Simon didn't know exactly when it was that he first began to Nudge the minds of those around him. But he was certain that the first time he realized he was doing it was one recent summer day at the Save-Rite grocery store, when the clerk showed him her breast.
She was about 40, dark-haired with a little curl of bang in front, a short woman with wide hips and wide breasts, all covered by her Save-Rite grocery store uniform, which included a button-down blouse. The top two buttons of the blouse were already unbuttoned when Simon arrived at the head of her line with two cans of salmon and a bottle of dishwashing liquid. A sliver of pink bra showed as the clerk leaned over to scan the soap, and Simon saw, too briefly, the soft shadow of cleavage before she stood straight again. He would remember, later, that he had had a brief thought -- right between thinking that salmon is too expensive and I wonder if 'Jeopardy' is on yet -- that she appeared to have pretty breasts and he wished her blouse was opened wider so he could see them better.
The thought, he recalled later, lasted maybe one second, so short that he wouldn't even remember, until hours later, that he had thought it. The thought wasn't accompanied by any kind of comment or look from him that the grocery clerk could possible have noticed. He had already moved onto other thoughts (I hope 'E.R.' isn't a re-run tonight) when she looked at him, smiled a small grocery-clerk smile at him, asked him if he wanted paper or plastic, and then, without waiting for an answer, unbuttoned her third and fourth buttons, pulled the right half of her blouse and bra aside and fully exposed her right nipple to him.
Simon stared dumbly at the nipple. It was dark red and rigid, with raised, dimpled red skin around its base, a crimson oval on the cream-white surface of her breast.
"Plastic," Simon said, weakly, because he couldn't think of anything else to say. "Sure," she said, still smiling her just-polite smile, still holding her blouse and bra aside and exposing her white breast and candy-red nipple to him. She stood like that a moment longer, then closed and buttoned her top as casually as she had opened it, grabbed a plastic bag from the metal stand next to her cash register and jabbed it in the air twice to open it.
Simon looked around him, feeling disoriented at the event and at the lack of any proportionate reaction to it. The elderly woman in line behind him was going through a stack of coupons in her hand, and apparently hadn't noticed. The other clerk, a young man, was ringing up a customer at the next cash register, and neither of them apparently had noticed. Simon was beginning to convince himself he had imagined the whole thing when he looked back at the wide-breasted clerk, saw the pale stillness in her face, and knew it had really happened. She was just realizing it herself, it seemed; her eyes had that inwardly focused, concentrated look of someone who is going back over the very recent past, second by second, reviewing every moment to make sure there hasn't been some mistake. Then she looked at Simon, wide-eyed and confused, and Simon made his face politely blank. I know nnn-othing!, he thought, in a sitcom-German accent, and he made his face look like someone who knew nnn-othing. You showed me your what? his face said. No, I don't think so, ma'am. I'm sure I would have noticed that. Maybe you imagined it.
He concentrated on keeping the polite-blank look on his face until he could see, in her face, that she was coming around, beginning to believe -- because she had to -- that it hadn't happened, that she hadn't done that just now, that she had just imagined it. By the time Simon left the Save-Rite, the plastic bag hanging from two of his fingers, heavy with salmon and soap, the clerk had, with Simon's silent help, completely accepted that it hadn't happened. But there was no longer any doubt in his own mind: This 40-ish, black-haired, wide-breasted clerk had definitely exposed one of her wide breasts to him, had exposed it as surely as there was salmon in this bag hanging off his two fingers. She had done it, and then she had been surprised at herself for having done it. Of that much, he was certain.
What he couldn't understand was why she had done it -- until hours later, lying in bed, looking at his ceiling, going back over some of the dialog from the "Cheers" episode he had just watched, when it came to him like a fly in his ear: She did it because I wanted her to do it!
* * *
"I think maybe I've been doing this for a long time," Simon told his fat white cat, Desi Arnez. It was after 1 a.m. and Simon was pacing the small kitchen of his small apartment, walking from his sink to his refrigerator, three steps, back and forth. The bright kitchen light threw his pacing shadow against the countertop, and down to the linoleum floor, and against the small dirty stove, and occasionally flung it off into the dark recesses of the apartment.
Desi Arnez, sitting on the countertop, sniffed once at his food dish, but the salmon was long gone. So he sat and twitched his tail and watched Simon's shadow pace the room.
"I think maybe I've been doing this for years," Simon told Desi Arnez, who said nothing.
Thinking back now, trying to pinpoint the day and hour that he believed he first employed the Nudge, Simon theorized it might have been four years earlier, when he had been packing up his bedroom into two cardboard boxes and preparing to leave his mother's house, where he had lived for thirty-four years. They had had that fight, him and his mother, about the car and the mechanic's bill and some other things. None of that mattered now, except for the last part, when she had given him the money. Simon had been navigating out the door, a cardboard box under one arm, Desi Arnez curled up under the other, preparing to leave without saying goodbye -- that would show her -- when he had suddenly thought: I don't have any money. I don't even have enough money to eat tonight. He remembered specifically that he had thought that, because two seconds later, there was his mother, standing in front of him and holding out a small stack of cash folded in two. She had offered it without saying anything, and he had, a moment later, accepted it without saying anything, and then he had left. It had seemed odd to him at the time, because she had stopped giving him money years earlier, and because he had just been thinking that he needed some when she had offered it. The timing had been odd enough to make him wonder, momentarily, whether he had said it rather than just thinking it -- but, no, he was sure he had only thought it.
"Desi, I think maybe I made her give me that money," Simon whispered now. Desi Arnez said nothing.
Simon paced some more and began retracing the four years since, reviewing all the times when people had done things just when he had been thinking he had wanted them to do those things. There were, it seemed, many of those times. He had been hired at the library a week after leaving home, just a janitorial job, nothing supernatural about it at all, except that the older man who had given him the application form had told him, almost rudely, that they were looking for someone older. "We generally like to give this job to seniors," the man had said, coolly, as Simon took the form. "It's something they can do. Have you thought about something in the trades? Construction or something?" Simon had understood the hint, and was preparing to hand the form back to the man, even as he thought: I really want this job. He liked the library, the silence of it, the smell of the books. Cleaning the library would allow him to think, something he liked to do when he wasn't watching TV. I really want this job, Simon had thought again, as he handed the blank form back to the man. And then, strangely, the man hadn't taken it. He had looked at the form, looked at Simon, and said: "I can see you really want this job. Fill out the form."
