Slow Sculpture

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Sudden thought: “Hey,” I said, “did he tell you why he dropped out mad like that? What was it—he did something the other one didn’t want him to do?”

  “Didn’t I mention that? Sorry,” said the dazed man. “He got tired of being a—a force. Whatever you call it, Spirit. He wanted to be a man for a while, to see what it was like. He could do it—but he couldn’t get out of it again without the other’s help. So he walked around for a while as a man.”

  “And?”

  “And got crucified.”

  Pruzy’s Pot

  Dear Fred:

  To come right to the point, do you think you could find us a house in your part of the world?

  I know this comes as a surprise to you. Well, hell, this letter is probably a surprise, knowing me and how I don’t write letters. Really sorry about that. Ever since I married Niwa two years ago we’ve been so busy there just hasn’t been time, and besides, I hardly ever wrote anyway, even before. But I know you’ve heard something about what we’ve been doing, if you’ve read anything I’ve published recently. In case you haven’t, I’ll give it to you briefly: we’re trying to work out a survival life-style in this crazy, crowded, complicated world we live in. Nothing theoretical; Niwa and I are both deadly sick and tired of sitting around with bright-eyed malcontents, all knowledge and no experience, complaining about pollution and corruption in the body, mind, and soul of man. It hit us all of a sudden, one night after one of these mouth-marathons, that anyone who has a complaint ought to have to qualify and be certified first. I mean, here’s somebody who thinks it’s just awful about the dirty water and the foul air. What is he doing about the solid waste he creates in his own house? What kind of poison-factory is he driving, and does he keep it running in such a way as to minimize the junk it puts into the air? Does he support government people he knows are corrupt, or by apathy just let them go on corrupting? The more we heard this kind of crap from these hobby gripers, the more we felt that a man should qualify to complain, just as he has to qualify to drive a bus or cut an appendix or run a ferryboat. Or vote. And if we were going to be honest about it, we had to look at ourselves. Point a finger at anybody and you’ll find you have three fingers pointing at you.

  Sorry, Fred—I didn’t mean to preach, but you’ve got to have this background. Once we faced these things we decided to get out of the plastic cave we were living in, with the chrome kitchen and all the little bells and buzzers that told us when to take the defrosted food out of the automatic oven and when the heavy phosphates were flushed out of the polyester double-knits, and headed for the hills to plant some honesty and see if we could harvest some survival. And you’ll never guess where we found what we were looking for: in the “Houses to Rent” in the Sunday paper, the first one we checked out. And yet it wasn’t all that simple, because when we got there to look at the place (2 bdr, frplc, sec, Ch & pets OK) there were cars all over the mountainside and the agent was running guided tours through the house every seven minutes. Secluded two-bedroom houses with fireplaces are not all that common so close to downtown. It was everything it claimed to be and the rent was most reasonable. It was also funky and creaky, with some interior wallboard smashed and cracked, a few broken windows, the most jarring paint-job inside I have ever seen (did you know there are seventeen DayGlo colors? It had them all), and no more than about eight pounds water pressure. However, it did have more than a half-acre of ground, and, being on a knoll with the wild part of a park just across a narrow road, it was absolutely private.

  Niwa, being Niwa, full of enthusiasm and articulateness, spouted and jetted all our ideas about survival techniques in the late twentieth century, man versus plastic and the organ versus technology, and the whole rap, interspersed with enthusiastic “What a great corner for the rabbit hutch” and “Here we dry sassafras” kind of things. You haven’t met her yet so I have to tell you that she lights up the landscape even when she isn’t enthusiastic. When she is—wear your welding hood. The agent, a faceless type with a clipboard, took notes and said don’t call us, we’ll call you, and we left to look up more houses.

  But that night we got a call from the landlord. He talked to Niwa and he talked to me. He had a deep voice that sounded something like that monotone you get from someone who’s had a laryngectomy and uses stomach wind—a sort of controlled burp—but not exactly that either. He said very little about himself except that he was in some kind of biochemical research and he owned a couple dozen properties around. We didn’t care about that part of it just then; what mattered was he said we could have the house if we wanted it, and we wanted it. He sent over a lease by messenger and we paid two months and that was that. The lease was standard except it said we were to let him put in another half-bath. It spelled out that we could do anything we wanted with the house and grounds except mess with the plumbing. I never heard of a landlord like that and I never saw one either, not even this one, because he died a few months later.

  I wish I could remember that conversation in detail or had taped it or something. It would have explained everything. Or almost. Maybe I didn’t listen too carefully because mostly it was Niwa in that electric explosive way of hers expounding our theories of survival, how to use tansy (which when growing repels ants) and toads for insecticides instead of chemical sprays, and how kitchen garbage is turned into rich black dirt, and how barter (two loaves of sourdough for a brake job on the VW) is better than money, and how much better it is to live without clothes but when you do wear clothes, design them yourself and have something money couldn’t buy. The thing was, this landlord, who said his name was Jones although we found out later it wasn’t, he liked everything she said and that’s why we got the house.

  So we really put roots down—in several senses—and dug in. It was kind of great, Fred. Anybody who tells you that working out this kind of lifestyle is easy, or that there’s an easy way to do it, is out of his gourd. The same thing is true of anyone who implies it’s cheap. And you make mistakes. When we imported a thousand lady-bugs to help the toads fight insects in the garden, what we got was a lot of fat toads. We also discovered the mysterious communication network that exists in the netherworlds. Like, nothing is more specialized than a hornworm, a beautiful animal that grows very large and is so perfectly adapted to tomato plants that you can stand with your nose seven inches away from one (and it seven inches long) and not see it, while it is stripping the plant of leaf, bud, flower, and fruit. Now: who sent for the son of a bitch? Likewise gophers. Nothing had grown on that little quarter-acre for years but Dichondra. All of a sudden gophers are all over, tearing up the beets and carrots and going down the lines of butter lettuce like a wire contacting phone poles. Who sent for them? Then of course there was Sonya—she’s a more-or-less dog we have who in a flash could pursue a gopher clear across the garden … diagonally … eighteen inches deep all the way. Which meant fencing.

  All the same there’s the way Brussels sprouts grow, which has to be seen to be believed, and baby ears of corn eaten raw, and vine-ripened tomatoes, like nothing else you ever flang a fang into, and chard, and carrots tenderer than a tit-man’s dream of the ultimate nipple … and then the barter that went on, and a kind of understanding of where it’s all really at that comes to you only if you can get naked and work soil with the sun on your back and the wind blowing through you rather than on you, and you plant a seed and lo it comes up, and it forms and buds and flowers and makes, and what it makes you eat—you eat it into your same body that did all this, no cellophane, no supermarket, no middleman, no tax. No, it isn’t easy; no, it isn’t cheap. It is, however, in these declining years of the twentieth century, one of the few realities that is not a bummer.

  But there I go. What I am writing to you about is can you find me a place, and especially now after all that I have to tell you why. It’s the toilet, the new toilet.

  I think I already said it was in the lease. That was pretty weird by itself; there are plenty of things that house needs, and there’s
nothing wrong with the facilities that are already there. But you don’t complain when a landlord wants to improve your place, even when he insists on it. So sure enough, after we’d been there ten days or so, here comes a truck with the agent and two guys, one a deaf-mute five feet across and the other one the skinniest man, and, I think, the strongest man, I have ever seen. Nobody said much, and we were busy outside most of the time. They converted one of the two big walk-in closets in the big bedroom into a nice little toidey with a sink and a pot and fluorescent lights and not-bad wallpaper and wall-to-wall carpet on the floor. There was a door from the bedroom and one from the hall—that was the new one.

  And there was the pot. The agent had nothing to say about it—I don’t think he knew anything—except that Mr. Jones had supplied it, that this and no other was the one he and his lease had specified, that it was a brand new design, and that in the remote eventuality we didn’t want to use it, we didn’t have to—there was always the old one; and we had to admit that the old one was adequate.

  That happened to be the day Pruzy Penntifer arrived from New Zealand. I’ve told you about her, haven’t I? Used to be Niwa’s roommate in London before we were married. Niwa made a special friend of Pruzy because she never could figure her out. She was the English-speaking-world’s number one straight, a noncussing virgin, “impermeable, impenetrable, and insurmountable,” as someone once said, so guarded against men that the armor was up against women, too, in case one of them be used by some man to infiltrate. To Niwa, who has always been interested in the matter of being honestly alive, Pruzy was a fascination and a challenge. Anyway, she was on a world trip and was to stay with us for a week, and Niwa had been spitting on her hands in anticipation for a long time. Pruzy had been warned in advance about our lifestyle and that we aren’t about to change it for anybody, although the last thing we’d ever do is to persuade anyone else to adopt it. “I’ll live by your rules in your house,” Niwa would say, “and you can live by your rules in my house. But when you expect me to live by your rules in my house, you go too damn far.” So we didn’t get a real look at the toilet until after it was installed, because we had to go to the airport for Pruzy while the men were finishing up; they were gone before we got back, everything cleaned up and the key under the mat.

  Pruzy you wouldn’t believe—tall and slender and dressed in blacks and browns. The one word for her is “contained.” Her chain-mail clothes contain her, and you get the idea her skin contains her body the same neat way. She has one of those self-contained mouths that has never sucked on anything but itself and does a lot of that, and eyes coated with one-way glass. She talks funny, being Australian, but not funny like most Australians, who to the American ear put a fine Bow-bells breadth to the simplest words; her laminated gentility contains even that.

  We gave her the guided tour of the house and garden, winding up in the big bedroom, which was to be hers while she stayed. The small one was my studio, and we’d sleep in the living room, which was fine with us—we mostly did anyhow. This way we could come and go without bothering her, if that’s what she might want. And of course she had her own sink and pot, the latter of which made a fine ending and climax to the tour. The big closet in the northeast corner was gone, and there was a new high-up half-casement in the outside wall, a built-in medicine chest, a very nice little washstand with a hemispherical imitation-marble bowl and gold-colored fittings, and the … the … well, the pot.

  It was wider and lower than most, bulbous. It seemed at first to have scales, tiny close-set ones, but if you closed your eyes and touched it, it was perfectly smooth. The seat was covered and there seemed to be no way to lift the cover—and indeed there was not; it took a little fumbling to discover that the raised pale spot on one side was a control. It must have (I thought at the time) some sort of electrostatic system, like those elevator buttons you don’t depress but just touch, because on contact the cover slid back like an eyelid, exposing the bowl. I got only the one glimpse of a complicated contour inside, obviously moist (though I saw no standing water) and deep red. And then, only half meaning to, I hit the spot again and the cover slid silently shut, whereupon the whole thing went (with overtones of joy and controlled power) softly hroom, hroom, hroom … like the revving of a distant muffled motorcycle or a tiger’s purring.

  I heard a tiger purr once.

  Just as I wish I could recall that one phone conversation with the late Mr. Jones, I wish I had been watching Niwa’s face and especially Pruzy’s, but I was preoccupied with my own reactions. There was something profoundly unsettling about that piece of plumbing. I had a crazy artist friend once who painted the inside of his toilet with high-gloss enamels, bright red and cerise and ivory, so that when you opened it up it looked like a huge slavering mouth with a wet tongue and sharp teeth. That was unsettling, too, but it was also funny. This one wasn’t funny. For one thing, the shock value of my friend’s work of art lay in the fact that in all respects his was a conventional fixture, with his efforts applied to it, whereas this thing was all of a piece—eerie all over. I think Niwa expressed it best when we talked about it later, after Pruzy had gone to bed. She said, “I think if it looked as if it might bite, I could laugh it off. But it doesn’t. It looks as if it was going to smile!”

  We lay quietly for a long time, thinking about sitting down on that smile. Then one or the other of us—it doesn’t matter which, because we both felt the same way—said, “Well, she can have the damn thing.” And we left it at that.

  During the night I heard it going hroom, hroom twice.

  The next day we got up and went to work as usual, me in my studio and Niwa in the kitchen and garden. Pruzy slept late, getting her time zones sorted out, and when she emerged and encountered us naked the way we always are in the house and yard, she took it imperturbably—well, she’d been told, she knew what to expect, and besides, nothing—nothing—can crack that chick’s unassailable front. She, of course, stayed not only dressed, but groomed.

  It must have been three days later that we began to notice how much time Pruzy was spending in her nonbath bathroom. She always shot the bolts on both doors when she went in and unlocked them when she left—a purposeless ritual, but then so is nineteen-twentieths of all ritual privacy. (An airline hostess once told me a little old lady borrowed a safety pin from her and she found it later in the tiny ten-inch curtains over the porthole in the john, where Granny had pinned them closed—at seven hundred miles per hour and thirty thousand feet—to guard against Peeping Toms.) Niwa and I had no need or desire to go in there, so she might just as well have kept the outside door permanently locked, but once she’d established the ritual she kept it up, that being the nature of ritual. So we always heard the bolts, and though we had no wish to pry, we couldn’t help but notice she was spending an awful lot of time in there.

  “Maybe she likes to read there. Lots of people—”

  “Pruzy is not a reader,” Niwa said positively. “She really thinks she knows everything she needs to know.” Which figured. People like that have achieved a kind of balance, and they’ll fight like hell to keep it. One of the best ways to do that is to put the brains in suspended animation.

  It took about five days for us—Niwa, really—to realize she wasn’t using any toilet paper. That became an increasing fascination, too, as the days went by. And they went by, too: Pruzy postponed her departure for a week and then for another, and started to chip in to the exchequer before we could suggest it … and she was no trouble, really. But we did wonder about the toilet paper. It wasn’t anything you could come out and ask, either. Not with Pruzy. She was company of a sort for Niwa when I’d go through my marathon writing sessions, or my marathon leave-me-the-hell-alone sessions, and she helped efficiently with the house … and got to where she was spending three hours a day in her john.

  She went into town one day and got her visa extended. Then there was a phone call when she was out, about a naturalization form. “I think,” Niwa whispered to me one ni
ght, “she’s going to immigrate, take the vows, join the melting pot.”

  “No pot in the world could melt that one,” I remember saying. I was wrong.

  Sonya had puppies. She would do that from time to time, concealing her intentions until it happened, then suddenly not being there at chowtime. Then it was a matter of beating the bush and crawling through dark crannies until you found out where she’d spawned them. If you couldn’t, the pups would give themselves away sooner or later, mewling and yapping. They were usually a sorry lot. This time was no exception. She’d found a crawl space under the house and had her puppies way underneath. I bellied under some forty feet before I found them, and it happened to be right under Pruzy’s bathroom. Though puppies were my immediate preoccupation, I couldn’t help noticing the plumbing. There were hot and cold pipes to the washstand and a cold feed to the toilet, shiny new pipe. And you know what else?

  Nothing else. No waste pipe. I mean, no sewer, no outlet. I’m telling you, Fred, nothing. And don’t tell me I could be wrong. Water pipes are half-inch, maybe three-quarters, but waste plumbing is big, man—four to seven inches.

  I didn’t say anything to Niwa about it, but the next day I went up on the roof. There was a vent pipe, sure enough. I hung an ear on it. Air was passing through it all right—inward. Before I could check it out it stopped, and then started again.

  Outward.

  Fred, it was going in and out about twenty-five to the minute. Like breathing.

  I didn’t say anything about that to Niwa either. Not then.

  It was the next day—yesterday—when the girls were out that I decided on a confrontation with the thing. Well, to tell the truth, it was my lower gut that decided me. I was on my way to the old familiar comfortable john when I suddenly thought of that purring pot of Pruzy’s. (In our minds it has become completely hers; neither of us ever use it.) So in I went.