The Sin Stripper

ED­WARD KILBY WAS CON­VINCED THAT THE SUM of each man can be re­duced to one ba­sic need he has. The need var­ies greatly from per­son to per­son, but if one can pen­et­rate the soul, there will be found a ter­rible urge that makes a man the kind of per­son he is. Like a de­sire to be rich. Or power­ful. Or re­spec­ted. Or even, in the mil­lions of ob­scure people around the world, the need or urge or de­sire to be non­entit­ies – to sit out an un­com­plic­ated life, troubled with as few re­spons­ib­il­it­ies and prob­lems as pos­sible.

His own ba­sic drive, Kilby con­cluded, was hun­ger. It had star­ted as a phys­ical hun­ger when he was young, liv­ing in poverty. As he grew through ad­oles­cence and into adult­hood, the drive was still hun­ger – but a hun­ger for things.

He had of­ten tried to shake off this ob­ses­sion with gath­er­ing ob­jects, be­cause he saw how fool­ish it really was. He was a smart guy, Ed­ward Kilby was, and he knew that in young adult­hood, he had ac­quired much more than suf­fi­ciency, but even if by some ter­rible bad for­tune he lost everything, he had the brains and the am­bi­tion to get it all back again. Yet the un­reas­on­able feel­ing didn‘t leave him., even when he could tell him­self quite lo­gic­ally that you could only eat one steak at a time, you could only take one wo­man to bed to play with at a time (usu­ally!), you could only wear one suit, drive one car, and so on. Sure, it was nice to have vari­ations in all these things, but he wished he could get over the hor­rible com­pul­sion to grasp everything.