The Nudge

Simon had found the buttons, and had pushed them, over and over, like a child playing with a machine. All three had had multiple orgasms; the fake blonde had had three in quick succession, and finally had begged Simon to stop, although he hadn't even been touching her at the time -- which made him wonder, again, if Nudgees could know they were being Nudged. He found that the idea didn't bother him as much as it had before. He sort of liked it, in fact, liked the notion that, even as a person carried out his mental commands, that person could understand that Simon was doing the commanding. He was becoming frustrated at the role of the powerless janitor; what fun is making people do your bidding if they think it's their own idea? He supposed this was how television Superheroes felt when they were off-duty, having to act like mild-mannered civilians, quietly accepting the indignities and abuses of daily life as if they had no choice.

As Simon greeted Jennifer at the door, he thought randomly about a boy who used to beat him up in junior high; he wondered, randomly, where that boy was today, and whether he might be able to locate that boy, and whether that boy might have any self-injuring tendencies.

"Hi, Jennifer," Simon said, smiling calmly, as she stepped into the lobby. She was wearing jeans and a blouse that appeared too thick to show her nipples through the fabric. No problem, thought Simon; that's what buttons are for.

Jennifer didn't return his smile. "I just came by to say goodbye, Simon," she said. "I'm quitting, and moving. I won't be seeing you again."

We'll see about that, thought Simon, adding verbally: "Oh? Where are you going?"

"Bill and I are getting a place together."

"Bill the married professor?"

"He's leaving his wife."

Simon was surprised at how little impact her words had. Words like, "I won't be seeing you again" would once have been devastating, but now they seemed irrelevant. Her words were based on the faulty premise that she could decide, without his input, whether she saw him again or not, whether she kept her clothes on or not, whether she moved her fingers or jumped off a bridge. He made her move her fingers (move your fingers) just to make sure. He smiled as he watched them move.

"Simon," Jennifer said evenly, "I know what you've been doing."

Apparently not, thought Simon, watching her moving fingers. "Oh? What have I been doing, Jennifer?"

"You've been hypnotizing me," she said, slowly, making it clear she wasn't going to be laughed off this time. "You've been doing that thing you asked me about that day, with your mind. You hypnotized me into wearing that dress, and you hypnotized me into kissing you."

"And how do you know this?" Simon said, wearing his most sarcastic smile.

"Because I've started doing it, too," Jennifer said. "Ever since you started doing it to me, I've been doing it to others. Bill, and the guy who hit the pole, and lots of others. I've spent the last two days testing it. It's real, Simon. I'm hypnotizing people."

Simon laughed, fighting back the panic that had suddenly appeared in his throat; he was wondering if it could be true that Jennifer had acquired the power to Nudge and, more to the point, whether that would impede his ability to Nudge her. He noticed, to his surprise, that the thought was blackly terrifying to him, in a way that nothing else was anymore.

"You're a psychology student, Jennifer, " Simon told her, still laughing. "How can you buy this stuff?"

"I think there may be a scientific explanation," Jennifer said, still refusing to join his laugh. "I think maybe it is like a yawn, something you pass on to others. I think that's what you did to me; you passed it on."

She stared at Simon a moment longer before adding, evenly: "You had no right to make me kiss you, Simon. You had no right to do that."

Simon's smile collapsed. He tried to rebuild it but couldn't. You had no right. God, why did the words hurt so much? It was like she had found a wound he was trying to ignore, and had probed it with a stick. He wondered if she knew about he had done with her fingers, and with her nipples; he wondered whether she had any notion of where his money had been coming from or what he had been doing with his nights. Oh, if she knew all that there was, so much more than one kiss. You had no right. He had been avoiding that conclusion for days, reminding himself about the limits of the Nudge, about the necessity of pre-existing hidden desires for the Nudge to work -- the waitress wouldn't show me her breasts, he had kept reminding himself -- while willfully ignoring the issue of whether it was morally permissible to rummage through strangers' hidden desires as if they were drawers. Now the issue was rising like a corpse from the grave. Jennifer was staring at him coolly, and he felt like a predator suddenly captured and caged and displayed in full light, to the ogling of its would-be prey. His face felt red.

"Jennifer, I -- His breath caught, and he tried again. "I just wanted a kiss. That's all. Was it that bad?"

"You had no right," she repeated. Then she turned toward the door. Simon stepped in front of her.

"Jennifer, don't," he said. "I won't do it anymore. I promise. I love you. Please, let's just talk. Let's -- let's -- "

"Bill's in love with me, and I'm in love with him, and I'm going to go to him and pretend I never saw any of this," Jennifer said, stepping around Simon. "Goodbye, Simon."

"How do you know he's in love with you?" Simon demanded, and Jennifer stopped turned back toward him. Yes, that was definitely the button. Simon pressed it again: "How do you know he even likes you? Maybe you made him like you. Maybe it's all hypnosis. How can you know?"

"You think I haven't thought about that?" Jennifer said, defensively. "Yes, I think it's possible I made Bill to fall in love with me. And that bothers me. But I really love him, and I know he'll really love me, in time. I'm not taking anything from him without giving something back. That's the difference between you and me, Simon. I'm giving back."

She turned again to leave, and Simon again darted in front of her, blocking the doorway. "Jennifer, don't leave," he said, ashamed of the desperation in his voice but unable to cleanse it. "Please. God, I need you. It's so lonely -- he was aware that he was babbling now, trying to Nudge her with talk, trying to avoid having to do it the other way -- "you'll see how lonely it is, you'll see how empty you feel when you look in people's faces and see nothing there but what you've put there. Jennifer, we can help each other, we can learn to live with it, control it, use it to do good deeds. I can give back, I swear I can. I've been meaning to; I just -- God, please don't do this."

Jennifer looked past him. She tried to push past him. He moved his arm into her path and, before he could stop himself, he thought: Step back!

She did, immediately, as if it had been her own idea. Then she stared at him, tears appearing.

"Oh, Simon," she breathed. It was the deepest look of betrayal he had ever seen, but he no longer cared. Anger was rising in his throat like vomit, and he made a conscious decision to let it rise. He could make waitresses smile, he could make people give him money, he could make women have sex with him, he certainly didn't have to stand idly by while the woman he loved walked out of his life. He could give back; he'd show her how much he could give back, whether she liked it not. She thought she wanted to leave, but decisions like that, Simon knew, were made of wet clay, were pliable things waiting for the right hands to come along and work them. His arms were blocking her way and his mind was blocking her way, and still she was trying to leave, but that was no problem. She would re-think it. Maybe seven or eight orgasms would change her mind.

But there was, he suddenly realized, something he needed to take care of first: His black gym shoes needed re-tying. He didn't know why he suddenly looked down at them, but when he did, he noticed it immediately: The dirty white laces were, technically, already tied, but they definitely weren't tied correctly. He couldn't quite put his finger on it, but there was something about the way they were tied that irked him. He knew he had to deal with Jennifer, had to stop her from making this huge mistake, had to Nudge her into the Non-Fiction Reading Section, had to Nudge her clothes off, had to Nudge her into orgasm after orgasm until dawn, had to test this theory of hers that the Nudge could be used to make a person fall in love; but first, his shoes needed re-tying, right now! They needed re-tying like no shoes ever had. This was an emergency re-tying.

It took Simon a full minute to re-tie both shoes, that's how meticulous he was about it. They were going to be tied right this time. Somewhere in the lower layers of his mind he wondered why he was doing this, why he was stooped over re-tying his shoes at a critical juncture in his life, but the thought was like a thin, wispy thread that he couldn't quite follow to its source. The shoes needed re-tying, period. He was putting the final touches on the left one when he felt the weight of empty air in the library.

He stood up in his newly re-tied black gym shoes, knowing even before his eyes confirmed it that she was gone. He stared at the empty doorway for a moment before leaning weakly against the wall and sliding slowly down to the floor, crying savagely.

* * *

"I'm never Nudging anyone again," Simon told Desi Arnez, sniffling. The fat white cat was plowing through the chunks of lobster meat Simon had bought while crying openly right in front of the dark-haired, wide-breasted grocery clerk, not caring what she thought. "Are you okay?" she had asked, and Simon had thought for a moment about making her show her red nipple again, just because it was there, but had stopped himself.

"I'm never doing it again," he repeated now, to his cat. "I swear."

Simon sat on his floor, his arms around his knees, watching Desi Arnez eat. The loss of Jennifer loomed like cloud cover, made it hard to breathe, made him want to jump out the window. Sitting on his floor, thinking of Jennifer, of her softness, of never seeing her again, it occurred to Simon that it wouldn't take much of a Nudge to send him out the window right now. He remembered wondering if Nudge-induced suicide was possible, and he knew now that it probably was. Jennifer had made someone drive into a pole, after all, after she had gotten the Nudge from Simon, after he had gotten it from -- from where?

"It was mom. It must've been. That bitch," he whispered now, to his cat. Desi Arnez said nothing. Simon knew there were holes in the theory -- he remembered all the times his mother had tried to get him to do things that he wouldn't do, how angry she had always been at her lack of control over him, not exactly strong evidence for the premise that she had been Nudging him and had infected him with the Nudge -- but who else would it have been? No one else in his life was close enough to him to want to control his mind.

I'm never doing it again. How would it be to live without the Nudge? Simon felt his wallet digging into his upper thigh. He was down to his last few fives. He could live on his paycheck, he knew, but barely. Money crossed his path every day in the pockets of Nudgeable minds, and he was going to leave it alone from now on, watch it walk on by, try to pay for his rent and his coffee and his cat's outlandish appetite without any help from the Nudge. Women crossed his path every day, too, Nudgeable women, saturated with softness and femininity and mystery, doorways to pleasure and excitement for those who knew the password, as Simon did, but he wouldn't whisper it anymore. He would watch them walk on by, red nipples and all. And when one did offer herself to him anyway -- hey, it could happen -- he'd know the offer was real.

He'd start watching his TV shows again; he missed the characters there. He'd stop seeing a predator when he looked in the mirror. He'd see fewer smiles, true, but they'd be better ones when he did see them. Smiles had become too cheap lately. He'd stick to watching his TV shows and sweeping the library and feeding his cat, and stay away from that lonely playground he had discovered, just stay out and try to forget it was there. Yes, that's what he would do, just stay away from it.

As for Jennifer -- well, if it was possible to Nudge oneself, Simon would have Nudged himself into forgetting her completely. As it stood, he would have to live with the memory.

At least he would always have the kiss. It wasn't possible to Nudge someone into doing something that the person found to be fundamentally abhorrent; he knew that. He would always have that.

It must have been his mother. That bitch. Maybe he'd use the Nudge, one last time, to get the truth out of her.

Simon sniffed and wiped his nose with one thumb and forefinger, and looked at the fat white cat. Its girth seemed to bulge out in a hundred directions, as if its skin was having trouble containing it all.

Simon sniffed again and said, "You're the fattest cat I've ever seen."

Desi Arnez licked the last specks of lobster from the bowl, and said nothing.

(END)