Couch

by Benjamin Parzybok

  Love, Thom

  He did a couple of feeble searches for Erik’s parents on the web, dreading he’d find something. There was an email from Jean: she was waiting in Astoria, and where the hell were they? He worked up another email of roughly the same content, adding a line to let her know that Tree believed the quest was more on than ever. He was tempted to ask her if she wanted to meet them in South America. Or wherever the hell they were going. Jean. The mind spun her around, knowing he should be graver, knowing he should eschew the possibility of romance. He wrote his mom, letting her know that he’d found an apartment and was busy working in Portland, how were the cats? He wrote his ex-boss to say that he was hard at work on a project and wouldn’t be able to go out for a beer for at least a couple of weeks. He wrote himself one.

  Dear Thom,

  Please be involved in something worthwhile.

  Learn to control the undertow.

  Stop eating wheat!

  Yours, Thom

  His inbox consisted of another half-dozen job rejections and a message from the person on the bulletin board who’d offered to buy the couch.

  Thom,

  Ten thousand dollars for a couch is a bit on the high side. I was sort of surprised at the price, perhaps you said that as a joke? However, it turns out that I rather want the couch and can’t stop thinking about how nice it’d look in my house. Where do I send the money? Let’s take care of this asap.

  -dem

  Thom couldn’t believe the email and read it several times. It defied any sense. Was it all a ploy to make fun of him? His brain roughed out the logistical problems of organizing this many people for the sole purpose of Thom’s befuddlement. What was the extent of Thom’s sanity? It was against his nature to trust without knowledge, to believe without proof. Deduction and logic were two essential skills in the arts of programming, but the number of oddities were adding up to an inductive proof. Circumstantial evidence. He wasn’t getting anywhere with denying everything. Better to play out the odd hand to find out where it went. He wrote back and said the price of the couch was now one hundred thousand dollars. Why the hell not? He pulled up his couch bulletin board and saw a message from an ex-girlfriend who was now a married reference librarian in New York City. The message was a giant stream of nonsense characters. He recognized the code at the top of the nonsense as an old key that they had used to encrypt messages between friends a few years ago. She was paranoid.

  ———————————————————————————

  16:04 / ip 212.55.1.8 / verified

  ———————————————————————————

  So Thomas. You’re always involved in the weirdest shit. But I’ve got some scum for you. What else am I going to do, you can only get so many requests for the book “7 habits of highly effective people” before you start wrenching your fingers into sprains to avoid the sarcasm that spills over your lips like so much bile.

  So I dodged around for a day looking for this stuff for you. Then I came back to the bulletin board armed with what I’d learned and found that someone was offering to purchase the couch (!). I hope after you read this you decide not to sell. Yes, I got paranoid, yes I know that you’ll think I’m too paranoid, no I don’t care. If you’re reading this you’ve obviously remembered how to decrypt the message.

  I know we’re occasionally at odds about various things because I shamelessly believe everything, and you shamefully believe in almost nothing. Though you seem to have a habit for falling for chicks that believe too much. Some kind of hidden desire in you, perhaps? Or the opposites attract thing. So what I’ve got for you is a bunch of things you’re not going to believe. Some of them dating back thousands of years. Truthfully, you shouldn’t believe most of them, I don’t even believe all of them. But one thing is for sure, among the histories of various couches, whether famous or used for occult purposes or that have some kind of rumor of magic about them, not a single one apparently is benevolent. Perhaps it’s that humans generally have a malevolent history as a whole, and there’s been very little room in the writings of the present or past for benevolence. It’s remarkable how little of history actually contains truly good or heroic deeds, perhaps that’s why the smallest heroics make it into songs. Or perhaps I’m a bit at odds with this silly species, is it too late to be from another?

  1) Speaking of Aliens, here’s a nice little rumor from the UFO files. As you know, UFO people are divided between the people who think aliens are bad and are out to try to control the minds of the human race, or simply destroy them, and the ET types who think that aliens are cuddly. What I’ve got for you is of the first camp. Apparently a couch was planted on Earth by aliens (they thought they’d plant something recognizable to humans as harmless, I guess) and it’s a giant antenna. It’s debatable what this antenna does. Some argument has it that it actually has some power over airwaves and controls or puts messages into TV programming. More apathy stuff like that other guy said, perhaps. Is it Aliens who want us to buy useless crap from corporate America? What a relief. Another argument is that it’s an antenna into the unknown, into the paranormal, basically into another world where laws of physics and logic are reversed. The word antenna is interesting . . . bugs have them to sense what is around them. Cars have them to pick up radio signals. Radio stations have them to broadcast those signals. So antennae have many functions. If you have communication going both ways, receiving and broadcasting, then an antenna may, in this case, be compared to a doorway, a portal.

  2) This is a sick little one in my book. There lived a barbarian wizard king (how’s that for a title?) who was apparently largely responsible for the collapse of the Roman Empire (you’ve got to give him credit there) by using blitzkrieg style raids on their monetary supplies. Though it’s argued in some books that rarely see the light of day that that wasn’t what brought about the destruction of the Romans. He was a busy fellow. Apparently he fucked a lot of women (Roman women, it seems) on an enchanted couch. When they had orgasms (apparently he was quite the stud) they immediately died and their souls were sucked into the couch. Another couch/soul story. At any rate, this couch was given as a present to Romans. A sort of bewitched Trojan horse. The Romans, of course, liked soft things. When they raided the English, or what were the English before they were the English, they laughed at them because the Romans brought pillows with them that they’d place under their soft bottoms before sitting. The English thought they were a bunch of sissies. At any rate, the couch was said to wreak havoc among the political circles, but not much was elaborated on here. What does a couch full of souls do to one who sits on it? Needless to say, it’s known that there was much de-moralization, and amoralization within Rome.

  3) Found a note that suggested that Pandora’s box was concealed in a seat of some kind. No more information on that one. Intriguing, though.

  4) This one is interesting. A well-respected historian I quite like also writes books a little less believable under a pen name . . . I only know this because he’s a library regular. In one book, he claims to have found some information that was omitted from the Old Testament. It basically claims that God was so angry that Adam and Eve had stolen the apple of knowledge that even after he kicked them out, he pretended to make a sort of peace with them by giving them a gift. You guessed it. It was a couch, or what passed for a couch in those days—who knows, some kind of pine-bough sitting apparatus? This historian claims that the single greatest flaw in human nature to this day is the inability for vision, we don’t have vision that spans generations in either way, we don’t think as a species, we think as individuals, and for that reason we’re bound to commit the same mistakes, reenact the same wars, century after century. I don’t think I need to delve into his argument very much other than to mention the environment, global warming, continuing religious wars, species extinction, etc. Blah blah blah, the examples are endless. The apple itself was never evil, knowledge by itself is not evil. It’s
the inability to perceive the effects of knowledge misused that’s evil. God apparently gave Adam and Eve a sort of vision-blocker in the form of this couch. As long as Adam and Eve or their descendants sat on this couch, its power held. It was his revenge. With their visions blocked, they’d never be at peace as a species.

  In those days, of course, God was a lot tougher candidate before he got remade into the softer more Santa Claus-like character from the new testament. He was a god that was not above giving an eternity’s worth of revenge.

  5) This stuff isn’t as fun for me, but we’ve got at least a half-dozen books in our arsenal written by sociologists, anthropologists, etc., about the couch as a symbol of civilization at its worst. Basically that a society makes and uses couches when they’ve given up on bettering themselves. The couch is the symbol of a lifestyle in coast. It’s the symbol of a civilization gone to apathy, laziness, obesity, basically we’re talking about some fancy words for what we all know as the Couch Potato. They’ve even talked about the way a couch orientates you. It prohibits interaction, because it faces people in a single direction. It’s a seat that encourages passivity.

  That’s it for your librarian. So what are you doing with this couch? Let me know your plans, I’d be curious. And be paranoid! When are you going to bring your giant handsomeness out here for an adulterous visit? Bring that couch and we’ll see if I lose my soul in it (just joking . . . that just gave me the shivers. I mean, just joking about the couch part, not the rest . . . that is to say, I’ve got a nice couch out here already, there’s a bed too . . . when Jim’s at work...)

  love, clare

  Thom smiled. Clare was a constant flirt. She had a rare but appealing combination of gullibility and paranoia. He drummed on the desk and realized that he’d started to let himself sincerely believe things. He was going to believe Shin and Tree and Clare, and this admission allowed the weight of the possibilities to seep into his consciousness. His head began to reel with the information. He lurched up and found his way out onto the deck. Rain was drenching everything, and the air smelled impossibly good. He spent a moment watching the rain fall into the ocean, tiny drops into the well, cycling up and down, piece by piece by piece. Erik was out there; Erik’s body was out there. Somewhere at the bottom. Osmosis balancing out the specific gravity difference between him and the saltwater.

  He found Tree with a scattering of books in front of him in the ship’s library. The ship had a library! What would Melville say?

  He debriefed Tree on what he’d learned from Clare.

  “That’s exciting,” Tree said.

  “Is it? When did Adam and Eve happen, how many years ago was that supposed to be, eight thousand? That’s an old couch we’ve got.” He experienced a tingling of fear and excitement, the realization that they possibly had in their possession one of the most valuable things on the planet. Get as far away as possible, brain warned.

  “Very old.” Tree flipped through the pages of a Bible. “We need other texts,” he said.

  “Yes,” Thom said. “If it’s this old, it will have spanned many cultural shifts. There were many centuries of polytheism after Eden. Seems like we’ve either got a choice between very old—Adam and Eve, the Romans, Pandora—or very foreign, not forgetting the alien option. There are just too many questions. This was easier when I didn’t believe it, but believing opens up a bottomless crevasse of mystery.”

  With a small jolt the ship’s engine changed from the constant hum they had gotten used to. Thom raised eyebrows in question to Tree. Was a stop planned?

  “I miss Erik,” Tree said, ignoring the ship’s movements.

  “Yeah.” Thom felt relieved that Tree felt anything and that there was no implicit blame in the statement. He’d been perturbed by Tree’s mysterious aloofness. It was hard to measure mourning. Was an amount required? Erik had flashed in and out of his consciousness all day. He’d lose an hour with the memory of his own lazy, drunken outstretched arm over the water and the silence from where Erik was supposed to have been. It wasn’t just his fault. Erik’s arm was supposed to have been there, the drunk shit, it was his fault too. How could he have given up hope so easily? He’d considered drowning Tree; the guilt charged through his slumbering synapses with an alarm-clock ring. Death was so dead. Only in Star Wars do the dead come back to have reassuring conversations in the form of holograms. He’d never see Erik’s mustache again.

  “I’ve always dreamed there would be three.” Tree had an innocent, absent look to his eyes.

  The ship’s engine idled, and Thom went to have a look. The couch was outside but sheltered from the rain, and one of the crew was asleep on it. Thom shook the man, and then shook him again with full force.

  The crewman did a dance similar to Erik’s. He fell to the ground, looking suspiciously at Thom, squeezing his eyelids together in exaggerated blinks, his eyes still a thousand miles from consciousness.

  Then the captain was there and the crewman seemed suddenly very awake. He managed to look busy doing nothing, and then wandered off, weaving slightly.

  “Well,” the captain said, “you’ll never guess what else we dragged out of the sea. This is like a fishing trip. We just picked up a Mexican kid, half drowned and hypothermic. Looked like a drowned monkey. I’m starting to feel like a real hero here.”

  “A Mexican kid?” Thom said.

  “Doesn’t speak a lick of English. He’s sick as a dog. The medic is going to look at him now. I’ve got a couple of Mexicans on board who are going to try to speak with him, but for now we’d best let him rest. My man who talked to him said the kid has lost it, completely delirious.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “You speak Spanish?”

  “No.”

  “Sorry, he’s in quarantine. I know you’d probably like to relate to him, but it’s not going to do you any good right now. Give it a couple of days. We’ve got plenty of time here. When he’s better, I’ll send a translator in with you, and you can chat to your heart’s content.”

  Thom,

  I hope you’re doing ok even though you don’t ever call me anymore. Should I get the cell phone and would you call me on that?

  Carter died the other day and I know that will make you sad. I thought maybe you’d like to come home so we could bury him. Right now he’s in the garden shed but it’s so cold out—we have two feet of snow on the ground!—I think he’ll be OK until you can make it home. I’ll wait for you. But hurry because I don’t like to go out there now.

  I tried to call your work but they put me on hold for ten minutes! Could you please look into the phone service there? I also tried to call Sheilene but I only got an answering machine message.

  I hope you’re well, honey.

  Love,

  Mom

  Shin was in the kitchen cleaning up after lunch, and just entering the room Thom felt the hunger coil up in him.

  “Hi, Shin.” Thom fashioned his voice in what he hoped was a conciliatory tone.

  “Thom.” A smile and nod. “Glad to see you. Have some time to think?”

  “Yes, yes, I did. Is that lasagna?”

  Shin deftly served up a plate of lasagna, salad, and sour dough bread and handed it to Thom.

  Thom ate, pushing the bread to the side of the plate for later consideration, throwing caution to the wind on the noodles. He stalled until he figured out what he was going to say to Shin. The man was appointed? To watch the couch, or what? What did he know about any of the rumors on the bulletin board? Now that the believing switch was on, and he knew that people were trying to get the couch, how could Thom know Shin didn’t want to take it too? Nearly any of those rumors on the bulletin board made the couch priceless.

  “So, Shin, I’m waiting for you to explain everything. I’m believing everything now, as a rule, so go ahead and tell me all the weird fantasy shit about couches. You’ve got my complete attention. And by the way, we’ve got to move that couch or risk sending various crewmen into comas.”

 
“Pardon?” said Shin.

  “When you sit on the couch, you fall asleep, and it’s almost impossible for anyone to wake you up.”

  “Really. Is that how you got so far out at sea?”

  Thom shrugged.

  “Interesting.” He rubbed down the stove top with steel wool. “I’ll tell you what I know, though you’ll probably be disappointed.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’m not the only one. I belong to a council, but I’m not allowed to know the other members. I know only the woman who brought me into the council, and she knows two—me and the one who brought her into the council. We learn certain skills and we’re given things to watch over. I have no idea how many of us there are. A lot of what we do is watch over objects from different . . . ah, different ages. Our belief is that humanity as a whole has not evolved to the point of being able to care for itself properly, and in many cases has devolved. And so the council tries to keep the species from destroying itself.”

  “Sounds real noble,” Thom said. He loaded up his fork again.

  “There are certain objects that have come down through time that are more than what they appear to be. But there are collectors who want them for themselves, who want to use them for their own benefit.”

  “I’m believing everything,” Thom said cheerfully through a mouthful of food. He picked up the sourdough and eyed it. “Throw it at me, whatever. I’m not making any promises on comprehension though.”

  “A lot of things are unclear, and truthfully I don’t know if anyone has the answers. I don’t know if you three were carefully chosen and brought together to perform the quest, or if the quest was created because the three of you came together. I only know that a situation that had been waiting for a long time suddenly matured. Presto!” Shin said, like toast popping up.