Couch

by Benjamin Parzybok

  And then the river made a decision. A tiny thread of current twisted them slightly to one side while the ship turned to the other and within seconds they were on one side of an island and the ship on the other. They could see the faintest glow and hear the sound of the metal monstrosity through the trees. They were in a slow, thin channel, the shore just an outline of blackness a short distance away.

  “Holy shit, that was close!” Erik exhaled great lungfuls of air. “Let’s go to shore. This isn’t a good idea, dreams or no.” He looked at his roommates, dark forms in the darkness. There was no reply, only a soft burbling of water and the even softer exhales of sleepers. “Hello?” Erik grabbed the form closest to him and shook. “Tree! Wake up!” The couch rocked back and forth in the water, and Erik could feel the drowsiness seeping into him. He let the limp form go, and Tree’s body fell back into the couch. Erik balled up his fists and pounded on Tree’s legs and then his own, trying to fight sleep. He dug among the gear spread around the couch and found some mostly dry blankets and put them over his wet roommates. They passed the island, and he saw the freighter had pulled ahead of them. Its wake came at the couch and rocked it, and Erik put his arm across his unconscious roommates like a seat belt as the couch bucked. He kept his eye on the black haze of water, searching for sticks, garbage, anything he could use as a paddle. He caught a branch the size of a baseball bat and fruitlessly stabbed at the water with it, trying to move the couch to shore, trying to fight his body for consciousness. The darkness of his surroundings made it difficult to know if his eyes were open or closed. He held his fists to his eyes until he saw red, but it quickly faded back to black. He beat the stick against Thom’s chest. “Wake up! Goddamnit!”

  He began to hallucinate, or dream, half in one world, half in the other, the couch’s strange spell slowly wedging him into its limbo world. Horses out on the water, standing in the middle of the river, grazing. His parents waving from the recently passed freighter. A brilliantly lit carnival on one bank, or was that real? A girl laughing, a kid with cotton candy. He worked at his eyes, stabbed at the water. Saw the white, colonial church of Zacotecas, Mexico, an island, a haven in the river. He stabbed toward that, and the river faded away, bright cobblestone streets, traffic everywhere, a taco stand, tienditas selling cola and cigarillos. He dodged a cab and pitched into the water, surfaced gasping, the couch a disruption in the blackness. He lunged for it, grabbed an armrest, and hoisted himself dripping wet on board, nearly rocking his roommates off. His teeth chattering and body shivering uncontrollably, he pulled a corner of Tree’s blanket over his head and curled deep into the couch.

  Thom woke to a clear blue sky and water in every direction. No sign of birds, no sign of anything. Tree was on his knees peering off toward the sunrise, toward the direction land must be. There was a pile of wire sculptures next to him, and he gripped his needle-nose pliers in his right hand. As far as Thom could tell, Erik was the compressed, wretched-looking ball at the opposite end of the couch. Thom’s legs were curled crosswise underneath him, and he found he could scarcely move them. They seemed like appendages someone had added on as an afterthought, forgetting to connect the nerve tissue. With the help of his arms, he stretched them straight out and had pins and needles like hammers and nails, blood entering into the cramped feet like a dam burst. SELECT * FROM reality_life WHERE EXISTS “couch in pacific.” His brain automatically sorted through any memories that would assist in explanation.

  “Look,” Tree said, “I did these wires in my sleep.” He picked up a human figure from the tangle, turned it in his hands. “I’ve never done that before.” The figure seemed grotesque somehow, wire curves hinting at the disfigurement and limbs akimbo of accidents or death.

  Thom raised his eyebrows, feeling too asleep for a conversation like this. “Wow,” he said. And then, “Where are we?” Realizing the question was absurd, he added, “We’re not in Kansas anymore?”

  Tree nodded. “The river must have been really fast. I don’t even know which way land might be.”

  Thom pointed east. “Land that way. Unless we jumped an ocean or something. We are moderately fucked, I’d say. How in the hell did we get here? How much water do we have?”

  Thom and Tree looked through the things that Tree had managed to throw on the couch at the last minute and found a gallon jug with a pint’s worth of water left. They moved like a movie reel slowed down, their bodies rediscovering sinew and tendon and muscle at each bend.

  “Okay, I’m going to upgrade us to very fucked.” The couch rolled gently in the ocean, and he saw nothing but horizon lines, so much air, so much water. The world was split into two uninhabitable spheres. “Maybe you ought to try and wake Erik up, and we’ll, ah, have a little conference. Or maybe you ought to let the guy sleep, I don’t know. I’d prefer doom dealt out to me in my sleep, I guess.” Leadership seemed futile, team-rallying long past its usefulness. Thom felt control slipping, panic rising. How long would the couch float? how long could they live? how far could he swim? His brain replaying every lost-at-sea story he’d ever heard. Forty-one days in a rowboat, lost in the Atlantic. A speck in the largest wilderness on the surface of the planet.

  Tree shook Erik and called his name. Erik, on a far faster reel, leapt to life, his legs and arms springing in opposite directions, climbing up the armrest and poised on the verge of tumbling into the sea when Tree caught the back of his shirt and pulled him back.

  “Holy shit! We’re in the ocean!”

  Tree and Thom nodded solemnly.

  “You bastards fell asleep last night. I tried to shake you awake but you fell asleep.”

  Thom nodded again, “I . . . know. It’s hard to believe. I was shot at. You might be right. . . . The couch might be a little weird with the sleeping. Wasn’t there a big ship?”

  “What’d I tell you? I told you so. What’d I tell you? Who believes Erik? Yes, there was a big ship! What in the hell are we going to do now?” Erik’s hair jutted away from his head in unlikely positions, and Thom noticed he had a full mustache again, though hardly any other facial hair.

  “Well, we’re going to hope a ship comes by.”

  “Paddles! We need paddles!”

  “If you find paddles, I don’t know how far you’ll be able to get this ship anyway. We could be ten miles from shore or a hundred.”

  “I think it’s going to be okay,” Tree said. Thom and Erik stared at him. Tree’s face was pale, and there was sweat on his forehead.

  “You alright, Tree?”

  “Ugh. Seasick I think,” he said. He turned around and leaned over the back of the couch and groaned. “It’s going to be alright,” he said again, his voice muffled.

  “That’s nice for you.” Erik angrily chafed at his mustache.

  Tree threw up into the water, and when he finished he blew his nose into his hand and washed it in a swell and then took a swallow of saltwater.

  Thom sighed. “Why do you think it’s going to be okay? You better think so, I should add, since we got on this damn couch in the water in the first place because of you. Erik and I had the shotgun situation handled without your diving into the water. Hey,” he tapped Tree on the back. “Don’t drink sea water. It’ll just make you thirstier, and sicker.”

  “I dreamed we’d be picked up by a ship today.”

  Thom nodded, realizing he had little choice but to hope that Tree’s dream was true. He closed his eyes and tried to force his breath to slow to regular intervals, his heart to slow, his mind back to a state of reason. “Okay,” he said, “Okay. We got held up last night for our couch. With guns.”

  Tree and Erik nodded.

  “And then, because of Tree, we jumped on the couch that mysteriously floats . . . couches shouldn’t float, you know. I mean, maybe a little, but not like this.”

  “I know!” Erik said.

  “We weren’t even to Astoria. How far can you float in, say, nine hours?” Thom calculated a worse-case scenario, ten miles per hour. It was forty miles fro
m their previous camp to Astoria. “We could be as far as fifty miles out at sea,” he said, an adrenalin-fed desperation making his voice rise at the end of the sentence.

  Erik stared in weary disbelief at the water lapping against the base of the couch.

  “I’ve got these.” Tree held up the wire sculptures. “That’s something else.”

  “Nobody is ever going to believe this,” Thom said.

  “Nobody is ever going to have the chance,” Erik said morosely and then jerked his head up level with the horizon. “What’s that!?”

  They looked and saw a dot on the water far off in the distance.

  “I bet it’s a boat,” Tree said. “It’s just like my dream.”

  “Paddle!” shouted Thom. The three roommates began to paddle. Erik leaned over an armrest in the bow, his arms up to his elbows. Thom and Tree gripped the back of the couch with one hand and paddled frantically with the other.

  Thom watched the sun ease up the sky as his arm turned to numb exhaustion, his hand shriveling into complex topographies. They appointed Tree the official waver and he spent the day waving a handkerchief toward the speck, trying to make a visual commotion. The speck seemed to get closer. It was now twice the speck it once was. Thom tamped down the rational brain that noted that a ship would have disappeared hours ago, that the optical illusion of the vastness might be showing them a freighter or a floating can. More hours went by, their arms aching from the effort, doling out teaspoons of water at a time from the pint, the saltwater numbing their hands and the effort making them sweat. Thom estimated they’d had three quarters of the sun’s path now. Time passed rapidly at times and unbearably slowly at others.

  “How come we’re not asleep?” Thom asked. “We’re still on the couch.”

  Erik shrugged. “Maybe it’s got a time limit?”

  They both looked at Tree.

  “I don’t know,” said Tree.

  “What about your computer,” Erik said. “Can’t you write for help?”

  Thom stared at him. Of course, his computer. He fetched it from the bag and was amazed to find it was still dry even though they’d spent the better part of the day pelting themselves and the couch with saltwater. He opened it up, happy to see that he had quite a charge left, and tried to connect. Nothing. He tried again. Nothing. They must be miles and miles away, out of range. He closed the laptop and shook his head in defeat and then rapidly reopened it again and stared at the date in the upper right-hand corner. “What day is it?” Thom said.

  Erik counted on his fingers. “It’s the twenty-sixth of February,” he said. “Tuesday.”

  Thom shook his head. “My computer says it’s the twenty-seventh.”

  Erik nodded. “Okay, then it’s the twenty-seventh. So what?”

  “So it should be the twenty-sixth.”

  “Like I said,” said Erik. “It’s the twenty-sixth, then.”

  “But my computer says it’s the twenty-seventh.”

  “You said that! So what? So we’re wrong or it’s wrong.”

  “It’s not wrong,” said Thom. “It doesn’t just go changing dates.”

  “We’ve been on the couch two days,” said Tree.

  Erik gaped at him. “No way. There’s no way we’ve been out here for two days.”

  “We slept all day yesterday,” said Tree.

  “I didn’t,” said Erik. “We talked to Jean, we carried the couch. I didn’t sleep. Maybe you were asleep, dreamboy.”

  Thom nodded. “He’s right. We slept for about thirty-four hours. By the way, you’re sunburned.” His mind automatically added up the possible distance out at sea, three hundred miles. Hope dropped like an elevator.

  Erik stood up, and the couch rocked precariously. “Fucking couch,” he yelled. He tried to leap up to be parted from it and came down kicking the back of the couch while balancing on the cushions, and then he was overboard, surfacing and gasping and calling for help.

  Thom and Tree pulled him aboard, and they sat silent for a while.

  “We’re going to die, aren’t we?” Erik said through shivers.

  “Looks that way.”

  “A ship is going to pick us up,” Tree said.

  “You better be right,” Erik said. “Hey, as I was falling I saw that speck again. It’s not very far. It’s not a ship. It’s something in the water, garbage. Maybe we can use it for a paddle.”

  The three reached in and paddled with a renewed frenzy. An hour later they had in their hands a large white cooler containing a case and a half of Olympia beer.

  “This is what we’ve been working all day for?” Thom looked in disgust at the contents. “I guess it’s better than spending the day thinking.”

  “Hey,” Erik said, opening a beer, “dying isn’t so bad after all.” He raised it to his lips. “The universe provides!” He took a terrifically long drink until the beer was finished. He crushed it and threw it in the water.

  “Erik, don’t litter,” Thom said.

  “What do you think we are? Want me to save it on the couch till we all go down?”

  Thom shrugged. “We shouldn’t drink beer,” he said. “We’ll get dehydrated even faster.”

  “Buddy, you don’t have much of a grip on reality here, do you?”

  Tree shrugged, grabbed a beer, and Erik took another. Thom stared at them for a minute, then took one too. It was the best-tasting beer he’d ever had in his life. From now on, he made a pact with himself, he would be devoted to that brand. He didn’t have much choice, seeing as how the only source of beer for the rest of his life was the Oly at their feet.

  They drank, and drank some more, floating the cooler in front of them and resting their feet on it. “That’s what we’ve needed this whole time,” Erik said gleefully. He was already four beers in on an empty stomach. “An ottoman! This makes all the difference! Do you think that that’s what this couch has been looking for? An ottoman? It’s been lonely! Poor, poor couch.” Erik broke up into hysterical laughter, and his roommates laughed and then quieted and watched when Erik wouldn’t stop.

  At eight or ten beers and dusk, Thom began to drunkenly holler out his will and well-wishings to friends. “May Megan find the dreamboat she’s always looked for, Izaac learn to eat better and drink less, may my mom find a husband.” Tree was unconscious at his elbow. Erik, several beers ahead of Thom, had lost control of his limbs and had already fallen in several times trying to piss over the edge, crying occasionally, or was it laughing, and bursting into twisted phrases of Spanish songs, saltwater and beer and tears mixing into one. The space was too small for his jerkiness, and Erik always verged on being overboard. Thom held out his arm to Erik in the water without interrupting the hollering of his will, latched strong fingers over Erik’s floundering arms, and yanked him back on ship. A soft drizzle began to cover them and wash away some of the salt. Thom kept his mouth wide, catching enough water to coat his tongue, chasing it with beer. The beer was giving Thom terrible gas, and with one great outburst Erik broke back into hysterics and went over the side again. “Ha ha,” Thom said, held out his arm into the darkness waiting for Erik’s wet fumbling, but it never came. “Erik,” he yelled, impatient, his arm getting heavy, his head beginning to nod. “Erik!”

  No sound came. Only the slightest white noise of the drizzle hitting the ocean. There’d been chaotic splashing, or was that last time? How long had he waited with his arm outstretched? Usually there was the rattle and splash of Erik. With effort, he raised his head up and tried to focus, made sure that Erik wasn’t sleeping in a corner of the couch. He looked over the back of the couch: darkness, his head swimming with the effort, no sign of him. They’d lost control of the cooler, and he caught a white glint of it about twenty yards out, floating its own course. “Erik, Erik has gone down, Davey Jones’ locker.” What did that mean? “Erik!” he hollered. “Errrrrrrrik!”

  He’d tucked a number of beers in next to him on the couch, and he opened one now. “Here’s to you, Erik!” he wiped at his face.
“One down, two to go!” he yelled. He poured the beer into the water next to him, imagining it finding its way to the drowned Erik. He pictured Erik with his arms spread, his mouth caught in a bit of Spanish song, bubbles rising up, Erik floating down into the deep, his stubborn hair stuck at whatever angle. The beer he poured into the water like an isolated golden stream falling through the water into his open mouth. He opened another and also poured it into the ocean, thinking this time of him and Tree, their similar fates, the inevitability of falling off the couch, their bodies filling with saltwater, his body becoming more bloated, drifting down to a bottom a million miles of water pressure away. It had to be a prank, Erik just out of arm’s reach, giggling at the folly. “Erikkk!” he yelled again. “Stop fooling, you dumb bastard.” A swell tilted him back, then forward. His panic level rose and fell with each sway. He considered pushing Tree off the couch into the water, holding him under, keeping him from the fate of waking up on the couch hungover, his body water-starved, saving him from the more terrible death of thirst, of boredom, of fear, exposure. Give him death now. He gave the sleeping form a half-hearted push. Everything came down to water; everything returned to water. He opened another beer, held it up, and yelled “Errrrrik!” and downed it in several long gulps. He gave the small body next to him another hard push with his right hand, throwing himself off balance. Thom flailed, one leg and arm in the water, pulled himself back onto the couch and swore. He grabbed another beer, this time yelled “Fuck you, Erik!” and then his head lolled back and the moon came out from behind a cloud to spotlight the lost.