Couch

by Benjamin Parzybok

  Thom felt more estranged from the world than ever. Lost in a no-place with two nobodies on an unidentifiable quest that no one would notice. At least Don Quixote had an author to write up his journey. He got up at first light and paced along the river, trying to warm himself. Tree joined him after a while, looking like an elephant had rolled over him in his sleep. They split one of Erik’s cigarettes filched along with matches from a coat pocket, just for the warmth of the fire on the end of it, and watched the water go by. A forested, uninhabited island divided the river, and there wasn’t a boat or house or road in sight, only railroad tracks that seemed to stretch for a hundred miles in either direction.

  Thom imagined diving into the water, letting it take him, letting it carry his body like a dead seal out to the ocean. The peace of surrendering the struggle was calming.

  “I dreamt we would be on water,” Tree said. “We would go by water.”

  “Go where?”

  “I don’t know. They were strange dreams. I think . . . I think someone is trying to steal the couch. Someone wants it.”

  Thom couldn’t help but laugh. “More power to them,” he said. “Right now that’d be fine with me.”

  “I don’t know. I think that this . . . might be important.”

  They waited another hour for Erik, Thom quietly bitter, until finally they decided to wake him.

  Erik was nearly comatose. Thom had to resort to shaking him until Erik finally cracked his eyes, a frightened-animal look in them.

  “Get up, Erik. We’ve been up for hours.”

  Erik tried to focus. He saw two human forms in front of him and trees beyond. That much he was sure of. He couldn’t remember where he was. I’ve been in a fight, he thought. I’ve been knocked out. He waited for his body to register pain, but nothing came. I’ve been drugged then. But the two phantoms in front of him finally crystallized into Thom and Tree, and his memory began to come back. He could barely move his limbs and glanced down in a moment of suspicion to make sure they hadn’t tied him up. Had they drugged him? He couldn’t remember eating, couldn’t remember food at all. He managed to swing a leg over the side of the couch to stand, and then he was facedown on wet earth, where he stayed.

  Thom picked up Erik, who had rather suddenly launched himself at the ground. Erik’s head rolled back, and his eyes went up into his head. “Tree! Help!”

  Tree helped steady Erik while Thom righted his head and opened his eyelids with his thumbs.

  “Erik! Wake up!”

  Erik could hear the sound but couldn’t make sense of it. And then, like surfacing from deep, icy water, he burst into consciousness, hyperventilating, awake and frightened.

  “Shhh, it’s okay, Erik. You were just asleep.”

  Erik realized he was yelling and closed his mouth over the sound, opened his mouth again to gasp. “I . . .”

  “You were really out. Do you always sleep like that?”

  “I . . . no.”

  “There was a moment when I thought you were dead.”

  “I’m a light sleeper.”

  “No, you’re not. Trust me.”

  Thom set Erik back on the couch, but he leapt up and stumbled to a tree.

  “What in the hell is wrong with you?”

  “I don’t know. I just know I don’t want to sit on that couch.”

  Thom sighed. “I’m going to make some coffee.” He fished for coffee and the small camp stove in his pack while Tree and Erik talked. He lit the stove, stifling thoughts of escape, and put the coffee on. He realized they were running low on water.

  A freighter passed slowly, swamping the shore with waves. He served up coffee to Tree and Erik, who sat on the bank smoking a cigarette. “How you feeling?”

  “Not so good,” Erik said. “Did you ever put a thing about the couch up on your website like you said?”

  “Yesterday morning. It seems like months ago. I forgot all about it.”

  “Can we check to see if somebody replied?”

  “I don’t know how far out the radio modem works, but I could try,” Thom said.

  He fetched his laptop. He had about seventy minutes of charge left on his batteries. The modem connected. He checked email and received five rejections from jobs he’d applied to. He cursed and called up the couch bulletin board. There were three responses already. His roommates read over his shoulder.

  ———————————————————————————

  12:28 / ip 123.91.2.01 / verified

  ———————————————————————————

  Thom, you’re a loony. Is this a real question or are you toying with us? Here’s my go. I did a search (using my s. engine, sam-o-search, thank you, thank you very much) and came up with some interest using search terms like: gravity+couch, supernatural+couch, magic+couch, flying+couch, weird+shit+couch, etc.

  Here’s this from a conspiracies page: During the cold war with USSR and at the beginning of the Vietnam war, the pentagon had a huge budget for experimental weapons. It was currently the theory that propaganda and mental conditioning were winning wars faster than military efforts. During this time a lot of radio stations were launched—we broadcast American propaganda and anti-communist messages into Cuba, Russia, China and numerous other communist countries. This is all public knowledge. What isn’t public knowledge is the testing the pentagon was doing on the American public in mind control. A lot of which consisted of trace additives in food—Aldous Huxley’s soma, more or less. They tried everything from subliminal messaging in radio and television broadcasts to [here’s where you come in] lacing the fabric of couches with substances that induced apathy. They were fighting just as much of an ideological war at home as they were fighting abroad, but they found, of course, using force in their own country usually worked against them.

  Apparently only a couple of couches were made, perhaps each with a different substance and different effect, frankly it was just too expensive to get these couches properly into the distribution channels and the pentagon has never been known for making stylish furniture, and food additives were very successful (eat organic!). No one knows what happened to them.

  There you go amigo, maybe you’ve got the apathy couch, I’d chuck it asap. Never know what other shit they put in there. -Sammy

  ———————————————————————————

  16:04 / ip 212.171.12.1 / verified

  ———————————————————————————

  Interesting bunch of bullshit that Sammy came up with. He’s always been a conspiracy nut. Not that I ever doubt rumors spawned about the pentagon, as I’m sure there’s just as much that we’ve never thought to even spawn rumors about. I didn’t do my research here as Sam did, (nor do I have a Maggie-O-Search that I’m desperately trying to promote, wink wink), I just idly mentioned it to a friend because I thought it was a funny sort of joke (knowing your humor) that you’d put up on your site. My friend went to art school at RISD and she said there was a guy in the industrial design department that started experimenting with witchcraft on his designs. Witchcraft is what she said, I don’t think she knows a whole lot about witchcraft, but let’s assume that he was experimenting with some kind of quote unquote black magic stuff. Apparently at one point he claimed to have given a couch a soul. I thought this was interesting—I don’t know if he thought he’d created a soul, or “gotten” one from somewhere else. But at any rate, the story turns spooky as it was said the couch exerted a not altogether positive influence on those that sat on it. I asked her what she meant but she’d heard it third-hand and couldn’t elaborate. But the clincher is, the art student later died in a furniture moving accident in which he fell down a flight of stairs and a couch landed on top of him. FREAKY, no? I’m assuming it was THE couch he was moving, but who knows.

  What do you need a couch for anyway? Couches are for watching telly. Roller chairs are for computers. Couches:
passive, roller chairs: interactive. Speaking of which, how come it’s been so long since you’ve updated the php image libraries? You’re not watching a lot of telly? are yOU?

  -Mags

  ———————————————————————————

  00:47 / ip xx.xx.xx.xx / unverified

  ———————————————————————————

  Hi Thom, I’m a fan of your work. It just so happens that I’ve been looking for a couch exactly like that. It’s a beaut. Would match everything I own. Would you be willing to sell? Name your price. Email me at demx741@mailhaven.com

  Thom typed mailhaven.com into a browser and came up with a web-based email service. No hints there. There was nothing unusual about the message, he thought, except that the person had managed to obscure the IP address, and as far as Thom could tell there was no reason to do so based on the message. It set off an internal alarm. He typed a quick reply to demx741@mailhaven.com explaining he was rather attached to the couch and wouldn’t part with it for less than ten thousand. Thom set the price impossibly high. If he/she were still interested, then either the individual had plenty of money, someone was just fucking with them, or the roommates had a hold of something very valuable.

  He powered down his laptop and tuned into the heated debate going on between Erik and Tree.

  “That’s why I was so freaked out when I woke up.” Erik’s eyes were wide. “Probably that soul did something to me in my sleep!”

  Tree looked over at the couch and then looked back at Erik. “Do you think you can really put a soul in a couch? Where do you even get a soul?”

  “How the hell do I know?”

  “I don’t think the couch has a soul, Erik,” Tree said.

  “Then I was drugged!” Erik’s voice bumped up an octave.

  For once, Thom saw Tree was playing the skeptic, and he joined in. “There’s definitely something unusual about the couch. Maybe it’s even drugged and has got a soul. But believe me, Erik, you can get any kind of thing off of the Internet. Before the day is out I bet there’ll be several more bizarre rumors for you to choose from. Some of them will be my friends trying to out-best each other’s stories. It’s normal. Especially for my site, which isn’t usually the epitome of sincerity.”

  Erik looked unconvinced. “Listen, I know when something weird happens to me. I’m not sleeping on that couch again.”

  “That’s okay with me,” Thom said. “I slept miserably.”

  “At your own risk, man.”

  Thom changed the subject. “Someone wants to buy the couch, and we can name a price. I told them ten thousand.”

  “Ten thousand!” Erik yelled. “Hell yes! Yes yes yes!” He hopped up and down, trying to click his heels together.

  “I’m not selling,” Tree said.

  “What!?”

  “I’m not selling. I have first claim to the couch.”

  “Okay, listen, I’m not either,” Thom said. “Let’s not get into this. I just put it out there as bait to see if they were really serious.”

  “What in the hell is the matter with you people?” Erik rubbed his mustache furiously. “This is a couch! Ten thousand is ten thousand dollars!”

  “If the first person who comes along is willing to pay ten thousand dollars, then we have something very valuable. If they really offer that—and I’m trying to express extreme doubt here—then let’s talk about it.”

  Tree nodded.

  “Okay, okay,” Erik said. “I see. Good idea. Then we could say twenty thousand. That would be better.”

  Thom stretched his neck and tamped down a smile. Point number one why Erik isn’t a salesman, he thought. “I think it was a hoax, so don’t get your hopes up.”

  They packed up. Their gear was wet, and a steady breeze made their fingers go numb. Erik, who still had a drugged look in his eyes, refused to carry the couch.

  “Erik, you’re going to have to chip in at some time,” Thom said.

  “I don’t want to carry it.”

  Tree stared at Erik for a long time without saying anything, then said, “You have to carry the couch, Erik. It’s your quest now too.”

  Like a firework whose fuse had run out, Erik sprang at Tree, grabbed him by the collar, and began to shake him. Thom watched Tree’s head flop back and forth on his neck, and then he was there restraining Erik.

  “What in the hell has gotten into you?” Thom held Erik by his collar.

  “That couch is fucked! It wants to fuck with us. And we’re letting it! Look at us carrying it. What in the fuck are we doing? Like a bunch of manslaves. I believe everything now—that couch was trying to kill me, and I don’t want to get within a million feet of it. We should sell it! We need money!”

  Thom’s brain automatically calculated the mileage of a million feet, a machine, feed in a number, answer is? “That’s just under two hundred miles,” Thom said. “Let’s carry it for two hundred miles outside of Portland, and then we can go home. Besides, I’m carrying it because I want to.”

  Erik shook his head no. “I’m through.”

  “Erik, would you please just be reasonable for a minute?” Thom said. “We had a tarp over us, it was extremely dark, the sound of rain hypnotizes, the tarp probably made it so you were breathing a higher carbon-dioxide content than usual, it was a strenuous day yesterday, you were just really asleep. Don’t be so damn reactive. You were always this asleep at the apartment too.”

  “I slept on the couch then too! Why can’t you believe me for a minute?”

  Thom sighed and appealed to Tree, who said nothing.

  “Fuck you, you patronizing, fat sonofabitch,” Erik added.

  Thom clenched his fists and then shrugged. They were all packed up. Thom picked up his end of the couch and waited for Tree. Why was he arguing, he wondered. It was just a couch. And he’d only known the guy a couple of weeks or so. With the couch in his arms he felt the ache of his feet and ankles. Tree and Thom started out again, leaving Erik smoking angrily on the bank.

  He realized he was quite a bit more excited now that he’d read the bulletin board. Someone wanted the couch. It didn’t make sense. You don’t buy couches over the Internet. Or maybe you do, but not used couches with no antique value. Or was it an antique? Most likely the interested party had no idea where he lived. He could be in Seattle or New Orleans. Shipping on a couch couldn’t be cheap. And shipping would probably depend on how much the couch weighed, he thought with amusement.

  They rounded a bend and lost sight of Erik.

  “Do you think he’s really not coming?” Tree said.

  “He’s coming,” said Thom. “He just had to make his point, and now what’s even tougher is he’s got to find a way to join up with us again without feeling like a fool. His mind is fixated on the possibility of money. I played this trick through my whole youth, the stomp-off. He’ll be around.”

  Tree nodded.

  “What’s strange about Erik is he’s a conman, so he makes his living by enticing others into a pseudo-reality. But he also believes the stories of others easily. You’d think he’d be a little more cautious.” Thom readjusted his grip. “Okay, let’s talk about the couch. I want to hear everything you think, no reticence.”

  “It’s hard to know what to believe, Thom, like you said, or if any of those couches are related to this one.”

  “True, true, but the last one about someone wanting the couch, that is very bizarre. Unless it’s a joke or something.”

  “I knew someone wanted it, maybe a lot of people.”

  “I don’t feel I should believe it, but I do. That’s why I want to keep carrying it, I guess. Isn’t this what everybody wants, for something different to happen to them? We figured out the secret, you just have to be so desperate and broke and lonely that something happens. Voilà!”

  “Voilà,” Tree repeated.

  “So come on, tell me about someone wanting it and the water thing.”

 
“I don’t really know. I just . . . it’s just a feeling. Sometimes my dreams are more vivid, and I could tell you details, but . . . Well, I’ll tell you this, I got an image of us sitting on the couch, and it was floating in water.”

  “Ha ha,” said Thom. “There’s no way this could float. Right?”

  “I also think . . . I think there’s some people who want us to have the couch.”

  Thom nodded, stuck in the limbo between humoring Tree and trusting him. It was a familiar sensation for Thom as of late—stuck on the fringe of belief. He worked back through the details he knew. Someone wanted the couch, someone wanted them to keep the couch, the couch had some weight issues, it had some sleep issues. Maybe it was the CIA’s, or maybe it used to be owned by a dead design student. Maybe it was just an old orange knit couch they’d inherited from the apartment. They were on a quest. Were they on the couch’s quest or their own? What would he quest for if he did quest? How many quests could a woodchuck chuck, brain said.

  They’d started early, and it would still be some time before Thom felt like they could justify stopping for lunch. Thom was in front and he’d turned around, carrying the couch against his back, partially so he wouldn’t have to look Tree in the face for hours on end. There was still no sign of Erik, and he began to wonder if they really had seen the last of him. Such a bad parting, Thom thought. It wouldn’t be fun with just two.

  After another mile or so, the tracks veered away from the river, near houses and through several intersections. A dirt road pockmarked with puddles ran alongside the tracks. At the third intersection, Jean, the journalist they’d intended to meet going east, leaned against a car. Her curly hair was wrapped up in a kerchief. She wore glasses, a thick canvas jacket, leather boots, and men’s slacks low on her waist. Thom did what he always did when he approached a woman he was attracted to; he tried to find the quickest way out. His mind worked through a thorn-infested escape toward the river, and then it was too late.