Couch

by Benjamin Parzybok

  Erik smiled at the compliment. Tree waited patiently.

  “So what I suggest is that we think positively about going out on I-84. Which might be hard. I’m finding it sort of hard myself. It’s a freeway, and we’ve got a hundred miles to go before the interview. You’re obviously not overcome, Erik. How about you, Tree?”

  “I feel like the couch wants to go the other way. West.”

  “But which direction do you want to go?”

  “I guess I want to go the direction the couch wants to go.”

  Thom closed his eyes. “Okay, but let’s assume that the couch, as an inanimate object, as most couches are, doesn’t really have a sense of direction much less a predilection for one. In which case, would you like to carry this hunk of wood and fabric out on I-84 to meet up with the journalist?”

  “But. . . . Okay.”

  “Okay, okay,” Thom exhaled and shook his fingers out. “I’m going to pretend that the journalist thought we were interesting people and wants to have another talk with us and not that she was humoring us or making fun of one of the most absurd things she’s ever heard of, and for that reason it would be interesting to talk to her again, because she’s interested in us, and therefore I’m going to will myself to want to go toward I-84.” And toward her, brain whispered.

  “Okay, Professor,” said Erik.

  “Okay, Mouth. Here I go! I’m excited about going east!” Thom awkwardly hopped up and down. “Let’s pick it up again, this time feeling happy. We are feeling happy about going toward I-84. Happy!”

  “I’ve always been happy to go that way,” Erik said.

  “Just pick up the couch,” Thom growled, aware that cars were whizzing by, aware of hopping, of arguing about which way to carry a couch.

  They bent down to pick it up, and it lifted easily.

  “Great, there we go, that was it,” Thom said, relieved he’d figured it out.

  They took several steps toward I-84, and the couch was too heavy to carry. They set it down again.

  “Honestly, this is going to make me cry,” Thom said.

  “Think the military would be interested in this?” Erik said.

  “Yeah, Erik. The military. Jesus Christ.”

  “Let’s just see where the couch wants to go,” Tree said.

  “I’m with Tree,” Thom said. “I want to find out what’s going on here.”

  “I wish I’d gotten her phone number,” Erik said. “We could have had her meet up with us the other way.” They picked up the couch and walked west up Thurman Street.

  “Yeah, she was pretty. And a journalist,” Thom said, wishing, too, a phone number were involved.

  “I don’t know, she was too . . . I don’t know, too librarian to be pretty.”

  “What? Too librarian?”

  “I could go as far as cute,” Erik said.

  “Then I get the rights to flirt if we meet her again.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m more attracted to her than you,” Thom said.

  “I think she’s pretty.”

  “Well, we won’t ever see her again. Which is good, because it doesn’t mean we’re roped into carrying this thing across America.”

  Erik shrugged. “I thought it’d be fun.”

  They walked in silence for a while, passing commercial and residential areas and getting deep into the Northwest Industrial area of Portland. The road turned into Highway 30, which curved to the north along the Columbia River and then west to Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia, and finally into Highway 101 along the Pacific Ocean. They would pass Thom’s ex-girlfriend’s house on Sauvie Island. A belt of anxiety tightened around his middle.

  “When we come to a resting spot, I want to have a good look at this thing. There may be some kind of strange gyroscopic mechanism inside. By the way, we seriously need to consider a sleeping place. It’s the middle of winter. We should have brought blankets. It’ll probably rain all night.”

  “I brought a blanket,” said Tree.

  “So did I,” said Erik.

  “Hell,” said Thom.

  A car passed and honked, two young kids in the back stared.

  The streets were deserted. They passed lots full of discarded iron parts, tin buildings with the discordant rumble of machinery inside. They sweated in their jackets.

  Thom began to dread the onset of darkness with its threat of rain and cold and nowhere to sleep. He marveled again at where he’d been twenty-four hours ago. Watching TV, his life full of anxiety and no purpose. The only difference now, he realized, was that he wasn’t watching TV. They’d reached the end of the industrial area when Thom made the decision that had been itching at the underside of his brain.

  “Hold up a second, Erik. Let’s put it down. I’ve got to find us a place to sleep tonight.” Erik and Tree looked wonderingly around the edge of the Northwest Industrial district, saw nothing but abandoned, unwelcoming areas, a small workmen’s cafe, and no shelter.

  They lowered the couch, and Thom went into the cafe, borrowed the phone, dialed an all-too-familiar number.

  Sheilene answered. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Shei. This is Thom.”

  “Thom. Where are you? I haven’t heard from you in a while.”

  “I know. It’s been a funny couple of weeks.”

  “It’s been a month. How are you?”

  “I’m not sure. I found an apartment and lost it, lost my job, and now I’m involved in the strangest thing of my life.”

  There was silence. “I wish you’d keep in touch.”

  “I know.” Thom paused. “I wasn’t feeling that great about things. I thought I’d call when things got better. You know, start off with good news.” He tried to chuckle, failed.

  “I see. So are things better now?”

  Thom thought about it. He’d never been so absolutely without plans in his life. But five minutes ago, yes, he’d felt . . . not quite happy, but intrigued at the very least. “I think maybe,” he said.

  “Hmm. So where are you now. What’s this thing?”

  “I’m actually calling to see if I can spend the night at your house.”

  “Ah. That might be kind of awkward, Thom.”

  “Well, I’ve got two friends with me, and we’re on foot coming from northwest Portland, and we’re carrying a magic couch, and I think we’re carrying it to the ocean.” Thom smiled, knowing Sheilene would approve of Thom’s display of whimsy, that for once he’d be surprising her.

  She cackled. “Sure then.” Warmth stole into her voice. “I can’t wait to hear the story. Skunk misses you.”

  Skunk was Sheilene’s black lab.

  “It’ll be a while. We won’t be there until after dark.”

  “Watch for cars.”

  “I think you’ll like my friends,” he added. One of their problems had been Thom’s lack of, and lack of interest in, friends.

  “Great. I’ll make dinner.”

  “See you soon,” he said and put the receiver in its cradle. He stared at the phone, two pieces, receiver and cradle, paired, one coming to rest on the other. They were matched, they were permanent, they fit.

  Erik and Tree had apparently decided to give Thom a rest. They picked up the couch as he came out. Thom jogged toward them and mimed jumping on the couch, and they flinched. He felt happy, and he measured his happiness. Getting back together with Shei was not an option, he knew. He could not be what she wanted, and she knew it too. But staying out on the Sauvie Island farm, wrestling with Skunk, eating Shei’s cooking, laughing with Shei as friends, this seemed suddenly all he could desire of life. Shei’s house had more feeling of home in it than he ever imagined encountering again. They came to Highway 30 and crossed to the opposite side. Trees loomed over the road. To their right was a hill covered with the wreckage of old shipping equipment, and then the slow Willamette River carrying city sludge to sea.

  Their feet and arms hurt, and their hunger grew. They felt the loneliness of the road. Darkness came and with
it a light rain. Each of them fell into the black hole of his own thoughts, the dread and misery of what they were doing occupying their consciousnesses, the lack of reasonable alternatives pushing them on. The burden they carried began to feel demanding, no longer a piece of furniture they wished to abandon but an entity that drove them on. Cars lurched past, headlights carving out the dark and leaving them blind. They became a momentary spectacle, worthy of thirty seconds of conversation in cars headed home to warm houses, food, family, the security of success.

  They came to their last out: St. John’s Bridge, a giant gothic beauty connecting Highway 30 with the northernmost part of Portland. They could walk across and be in a warm bar, stay in a hotel, be a part of the city.

  “Only about four or five miles now and we’ll be at Sauvie,” said Thom.

  The last miles were beyond effort. They were a blurred memory of rain and pain and cars, their bodies numb, their throats choking on exhaust.

  And then, like a lighthouse beam, a car illuminated the sign for the Sauvie Island Bridge.

  They turned onto the bridge, away from the cars on Highway 30, and entered into a thick Sauvie Island fog. “Only a mile more,” Thom said, and just saying this made his body ache. Each mile seemed longer than the last, so that this last one, lost in a deep fog in the dark, soaked through from rain, he could only imagine as the unending mile, where his body would finally come to rest, the Sisyphus mile, stuck in a freezing Hades. And then Skunk was barking and wagging his tail and the house glowed and Sheilene was on the porch joking around about the furniture-moving company, her muscular farmer’s frame garbed in overalls taking over Tree’s end of the couch, remarking on how light it was, what was all the complaining about?

  With the couch under cover of the front porch, she gave Thom a giant, tight hug and then to be fair embraced a speechless Erik and an unusually present Tree.

  Dinner was yams and salads and the richest of home-baked, wheat-free breads. Peas and red sauce and polenta and wine. Cheese and pie and ice cream and then a bottle of whisky and the easy laughter that comes from exhaustion. Sheilene wanted to know everything, loving the story, Thom knew, whether it was true or not. She had no problems believing anything if told by someone who believed they were telling the truth. If they’d told her the couch could fly, she’d laugh heartily and toast to flying couches and would only become bothered when someone would not believe. She was not a friend of skeptics.

  Thom and Sheilene put Erik and Tree to bed like children and stayed up late talking amiably about things not related to them. They talked about the couch, Thom letting himself, at last, be carried away into the fantasy of it, what it was, where it’d come from, what might happen.

  “I think it’s an old man,” Sheilene said, “with hollow bones and a sad heart. A sailor. You’re probably carrying him to his fishing vessel.”

  They talked about the farm, the weather, Erik and Tree. And when it was past midnight, she put her calloused hand around Thom’s wrist and led him to her bedroom. They both knew that they were going to have the good-bye they should have had, the good-bye that two lovers who still cared for each other have when they realize their futures are parting indefinitely.

  Afterward, Sheilene said, “I heard something the other day that I thought might apply to you. It was by Eduardo Galeano. Know him?”

  Thom nodded.

  “It was something like—I’m sure I’m murdering it here—Your purpose in life is to find out what your purpose in life is, and then not to let it kill you once you’ve found it.”

  “Cheery.”

  “Yeah. But you know what I’m getting at, right?”

  Thom went through the catalogue of complaints she’d registered with him over the course of their relationship. That he was stuck, that he sat at his computer all the time; that he wanted to do good things in the world but didn’t, and the weight of it was burying him; that he was dreary, a skeptic, a cynic; that he believed in nothing, that he avoided all human contact; that he was gaining weight; that he was avoiding the important political, emotional, complex human world in favor of the clean, logical, functional world of computer code, that he was becoming a drone; that he was becoming a machine.

  “Yeah,” Thom said, hoping she wouldn’t repeat any of them, knowing they were all true and that hearing them again would make them all sting. Or at least that they had been true before even that world had dropped out from beneath him.

  “Then maybe carrying a couch with those two to the end of the earth is exactly what you should do right now. For you, Thom.”

  Thom woke up several hours before dawn. He watched Sheilene sleep for a while and then quietly dressed and went to walk the property with Skunk, passing the couch on the way out, giving it a few experimental prods. Sheilene’s farm was half organic vegetables and half u-pick berries. The winter was down-time, however, and so the workload was relatively small. He cleaned up some brush and branches that she’d pruned, realizing he was sore from the day before. He checked the oil in the truck and the tractor, knowing as he checked that they’d be fine. She was more mechanically inclined than he. He walked across the neighbor’s property, and their yellow lab joined him and Skunk to the edge of the island. He watched the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers and stared across at Washington, the state he’d been born in. He picked up a rock and went over its edges with his thumb. The dogs horsed around in the river as the sun came up, biting and splashing, and he looked on the view for the last time and threw rocks as far out into the river as he could until he wept.

  Back at the house, he wandered around the downstairs. It was an early twentieth-century farmhouse, with wood floors and Sheilene’s dried-flower, rock-pile, bird-feather, pottery-bowl decorating touches everywhere. There was a beautiful old piano neither Sheilene nor he had known how to play and ancient wallpaper mismatched with newer experimental paint jobs. He went through his old office, which had turned into a makeshift library for Sheilene’s voracious reading habit. Books were piled in precarious stacks around the room. Where his desk had been, there was a large potted plant. Mysteriously, on the wall were numerous newspaper articles about Thom that he didn’t remember being there. Clippings from several years ago when Thom had had his brief moment of fame, when he’d last felt really alive.

  Thom snagged the digital camera from his bag, went to the front porch and snapped a photo of the couch. Back in his ex-office, Thom powered up his laptop and plugged into his other reality. He uploaded the photo of the couch to his website with a simple line of text: “Handmade couch of unknown origin, exhibits odd weightless tendencies while moving certain directions. Have data?” Not many people visited sanchopanchez.net. Only friends, open source geeks, and the occasional fan. But those that did usually liked a riddle and would go to absurd means to solve it.

  In the kitchen he brewed some coffee and fired up a batch of waffles and waited for the smells to rouse others. Sheilene brought her I Ching to the kitchen table, mischievously looking at Thom. Tree and Erik joined them not long after.

  “So what’s the deal with this couch?”

  “We’re carrying it across America,” Erik said, his fork raised in front of him like a saber.

  “America is the other way,” said Sheilene, jerking her thumb eastward. “The way you’re going is ninety miles of depressed, forgotten places soaked through with rain and alcoholism, and then the ocean.”

  “Oh,” said Erik. Thom noticed his mustache was well on its way and his hair looked dangerous to touch.

  “The couch is taking us somewhere,” said Tree.

  Sheilene nodded. “Where?”

  “I don’t know, but I think it’s far away.”

  “Astoria is a long way by foot,” Thom said.

  “The couch let us come here,” said Erik. He grinned. “Maybe this is where it wanted to go.”

  “This has always been a favorite stopping-off place for couches.” Sheilene smiled, and Thom glanced at her to see if there was anything to
be read in the remark.

  “Maybe it wants us to stay here.” Erik crammed a huge forkful of waffles in his mouth.

  “I don’t think so,” Tree said.

  “Oh, come on, Tree.” Erik said. “You’re just using that couch to get someplace. Where do you want to go?”

  Tree shrugged. “I’m not, really.”

  “Are either of you familiar with the I Ching?” Sheilene asked.

  “I am,” said Erik. “Ancient Chinese riddle book.”

  “Yes, it’s sort of like that,” Sheilene said. She set out three coins with square holes in their centers. “Throw them twice each.”

  She clucked or whistled with each of their throws, raised eyebrows at Thom, and, when they were done, read from the book.

  Inner Truth. Pigs and fishes.

  It furthers one to cross the great water.

  Perseverance furthers.

  Wind over the lake: the image of inner truth.

  Dense clouds, no rain from our western region.

  The movement of heaven is full of power.

  Thus the superior man makes himself strong and untiring.

  It furthers one to undertake something.

  The lake rises up to heaven.

  When she finished, no one spoke for a full minute.

  “What in the hell does all that mean?” asked Erik with obvious exasperation. “Pigs and fishes?”

  Thom giggled.

  “Well, you’ll each need to derive whatever meaning you can from it,” Sheilene said, focusing on Thom.