Collected Short Fiction, page 889
Bob and his electronics-engineer wife Barbie (talk about combining beauty and brains) have lived in the mansion formerly owned by the family of New York’s Mayor LaGuardia. They recently moved to Oakland, California, where they are waiting for the inevitable earthquake. When it comes, Bob will, Tm sure, find some pubescent poltergeist like his hero of “Push No More” responsible for the whole thing.
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 roughnesses 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 he 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 backwards, 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.
How soon before my sister connects these incidents with the episode of the toilet that flushed by itself?
Monday is here. I enter the classroom through the rear door and skulk to my seat. Cindy hasn’t arrived yet. But now here she comes. God, how beautiful she is! The gleaming, shimmering red hair, down to her shoulders. The pale flawless skin. The bright, mysterious eyes. The purple sweater, same one as Saturday night. My hands have touched that sweater. I’ve touched that sweater with my power, too.
I bend low over my notebook. I can’t bear to look at her. I’m a coward.
But I force myself to look up. She’s standing in the aisle, up by the front of the room, staring at me. Her expression is strange—edgy, uneasy, the lips clamped tight. As if she’s thinking of coming back here to talk to me but is hesitating. The moment she sees me watching her, she glances away and takes her seat. All through the hour I sit hunched forward, studying her shoulders, the back of her neck, the tips of her ears. Five desks separate her from me. I let out a heavy romantic sigh. Temptation is tickling me. It would be so easy to reach across that distance and touch her. Gently stroking her soft cheek with an invisible fingertip. Lightly fondling the side of her throat. Using my special power to say a tender hello to her. See, Cindy? See what I can do to show my love? Having imagined it, I find myself unable to resist doing it. I summon the force from the churning reservoir in my depths; I pump it upward and simultaneously make the automatic calculations of intensity of push. Then I realize what I’m doing. Are you crazy, man? She’ll scream. She’ll jump out of her chair like she was stung. She’ll roll on the floor and have hysterics. Hold back, hold back, you lunatic! At the last moment I manage to deflect the impulse. Gasping, grunting, I twist the force away from Cindy and hurl it blindly in some other direction. My random thrust sweeps across the room like a whiplash and intersects the big framed chart of the plant and animal kingdoms that hangs on the classroom’s left-hand wall. It rips loose as though kicked by a tornado and soars twenty feet on a diagonal arc that sends it crashing into the blackboard. The frame shatters. Broken glass sprays everywhere. The class is thrown into panic. Everybody yelling, running around, picking up pieces of glass, exclaiming in awe, asking questions. I sit like a statue. Then I start to shiver. And Cindy, very slowly, turns and looks at me. A chilly look of horror freezes her face.
She knows, then. She thinks I’m some sort of freak. She thinks I’m some sort of monster.
Poltergeist. That’s what I am. The German occult dictionary in the library says: “from poltern, to make a noise, and geist, a spirit. That’s me, Harry Blaufeld, boy poltergeist, noisy spirit. Poltergeists make plates go smash against the wall, pictures fall suddenly to the floor, doors bang, rocks fly through the air.
I’m not sure whether it’s proper to say I am a poltergeist or that I’m merely the host for one. True-blue occultists think that poltergeists are wandering demons or spirits that take up residence in human beings and play their naughty tricks. The scientists, like the Rhine group at Duke, view the poltergeist as someone who can harness paranormal ability within himself and move things without touching them. Myself, I incline to the latter view. It’s more flattering to think I have an extraordinary psychic gift than that I’ve been possessed by a marauding demon. Also less scary.
I found lots of references to poltergeists in the library. A Chinese book about a thousand years old called Gossip from the Jade Hall tells of one that disturbed the peace of a monastery by flinging crockery around. The monks hired an exorcist but the noisy spirit worked him over, tearing off his clothes and driving him away.
Then there was the Clarke case in Oakland, California, in 1874. On hand: Mr. Clarke, a reserved and austere businessman, and his wife and adolescent daughter and eight-year-old son, plus two of Mr. Clarke’s sisters and two male houseguests. On the night of April 23, as everyone prepares for bed, the front doorbell rings. No one there. Rings again a few minutes later. No one there. Sound of furniture being moved in the parlor. One of the houseguests, a banker named Bayley, inspects, in the dark, and is hit by a chair. No one there. A box of silverware comes floating down the stairs and lands with a bang. (Poltergeist = “noisy spirit.”) A heavy box of coal flies about next. A chair hits Bayley on the elbow and lands against a bed. In the dining room a massive oak chair rises two feet in the air, spins, lets itself down, chases the unfortunate Bayley around the room in front of three witnesses. And so on. Much spooked, everybody goes to bed, but all night they hear crashes and rumbling sounds; in the morning they find all the downstairs furniture in a scramble. Also the front door, which was locked and bolted, has been ripped off its hinges. More such events the next night. Likewise on the next, culminating in a female shriek out of nowhere, so terrible that it drives the Clarkes and guests to take refuge in another house. No explanation for any of this ever offered.
A man named Charles Fort, who died in 1932, spent much of his life studying poltergeist phenomena and similar mysteries. Fort wrote four fat books which so far I’ve only skimmed. They’re full of newspaper accounts of strange things like the sudden appearance of several young crocodiles on English farms in the middle of the nineteenth century, and rainstorms in which the earth was pelted with snakes, frogs and blood, or stones, coal-heaps and houses and even human beings spontaneously bursting into flame. Luminous objects sailing through the sky. Invisible hands that mutilate animals and people. “Phantom bullets” shattering the windows of houses. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
