II. Undertow
When Thom was young, and before he’d become a giant, he’d been the victim of torturing in school. A gang of four boys delighted in making him miserable, and he always managed to say something odd or backward or strange to elicit their violence. Once, the cruelest time, they threw him down, one of them sitting on his head, smashing his ear into the ground, his head feeling like it would collapse from the weight, another holding his legs, the other two throwing him punches in the gut until he puked.
Thom woke with these same four boys, his cheek pressed against his own puke, his head set to burst from pressure. Every part of him hurt. But there were no boys, just a bare lightbulb, wool blankets, a tiny room that spun and bucked, a terrible smell emanating from him. He looked up, saw the boards of a top bunk above him.
Twisting his way out of the bunk without dragging himself through his own puke he managed to get his legs out onto the floor. He waited for the spinning to slow, holding back whatever else his stomach wanted to shove out of him.
He stabilized himself, trying to find the strength in his legs, then launched himself up and outward. He slammed his head against the top bunk and landed on the floor on his knees, gripping his head. He was alive, he thought. This must be alive, only being alive hurt this much.
He stayed where he was; no movement was the best movement. The room rocked enough for both of them. He needn’t add his own reckless motion. He was saved . . . was he saved? He thought of Erik’s last vault off of the couch. Had he held his arm up to be saved? They were dead. They had thought they were dead, and now he was alive. Erik—the memory of the drowning brought on a series of dry heaves. When it passed, he rocked back onto his feet, gripping the floor, one hand in the mess there, and then the bottom bunk. With his hand clutching the top bunk he brought himself to a standing position. An amusement ride: Tea Cups, the Hammer, the Octopus. He was naked, and there was nothing in the room that would clothe a body. The top bunk was empty, with no sign of anyone having slept there. A hollow uncertainty in his chest, a dread. Had he been the only one who made it? A distant memory of a push. He was alive, his body convulsed with shivers. Thank God it hadn’t been him, his brain said and Thom silenced it. Erik was at the bottom of the sea and he was alive, and he felt sick and stupid and like he’d won the lottery. He was a survivor.
The room was white, and the walls were made of metal—maybe it was the afterlife after all. He gripped the bolted-on iron frame of the bunk bed and let the room’s movement take him. The room really was rocking, he realized with immense relief. He was at sea, not just the sea of his hangover. The couch. The valuable, troublesome couch. Why hadn’t they sold the damn thing? He stayed there with his fists fastened around the frame for an eternity, eyes on the closed doorway, unsure of what a next move might be, and with little will to move at all.
The door opened and an older man Thom vaguely recognized entered, a giant, angular beak of a nose on him. The man was on a TV show maybe, an advertisement, he’d been selling pain medicine or vitamins for the elderly. The man smiled, carefully stepped around the watery mess on the floor, and set a small stack of folded clothes on the top bunk. He wore an old baseball cap at an angle that made him look sloppy despite his handsomeness, a white line cook’s jacket, and a destroyed pair of tennis shoes. Half-a-dozen days’ growth of silver beard covered his jaw. Outside a man in overalls walked by the entrance and glanced in. Thom felt exposed, but the best he could do was to grip the bed frame more tightly.
“Good to see you up. We’ve been a little worried. They call me Shin. I’m the ship’s cook.” The man didn’t hold out his hand. “You’re Thom?”
Thom nodded, said nothing. The movement of his head was painful. He was sure some bastard had pushed his eyes back in their sockets six inches while he was sleeping.
“Take your time. If you want to shower, there’s one across the hall, and second door on the right will take you down to the dining room. Come down when you’re ready. You’ll need to get rehydrated.” He handed over the water bottle he carried, then reached into his pocket. “Here’s a pill that will help with seasickness.” He reached into another pocket and fished out several more pills. “These will help with the hangover.”
Thom tried to nod again but only managed a prolonged blink. He held out his hand to take the pills. Fought a temptation to run out and hurl himself overboard.
Shin smiled kindly, touched his brow good-bye and left.
Thom stood and tried to make up his mind. A hot shower seemed like the best chance for a resurrection. He wondered if he could manage to get dressed before heading across the hall and thought not.
Thom clutched the stack of clothes to his chest and opened the door to his cabin. The light seared his eyes, and he lurched out and caught his toe on the tall threshold. Off-balance with the movement of the ship and his own internal mechanism, he plowed head first into the door across the hall, which opened with the force his head dealt it. He brought himself to a halt against a toilet stall and yelled out, the folded clothes falling to the floor.
Thom felt better clean, hot water bringing back circulation and washing away saltwater and sweat. He hadn’t showered since Sheilene’s house, which felt like another lifetime. How would he tell Sheilene that Tree and Erik had drowned? He put his head against the shower stall with the hot water beating on his back and let himself moan without caring who heard, let the sound fill up the tile bathroom with echo.
Dressed, he stood at the edge of the ship. A giant red shell in the water, a freighter. He was in a rear tower that rose out of a long cargo bay, giant doors opening into who knows what. They were heading south. Thom thought about the movement that would take him over the edge, left hand on the metal rim, a quick gymnastic jump to launch his body into the largest of graves, a great watery hole. He wavered on the edge, thought about the immediate physical relief it would bring, traced the motions in his mind, the gulping of water into the lungs.
Turning away, he saw it propped against a white wall, a shallow pool of water around it. Orange threadwork and a high back. It was still with him, his curse.
After he’d mentally buried him, seeing Tree alive and drinking coffee across from Shin in the ship’s dining room caused an involuntary squeak to issue from Thom’s throat. Tree stood up and shook his hand. Thom pulled him into a fierce hug and tried to get his language back.
“Tree! I thought . . .”
Tree nodded. He had deep rings under red eyes, a bruised, starved look about him.
“We made it.” Tree smiled. “I knew a ship would pick us up.”
“Erik?” he looked about. Perhaps he could not be trusted; he’d already killed off Tree. He was willing to forfeit his take on reality in the hope that another was more optimistic. “Erik?” he repeated.
Tree stared at him blankly, and for the briefest of moments Thom wondered if Erik were someone he’d dreamed up.
“Erik’s not here,” said Tree. “They only found you and me and the couch. He must have fallen off. I . . . I thought maybe you knew.”
Thom nodded and sat down, aware of Shin, trying to act reasonable. Trying to act like he knew how to deal with situations like these. He was at a table in the kitchen. People sit at tables. It was a cramped affair, everything fastened down, pans with Velcro straps across them to keep from banging about in bad weather. His stomach fired off several internal geysers so that he felt the pressure against his belt cruelly. He looked down at his gut. How did it find cause to agitate? he wondered. There’s nothing in there. Conspiring stomach.
“Erik drowned,” he said finally. “I held out my arm . . . it was dark . . . and he never took it. We had been drinking.”
Shin nodded. “I’m sorry.”
Thom put his hands over his eyes, the memory too fresh. The line between Erik being there just last night and now, simply, just not being—it was unclear, too sudden, too strange. One of the first laws of physics was that matter cannot be destroyed, only changed. But, the com
plete nonexistence of Erik defied this law. His shell of a body bumped along the sand at the bottom of the sea, but where was the rest of him, the voice, the action?
Shin cleared his throat. “The captain wants to talk to you. I’m afraid it looks like you both are going to South America as we don’t have time to stop.” Shin waited while Thom digested the news. “Can I fix you something to eat?”
Thom nodded. Anywhere was fine with him. Take me to the end of the earth, he thought. He resigned himself to this dark undertow that had taken over his life, no matter which direction he struggled in, a greater malevolent force seemed to be pulling him deeper into its own ocean, literally and figuratively.
Shin served them scrambled eggs and toast, and Thom ate the wheat toast to punish himself, tore into it ravenously, anticipating the havoc it would cause in his stomach later. He didn’t want to feel well. How much of his own subconscious was involved in the creation of that undertow? he wondered. After years of stagnancy and inaction, was he responsible for this upheaval? He felt slightly better after eating, and for the first time focused on Shin.
And then he saw, a puzzle piece fit into place, his brain, the solver, exultant, the fear of conspiracy blooming. “You’re . . . you’re the Goodwill guy!”
Shin chuckled. “Yes, I am the Goodwill guy. Also your apartment-building owner, among other things.”
“What the hell are you doing here? You”—he jabbed his finger at Tree—“goddamn well knew it was the Goodwill guy.”
“Well, I’ve been up for hours,” said Tree. “We’ve been talking.”
“It’s your fault, you bastard.” Thom stood up, towering close to the low ship ceiling. “If you’d taken the damn couch in the first place, none of this would have happened.” Thom reached out and grabbed Shin’s shirt and pulled him toward him.
“Well, looks like we’re feeling better.” A hardened voice with the resonance of command came from the doorway. A handsome man in his fifties dressed in blue jeans and a sweater walked toward them, thick gray hair needing a cut wind-whipped about his head.
“I’m Robert.” He held out his hand toward Thom. “I’d recommend unhanding my cook.”
“This man is a fraud,” Thom said. “He works at the Goodwill in Portland, and he’s responsible for all of this.” He loosened his grip on Shin.
The captain laughed heartily. “I’d like to hear this! Seems to me you were the bloke adrift at sea with your living room. Truly, that was one of the oddest things I’ve ever seen. I even called in to see if there’d been floods. I imagined people getting swept from out of their living rooms by torrents of water!” The captain fetched himself a cup of coffee and sat at the table.
“He . . .” Thom had no idea where to begin. His position didn’t look very strong. “We tried to bring our couch to the Goodwill,” he said, already resigned to not being believed, “and he wouldn’t take it. And he was at another place, and that was weird, and he wouldn’t take it there either, and so we were just trying to get rid of it, and that’s how . . . it all started.” Thom felt vaguely like Erik, wondered if he’d inherited part of Erik as the last one to see him.
Robert nodded, running his fingers through his hair. “I see.” Trying not to smile. “Shin,” he said, “when’s the last time you left the ship?”
“Japan,” Shin said. “About three months ago.”
Thom looked at Tree for backup, but Tree had his pliers and wire out, twisting a ship into shape. That’ll be the first thing I throw overboard, Thom thought, those damn wire and pliers, right before Tree, and then Shin, and then myself.
“It’s okay,” Shin looked at the captain, “I don’t mind. . . . There were originally three of them.”
“Ah,” said the captain, his face going grave. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry to hear that. Losing someone at sea is the hardest loss.”
Thom nodded and stared at his feet.
“Of course, a couch isn’t the most seaworthy vessel. It’s very lucky both of you are alive. I didn’t even know couches floated.”
Thom practiced more nodding, ashamed, his head still a coconut, the water beating painfully about his brain.
“I wasn’t even going to take the couch on board, but Shin convinced me that the crew might enjoy a couch. At any rate, I’d like to hear the whole story sometime. We’ll have plenty of time in the weeks ahead. Perhaps Shin has mentioned to you that I can’t spare the time to take you to shore? Sorry about that, just the way it is, I’m late already and didn’t expect to be picking up living rooms. South America wants televisions, and the company wanted me there two weeks ago.”
Thom looked up at the captain, knowing he owed him something. “Thanks for picking us up,” he said. “I don’t mean to seem ungrateful.”
“Not a problem,” Robert said.
“You didn’t happen to see a laptop on the couch, did you?”
The captain laughed. “Yes. It reeked of beer. I gave it to our computer guy to air out. We’ve got a computer room upstairs in the meantime if you want. Probably you ought to write your families and let them know not to send the coast guard in search of you. And of course, it’s your job to notify the other fellow’s family.”
Tree finished the twisting and sculpting of his ship and handed it to the captain.
“Isn’t she a beauty.” The captain admired it from all sides. Tree had fashioned an eight-inch-long intricate skeleton of the ship. “I’ll take it as fare for passage.”
The captain left, promising to have dinner with them, and Thom glared at Shin.
“Sometimes things make less sense when they’re explained,” Shin said. “But a lack of understanding does not take away from their importance.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that my destiny is as tied to that couch as yours.”
Thom gawked at him. “What!?”
“Just that it’s my duty to see the couch gets to where you’re taking it.”
“How did you fool the captain into thinking you hadn’t left the ship?”
“I haven’t left the ship. I haven’t been off since Japan.”
“But you just fucking told me you were the Goodwill guy!”
“I was. I was him too. Sometimes things make less sense when they’re explained.”
Thom turned in exasperation to Tree, who shrugged. “Aren’t you going to say anything? Doesn’t this seem weird to you?”
“I don’t really think about it much.”
“He doesn’t really think about it much,” said Thom. He grabbed a handful of hair on his head and squeezed. “He doesn’t really think about it.”
“I realize that this all seems a bit out of the normal, but the truth is that there is an aquifer of abnormal just beneath the surface of the normal. Usually it doesn’t come to the surface. You just happen to be a crossover. So am I. And you’ve been given a duty.”
Thom felt cornered in nonsense. He could have counted on Erik for backup, at least a reasonably startled expression. His intestines contracted, sharp pains echoed through his lower gut, the air filled with gas. He remembered hearing that the most important skill for a person in the information-heavy age was the synthesis of information. He was used to looking at hundreds of websites a day and knowing within seconds the validity or importance of the information, simply by the tone or construction. But this? He couldn’t even get a foothold on what he was hearing. Shin’s eyes were watering, possibly from the gas. Thom needed to escape, escape into something nonhuman for an hour or two. Tree had gotten up and seemed to be inspecting pans in the corner of the room farthest from Thom. He’d go to the computer lab, barricade the damn door. He’d find his computer. Shin seemed to be waiting for some comment. More gas welled up about him, and Thom realized he had to find a bathroom. “How glorious,” he said to Shin and sprinted toward the stairs. “I’m a furniture mover. Of the third kind!”
After some time in the bathroom, Thom found his way to the computer lab, passing various crewmates amo
ng whom he held a certain amount of fame. They either wisecracked about floating sofas or looked at him with obvious regard for attempting such a foolhardy act. Those who had heard about Erik gave condolences, shared their own stories.
The “computer guy” was in the lab with Thom’s laptop, and after the initial formalities, Thom realized he was one of the straight-laced, clean-cut, socially awkward computer guys with fixations on order. He handed over the laptop and vacated the lab, and Thom felt grateful that the computer industry was speckled with those types. The laptop smelled vaguely of beer. It made him queasy, but it worked fine.
He plugged the laptop into the ship’s network and spent a frustrating hour working on a five-line email to Sheilene.
Sheilene,
There’s little other way to say this. We somehow ended up at sea on top of the couch, got lost . . . Erik drowned. We’re now picked up on a ship and heading for South America. Tree is okay. We’re all stunned and mourning the loss of Erik. Sorry to break the news to you like this. I have no idea how to get a hold of his parents, I’m trying.
Couch Page 13