Free Slow Sculpture by Theodore Sturgeon Page B

first!
something wailed within him, and as he sensed it he kicked it away again: more hysteria, not letting him think. And then a word from O’Banion, a phrase from Miss Schmidt, and his own ragbag memory: The Bittelmans never said—they always asked. It was as if they could reach into a man’s mind, piece together questions from the unused lumber stored there, and from it build shapes he couldn’t bear to look at.
How many terrible questions have I locked away?
And has she broken the lock? He said, “Don’t … ask me that.… Why did you ask me that?”
    “Well, why ever not?”
    “You’re a … you can read my mind.”
    “Can I?”
    “
Say
something!” he shouted. The paper bag stopped whispering. He thought she noticed it.
    “Am I reading your mind,” she asked reasonably, “if I see you walk in here the way you did looking like the wrath o’ God, holding that thing out in front of you and shying away from it at the same time, and then tell you that if you accidentally pull the trigger you might have to die for it? Read minds? Isn’t it enough to read the papers?”
    Oh, he thought.… Oh-h. He looked at her sharply. She was quite calm, waiting, leaving it to him. He knew, suddenly and certainly, that this woman could outthink him, outtalk him, seven ways from Sunday without turning a hair. This meant either that he was completely and embarrassingly wrong, or that her easy explanations weren’t true ones … which was the thing that had been bothering him in the first place. “Why did you say I bought the gun for something else?” he snapped.
    She gave him that brief, very-warm smile. “Didn’t say; I askedyou, right? How could I really know?”
    For one further moment he hesitated, and it came to him that if this flickering doubt about her was justified, the chances were that a gun would be as ineffective as an argument. And besides … it was like a silent current in the room, a sort of almost-sound, or the aural pressure he could feel sometimes when a car was braking near him; but here it came out feeling like comfort.
    He let the bag fall until it swung from its mouth. He twisted it closed. “Will you—I mean,” he bumbled, “I don’t want it.”
    “Now what would I do with a gun?” she asked.
    “I don’t know. I just don’t want it around. I can throw it away. I don’t want to have anything to do with it. I thought maybe you could put it away somewhere.”
    “You know, you’d better sit down,” said Bitty. She didn’t exactly push him but he had to move back to get out of her way as she approached, and when the back of his knees hit a chair he had to sit down or fall down. Bitty continued across the kitchen, opened a high cupboard and put the bag on the topmost shelf. “Only place in the house Robin can’t climb into.”
    “Robin. Oh yes,” he said, seeing the possibilities. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
    “You’d better talk it out, Philip,” she said in her flat, kind way. “You’re fixing to bust wide open. I won’t have you messing up my kitchen.”
    “There’s nothing to talk about.”
    She paused on her way back to the sink, in a strange hesitation like one listening. Suddenly she turned and sat down at the table with him. “What did you want with a gun, Philip?” she demanded; and just as abruptly, he answered her, as if she had hurled something at him and it had bounced straight back into her waiting hands, “I was thinking about killing myself.”
    If he thought this would elicit surprise; or an exclamation, or any more questions, he was disappointed. She seemed only to be waiting, so he said, with considerably more care, “I don’t know why I told you that but it came out right. I said I was thinking about doing it. I didn’t say I was going to do it.” He looked at her. Not enough?Okay then: “I couldn’t be sure exactly what I was thinking until I bought a gun. Does that make any sense to you?”
    “Why not?”
    “I don’t ever know