Robert Silverberg - Push No More

Push…

I do my little poltergeisty numbers. I stack and restack my textbooks without leaving my bed. I move my shirt from the floor to the back of the chair. I turn the chair around to face the wall. Push… push…push…

Water running in the john. Sara’s washing up. What’s it like, Sara? How does it feel when he puts it in you? We don’t talk much, you and I. You think I’m a child; you patronize me, you give me cute winks, your voice goes up half an octave. Do you wink at Jimmy the Greek like that? Like hell. And you talk husky contralto to him. Sit down and talk to me some time, Sis. I’m teetering on the brink of manhood. Guide me out of my virginity. Tell me what girls like guys to say to them. Sure. You won’t tell me shit, Sara. You want me to stay your baby brother forever, because that enhances your own sense of being grown up. And you screw and screw and screw, you and Jimmy the Greek, and you don’t even understand the mystical significance of the act of intercourse. To you it’s just good sweaty fun, like going bowling. Right? Right? Oh, you miserable bitch! Screw you, Sara!

A shriek from the bathroom. Christ, what have I done now? I better go see.

Sara, naked, kneels on the cold tiles. Her head is in the bathtub and she’s clinging with both hands to the bathtub’s rim and she’s shaking violently.

“You okay?” I ask. “What happened?”

“Like a kick in the back,” she says hoarsely. “I was at the sink, washing my face, and I turned around and something hit me like a kick in the back and knocked me halfway across the room.”

“You okay, though? You aren’t hurt?”

“Help me up.”

She’s upset but not injured. She’s so upset that she forgets that she’s naked, and without putting on her robe she cuddles up against me, trembling. She seems small and fragile and scared. I stroke her bare back where I imagine she felt the blow. Also I sneak a look at her nipples, just to see if they’re still standing up after her date with Jimmy the Greek. They aren’t. I soothe her with my fingers. I feel very manly and protective, even if it’s only my cruddy dumb sister I’m protecting.

“What could have happened?” she asks. “You weren’t pulling any tricks, were you?”

“I was in bed,” I say, totally sincere.

“A lot of funny things been going on around this house lately,” she says.

Cindy, catching me in the hallway between Geometry and Spanish: “How come you never call me any more?”

“Been busy.”

“Busy how?”

“Busy.”

“I guess you must be,” she says. “Looks to me like you haven’t slept in a week. What’s her name?”

“Her? No her. I’ve just been busy.” I try to escape. Must I push her again? “A research project.”

“You could take some time out for relaxing. You should keep in touch with old friends.”

“Friends? What kind of friend are you? You said I was silly. You said I was disgusting. Remember, Cindy?”

“The emotions of the moment. I was off balance. I mean, psychologically. Look, let’s talk about all this some time, Harry. Some time soon.”

“Maybe.”

“If you’re not doing anything Saturday night—”

I look at her in astonishment. She’s actually asking me for a date! Why is she pursuing me? What does she want from me? Is she itching for another chance to humiliate me? Silly and disgusting, disgusting and silly. I look at my watch and quirk up my lips. Time to move along.

“I’m not sure,” I tell her. “I may have some work to do.”

“ Work?”

“Research,” I say. “I’ll let you know.”

A night of happy experiments. I unscrew a light bulb, float it from one side of my room to the other, return it to the fixture, and efficiently screw it back in. Precision control. I go up to the roof and launch another beer can to the moon, only this time I loft it a thousand feet, bring it back, kick it up even higher, bring it back, send it off a third time with a tremendous accumulated kinetic energy, and I have no doubt it’ll cleave through space. I pick up trash in the street from a hundred yards away and throw it in the trash basket. Lastly—most scary of all—I polt myself. I levitate a little, lifting myself five feet into the air. That’s as high as I dare go. (What if I lose the power and fall?) If I had the courage, I could fly. I can do anything. Give me the right fulcrum and I’ll move the world. O, potentia! What a fantastic trip this is!

After two awful days of inner debate I phone Cindy and make a date for Saturday. I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea. Her sudden new aggressiveness turns me off, slightly, but nevertheless it’s a novelty to have a girl chasing me, and who am I to snub her? I wonder what she’s up to, though. Coming on so interested in me after dumping me mercilessly on our last date. I’m still angry with her about that, but I can’t hold a grudge, not with her. Maybe she wants to make amends. We did have a pretty decent relationship in the nonphysical sense, until that one stupid evening. Jesus, what if she really does want to make amends, all the way? She scares me. I guess I’m a little bit of a coward. Or a lot of a coward. I don’t understand any of this, man. I think I’m getting into something very heavy.

I juggle three tennis balls and keep them all in the air at once, with my hands in my pockets. I see a woman trying to park her car in a space that’s too small, and as I pass by I give her a sneaky little assist by pushing against the car behind her space; it moves backward a foot and a half, and she has room to park. Friday afternoon, in my gym class, I get into a basketball game and on five separate occasions when Mike Kisiak goes driving in for one of his sure-thing lay-ups I flick the ball away from the hoop. He can’t figure out why he’s off form and it really kills him. There seem to be no limits to what I can do. I’m awed at it myself. I gain skill from day to day. I might just be an authentic superman.

Cindy and Harry, Harry and Cindy, warm and cozy, sitting on her living-room couch. Christ, I think I’m being seduced! How can this be happening? To me? Christ. Christ. Christ. Cindy and Harry. Harry and Cindy. Where are we heading tonight?

In the movie house Cindy snuggles close. Midway through the flick I take the hint. A big bold move: slipping my arm around her shoulders. She wriggles so that my hand slides down through her armpit and comes to rest grasping her right breast. My cheeks blaze. I do as if to pull back, as if I’ve touched a hot stove, but she clamps her arm over my forearm. Trapped. I explore her yielding flesh. No padding there, just authentic Cindy. She’s so eager and easy that it terrifies me. Afterward we go for sodas. In the shop she turns on the body language something frightening—gleaming eyes, suggestive smiles, little steamy twistings of her shoulders. I feel like telling her not to be so obvious about it. It’s like living one of my own wet dreams.

Back to her place, now. It starts to rain. We stand outside, in the very spot where I stood when I polted her the last time. I can write the script effortlessly. “Why don’t you come inside for a while, Harry?” “I’d love to.” “Here, dry your feet on the doormat. Would you like some hot chocolate?” “Whatever you’re having, Cindy.” “No, whatever you’d like to have.” “Hot chocolate would be fine, then.” Her parents aren’t home. Her older brother is fornicating in Scarsdale. The rain hammers at the windows. The house is big, expensive-looking, thick carpets, fancy draperies. Cindy in the kitchen, puttering at the stove. Harry in the living room, fidgeting at the bookshelves. Then Cindy and Harry, Harry and Cindy, warm and cozy, together on the couch. Hot chocolate: two sips apiece. Her lips near mine. Silently begging me. Come on, dope, bend forward. Be a mencsh. We kiss. We’ve kissed before, but this time it’s with tongues. Christ. Christ. I don’t believe this. Suave old Casanova Blaufeld swinging into action like a well-oiled seducing machine. Her perfume in my nostrils, my tongue in her mouth, my hand on her sweater, and then, unexpectedly, my hand is under her sweater, and then, astonishingly, my other hand is on her knee, and up under her skirt, and her thigh is satiny and cool, and I sit there having this weird two-dimensional feeling that I’m not an autonomous human being but just somebody on the screen in a movie rated X, aware that thousands of people out there in the audience are watching me with held breath, and I don’t dare let them down. I continue, not letting myself pause to examine what’s happening, not thinking at all, turning off my mind completely, just going forward step by step. I know that if I ever halt and back off to ask myself if this is real, it’ll all blow up in my face. She’s helping me. She knows much more about this than I do. Murmuring softly. Encouraging me. My fingers scrabbling at our under garments. “Don’t rush it,” she whispers. “We’ve got all the time in the world.” My body pressing urgently against hers. Somehow now I’m not puzzled by the mechanics of the thing. So this is how it happens. What a miracle of evolution that we’re designed to fit together this way! “Be gentle,” she says, the way girls always say in the novels, and I want to be gentle, but how can I be gentle when I’m riding a runaway chariot? I push, not with my mind but with my body, and suddenly I feel this wondrous velvety softness enfolding me, and I begin to move fast, unable to hold back, and she moves too and we clasp each other and I’m swept helter-skelter along into a whirlpool. Down and down and down. “Harry!” she gasps and I explode uncontrollably and I know it’s over. Hardly begun, and it’s over. Is that it? That’s it. That’s all there is to it, the moving, the clasping, the gasping, the explosion. It felt good, but not that good, not as good as in my feverish virginal hallucinations I hoped it would be, and a backwash of let-down rips through me at the realization that it isn’t trans cendental after all, it isn’t a mystic thing, it’s just a body thing that starts and continues and ends. Abruptly I want to pull away and be alone to think. But I know I mustn’t, I have to be tender and grateful now, I hold her in my arms, I whisper soft things to her, I tell her how good it was, she tells me how good it was. We’re both lying, but so what? It was good. In retrospect it’s starting to seem fantastic, overwhelming, all the things I wanted it to be. The idea of what we’ve done blows my mind. If only it hadn’t been over so fast. No matter. Next time will be better. We’ve crossed a frontier; we’re in unfamiliar territory now.