen.
She looked at the window above the sink, which was the window of someone who had spent a life looking out of windows at what was happening and deciding what to do with what she saw.
"Why does it matter," she said. "Now."
He thought about the honest answer.
"Because it was true then," he said. "And it's still true. Truth doesn't have an expiration."
She looked at him.
"No," she said. "I suppose it doesn't."
They talked for an hour and twenty minutes.
The narrator will not record the full conversation because the full conversation belonged to the between between Chuck Norris and Clara Reeves and the between was not available to the narrator in the way that kitchens and roads and spaces between galaxies were available.
What the narrator knows of it is what was visible from outside — the quality of two people at a kitchen table discovering, across a conversation that neither had planned, that the other was interesting.
Not just present. Interesting.
Clara Reeves had been a bookkeeper for forty years and had developed, through the specific practice of someone who works with numbers for four decades, a precision about the world that was different from Chuck's precision but which recognized his. She noticed things. She kept track. She had maintained, across an entire life organized around not being noticed, a comprehensive and accurate account of everything around her.
She had just never been asked for it.
Chuck asked.
He asked what she had seen from the window on Elm Street.
He asked what Wilson had been in the forties and fifties.
He asked what forty years of bookkeeping had taught her about how things actually worked versus how they were supposed to work.
She answered.
She answered the way someone answers when they have been keeping the account for eighty-five years and have not previously been invited to read it aloud — with the specific quality of something that has been waiting to be said and is now being said, finding its form in the saying, becoming more itself in the speaking of it.
The narrator watched from outside.
The narrator could not hear the words.
The narrator could see the quality of it — two people at a table, the between between them full and present and making something, the specific creation of a between that had been available for seventy-eight years and was being entered now.
Not the same between that had been missed.
A different one.
One that could only happen between two people who had been what they had been for seventy-eight years and were now sitting across from each other with all of it.
When Chuck left he stood on Maple Street.
He stood there for a moment.
He thought about what the Void had said.
The betweens that didn't happen don't become available again.
The Void had been right.
The between that had been available in 1945 had not happened and could not be recovered.
What had happened in the kitchen on Maple Street was not a recovery.
It was its own thing.
A new creation.
The between between an eighty-five-year-old woman with clear eyes and a man who had come back to Wilson, Texas because the route brought him here.
He did not know what it would make.
He would not know for a long time.
Maybe never.
The chain extended outward, the way chains always did, into territory the origin could not see.
He walked home.
Marcus was on the front step when he got back.
Not waiting — drinking coffee, looking at the street, in the specific mode of someone who has finished his own morning and is present in the simple way of someone who has nowhere to be.
He looked up when Chuck came down the street.
"How was it," he said.
Chuck sat on the step beside him.
"She was watching me," he said.
Marcus looked at him.
"She watched me run past every morning," Chuck said. "From her window. She didn't wave because she didn't think I'd notice."
Marcus was quiet.
"Did you tell her she was worth noticing," he said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"How did she take it," Marcus said.
Chuck thought about Clara Reeves at her kitchen table.
The way she had held her cup.
The way she had looked at the window.
The way she had said I suppose it doesn't about truth not having an expiration.
The way she had, across an hour and twenty minutes, read aloud an account she had been keeping for eighty-five years and which had never previously been invited.
"Like someone who has been keeping accurate books for forty years," he said. "And has just been asked to present them."
Marcus was quiet for a moment.
Then he said: "What does that mean."
"It means she had it all along," Chuck said. "The account. The precision. The seeing. She'd been keeping it. She just needed someone to ask."
"You asked," Marcus said.
"Seventy-eight years late," Chuck said.
"Late," Marcus said. "But not never."
"Not never," Chuck said.
They sat on the step.
The Friday morning was doing what Friday mornings did.
"Chuck," Marcus said.
"Yes."
"The Void. Tomorrow you said it would show you what's still open."
"Yes," Chuck said.
"The valve that's getting old," Marcus said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
Marcus held his cup.
"I think I know what it is," he said.
Chuck looked at him.
Marcus looked at the street.
"I think," Marcus said carefully, "that the thing that's still open is something to do with me."
Chuck was very still.
"Why do you think that," he said.
"Because I can feel it too," Marcus said. "Something approaching. Not a disaster. Something that's — getting ready to require something."
Chuck looked at him.
The facility Marcus had developed across seventeen years of reading systems was reliable.
If Marcus felt it approaching, it was approaching.
"Are you afraid," Chuck said.
Marcus thought about it.
"No," he said. "I know the weight now. What weight feels like. And this—" He paused. "This feels like the right kind."
"Heavy and right," Chuck said.
"Heavy and right," Marcus confirmed.
They sat on the step.
The between between them was present — full and weighted and named and making something.
The something was still becoming.
The narrator turned the page.