Slow Sculpture by Theodore Sturgeon

exactly what I think unless I try it out. Or get all the pieces laid out ready to try.”
    “Or tell somebody?”
    “I couldn’t tell anybody about this.”
    “Did you try?”
    “
Damn
it!” It was a whisper, but it emerged under frightening pressure. Then normally, “I’m sorry, Bitty, I’m real sorry. I suddenly got mad at the language, you know what I mean? You say something in words of one syllable and it comes out meaning something you never meant. I told you, ‘I couldn’t tell anybody about this.’ That sounds as if I knew all about it and was just shy or something. So you ask me, ‘Did you try?’ But what I really mean was that this whole thing, everything about it, is a bunch of—of feelings, and—well, crazy ideas
that I couldn’t tell anyone about
.”
    Bitty’s rare smile flickered. “Did you try?”
    “Well I’ll be. You’re worse than ever,” he said, this time without anger. “You
do
know what I’m thinking.”
    “So what were you thinking?”
    He sobered immediately. “Things … all crazy. I think all the time, Bitty, like a radio was playing all day, all night, and I can’t turn it off. Wouldn’t want to; wouldn’t know how to live without it. Ask me is it going to rain and off I go, thinking about rain, where it comes from, about clouds, how many different kinds there are; about air-currents and jet-streams and everything else you pick up reading those little paragraphs at the bottom of newspaper columns; about—”
    “About why you bought a gun?”
    “Huh? Oh … all right, all right, I won’t ramble.” He closed his eyes to hear his thoughts, and frowned at them. “Anyway, at the tail end of these run-downs is always some single thing that stops the chain—for the time. It might be the answer to some question I asked myself, or someone asks me, or it might just be as far as the things I know will take me.
    “So one day a few weeks ago I got to thinking about guns, andnever mind the way I went, but what I arrived at was the idea of a gun killing me, and then just the idea of being dead. And the more I thought, the more scared I got.”
    After waiting what seemed to be long enough, Bitty said, “Scared.”
    “It wasn’t kil— being dead that scared me. It was the feeling I had about it. I was glad about it. I wanted it. That’s what scared me.”
    “Why do you want to be dead?”
    “That’s what I don’t know.” His voice fell. “Don’t know, I just don’t know,” he mumbled. “So I couldn’t get it out of my head and I couldn’t make any sense out of it, and I thought the only thing I could do was to get a gun and load it and—get everything ready, to see how I felt then.” He looked up at her. “That sounds real crazy, I bet.”
    Bitty shrugged. Either she denied the statement or it didn’t matter. Halvorsen looked down again and said to his clenched hands, “I sat there in my room with the muzzle in my mouth and all the safeties off, and hooked my thumb around the trigger.”
    “Learn anything?”
    His mouth moved but he couldn’t find words to fit the movement. “Well,” said Bitty sharply, “why didn’t you pull it?”
    “I just—” He closed his eyes in one of those long, inward-reading pauses. “—couldn’t. I mean,
didn’t
. I wasn’t afraid, if that’s what you want to know.” He glanced at her and couldn’t tell what she wanted to know. “Sitting there, that way, I came to realize that this wasn’t the way it should happen,” he said with some difficulty.
    “What is the way?”
    “Like this: if ever there was an earthquake, or I looked up and saw a safe falling on me, or some other thing like that, something from outside myself—I wouldn’t move aside. I’d let it happen.”
    “Is there a difference between that and shooting yourself?”
    “Yes!” he said, with more animation than he had shown so far. “Put it like this: there’s part of me that’s dead, and wants the rest of me dead. There’s a part of