Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  Thom sat on the couch between Tree and Erik. The couch was miraculously large and held the three of them without testing his personal-space requirements. It was comfortable too. It sucked you in and gave you the impression of continually sinking. The Simpsons was on, and there was silence among them until a commercial. You did not talk during The Simpsons.

  Tree tucked a long strand of hair behind his ear and picked up a spool of baling wire from the floor. He drew a length and cut it with a pair of needle-nose pliers and began to twist. His thin hands moved with great agility, making quick definitive bends to the wire, working its straightness to a ball of something. And then, to Thom’s astonishment, Tree opened his palm to reveal a perfectly shaped three-inch horse with a long horn on the front of its head. A unicorn. Thom studied the couch to make sure Tree hadn’t discarded the wire and plucked the unicorn from somewhere. Thom beamed his approval, but Tree seemed unconscious of him.

  Tree fashioned a tornado from the same spool and twisted the bottom of it into the green shag-rug carpet so that it stayed upright. A tornado on shag-rug plains. He planted the unicorn in the rug so that its horn just pierced the midsection of the tornado. A battle in miniature.

  “Just like jousting windmills,” Thom blurted loud enough to make Tree jump.

  Erik stared at it. “Well,” Erik said. “Here we all are.” He rubbed his forefinger vigorously across his mustache.

  “Yes,” Tree said.

  “There you have it then,” Erik said.

  Thom counted his teeth with his tongue—twenty-seven? Could he really have an odd number?—as a defense against whatever words his brain might try to dislodge into the quiet air like a donkey’s bray.

  “I lost my job.” Thom pulled at a string on his pants. “Just got an email.”

  “Alright, buddy!” Erik gave an irksome punch to Thom’s arm. “Join the club. How about you and me drive down to Labor Ready in the morning after our jog? Guaranteed payment daily, can’t beat that. They’d love the likes of you.”

  “I’m not sure about the jogging part.”

  “Just jumping jacks then, no problem.”

  “I’m not sure about the Labor Ready part either.”

  “I don’t really like to work,” Tree said. He hugged his knees up against his slim frame.

  Erik and Thom stared at Tree.

  “Except lawn care.”

  “It’s the middle of winter, amigo. You won’t be doing lawn care for another five months.”

  Tree looked thoughtful. “Maybe something will come up.”

  “Get a rich girlfriend. That’s the ticket,” Erik said.

  Hearing the word “girlfriend” made Thom’s stomach ache, a compost pile too long in the sun, methane fuming from the bottom of the heap. “My girlfriend broke up with me,” he blurted out, belched.

  There was a long pause in which nobody was sure what to say.

  “I’ve never had a girlfriend,” Tree said.

  “What a bunch of freaking sad sacks!” Erik said.

  Thom started to chuckle. The chuckle gained momentum into a giggle, and then he was holding his gut and belching and giggling and the others were caught by surprise by the cacophony until they joined in laughing, laughing the laugh that only the bottom rung laughs, crying laugh tears.

  If one were to graph the traffic through the front door of the apartment, a downward-sloping curve would begin to emerge, so that by the end of the week it would be apparent the door was being used half as frequently as at the beginning.

  The apartment’s gravity drew them in like some amassing black hole. Each outward foray grew more difficult and less successful. As their comfort level with each other increased, and with no great purpose outside, the path of least resistance lay in the hallways of their apartment.

  Monday morning found Thom in his shiny clothes on the streets of Portland, wielding a résumé laden with tech acronyms and buzzwords: Ruby, Python, Perl, XML, PHP, SQL, C++. He paced through the downtown corridors, traveling the route from Internet startup to established technology company, finding them either closed for good, moved to the suburbs, or “weathering the storm.” And even those he suspected had room to grow were looking for sharp shooters, sharp talkers, sharp lookers from other failed tech companies, not veterans of ShopStock who wore overly baggy clothes, couldn’t find the right words at the right time, and towered over them. More than once a startled remark was made: “It says here you have a Master’s in English Literature—oh, that’s too bad, we’re really looking for someone with an MS in Computer Science.” Never mind that most colleges still weren’t teaching the skills that the companies needed, skills that Thom possessed from being a part of the actual movements that had created the software. Thom was not one to point this out. He failed to mention, too, certain legal troubles he’d had concerning a certain slightly less than legal thing he’d done which would certainly, beyond a doubt, prove his computer expertise.

  Possibly to address the question Why are we here? or to toy with creationism versus evolution, Tree created a lineup of wire figures from fish to monkey to hominid on Monday, planting them into the back of the couch in order. He admired them from a distance and several angles and then, not yet satisfied, added a larger manlike creature at the beginning of the line that sculpted wire fish out of a bundle of its own wire. In his bedroom, he picked up his shrinkwrapped Bible and then put it down again without unwrapping it. Then from under his futon he pulled a spiral notebook full of pages wildly scrawled in pencil. As always, he studied the handwriting, marveling that it was his and so different from his daytime script. He read and reread the last five dreams. In the hundred or so dreams before this, not one of them took place within the last several thousand years, and now these. He closed the book and passed an hour he wouldn’t recall later staring at a fixed point. He folded some clothes, then arranged some wire sculptures, setting scenarios and adding roommates. He washed dishes and then made a large batch of split-pea soup and waited for Thom and Erik to come home. The phone rang three times, and each time the caller hung up when Tree answered.

  Erik spent the first hour of the first day of the week trying to unplug the toilet using improvised instruments—a spatula, vinegar (did vinegar even work?), a soy-sauce bottle—still wondering how what had come out of him could really have come out of him.

  Then he prepared. He shaved his mustache, did fifty push-ups and all the Tai Chi he could remember, put a baseball cap over his unruly plug of hair, donned a silk shirt and headed out along trendy Twenty-third Avenue to see what turned up. At Twenty-third and Flanders a possibly stranded young woman stood on a street corner, and Erik took it as an opportunity to introduce himself and offer his navigational services. Not long after, he was having coffee with the young Wisconsinite and talking about airline safety in Third World countries, with an emphasis on Latin America. By four o’clock Erik had a lipstick stain on his chin and fifty-eight dollars in his pocket that she had given him to buy tickets to a “three-day dinner-theater performance” he’d mentioned that they absolutely must go see together.

  Alone, he headed up to Forest Park and ran through bushes for a half hour to punish himself for being such a snake, hollering, stumbling on the wet ground. Rotting leaves clung to his shoes and pants. With his face sufficiently bush whipped, he dropped by the grocery store, picked up a case of cheap beer, and went back to the apartment to celebrate his earnings with his roommates.

  Night found them embedded in the couch, drinking Erik’s beer, eating Tree’s popcorn, watching TV, while the fishing line of their collective fates intertwined, became inseparably tangled. The couch cast the late-night spell that couches cast on their occupants the world over. And they became comfortable with each other—if by no other way than by the proximity of their bodies.

  On Wednesday Thom completely reworked his résumé to accentuate his Master�
��s in English Literature degree while muttering curses at various employers at high-tech companies he wished would get trapped in Porta-Potties. He printed fifty copies and spent the first half of the day farming out his statistics to law firms looking for research assistants, newspapers looking for junior editors, businesses looking for copy editors and, frankly, anyone else who’d listen. He carried his massive form dutifully from office to office, crowding doorways, looming over desks, frightening secretaries. He wished for some shred of success he could use to ground in truth his increasingly fictional emails to his mother. By two in the afternoon he’d had all the human contact he could take and headed home.

  He found Tree in the kitchen baking a pie. A young, hippy, wire-working Martha Stewart, delicately smoothing out their home life, Thom thought.

  Tree was bent on his purpose, one-tracked but with an absentminded carelessness, leaving plates barely balanced on counter edges, so that Thom would lurch forward and scoot the plates into the safety of the counter behind Tree’s back.

  “Wheat-free,” Tree said after five minutes of silence.

  “Wow. Thanks, Tree, but you don’t have to do that for me.”

  “I like to cook. Any luck?”

  “Not that I can tell. I shook about twenty hands, handed out all résumés. Fifty copies. I figure that’s got to be some kind of record. I felt like a political pamphleteer. And that’s not including the résumés I sent by email the last few days. I’m bound to scare someone into hiring me sooner or later.”

  “Seems like someone with as many skills as you wouldn’t have a problem.”

  “Yesss. One would think. I’m afraid there’s a bit more to getting a job than having the skills.”

  Tree nodded. “Maybe you should take the next few days off.”

  “That’d be nice, though I suspect you’d rather have a rent payer living here.” Thom smiled. He found a spot out of Tree’s way in the small kitchen.

  “It’s not so important.”

  Thom stared at Tree, watched him wipe cutting boards of flour, wash measuring cups, sweep the floor. Sometimes Tree looked like an elf: petite and only half-human. Thom never felt sure if they were having the same conversation. “Surely it’s important,” he said. “The rent will become due.”

  “I had a dream it would work out.”

  Thom repressed a chuckle. “Excellent. I can always use a subconscious advocate. Your dream mention my salary?”

  “Well, you don’t have to get a job. That’s why I said you should take a couple of days off.”

  The phone rang, and Thom picked it up. He heard a click on the other end.

  “Hang up?” Tree said.

  “I guess so.”

  “Somebody’s keeping tabs on us.”

  “Oh?” Thom experienced a quick wave of full-body itchiness, and he jerked to scratch several places at once. What the hell was the kid talking about? His brain couldn’t seem to come up with any reasonable response, and he began to long for some kind of computer project, something logical and solitary and problem-solving intensive, something that worked, something he could create, his own digital Garden of Eden to craft. Something without the strange unpredictability of human interaction. Surely God was a programmer, fleeing his own creation after he’d introduced code that spawned its own bugs: humans.

  “I saw those sculptures on the back of the couch,” he said, hoping to change the subject. “Really something. You should try to do something with that.”

  “I have pretty clear dreams, and sometimes they sort of come true,” Tree said.

  Thom wasn’t sure what to say, so he pushed on. “You could take those down to Saturday Market. I’m sure you could sell them. Get a little stand.” That’s what God needed, Thom realized suddenly. He should have created himself a quality-assurance department first thing. There were a lot of programmatical errors in human nature that could have been worked out.

  “I dreamed you wouldn’t have to worry about getting a job, so I’d hate for you to have to waste a lot more time looking for one, you know?”

  “What did you dream?” Thom sighed.

  “Oh, I don’t really like to talk about them.”

  Thom blinked. “Pie smells great,” he said finally. “I’m going to do some work for a while. How’s Erik’s job search coming, by the way? Any word from him?”

  “He doesn’t need to find a job either, actually.”

  Thom nodded. Of course, he thought.

  Somehow the smell of the pie baking was stronger in Thom’s room than in the kitchen, as if the smell had intensified into a presence, looming over him. His mouth watering, he opened his laptop. There were two emails from prospective employers that weren’t hiring. He weighed the threat of human interaction against eating a piece of pie and went back to the kitchen.

  “Smells really good.”

  “It’s done. Want me to cut you a piece?”

  “Sure, sure, yes.” Thom considered his reaction to Tree’s dreams. So he had dreams he thought came true, or he had dreams that came true and he doesn’t like to talk about them. That’s okay. Thom’s ex-girlfriend had been an amateur I Ching diviner, and when Thom had done something contrary to what her reading had recommended she’d get irritated with him. Sure it was possible to dream about the future, Thom tried to make himself believe momentarily, and then felt himself losing the effort.

  Tree set a gorgeous, steaming plate of pie in front of him.

  “Beautiful,” Thom said. “Where did you learn to cook?”

  “I grew up on a commune. We all had to take turns at the chores. There were a few people with strict eating habits.”

  Thom nodded. Suddenly anxious not to hear anything else about the commune, but he nevertheless felt compelled to ask, “What type of commune?”

  “The usual sort.” Tree turned away.

  Thom saw the back of Tree’s neck redden. He felt certain the kid preferred that he not pursue the subject, and he wondered if it’d been some sort of cult.

  “So what else can you tell me about this dream?”

  Tree turned and beamed at him, his voice the tone of happy announcements. “I think we’re going on a journey together.”

  This wasn’t speculation. This was conviction. “Really?” Thom’s stomach bubbled up hotly from the center of the Earth, and he excused himself to the bathroom. On the way there, Erik burst through the front door. Thom noticed that he had a full mustache again.

  “Hide me, you’ve got to hide me. I’m not here. I am not here.”

  “You’re not here?” Thom burping the last half of the question.

  “You don’t even know me. You’ve never even seen me.”

  “I’ve never even seen you,” Thom repeated gratefully and continued to the bathroom. With the door closed safely behind him, Thom looked in the mirror, raised his eyebrows at the racket that was continuing outside the bathroom, and proceeded to create some gaseous racket inside the bathroom. How did the guy grow hair so quickly? Thom barely shaved more than once a week, and Erik had grown a full mustache in two days.

  There was a fierce shout, and a noise Thom felt could safely qualify as a yelp. He searched his face for something to pinch and stared into his pupils as the sound rose outside. He thought he should see what was happening.

  Erik was backed up against a wall in the living room by a gentleman holding a pocket knife to his throat. The man was in his forties, wore a tightly fitted outdoor-style shirt, and seemed to have the upper hand. In the doorway a young woman vacillated between outrage and infatuation for Erik. Thom took a stride across the living room and grabbed the man’s hand until the knife fell to the floor and the man cried out.

  Erik picked up the knife, leapt back, and yelled, “We take them!”

  “We’re not taking anybody,” Thom said. He
held his arm out so Erik would stay back. The man eyed Thom and backed toward the doorway. “What’s going on here, Erik?”

  “Don’t listen to him,” said the woman in the doorway.

  The man rubbed his wrist. “Let’s just forget the whole thing, Sherry,” he said.

  Thom turned to Erik, who shrugged.

  “Sounds like we’re forgetting the whole thing,” Erik said. “I’m willing to do that. Let bygones be bygones. Let them who is without sin throw the first stone.” Erik kept the knife raised.

  “Cast the first stone. It’s cast the first stone. Somehow I doubt this is about martyrdom.” Thom looked back toward Sherry and tried to appear upstanding, which took the form of a smile and better posture.

  Sherry closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, they were rimmed with the beginning of tears.

  “On Monday I met him on the street and he seemed nice and we had coffee and talked for a long time and then he, well, we made some plans and I thought he was nice and I didn’t know the city so it was nice to meet somebody nice.” Sherry inhaled just shy of a sob and looked up at the older man. “Like maybe we would go see this theater performance that he’d heard about and we made plans for where to meet and I gave him money for the tickets because what else am I going to do while I’m here and he never showed up,” Sherry said in a hurried exhale. “Then we saw him on the street and I’d already told Dad about it and when we saw him he ran and we followed him and then Dad and he got in a fight and . . . then you got here.”

  “Ah.” Thom wished he was back in the bathroom.

  Tree appeared, looking sleepy. For a minute Thom feared that Tree was going to wave at him, like a mother waves at her child onstage in his first play.

  Thom sighed. “Erik?”

  “I meant to go buy the tickets, but I got . . . I meant to go buy the tickets.”