Couch

by Benjamin Parzybok

“I felt something get off!” Erik yelled.

  Thom chuckled. Erik’s face was pale, and his eyes showed more white than seemed possible. “There’s got to be some kind of explanation,” he said.

  Tree shrugged.

  The old man appeared again. “I call zee cops!”

  “We’re going, we’re going,” Thom yelled.

  “Run!” Erik hissed.

  “Oh, come on, Erik.” Thom said. He and Tree picked up the couch and headed toward Twenty-third. “I can’t think of what might do that to a couch. Do you have any ideas?” Thom asked, fearing what Tree might say.

  “I don’t think the couch wants us to get rid of it,” Tree said. “At least not here.”

  Thom shook his head. “That’s not the kind of explanation I was looking for.” He punctuated five footsteps in a row with a rear-facing, gaseous exhale.

  At the corner, Thom felt eyes on them everywhere. There was no way they could leave the couch here.

  Thom saw a burrito joint down half a block. “Let’s go get a burrito, talk this over.” A good deal of the morning had passed, wasted by the couch. Buses were escaping to promised lands. The rain had stopped, and the clouds were beginning to thin out. They put the couch down just to the left of the burrito shack, ordered, and sat eating quietly.

  “It’s not wet,” Tree said.

  “Hmm.” Erik said.

  “It’s been raining.”

  “I know it’s been raining,” Erik snapped.

  “This has been a very unusual twenty-four hours,” Thom said.

  A kid of about eighteen with a burrito sat down next to Erik, bringing the couch to capacity. “I love that they put a couch out here for us,” he said, taking an enormous bite of his burrito. “How do they keep it dry?”

  Erik nodded enthusiastically. “Amazing, isn’t it? What a smart thing for a restaurant to do.” Erik eyed the burrito shack to make sure no one could see them.

  Thom smiled. Erik and he seemed to have come to a decision. It was obviously the burrito shack’s couch, not theirs. The teenager finished his burrito in about three more bites, waved good-bye and headed on. “Okay,” said Thom, and they stood up.

  A cop car came to a slow halt in front of them. The cop in the passenger seat rolled down his window and stared at them.

  “Officer.” Erik gave a quick half-salute.

  “We got some kind of call about disturbing the peace, apparently”—he drew the word out and sucked in, looked back at his partner to register the joke—“some kind of issue involving a couch.”

  Erik raised his eyebrows.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that?” The policeman let his gaze come to rest on the couch.

  “Well, sir.” Erik rolled out a hand in explanation, straightened his posture, deepened his voice. “We were trying to donate this couch, seeing as how it’s a nice couch, and we’re moving just now and not needing it. We were down there at William Temple”—Erik pointed—“and this crazy old codger gets irate, I suspect because my friend Dave here”—Erik gestured to Tree—“didn’t think the doorbell was working, and he might have pushed it a time or two too many for that old man’s patience.” Erik gave a know-what-I-mean look and licked his lips. “We were there just to donate this couch, and before we knew it that man had pulled a gun on us. I’m not one to know when a gun is legal or not, but certainly we knew we weren’t wanted there, and so we decided to just go ahead and carry our couch to our new apartment”—Erik gestured down the street—“to see if we couldn’t just go ahead and use it after all.”

  The officer nodded. He looked at his partner and then back at Erik. “Well, see to it that that couch makes it to your apartment without any more doorbell ringing or yelling.”

  “I sure will, sir.” Erik nodded a series of quick, courteous nods.

  The police car slowly pulled up the street and turned toward William Temple.

  Erik gave his mustache a couple of quick rubs and turned to his roommates. “We’ve got to see that this gets to our new apartment.”

  “Good job, Erik.” Thom shook his head. “I never thought this would be so complicated.”

  “They’ll be back around, they always are.”

  “Let’s bring it down to the industrial area at the end of Twenty-third and lose it down there. Or we could hit one of these side streets, but they seem sort of crammed with people,” Thom said.

  “This is ridiculous.”

  Tree smiled. “Maybe this is it,” he said cheerfully. “Our trip. Maybe we were meant to carry this couch.”

  Thom and Erik ignored Tree, picked up the couch, and headed down Twenty-third. They had tired of the hassle, and the occasional cheers of pedestrians didn’t lift them as much. What does he mean meant, Thom thought crossly. Meant to be stumbles into faith and belief and destiny. These are not terms to describe furniture-moving.

  “Hey,” said Erik, “what about Forest Park? We could haul it up there.”

  “That’s kind of littering.” Thom looked in the general direction of Forest Park and measured his annoyance at carrying the couch. “But I’m willing to try it.”

  “Let’s take our next left then.”

  At Irving they turned left, and only twenty feet up the street the couch became unliftable. Erik dropped his end first.

  “Couch doesn’t want to go that way,” Tree said.

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass which way the fucking couch wants to go! I’ve never had a couch order me around before, and I’m not about to start now.”

  Thom gave the couch a kick to emphasize Erik’s point, which he found he had no problem agreeing with. “This,” he said, “is a very strange experience.”

  “Should we just keep carrying it to the end of Twenty-third then, like you said?”

  “Sure, sure.” Thom picked up his end of the couch again, and Tree picked up Erik’s end. Erik was in the bushes taking a leak. Thom wondered if perhaps the couch was their trip after all. Just like with programming, puzzles were irresistible to him. Counter weights, brain volunteered, magnets, gyroscopes. The whole feel of the couch was different for him now. This was something special, something unpredictable in his hands, something with a will, or at least an impressive mystery; and it was a bit creepy.

  Twenty-third was crossed by alphabetical streets, beginning at Burnside and ending at Thurman. Eleven blocks to go, Thom’s brain calculated. A lot of distance.

  A woman leaned out of a lingerie storefront. “Where you taking that thing?”

  Erik had caught up with them. He took a half-bow, smiled. “Why, this is the Couch Across America campaign.” The woman laughed heartily.

  “We could do that,” Erik said after they’d passed.

  “Carry it across America?”

  “Sure.” They crossed another intersection.

  “You have a short attention span, my friend,” Thom said. “A minute ago we were trying to dump it in Forest Park. Do you know how many miles that is?”

  “Sure, sure, it’s a lot of miles, lots of miles. I know. This is the Couch Across America campaign. We’re carrying this couch across America to fight hunger,” Erik announced to a passerby, who looked awed, confused, and suspicious all at once.

  “Good luck, hell, good luck!” the man said when he’d determined Erik was being serious and walked away shaking his head like there was water trapped in his ear.

  A woman in her thirties with curly, shoulder-length hair sat on a nearby bench. “Did I just hear you say you were carrying that across America?” she asked.

  “That’s right!” Erik said proudly. Thom rolled his eyes.

  “How do you feel about press?” The woman stood and began to walk beside them. She had a bookish air, Thom noticed. As if at any moment she might quote Howard Zinn or Mary Shelley. He swallowed a small lump of fear.

  “Like news people?” Erik screwed his face up, thinking about it.

  “Like news people.” She smiled. “If you’re really carrying this across America, you’l
l want some coverage.” She raised her eyebrows to see if she could gather a level of seriousness from the three roommates. Tree remained passive. Thom tried his best for a wry smile. I might be with him, or I might not. She winked playfully. Did she really wink?

  “Definitely.” Erik nodded vigorously. “Of course that makes sense. Definitely. We believe in touching people personally, and that’s why we haven’t sought coverage before now.”

  “Ah,” she said, “of course.” Thom couldn’t tell if Erik was playing her or she was playing Erik. Tree and he kept the couch moving. They crossed another intersection together.

  “So what news are you from?” Thom could see Erik was in over his head.

  “I’m a radio journalist. Public radio.”

  “I like radio,” Erik said and patted a couch cushion, raising a small cloud of dust.

  “Great. So I can do a story on you?”

  “You bet,” Erik said. “Shoot.”

  “What’s your route? I’ll have to catch up in a day or two.”

  Erik turned and looked at Thom, a nervous pleading in his eyes. There didn’t seem to be any question as to whether Erik would carry a couch for two days to be on the radio. Thom could tell Erik had as much knowledge of which roads went out of town as he did of radio journalism or the distance across America. Tree had the expression of his namesake. Thom sighed. Should he mislead the obviously interested, apparently intelligent, and quite nice-looking radio journalist by telling her that, yes, the three socially inept nerds were indeed carrying a ratty couch across the United States for no particular purpose that they yet knew of other than they were depressed and unwanted here and sex freaks had broken a waterbed over their apartment? He decided he wasn’t morally capable of it. He’d call Erik’s bluff, they’d ditch the couch, and catch a bus destined for some special haven for people like them.

  “We’re taking I-84.” His stomach rumbled with surprise at his own words. “We’re taking Middle America, I-84 through the Oregon desert, to Boise, Idaho, and on through there. We’re not fast. In a couple days’ time you should be able to catch us up in no more than an hour, hour and a half maximum. We’d love to do an interview. Awareness brings justice,” he added, just to put the cherry on top.

  She smiled at him, a whole new level of seriousness in her demeanor. “Perfect. Awareness is what I can bring. In two days I’ll head out I-84 and keep my eye on the road. Not much out there,” she went on. “That’s bleak territory.” They crossed another intersection. “You’ll need provisions.”

  Erik nodded fiercely. “Not going to be an easy trip. We know, ma’am.”

  “I’m Thom.” Thom smiled. “Your name is?”

  “Jean Sidklowski.” She waved. “I guess you don’t probably want to shake.”

  “Erik.” He pumped her arm vigorously. “And this is Tree at the front of the couch.”

  Jean smiled at them. “Thom, Tree, and Erik. I’ll see you in a couple of days. Good luck!”

  Thom watched Jean walk away. Maybe he could follow her and check up on the roommates in a couple of days. Knowing he wouldn’t. Knowing that following would never get him anywhere except sad in some cafe. They carried the couch silently for several blocks.

  “So what’d you have in mind here, Erik?”

  Erik shrugged. “I’ve never been on the radio before.”

  “You are a slut,” Thom said. “An attention slut.”

  Erik shrugged again. “It’d be kind of cool being on the radio. I mean carrying this across America isn’t such a bad idea.”

  “It’s insane, pointless, ridiculous, absurd. It’s incompletable. It’s over three thousand miles, that’s walking, over three thousand miles of walking, carrying a large piece of disagreeable furniture. Do you know how far three thousand miles is?”

  “She was nice. Let’s walk for a day and see how it goes, you know?”

  The cop car slowly rolled by, the patrolmen turning their heads like lizards in the sun, their eyes blinking in slow motion. Erik waved.

  “What do you think, Tree?” Thom said.

  “I don’t know yet. The desert doesn’t feel right to me. I feel like . . . we’re headed west.”

  “Well, technically we’re headed north right now, Tree. We are currently considering taking the couch east, and the fabled bus ride out of here that this whole fiasco was supposedly about would be in the direction south. Does that clear anything up?”

  “I still think west,” Tree said.

  Thom nodded. He realized that if a contest were held now, for the first time in his life, he would be the chosen of the three.

  “It’s doing something,” Erik said. “It’s like we’re a movement.”

  “And what do you think the political significance of carrying a couch across America would be?”

  “Other people have marches. Or, you know, hunger strikes.”

  “Yes . . . but they have a cause.”

  Erik fielded a couple of waves, smiling. Like a politician, Thom thought.

  “So all we have to do is come up with a cause. That shouldn’t be hard. Don’t you have one?”

  Thom smiled. This isn’t how it was supposed to work—first you felt the injustice, then you came up with the vehicle. But yes, he had causes, plenty of causes: environmentalism, cultural imperialism, rampant consumerism, an overstimulated, superficial culture obsessed with sensation, excessive privatization of ideas, and excessive individual privacy loss. He had causes. Some he even got on soap boxes about when they weren’t buried under the shame and heartbreak and struggle of living.

  They made it to Thurman Street. It was a busy intersection, with an on-ramp to the I-5 freeway, which led quickly to I-84. Five hundred cars passed here per hour. All of them with purpose, smog tails tracing their paths, making their mark, Thom thought, carving out their own lives, networking, connecting, all part of the interconnected system called society of which they were not. Doing what humans were born to do: to glom and herd. He should be in an office somewhere working on some company’s ecommerce engine, making loads of money. That’s what his peers were doing. An easy life, of sorts. A forgettable life. A comfortable life with habits, favorite restaurants, potlucks, and girlfriends.

  “That way is I-84.” He pointed to the right for his roommates. “Just a couple of blocks that way”—he pointed in the opposite direction—“is the Food Front co-op. If we are really going to carry a couch several days east, we’re going to need provisions.” His roommates nodded, and they began carrying the couch toward the co-op.

  “The couch wants to go this way,” said Tree.

  “It’s light this way, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t want to go the other way too,” Erik said.

  Thom rolled his eyes. “Maybe it’s just hungry.”

  At the co-op they left the couch at the front door and bought dry goods, water, snacks, and whatever else they thought they could carry and eat on the road.

  “We shouldn’t be getting such heavy stuff,” said Thom, hoarding his supply, including a sizable hunk of organic, free range, college-educated salami he hoped to conceal from his roommates.

  “We’ll put it on the couch, maestro.” Erik popped a handful of salted almonds in his mouth from the bulk bin. “The couch will carry it.”

  Thom shook his head. He could go live with his mom. He could get a huge cash advance on his credit card and try to get an apartment here.

  The newspaper at the cash register spelled out doom for the computer and internet industries. There was always a war going on, a budget crisis, an environmental disaster. Thom imagined headlines. Couch Carriers Save World.

  They regrouped at the couch and put the sacks of food on it.

  “I’ll take a turn, Tree,” said Erik.

  “How come I’m always carrying the couch and you guys are taking turns?” said Thom.

  “You’re the big guy,” said Erik.

  “But the couch isn’t heavy.”

  “That’s because you’re the big guy,” Erik sa
id with a tone reserved for patient explanations.

  Erik and Thom lifted the couch and headed back toward I-84. Within a step, Thom felt the weight again. Not a sudden weight, but an increasing downward pull, as if a giant gravity knob were being cranked up.

  “Erik, either I’m no longer the big guy or this couch is getting heavier.”

  “Probably just the food,” Erik said, not looking convinced.

  Tree nodded. “I thought so.”

  They took several more steps, and the couch became very heavy.

  Erik dropped his end, and Thom lurched to a halt. “Tell me when you’re going to put it down, nimrod. I’ve had enough of your dropping the couch.”

  “Shit shit shit!” Erik did his flailing, kicking dance. “I was going to be on the radio!”

  “Maybe it just wants to start from the coast,” Tree said.

  “Okay,” Thom said. “Let’s think for a minute, let’s be sane, let’s theorize. Let’s just for a minute take it for granted that this is a magical couch—or technology advanced to a state that we think of as magic. First of all, we’d have to admit the presence of magic in a world that is generally devoid of it.”

  “When it’s going west,” Tree added.

  “Right. Thank you, Tree. And if it is magic, and it is getting us to carry it in a certain direction, can we not also assume that it has a will? Unless we’re talking about some kind of magnetic polarization that acts on a horizontal as well as vertical basis. Horizontal movement triggers a vertical effect, which changes willy-nilly—because a minute ago we were carrying it the same direction as we tried to carry it when we headed toward Forest Park, and it was very light that time.”

  “Uh-huh,” Erik said. “Light that time.”

  “On the other hand, let’s not forget to take in the psychological effect. We’ve had very little sleep in the past twenty-four hours and a lot of shock. In the past four weeks we—at least you and me, Erik—have had very bad luck with job situations. I’ve lost my girlfriend; we lost our apartment. It could be simply how moving one direction makes us feel. We were having a good time on Twenty-third, and our brains wanted us to stay there. That’s why it was hard to pull off of that street. We were emotionally disinclined. Plus, truthfully, it’s the first activity I’ve done in a long time in which I wasn’t the only entity involved, if you don’t count CVS code repositories. We were a team, and that was fun. People’s reactions and your mouth made it funner.”