Slow Sculpture

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “Yup. There you are!” he said cheerfully, moving the instrument close to her right breast.

  “What?” she whimpered.

  “Your cancer. Right breast, low, around toward the armpit.” He whistled. “A mean one, too. Malignant as hell.”

  She swayed and then collapsed forward and down. A sick blackness swept down on her, receded explosively in a glare of agonizing blue-white, and then crashed down on her like a mountain falling.

  Place where wall meets ceiling. Another wall, another ceiling. Hadn’t seen it before. Didn’t matter. Don’t care.

  Sleep.

  Place where wall meets ceiling. Something in the way. His face, close, drawn, tired; eyes awake though and penetrating. Doesn’t matter. Don’t care.

  Sleep.

  Place where wall meets ceiling. Down a bit, late sunlight.

  Over a little, rusty-gold chrysanthemums in a goldgreen glass cornucopia. Something in the way again: his face.

  “Can you hear me?”

  Yes, but don’t answer. Don’t move. Don’t speak.

  Sleep.

  It’s a room, a wall, a table, a man pacing; a nighttime window and mums you’d think were alive, but don’t you know they’re cut right off and dying?

  Do they know that?

  “How are you?” Urgent, urgent.

  “Thirsty.”

  Cold and a bite to it that aches the hinges of the jaws. Grapefruit juice. Lying back on his arm while he holds the glass in the other hand, oh no, that’s not … “Thank you. Thanks very—” Try to sit up, the sheet—my clothes!

  “Sorry about that,” he said, the mindreader-almost. “Some things that have to be done just aren’t consistent with panty-hose and a minidress. All washed and dried and ready for you, though—any time. Over there.”

  The brown wool and the panty-hose and the shoes, on the chair. He’s respectful, standing back, putting the glass next to an insulated carafe on the night-table.

  “What things?”

  “Throwing up. Bedpans,” he said candidly.

  Protective with the sheet, which can hide bodies but oh not embarrassment. “Oh I’m sorry.… Oh I must’ve—” Shake head and he slides back and forth in the vision.

  “You went into shock, and then you just didn’t come out of it.” He hesitated. It was the first time she had ever seen him hesitate over anything. She became for a moment an almost-mind-reader: Should I tell her what’s in my mind? Sure he should, and he did: “You didn’t want to come out of it.”

  “It’s all gone out of my head.”

  “The pear tree, the electroscope. The injection, the electrostatic response.”

  “No,” she said, not knowing, then, knowing: “No!”

  “Hang on!” he rapped, and next thing she knew he was by the bed, over her, his two hands hard on her cheeks. “Don’t slip off again. You can handle it. You can handle it because it’s all right now, do you understand that? You’re all right!”

  “You told me I had cancer.” It sounded pouty, accusing. He laughed at her, actually laughed.

  “You told me you had it.”

  “Oh, but I didn’t know.”

  “That explains it, then,” he said in a load-off-my-back tone. “There wasn’t anything in what I did that could cause a three-day withdrawal like that; it had to be something in you.”

  “Three days!”

  He simply nodded in response to that and went on with what he was saying. “I get a little pompous once in a while,” he said engagingly. “Comes from being right so much of the time. Took a bit more for granted than I should have, didn’t I? when I assumed you’d been to a doctor, maybe even had a biopsy. You didn’t, did you?”

  “I was afraid,” she admitted. She looked at him. “My mother died of it, and my aunt, and my sister had a radical mastectomy. I couldn’t bear it. And when you—”

  “When I told you what you already knew, and what you never wanted to hear, you couldn’t take it. You blacked right out, you know. Fainted away, and it had nothing to do with the seventy-odd thousand volts of static you were carrying. I caught you.” He put out his arms and instinctively she shrank back, but he held the arms where they were, on display, until she looked at them and saw the angry red scorch marks on his forearms and the heavy biceps, as much of them as she could see from under his short-sleeved shirt. “About nine-tenths knocked me out too,” he said, “but at least you didn’t crack your head or anything.”

  “Thank you,” she said reflexively, and then began to cry. “What am I going to do?”

  “Do? Go back home, wherever that is—pick up your life again, whatever that might mean.”

  “But you said—”

  “When are you going to get it into your head that what I did was not a diagnostic?”

  “Are you—did you—you mean you cured it?”

  “I mean you’re curing it right now. I explained it all to you before—you remember that now, don’t you?”

  “Not altogether, but—yes.” Surreptitiously (but not enough, because he saw her) she felt under the sheet for the lump. “It’s still there.”

  “If I bopped you over the head with a bat,” he said with slightly exaggerated simplicity, “there would be a lump on it. It would be there tomorrow and the next day. The day after that it might be smaller, and in a week you’d still be able to feel it, but it would be gone. Same thing here.”

  At last she let the enormity of it touch her. “A one-shot cure for cancer.…”

  “Oh God,” he said harshly, “I can tell by looking at you that I am going to have to listen to that speech again. Well, I won’t.”

  Startled, she said, “What speech?”

  “The one about my duty to humanity. It comes in two phases and many textures. Phase one has to do with my duty to humanity and really means we could make a classic buck with it. Phase two deals solely with my duty to humanity, and I don’t hear that one very often. Phase two utterly overlooks the reluctance humanity has to accept good things unless they arrive from accepted and respectable sources. Phase one is fully aware of this but gets very rat-shrewd in figuring ways around it.”

  She said, “I don’t—” but could get no farther.

  “The textures,” he overrode her, “are accompanied by the light of revelation, with or without religion and/or mysticism; or they are cast sternly in the ethical-philosophy mold and aim to force me to surrender through guilt mixed, to some degree all the way up to total, with compassion.”

  “But I only—”

  “You,” he said, aiming a long index finger at her, “have robbed yourself of the choicest example of everything I have just said. If my assumptions had been right and you had gone to your friendly local sawbones, and he had diagnosed cancer and referred you to a specialist, and he had done likewise and sent you to a colleague for consultation, and in random panic you had fallen into my hands and been cured, and had gone back to your various doctors to report a miracle, do you know what you’d have gotten from them? ‘Spontaneous remission,’ that’s what you’d have gotten. And it wouldn’t be only doctors,” he went on with a sudden renewal of passion, under which she quailed in her bed. “Everybody has his own commercial. Your nutritionist would have nodded over his wheat germ or his macrobiotic rice cakes, your priest would have dropped to his knees and looked at the sky, your geneticist would have a pet theory about generation skipping and would assure you that your grandparents probably had spontaneous remissions too and never knew it.”

  “Please!” she cried, but he shouted at her: “Do you know what I am? I am an engineer twice over, mechanical and electrical, and I have a law degree. If you were foolish enough to tell anyone about what has happened here (which I hope you aren’t, but if you are I know how to protect myself) I could be jailed for practicing medicine without a license, you could have me up for assault because I stuck a needle into you and even for kidnapping if you could prove I carried you in here from the lab. Nobody would give a damn that I had cured your cancer.
You don’t know who I am, do you?”

  “No, I don’t even know your name.”

  “And I won’t tell you. I don’t know your name, either—”

  “Oh! It’s—”

  “Don’t tell me! Don’t tell me! I don’t want to hear it! I wanted to be involved with your lump and I was. I want it and you to be gone as soon as you’re both up to it. Have I made myself absolutely clear?”

  “Just let me get dressed,” she said tightly, “and I’ll leave right now!”

  “Without making a speech?”

  “Without making a speech.” And in a flash her anger turned to misery and she added, “I was going to say I was grateful. Would that have been all right?”

  And his anger underwent a change too, for he came close to the bed and sat down on his heel, bringing their faces to a level, and said quite gently, “That would be fine. Although … you won’t really be grateful for another ten days, when you get your ‘spontaneous remission’ reports, or maybe for six months or a year or two or five, when examinations keep on testing out negative.”

  She detected such a wealth of sadness behind this that she found herself reaching for the hand with which he steadied himself against the edge of the bed. He did not recoil, but he didn’t seem to welcome it either. “Why can’t I be grateful right now?”

  “That would be an act of faith,” he said bitterly, “and that just doesn’t happen any more—if it ever did.” He rose and went toward the door. “Please don’t go tonight,” he said. “It’s dark and you don’t know the way. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  When he came back in the morning the door was open. The bed was made and the sheets were folded neatly on the chair, together with the pillow slips and the towels she had used. She wasn’t there.

  He came out into the entrance court and contemplated his bonsai.

  Early sun gold-frosted the horizontal upper foliage of the old tree and brought its gnarled limbs into sharp relief, tough brown-gray and crevices of velvet. Only the companion of a bonsai (there are owners of bonsai, but they are a lesser breed) fully understands the relationship. There is an exclusive and individual treeness to the tree because it is a living thing, and living things change, and there are definite ways in which the tree desires to change. A man sees the tree and in his mind makes certain extensions and extrapolations of what he sees, and sets about making them happen. The tree in turn will do only what a tree can do, will resist to the death any attempt to do what it cannot do, or to do it in less time than it needs. The shaping of a bonsai is therefore always a compromise and always a cooperation. A man cannot create bonsai, nor can a tree; it takes both, and they must understand each other. It takes a long time to do that. One memorizes one’s bonsai, every twig, the angle of every crevice and needle, and, lying awake at night or in a pause a thousand miles away, one recalls this or that line or mass, one makes one’s plans. With wire and water and light, with tilting and with the planting of water-robbing weeds or heavy root-shading ground cover, one explains to the tree what one wants, and if the explanation is well-enough made, and there is great enough understanding, the tree will respond and obey—almost. Always there will be its own self-respecting, highly individual variation: Very well, I shall do what you want, but I will do it my way. And for these variations, the tree is always willing to present a clear and logical explanation, and more often than not (almost smiling) it will make clear to the man that he could have avoided it if his understanding had been better.

  It is the slowest sculpture in the world, and there is, at times, doubt as to which is being sculpted, man or tree.

  So he stood for perhaps ten minutes watching the flow of gold over the upper branches, and then went to a carved wooden chest, opened it, shook out a length of disreputable cotton duck, opened the hinged glass at one side of the atrium, and spread the canvas over the roots and all the earth to one side of the trunk, leaving the rest open to wind and water. Perhaps in a while—a month or two—a certain shoot in the topmost branch would take the hint, and the uneven flow of moisture up through the cambium layer would nudge it away from that upward reach and persuade it to continue the horizontal passage. And perhaps not, and it would need the harsher language of binding and wire. But then it might have something to say, too, about the rightness of an upward trend, and would perhaps say it persuasively enough to convince the man; altogether, a patient, meaningful, and rewarding dialogue.

  “Good morning.”

  “Oh goddam!” he barked, “you made me bite my tongue. I thought you’d gone.”

  “I did.” She knelt in the shadows with her back against the inner wall, facing the atrium. “But then I stopped to be with the tree for a while.”

  “Then what?”

  “I thought a lot.”

  “What about?”

  “You.”

  “Did you now!”

  “Look,” she said firmly, “I’m not going to any doctor to get this thing checked out. I didn’t want to leave until I had told you that, and until I was sure you believed me.”

  “Come on in and we’ll get something to eat.”

  Foolishly, she giggled. “I can’t. My feet are asleep.”

  Without hesitation he scooped her up in his arms and carried her around the atrium. She said, her arm around his shoulders and their faces close, “Do you believe me?”

  He continued around until they reached the wooden chest, then stopped and looked into her eyes. “I believe you. I don’t know why you decided that, but I’m willing to believe you.” He set her down on the chest and stood back.

  “It’s that act of faith you mentioned,” she said gravely. “I thought you ought to have it, at least once in your life, so you can never say such a thing again.” She tapped her heels gingerly against the slate floor. “Ow.” She made a pained smile. “Pins and needles.”

  “You must have been thinking for a long time.”

  “Yes. Want more?”

  “Sure.”

  “You are an angry, frightened man.”

  He seemed delighted. “Tell me about all that!”

  “No,” she said quietly, “you tell me. I’m very serious about this. Why are you angry?”

  “I’m not!”

  “Why are you so angry?”

  “I tell you I’m not! Although,” he added good-naturedly, “you’re pushing me in that direction.”

  “Well then, why?”

  He gazed at her for what, to her, seemed a very long time indeed. “You really want to know, don’t you?”

  She nodded.

  He waved a sudden hand, up and out. “Where do you suppose all this came from—the house, the land, the equipment?”

  She waited.

  “An exhaust system,” he said, with a thickening of the voice she was coming to know. “A way of guiding exhaust gases out of internal-combustion engines in such a way that they are given a spin. Unburned solids are embedded in the walls of the muffler in a glass-wool liner that slips out in one piece and can be replaced by a clean one every couple of thousand miles. The rest of the exhaust is fired by its own spark plug and what will burn, burns. The heat is used to preheat the fuel; the rest is spun again through a five-thousand-mile cartridge. What finally gets out is, by today’s standards at least, pretty clean; and because of the preheating, it actually gets better mileage out of the engine.”

  “So you’ve made a lot of money.”

  “I made a lot of money,” he echoed. “But not because the thing is being used to cut down air pollution. I got the money because an automobile company bought it and buried it in a lock-box. They don’t like it because it costs something to install in new cars. Some friends of theirs in the refining business don’t like it because it gets high performance out of crude fuels. Well all right—I didn’t know any better and I won’t make the same mistake again. But yes—I’m angry. I was angry when I was a kid on a tankship and we were set to washing down bulkhead with chipped brown soap and canvas, and I went ashore and boug
ht a detergent and tried it and it was better, faster and cheaper so I took it to the bos’n, who gave me a punch in the mouth for pretending to know his job better than he did.… Well, he was drunk at the time, but the rough part was when the old shellbacks in the crew got wind of it and ganged up on me for being what they called a ‘company man’—that’s a dirty name in a ship. I just couldn’t understand why people got in the way of something better.

  “I’ve been up against that all my life. I have something in my head that just won’t quit: it’s a way I have of asking the next question: Why is so-and-so the way it is? Why can’t it be such-and-such instead? There is always another question to be asked about any thing or any situation; especially you shouldn’t quit when you like an answer because there’s always another one after it. And we live in a world where people just don’t want to ask the next question!

  “I’ve been paid all my stomach will take for things people won’t use, and if I’m mad all the time it’s really my fault—I admit it; because I just can’t stop asking that next question and coming up with answers. There’s a half-dozen real blockbusters in that lab that nobody will ever see, and half a hundred more in my head; but what can you do in a world where people would rather kill each other in a desert even when they’re shown it can turn green and bloom, where they’ll fall all over themselves to pour billions into developing a new oil strike when it’s been proved over and over again that the fossil fuels will kill us all?

  “Yes, I’m angry. Shouldn’t I be?”

  She let the echoes of his voice swirl around the court and out through the hole in the top of the atrium, and waited a little longer to let him know he was here with her and not beside himself and his fury. He grinned at her sheepishly when he came to this, and she said:

  “Maybe you’re asking the next question instead of asking the right question. I think people who live by wise old sayings are trying not to think, but I know one worth paying some attention to. It’s this: If you ask a question the right way, you’ve just given the answer.” She paused to see if he was paying real attention. He was. She went on, “I mean, if you put your hand on a hot stove you might ask yourself, how can I stop my hand from burning? And the answer is pretty clear, isn’t it? If the world keeps rejecting what you have to give, there’s some way of asking why that contains the answer.”