Couch

by Benjamin Parzybok

  “You look like . . . God, I don’t even know.”

  “Superman!” Juan said.

  “Pajama man,” Erik said.

  “Like a mechanic,” Tree said.

  Thom blushed, but it was good to be clothed, and the laughter seemed kind. On a whim he took up a Superman pose, one arm outstretched as if to fly, the other a fist against his side, and the laughter doubled. He wouldn’t leave the house, that’s what. He’d live here the rest of his life, where they liked him. He was a superhero. Can’t beat that. He needed a name stitched across the front. Azul is blue, Erik had said. Azulman. Whose secret powers were flatulence and the ability to think like a machine. Secret powers that allowed him to cry about the stories in books but not his own. Azulman! Endowed with a second brain who sat on his shoulder like a dour talking cat.

  An hour later, Fernanda had made a pair of shoes for Thom too. Two slabs cut from a car tire, with canvas straps holding the feet in. A makeshift sandal, utilitarian, brilliant.

  With the couch now inside and darkening a corner of the room, Thom, Erik, and Tree lay out on the floor with a layer of blankets.

  Thom waited until his roommates were asleep and got up to stand at the window. He imagined the earth from space, and his body upon it, so very far from where it belonged. He heard the sound of something that might be crickets, or some other many-legged thing that delivered fatal bites to your neck in your sleep. It took all his willpower to keep his breathing under control, to keep his body from acting out all his frenzied, panicked emotions. His thoughts leapt wildly from the worthiness of their cause, the exotic excitement of being thousands of miles away from home, and the feeling that he was a lost escape pod, jettisoned from the mothership and hurtling ever deeper into space. He forced his breathing to become deep and sure, but he felt lonely. He wanted a girlfriend and a job and a nice family and a home and all things that all right people call their own. The things that the chosen people come by naturally, without brushing up against suicide to get them.

  But then he knew that if he wanted those things, or if he wanted those things above all things, he could have them, but instead he was here, partially, at least, of his own choosing. If only there was a tincture that confirmed decisions, a vitamin that pointed the nose like an arrow toward one’s proper destiny.

  He lay back down next to Tree, who was thrashing about, living in two worlds, the dream world testing him, teasing him, coaxing.

  Thom stared at the ceiling deep into the night and tried to place himself. Out the door was a chaotic and foreign world, and for once, he began to feel excited. Later the rain came, falling on the tin roof like hammers in the night.

  Morning revealed Tree covered in fifty or sixty mosquito bites, from the bottom of his feet to his forehead, a collage of welts.

  “Whoa,” Erik said, searching himself and not finding a single bite. “Usually they like me, but you must be tasty. That’s one of the reasons my parents split up. She couldn’t handle the jungle mosquitoes anymore. They never hit my pop. Los indios think it’s a bad sign if the mosquitoes only bite on one person. They say they smell death.”

  Thom noted that Tree looked genuinely afraid. He caught Erik’s gaze and mouthed for him to shut up.

  “Sorry, Tree,” Thom said. “Bummer.” He didn’t have a single bite either. He marveled at Tree’s new complexion, a rash of itching spawned in a night. “I heard you scratching, and I thought you were dreaming.”

  Tree scratched the tops off his bites until they bled. Fernanda, with a motherly look gave him a bottle of insect repellent, and then a bottle of sunblock for the fiery red he’d developed. He’d need something to do with his hands.

  They spent a day of rest at Julio’s house, who was thrilled to have them. He brought neighbors by and regaled them with the story of how the foreigners had arrived by sea, and Thom, Tree, and Erik accommodated. They felt at the end of the world and utterly unfindable. A fishing village perched lonely on the edge of the Pacific. Thom learned a half dozen more Spanish words. Cerveza—beer; chuchaki—hangover; mar—sea; viaje—journey; disculpeme—excuse me. Where was Shin, he wondered. Just when would he be showing up to lead and protect them?

  They ate ceviche and drank more, and Juan and Thom came to certain computer understandings. It was the way he knew how to talk, his language. He introduced Juan to the tenets of programming and system scripting, hoping it would ignite a passion in him. Since programming languages were mostly in English, or rather they were their own languages but with English phrasing, Thom could steer himself around effortlessly.

  After substantial arguments on the nature of financing their voyage, Tree dug up his ATM card from a crack in the couch and Tree, Erik, and Julio went to town to find a bank. They returned with needle-nose pliers and spools of wire, straw hats, and ice cream. Tree handed out money like Christmas, each roommate getting a hundred and fifty dollars.

  “They use U.S. dollars here.” Erik sounded upset. “I guess they killed the sucre in ’99. Sad. That’s got to piss off my parents.”

  Thom was unfamiliar with currencies. “The sucre?” Relieved at another item on the small list of familiars.

  Tree twisted and turned wire replicas of the family, meager gifts.

  In the morning they pored over a tiny map of Ecuador, eking out a rough plan. Or as much of a plan as one can make without a clear idea of where one is going. Erik pointed to giant areas like they were amusement rides he wanted to make sure they hit. “The Amazon! We better go there. The equator! We should try the toilets. Ingapirca—Temple of the Sun, I’ve been to a rally there!”

  Thom studied the hundreds of miles of land to traverse and tried to imagine what travel was like beyond their village. With his fingers he traced rugged stretches of the Andes, thousands of miles of jungle, all of it impossible territory for carrying couches.

  Tree, constantly twitching and scratching himself, repeated We’ve got to stay off the roads until it became background noise. All of them fanning the fronts of their shirts, trying to keep cool.

  Erik and Thom begged Tree to give them an inkling of their direction. After much pressure, Tree let his finger glide along the map. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for other than the visual imagery that played in his mind—cobblestone streets, a mountain trail, a type of wagon, endless fog. How could he reconcile this with a two-dimensional map? His finger halted at a stretch of mountains to the south. There was a bump in the map, a bit of Braille there just for him perhaps.

  “There’s a bump here,” Tree said and lifted his finger to show the others.

  “It’s sand under the map, smart guy, not the map.”

  “We’re going here.” Tree stabbed his finger down over the bump, a mountainous stretch to the south and east of them.

  “It’s sand,” Erik repeated. “Dude! That’s the middle of nowhere. It was just a sand bump. Thom, help me out?”

  Thom studied the spot. “Technically, yes, it is indeed sand under the map. That’s good enough for me.”

  Julio generously offered to drive them south to Posorja, where the end of the Guayas River issued monstrous and brown from the city of Guayaquil. There he knew a man, Carlos, who could boat them around Isla Puná, deeper into the mainland, banana country, where presumably they’d pick up their couch and walk into the unknown in the direction of Tree’s sand bump. Thom’s belly was a furnace of unpredictability. Anxiety sweated off of him. Erik checked doubtfully with Tree. “Are you sure you dreamed that? Are you sure this is the way?”

  But it felt good to be in the car, with the couch tied to the roof this time. The wind whipped through Thom’s thin blue suit, cooling him. Julio drove like a madman, passing on the left, playing chicken, passing on the right, driving through mud, vegetation, rocks, road, the car weaving like a drunken horse running full-bore down a mountainside. Gas fumes filled up the back of the car so that Thom and Tree kept their faces in the wind, panting for breath. They passed dilapidated buildings, the sky full of wires, signs at
precarious angles, mud brick houses and buildings with thatch or rusted tin roofs whose walls were painted over with the faces of politicians, animals in the street, dogs as thin as postcards, chickens, goats, pigs. Julio talking through it all, jerking the wheel this way and that, his tongue clicking against his three teeth to punctuate sentences. Thom held on for dear life to anything he could grab a hold of.

  Then Julio would see someone he knew. He’d skid to a stop and tell the gringo story from the beginning. Thom and Tree were familiar with the gestures of the story by now. They pointed to the couch on the roof, gringos out in the water on it, ha ha ha. And then they’d go again, Julio grinding the engine into a heap of oily filings.

  It was market day in Posorja. The streets were full of carts and stands of vegetables and spices and meat and goods. A sea of black hair that came up to Thom’s chest, stacks of fish on tables, a tangled web of crabs tied over the shoulder of a man who yelled Cangrejo! Cangrejo! A table with a pile of yellowed pig’s heads, a fork jutting from a snout, a baseball-sized rock jammed into the mouth of another, sides of beef dangling from hooks, blood pooling in the dust, butchers throwing stones at dogs, a woman in a bowler hat with a lamb over her shoulder chatting with an old man with one hundred and fifty years of wrinkles astride a mule. Women sat on blankets on the ground with heaps of leafy vegetables around them, sat against walls, sat everywhere, surrounded by pyramids of tomatoes, cabbage, shucking corn, mounds of green bananas the size of fallen elephants. A man tap-tapping a human skeleton with a rod, yelling his cure through a megaphone. A woman with a handful of chicken legs in her fist, connected to live chickens, their heads dangling, eyeing the world from upside down. An escaped hollering sow charged through the stalls with a man just taller than a bar stool in hot pursuit. Everything was in chaos, streets disappearing under the bustle.

  With the car finally parked, Thom exited Julio’s spacecraft and gave Posorja its first-ever alien encounter. Azulman! Everywhere eyes followed this blue behemoth ducking and grabbing his head with each impact against vendor stall or ceiling or doorway. His face a balloon red, mumbling what he knew, gracias, hola, mis labios están cerrados.

  Tree refused to leave the couch, and Julio led the others through the market. Thom acquired a small following of children. When he turned, they scattered into hiding. He cursed his outfit. His sandals sank into the mud streets, the canvas taking on a blackened hue. Julio ducked into the nicest building on the street, two stories of aquamarine-painted cinder blocks with a ceramic tile roof. If you can’t beat them, join them, brain offered. He turned at the doorway to wave at his crowd of followers, breaking them into a storm of giggles, a few waving back reflexively, scattering. Some ran for their lives. Others smiled and stationed themselves like bodyguards at the entrance of the building while their giant sat uncomfortably inside.

  Carlos had a boat, and they needed a ride. It was a big trip, across the great delta, some thirty miles of ocean, and they began the obligatory haggling for the fare. He had a gold ring on each hand, a man who had and liked wealth. They sat around on stools while he sat kingly in his recliner throne, aimed squarely at a TV in the corner. The market scene blared through the open door. A radio upstairs charged the air with salsa. Soap-opera dialogue spilled through the brassy speakers of the TV. There wasn’t a sole atom within a mile that wasn’t vibrating with sound energy for all it was worth.

  Perhaps it was a restaurant, Thom realized. It was a sweaty cave of a place. A picture of the food groups hung on one wall. An Argentinean soap opera flashed on the screen, and Erik knew the characters by name. Julio and Erik and Carlos talked, and Thom hunkered on the periphery, unsure if things were going well, unsure of where they were going and why. He stood and stationed himself at the doorway, where his child disciples waited and asked him questions in squeaky Speedy Gonzalez voices. He mussed a boy’s hair who wore a U.S. flag shirt, redneck style. Where was the center of the world? Couldn’t it be here? He felt more comfortable with the stares. There was no malevolence, he thought, or hoped, only curiosity and, yes, laughter. But look at what you wear, brain said. You would laugh, too. A boy of three or four or five?—they were all so small—grabbed his pant leg and shook, looking up at him, Why? Why? clearly on his face. Yes, why? Sharks ate my clothes. I’m on an important mission involving furniture. I couldn’t find a job in my own country. My girlfriend broke up with me. I’m trying to impress a journalist. That’s why. Thom mimed a Superman flying gesture. A creature in an electric blue Superman suit, poised to launch from the earth, leave gravity behind. Their reactions divided by age. An excited murmur rose from the five-and-under contingent; shy skepticism and smiles permeated the six and aboves. Eleven and above scowled skeptically but stuck around just in case. Some ran off to notify parents. He could settle down, get a casa, marry the tallest Ecuadoriana in town, teach the tykes programming, learn the accordion, sell something at the market—websites? American literature? Did he have any skills that applied here? He could be the freak show, charge admission for a peek. His mother would never approve.

  Or maybe he’d leave computers behind completely. Emerge once again into a tangible world, try to have relationships with people whose eyes he could see, who moved their lips to communicate.

  Negotiations were finished and Erik came to stand in the doorway. Julio was stuck to the TV, unable to leave before the climax of the soap. Carlos had disappeared upstairs.

  “You seem like you’re getting on fine. Mande?” Erik said to a tiny fellow piping up with a question, then laughed. “He wants to know when you’re going to fly.”

  Thom chuckled. “It’s the outfit.”

  Erik winked at the boy. “Muy pronto. Muy, muy pronto.” Erik jerked his thumb back toward where the negotiations had happened. “Well, we’re getting a ride, but if this guy doesn’t chuck us overboard I’ll be surprised. And I promised him seventy dollars—quite a huge amount of money here—for the ride, to be paid at arrival.”

  Erik borrowed a cigarette from a man leaning against the building, and a bevy of questions followed, handshakes, motions to Thom.

  “Everybody asks if there’s work in the States. Everybody wants to go there.” Erik exhaled toward the market. “Thom, I’m really still unclear on where we’re going, what we’re doing. Is it okay to have doubt? You can’t say anything in front of Tree. And I can’t even figure out who I’m supposed to be suspicious of. Sure, sometimes we run across someone we can obviously trust, like Julio. The guy wouldn’t even know how to double-cross. But this guy Carlos, or Shin, or even Jean—have you thought about that much? Why is Jean meeting us here? That’s a long way to come for some dudes she met on the street in Portland, strange couch or no.”

  Thom took a drag from Erik’s cigarette and was immediately offered another by the man who’d loaned Erik one, exaggerated gestures compensating for lack of a shared language. “Yeah, I know.”

  “I know you think you’ve got a possible interest there,” Erik said. “Hell, maybe she’s got the same thing in mind.” Erik eyed Thom and bit his bottom lip, raised his eyebrows. “Look—you’re the sane, reasonable guy here. I don’t exactly have that reputation. But I thought I’d better point that out. Alright?”

  Thom nodded, studied his sandals. “Alright,” he said. “Point taken.”

  “I mean. This couch used to be in our living room, thousands of miles away, and now what? We’re on a trip. That’s fun, I like Ecuador. Maybe I’ll even try to find one of my parents. But what the hell, man! We’re carrying this couch like some kind of Jesus story.”

  “Carrying it for other people’s sins.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Or for ours.”

  “That too.”

  “Or worse, really, you see that movie about those guys who were trying to carry a big thing of ice into the jungle to show the natives and it melted before they got it there?”

  “Yeah,” Thom said. “Doomed quests. What did I tell Jean? Absurd quests movement. But I think we’re go
ing somewhere. There have been too many coincidences not to believe something.” He gave a smile to his fan base.

  “Or it could be a lot of lucky delusion,” Erik said and spit into a muddied, oily ditch.

  “That’s what I’m worried about.”

  A cartload of watermelons collided with a stand full of fish. An argument erupted. Fish on watermelons, watermelons on fish, the flesh of both exposed, mixing gorily.

  “But what about Shin?” Thom said. “The council thing.”

  Erik shrugged. “He gives me the creeps.”

  “But what if we are doing something big, what if this is the new war, what if we’re removing the world’s poison, what if we’re changing the planet?” Thom rushed the sentences out of his mouth, all his hopes in one breath of air as his stomach up heaved massively in manic response. He saw one of his disciples plug his nose.

  Erik sighed. “Sure, could be. Never seen myself that way, but what the heck. Yes, let’s do it. All the way. My parents would be proud. But how do we know? I mean, it’s a couch, you know, so don’t get your hopes up.” He worked at his mustache, blew smoke. “Or what if we’re really lost. Listen, man, no offense, but I don’t believe in a center of the world. I don’t believe Tree’s Garden of Eden stuff, if that even has anything to do with this. Yes, I think the couch is strange . . . but . . . pfff, there’s just no other way to say it, it’s a couch.”