“Lou and Janet were going to be here tonight, too,” Ruby said to Paula. “But their younger boy came back from Texas with that new kind of cholera and they had to cancel.”
Phil said, “I understand that one couple saw the moon come apart. It got too close to the Earth and split into chunks and the chunks fell like meteors. Smashing everything up, you know. One big piece nearly hit their time machine.”
“I wouldn’t have liked that at all,” Marcia said.
“Our trip was very lovely,” said Jane. “No violent things at all. Just the big red sun and the tide and that crab creeping along the beach. We were both deeply moved.”
“It’s amazing what science can accomplish nowadays,” Fran said.
Mike and Ruby agreed they would try to arrange a trip to the end of the world as soon as the funeral was over. Cynthia drank too much and got sick. Phil, Tom, and Dave discussed the stock market. Harriet told Nick about her operation. Isabel flirted with Mike, tugging her neckline lower. At midnight someone turned on the news. They had some shots of the earthquake and a warning about boiling your water if you lived in the affected states. The President’s widow was shown visiting the last President’s widow to get some pointers for the funeral. Then there was an interview with an executive of the time-trip company. “Business is phenomenal,” he said. “Time-tripping will be the nation’s number one growth industry next year.” The reporter asked him if his company would soon be offering something besides the end-of-the-world trip. “Later on, we hope to,” the executive said. “We plan to apply for Congressional approval soon. But meanwhile the demand for our present offering is running very high. You can’t imagine. Of course, you have to expect apocalyptic stuff to attain immense popularity in times like these.” The reporter said, “What do you mean, times like these?” but as the time-trip man started to reply, he was interrupted by the commercial. Mike shut off the set. Nick discovered that he was extremely depressed. He decided that it was because so many of his friends had made the journey, and he had thought he and Jane were the only ones who had. He found himself standing next to Marcia and tried to describe the way the crab had moved, but Marcia only shrugged. No one was talking about time-trips now. The party had moved beyond that point. Nick and Jane left quite early and went right to sleep, without making love. The next morning the Sunday paper wasn’t delivered because of the Bridge Authority strike, and the radio said that the mutant amoebas were proving harder to eradicate than originally anticipated. They were spreading into Lake Superior and everyone in the region would have to boil all their drinking water. Nick and Jane discussed where they would go for their next vacation. “What about going to see the end of the world all over again?” Jane suggested, and Nick laughed quite a good deal.
PUSH NO MORE
Among the many anthologies of previously unpublished science-fiction stories that were launched in 1971, two dealt specifically with erotic themes—something that would have been unthinkable only a decade earlier, before Philip Jose Farmer’s taboo-smashing 1952 novella “The Lovers” made it possible to regard sexual issues as something appropriate to consider within the speculative framework of science fiction. The first of these anthologies was Thomas N. Scortia’s Strange Bedfellows; the other was Joseph Elder’s Eros in Orbit. I had stories in both of them.
Scortia, a space engineer turned science-fiction writer, was an earthy, jovial, extraverted guy, big and loud, the perfect stereotype of the Middle American businessman—except that despite all those traits he happened to be gay and didn’t really fit any stereotypes at all. I had known him in a glancing way since the late 1950’s, but after he left the Midwest for the San Francisco Bay Area about 1969, something that I would do myself (for very different reasons) a few years later, he and I became much closer friends in our new California incarnations. But I was still in my last months as a New Yorker when he asked me, in September, 1971, to do a story for his anthology of s-f erotica.
I was getting ready, that month, to write Dying Inside, a novel about the problems of a middle-aged telepath, and so the whole topic of extrasensory powers was much on my mind. For my contribution to Strange Bedfellows I chose to write about a different extrasensory manifestation—the poltergeist phenomenon—and that required me to use a younger protagonist than I had in mind for Dying Inside, since the standard poltergeist theory maintains that most carriers of that ability are adolescents who have not yet had their first sexual experience. So in place of the balding, world-weary David Selig of Dying Inside, we have the lively, quirky, very horny Harry Blaufeld of “Push No More.”
But—seeing now that I wrote those two stories consecutively in the autumn of 1971—I realize now, suddenly and with some surprise, that both stories had precisely the same structure: the first-person narrative of a bright Jewish boy with ESP who eventually has to come to terms with the loss of his special power. So “Push No More” can be considered a warm-up for Dying Inside in more ways than one. It’s odd that I never noticed that until this moment—but neither, apparently, has anyone else.
——————
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 make-out 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.
She’s getting undressed now, right across the hallway. Off with the shirt, the slacks, the bra, the panties, whatever the hell she wears. I can hear her moving around. I wonder if her door is really closed tight. It’s a long time since I’ve had a good look at her. Who knows, maybe her nipples are still standing up. Even if her door’s open only a few inches, I can see into her room from mine, if I hunch down here in the dark and peek.
But her door’s closed. What if I reach out and give it a little nudge? From here. I pull the power up into my head, yes…reach…push…ah…yes! Yes! It moves! One inch, two, three. That’s good enough. I can see a slice of her room. The light’s on. Hey, there she goes! Too fast, out of sight. I think she was naked. Now she’s coming back. Naked, yes. Her back is to me. You’ve got a cute ass, Sis, you know that? Turn around, turn around, turn around…ah. Her nipples look the same as always. Not standing up at all. I guess they must go back down after it’s all over. Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies. (I don’t really read the Bible a lot, just the dirty parts.) Cindy’s got bigger ones than you, Sis, I bet she has. Unless she pads them. I couldn’t tell tonight. I was too excited to notice whether I was squeezing flesh or rubber.
Sara’s putting her housecoat on. One last flash of thigh and belly, then no more. Damn. Into the bathroom now. The sound of water running. She’s getting washed. Now the tap is off. And now…tinkle, tinkle, tinkle. I can picture her sitting there, grinning to herself, taking a happy piss, thinking cozy thoughts about what she and Jimmy the Greek did tonight. Oh, Christ, I hurt! I’m jealous of my own sister! That she can do it three times a week while I…am nowhere…with nobody…no one…nothing…
Let’s give Sis a little surprise.
Hmm. Can I manipulate something that’s out of my direct line of sight? Let’s try it. The toilet seat is in the right-hand corner of the bathroom, under the window. And the flush knob is—let me think—on the side closer to the wall, up high—yes. Okay, reach out, man. Grab it before she does. Push…down…push. Yeah! Listen to that, man! You flushed it for her without leaving your own room!
She’s going to have a hard time figuring that one out.
Sunday: a rainy day, a day of worrying. I can’t get the strange events of last night out of my mind. This power of mine—where did it come from, what can I use it for? And I can’t stop fretting over the awareness that I’ll have to face Cindy again first thing tomorrow morning, in our Biology class. What will she say to me? Does she realize I actually wasn’t anywhere near her when I knocked her down? If she knows I have a power, is she frightened of me? Will she report me to the Society for the Prevention of Supernatural Phenomena, or whoever looks after such things? I’m tempted to pretend I’m sick, and stay home from school tomorrow. But what’s the sense of that? I can’t avoid her forever.
The more tense I get, the more intensely I feel the power surging within me. It’s very strong today. (The
rain may have something to do with that. Every nerve is twitching. The air is damp and maybe that makes me more conductive.) When nobody is looking, I experiment. In the bathroom, standing far from the sink, I unscrew the top of the toothpaste tube. I turn the water taps on and off. I open and close the window. How fine my control is! Doing these things is a strain: I tremble, I sweat, I feel the muscles of my jaws knotting up, my back teeth ache. But I can’t resist the kick of exercising my skills. I get riskily mischievous. At breakfast, my mother puts four slices of bread in the toaster; sitting with my back to it, I delicately work the toaster’s plug out of the socket, so that when she goes over to investigate five minutes later, she’s bewildered to find the bread still raw. “How did the plug slip out?” she asks, but of course no one tells her. Afterward, as we all sit around reading the Sunday papers, I turn the television set on by remote control, and the sudden blaring of a cartoon show makes everyone jump. And a few hours later I unscrew a light bulb in the hallway, gently, gently, easing it from its fixture, holding it suspended close to the ceiling for a moment, then letting it crash to the floor. “What was that?” my mother says in alarm. My father inspects the hall. “Bulb fell out of the fixture and smashed itself to bits.” My mother shakes her head. “How could a bulb fall out? It isn’t possible.” And my father says, “It must have been loose.” He doesn’t sound convinced. It must be occurring to him that a bulb loose enough to fall to the floor couldn’t have been lit. And this bulb had been lit.
The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 3: Something Wild Is Loose: 1969-72 Page 29
