Robert Silverberg - Push No More

I pushand 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 dont bother doing it, man. Not just now. This is hard work. Just relax, Harry. Your arms are shaking. Youre perspiring all over. Take it easy for a while. You dont 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, andusing it. As I just did with my shoe. As I did a couple of hours earlier with Cindy. So you arent 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. Thats 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. Its 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.

Lets go back three hours. To a time when I know nothing of this potentia in me. Three hours ago I know only from horniness. Im standing outside Cindys 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. Im trying to get myself invited inside, knowing that her parents have gone away for the weekend and theres nobody home except her older brother, who is seeing his girl in Scarsdale tonight and wont be back for hours, and once Im past Cindys 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: youre twenty-three years old, tall, strong, suave, a man of the world, veteran of so many beds youve lost count. Bushy beard that girls love to run their hands through. Big drooping handlebar mustachios. And you arent asking her for any favors. You arent whining and wheedling and saying please, Cindy, lets do it, because you know you dont need to say please. Its no boon you seek: you give as good as you get, right, so its a mutually beneficial transaction, right? Right? Wrong. Youre as suave as a pig. You want to exploit her for the sake of your own grubby needs. You know youll be inept. But lets 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 ones around; its a dark night. Go for the boobs, get her hot. Isnt 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, Dont be disgusting, Harry. Dont be silly. Silly. Backing away from me like Ive turned into a monster with eight eyes and green fangs. Dont 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. Dont be disgusting, she said. Dont be silly. The trivial little immature bitch. And now I feel the anger mounting. Down between my legs theres this hideous pain, this throbbing sensation of anguish, this purely sexual tension, and its 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 dont question it. I dont ask myself what it is or where it came from. I just push her, hard, from ten feet away, a quick furious shove. Its like an invisible hand against her breastsI can see the front of her sweater flatten outand she topples backward, clutching at the air, and goes over on her ass. Ive knocked her sprawling without touching her. Harry, she mumbles. Harry?

My angers 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 isnt his name. Aristides Pappas is who he really is. Ari, she calls him. Jimmy the Greek, I call him, but not to his face. Hes nine feet tall with black greasy hair and a tremendous beak of a nose that comes straight out of his forehead. Hes twenty-seven years old and hes 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. Shes never said a word to me about that, about the screwing, but I know. Sure they screw. Why not? Theyre going to get married, arent they? And theyre adults. Shes nineteen years old, so its legal for her to screw. I wont be nineteen for four years and four months. Its 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. Thats her door closing. She doesnt give a damn if she wakes the whole family up. Why should she care? Shes 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 doesnt smoke it. I bet shes putting me on. They get naked. Christ, hes so tall, he must have a dong a foot long. Doesnt 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. Ive read about it. He strokes the breasts, making the nipples go erect. Ive seen her nipples. They arent any bigger than mine. How tall do they get when theyre erect? An inch? Three inches? Standing up like a couple of pink pencils? And his hand must go down below, too. Theres this thing youre supposed to touch, this tiny bump of flesh hidden inside there. Ive studied the diagrams and I still dont 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 its time to go inside her? The time arrives. Theyre finally doing it. You know, I cant visualize it. Hes on top of her and theyre moving up and down, sure, but I still cant imagine how the bodies fit together, how they really move, how they do it.