Robert Silverberg - Push No More

I push…and the shoe moves. Will you look at that? It really moves! All I have to do is give a silent inner nudge, no hands, just reaching from the core of my mind, and my old worn-out brown shoe, the left one, goes sliding slowly across the floor of my bedroom. Past the chair, past the pile of beaten-up textbooks (Geometry, Second Year Spanish, Civic Studies, Biology, etc.), past my sweaty heap of discarded clothes. Indeed the shoe obeys me. Making a little swishing sound as it snags against the roughness of the elderly linoleum floor tiling. Look at it now, bumping gently into the far wall, tipping edge-up, stopping. Its voyage is over. I bet I could make it climb right up the wall. But don’t bother doing it, man. Not just now. This is hard work. Just relax, Harry. Your arms are shaking. You’re perspiring all over. Take it easy for a while. You don’t have to prove everything all at once.

What have I proven, anyway?

It seems that I can make things move with my mind. How about that, man? Did you ever imagine that you had freaky powers? Not until this very night. This very lousy night. Standing there with Cindy Klein and finding that terrible knot of throbbing tension in my groin, like needing to take a leak only fifty times more intense, a zone of anguish spinning off some kind of fearful energy like a crazy dynamo implanted in my crotch. And suddenly, without any conscious awareness, finding a way of tapping that energy, drawing it up through my body to my head, amplifying it, and… using it. As I just did with my shoe. As I did a couple of hours earlier with Cindy. So you aren’t just a dumb gawky adolescent schmuck, Harry Blaufeld. You are somebody very special.

You have power. You are potent.

How good it is to lie here in the privacy of my own musty bedroom and be able to make my shoe slide along the floor, simply by looking at it in that special way. The feeling of strength that I get from that! Tremendous. I am potent. I have power. That’s what potent means, to have power, out of the Latin potentia, derived from posse. To be able. I am able. I can do this most extraordinary thing. And not just in fitful unpredictable bursts. It’s under my conscious control. All I have to do is dip into that reservoir of tension and skim off a few watts of push. Far out! What a weird night this is.

Let’s go back three hours. To a time when I know nothing of this potentia in me. Three hours ago I know only from horniness. I’m standing outside Cindy’s front door with her at half past ten. We have done the going-to-the-movies thing, we have done the cappuccino-afterward thing, now I want to do the makeout thing. I’m trying to get myself invited inside, knowing that her parents have gone away for the weekend and there’s nobody home except her older brother, who is seeing his girl in Scarsdale tonight and won’t be back for hours, and once I’m past Cindy’s front door I hope, well, to get invited inside. (What a coy metaphor! You know what I mean.) So three cheers for Casanova Blaufeld, who is suffering a bad attack of inflammation of the cherry. Look at me, stammering, fumbling for words, shifting my weight from foot to foot, chewing on my lips, going red in the face. All my pimples light up like beacons when I blush. Come on, Blaufeld, pull yourself together. Change your image of yourself. Try this on for size: you’re twenty-three years old, tall, strong, suave, a man of the world, veteran of so many beds you’ve lost count. Bushy beard that girls love to run their hands through. Big drooping handlebar mustachios. And you aren’t asking her for any favors. You aren’t whining and wheedling and saying please, Cindy, let’s do it, because you know you don’t need to say please. It’s no boon you seek: you give as good as you get, right, so it’s a mutually beneficial transaction, right? Right? Wrong. You’re as suave as a pig. You want to exploit her for the sake of your own grubby needs. You know you’ll be inept. But let’s pretend, at least. Straighten the shoulders, suck in the gut, inflate the chest. Harry Blaufeld, the devilish seducer. Get your hands on her sweater for starters. No one’s around; it’s a dark night. Go for the boobs, get her hot. Isn’t that what Jimmy the Greek told you to do? So you try it. Grinning stupidly, practically apologizing with your eyes. Reaching out. The grabby fingers connecting with the fuzzy purple fabric.

Her face, flushed and big-eyed. Her mouth, thin-lipped and wide. Her voice, harsh and wire-edged. She says, “Don’t be disgusting, Harry. Don’t be silly.” Silly. Backing away from me like I’ve turned into a monster with eight eyes and green fangs. Don’t be disgusting. She tries to slip into the house fast, before I can paw her again. I stand there watching her fumble for her key, and this terrible rage starts to rise in me. Why disgusting? Why silly? All I wanted was to show her my love, right? That I really care for her, that I relate to her. A display of affection through physical contact. Right? So I reached out. A little caress. Prelude to tender intimacy. “Don’t be disgusting,” she said. “Don’t be silly.” The trivial little immature bitch. And now I feel the anger mounting. Down between my legs there’s this hideous pain, this throbbing sensation of anguish, this purely sexual tension, and it’s pouring out into my belly, spreading upward along my gut like a stream of flame. A dam has broken somewhere inside me. I feel fire blazing under the top of my skull. And there it is! The power! The strength! I don’t question it. I don’t ask myself what it is or where it came from. I just push her, hard, from ten feet away, a quick furious shove. It’s like an invisible hand against her breasts—I can see the front of her sweater flatten out—and she topples backward, clutching at the air, and goes over on her ass. I’ve knocked her sprawling without touching her. “Harry,” she mumbles. “Harry?”

My anger’s gone. Now I feel terror. What have I done? How? How? Down on her ass, boom. From ten feet away!

I run all the way home, never looking back.

Footsteps in the hallway, clickety-clack. My sister is home from her date with Jimmy the Greek. That isn’t his name. Aristides Pappas is who he really is. Ari, she calls him. Jimmy the Greek, I call him, but not to his face. He’s nine feet tall with black greasy hair and a tremendous beak of a nose that comes straight out of his forehead. He’s twenty-seven years old and he’s laid a thousand girls. Sara is going to marry him next year. Meanwhile they see each other three nights a week and they screw a lot. She’s never said a word to me about that, about the screwing, but I know. Sure they screw. Why not? They’re going to get married, aren’t they? And they’re adults. She’s nineteen years old, so it’s legal for her to screw. I won’t be nineteen for four years and four months. It’s legal for me to screw now, I think. If only. If only I had somebody. If only.

Clickety-clickety-clack. There she goes, into her room. Blunk. That’s her door closing. She doesn’t give a damn if she wakes the whole family up. Why should she care? She’s all turned on now. Soaring on her memories of what she was just doing with Jimmy the Greek. That warm feeling. The afterglow, the book calls it.

I wonder how they do it when they do it.

They go to his apartment. Do they take off all their clothes first? Do they talk before they begin? A drink or two? Smoke a joint? Sara claims she doesn’t smoke it. I bet she’s putting me on. They get naked. Christ, he’s so tall, he must have a dong a foot long. Doesn’t it scare her? They lie down on the bed together. Or on a couch. The floor, maybe? A thick fluffy carpet? He touches her body. Doing the foreplay stuff. I’ve read about it. He strokes the breasts, making the nipples go erect. I’ve seen her nipples. They aren’t any bigger than mine. How tall do they get when they’re erect? An inch? Three inches? Standing up like a couple of pink pencils? And his hand must go down below, too. There’s this thing you’re supposed to touch, this tiny bump of flesh hidden inside there. I’ve studied the diagrams and I still don’t know where it is. Jimmy the Greek knows where it is, you can bet your ass. So he touches her there. Then what? She must get hot, right? How can he tell when it’s time to go inside her? The time arrives. They’re finally doing it. You know, I can’t visualize it. He’s on top of her and they’re moving up and down, sure, but I still can’t imagine how the bodies fit together, how they really move, how they do it.