Robert Silverberg - Push No More

An unavoidable humiliating encounter with Cindy today. At lunchtime I go into Schindler’s for my usual bacon-lettuce-tomato; I take a seat in one of the back booths and open a book and someone says, “Harry,” and there she is at the booth just opposite, with three of her friends. What do I do? Get up and run out? Poltergeist her into the next county? Already I feel the power twitching in me. Mrs. Schindler brings me my sandwich. I’m stuck. I can’t bear to be here. I hand her the money and mutter, “Just remembered, got to make a phone call.” Sandwich in hand, I start to leave, giving Cindy a foolish hot-cheeked grin as I go by. She’s looking at me fiercely. Those deep green eyes of hers terrify me.

“Wait,” she says. “Can I ask you something?”

She slides out of her booth and blocks the aisle of the luncheonette. She’s nearly as tall as I am, and I’m tall. My knees are shaking. God in heaven, Cindy, don’t trap me like this, I’m not responsible for what I might do.

She says in a low voice, “Yesterday in Bio, when that chart hit the blackboard. You did that, didn’t you?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You made it jump across the room.”

“That’s impossible,” I mumble. “What do you think I am, a magician?”

“I don’t know. And Saturday night, that dumb scene outside my house—”

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

“I would. How did you do that to me, Harry? Where did you learn the trick?”

“Trick? Look, Cindy, I’ve absolutely got to go.”

“You pushed me over. You just looked at me and I felt a push.”

“You tripped,” I say. “You just fell down.”

She laughs. Right now she seems about nineteen years old and I feel about nine years old. “Don’t put me on,” she says, her voice a deep sophisticated drawl. Her girlfriends are peering at us, trying to overhear. “Listen, this interests me. I’m involved. I want to know how you do that stuff.”

“There isn’t any stuff,” I tell her, and suddenly I know I have to escape. I give her the tiniest push, not touching her, of course, just a wee mental nudge, and she feels it and gives ground, and I rush miserably past her, cramming my sandwich into my mouth. I flee the store. At the door I look back and see her smiling, waving to me, telling me to come back.

I have a rich fantasy life. Sometimes I’m a movie star, twenty-two years old with a palace in the Hollywood hills, and I give parties that Peter Fonda and Dustin Hoffman and Julie Christie and Faye Dunaway come to, and we all turn on and get naked and swim in my pool and afterward I make it with five or six starlets all at once. Sometimes I’m a famous novelist, author of the book that really gets it together and speaks for My Generation, and I stand around in Brentano’s in a glittering science-fiction costume signing thousands of autographs, and afterward I go to my penthouse high over First Avenue and make it with a dazzling young lady editor. Sometimes I’m a great scientist, four years out of Harvard Medical School and already acclaimed for my pioneering research in genetic reprogramming of unborn children, and when the phone rings to notify me of my Nobel Prize I’m just about to reach my third climax of the evening with a celebrated Metropolitan Opera soprano who wants me to design a son for her who’ll eclipse Caruso. And sometimes—

But why go on? That’s all fantasy. Fantasy is dumb because it encourages you to live a self-deluding life, instead of coming to grips with reality. Consider reality, Harry. Consider the genuine article that is Harry Blaufeld. The genuine article is something pimply and ungainly and naive, something that shrieks with every molecule of his skinny body that he’s not quite fifteen and has never made it with a girl and doesn’t know how to go about it and is terribly afraid that he never will. Mix equal parts of desire and self-pity. And a dash of incompetence and a dollop of insecurity. Season lightly with extrasensory powers. You’re a long way from the Hollywood hills, boy.

Is there some way I can harness my gift for the good of mankind? What if all these ghastly power plants, belching black smoke into the atmosphere, could be shut down forever, and humanity’s electrical needs were met by a trained corps of youthful poltergeists, volunteers living a monastic life and using their sizzling sexual tensions as the fuel that keeps the turbines spinning? Or perhaps NASA wants a poltergeist-driven spaceship. There I am, lean and bronzed and jaunty, a handsome figure in my white astronaut suit, taking my seat in the command capsule of the Mars One. T minus thirty seconds and counting. An anxious world awaits the big moment. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Lift-off. And I grin my world-famous grin and coolly summon my power and open the mental throttle and push, and the mighty vessel rises, hovering serenely a moment above the launching pad, rises and climbs, slicing like a giant glittering needle through the ice-blue Florida sky, soaring up and away on man’s first voyage to the red planet…

Another experiment is called for. I’ll try to send a beer can to the moon. If I can do that, I should be able to send a spaceship. A simple Newtonian process, a matter of attaining escape velocity; and I don’t think thrust is likely to be a determining quantitative function. A push is a push is a push, and so far I haven’t noticed limitations of mass, so if I can get it up with a beer can, I ought to succeed in throwing anything of any mass into space. I think. Anyway, I raid the family garbage and go outside clutching a crumpled Schlitz container. A mild misty night; the moon isn’t visible. No matter. I place the can on the ground and contemplate it. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Lift-off. I grin my world-famous grin. I coolly summon my power and open the mental throttle. Push. Yes, the beer can rises. Hovering serenely a moment above the pavement. Rises and climbs, end over end, slicing like a crumpled beer can through the muggy air. Up. Up. Into the darkness. Long after it disappears, I continue to push. Am I still in contact? Does it still climb? I have no way of telling. I lack the proper tracking stations. Perhaps it does travel on and on through the lonely void, on a perfect lunar trajectory. Or maybe it has already tumbled down, a block away, skulling some hapless cop. I shot a beer can into the air, it fell to earth I know not where. Shrugging, I go back into the house. So much for my career as a spaceman. Blaufeld, you’ve pulled off another dumb fantasy. Blaufeld, how can you stand being such a silly putz?

Clickety-clack. Four in the morning, Sara’s just coming in from her date. Here I am lying awake like a worried parent. Notice that the parents themselves don’t worry: they’re fast asleep, I bet, giving no damns about the hours their daughter keeps. Whereas I brood. She got laid again tonight, no doubt of it. Possibly twice. Grimly I try to reconstruct the event in my imagination. The positions, the sounds of flesh against flesh, the panting and moaning. How often has she done it now? A hundred times? Three hundred? She’s been doing it at least since she was sixteen. I’m sure of that. For girls it’s so much easier; they don’t need to chase and coax, all they have to do is say yes. Sara says yes a lot. Before Jimmy the Greek there was Greasy Kid Stuff, and before him there was the Spade Wonder, and before him…

Out there tonight in this city there are three million people at the very minimum who just got laid. I detest adults and their easy screwing. They devalue it by doing it so much. They just have to roll over and grab some meat, and away they go, in and out, oooh oooh oooh ahhh. Christ, how boring it must get! If they could only look at it from the point of view of a frustrated adolescent again. The hungry virgin, on the outside peering in. Excluded from the world of screwing. Feeling that delicious sweet tension of wanting and not knowing how to get. The fiery knot of longing, sitting like a ravenous tapeworm in my belly, devouring my soul. I magnify sex. I exalt it. I multiply its wonders. It’ll never live up to my anticipations. But I love the tension of anticipating and speculating and not getting. In fact, I think sometimes I’d like to spend my whole life on the edge of the blade, looking forward always to being deflowered but never quite taking the steps that would bring it about. A dynamic stasis, sustaining and enhancing my special power. Harry Blaufeld, virgin and poltergeist. Why not? Anybody at all can screw. Idiots, morons, bores, uglies. Everybody does it. There’s magic in renunciation. I f I keep myself aloof, pure, unique…