Thom paused, slightly open mouth full of half-chewed sourdough bread. He realized that the hardest thing to believe was that he’d be involved in anything important. That someone outside of his small circle of geeks would have anything to do with him. Chosen. When had he ever been chosen in his life? On the rare times he’d hit the ball, it had always flown heroically from the field as if shot from a cannon. But even then he was still never chosen, not even Little League, not even softball. What did ability matter—not that he had excessive sports ability by any means—when your cool ratio was a negative number? And now this? He was Thom. He was an unchosen. It had taken several decades, but he’d resigned himself to the role.
Shin was waiting for a response.
“Okay, you’re right, I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about. Tell me about the couch.”
“I know almost nothing about it. It’s probably not going to hurt you knowing nothing about it. Instinct and intuition might serve more than knowledge. It’s a bad thing, as you’ve probably gathered. At least its nature affects things badly.”
“Where are we taking it?”
“To a safe place, the only safe place.”
“Come on, man! Help me out here.”
“I don’t know where you’re taking it. Ask Tree. He might have a better idea. He wouldn’t have any names, but he might have seen it. Each of you has a specialty, and that’s Tree’s.”
“Okay, okay,” Thom said, thinking of Erik’s pet name for Tree, dreamboy. “Does the couch want us to take it a certain way? It gets lighter if we go in a certain direction.”
“Or it gets less potent. In one direction its power accumulates. In the other it disseminates.”
“What?”
“Just a theory. But it was certainly useful in getting you started.”
“Just a theory,” repeated Thom. “So what’s your job?”
“I make sure that the job gets finished. I ward off interference and make sure you keep on. I try to keep the collectors from knowing about you, and now I accompany you to the end. There may be more than one council member assigned to the couch. I’m prohibited from knowing.”
“What, so one day your teacher-lady just said three guys are going to come walking by with a couch?”
“Something like that.”
Thom finished up the plate of food, feeling tremendously better, and then realized he’d eaten wheat bread and wheat noodles and that in a very little time his stomach would be a witch’s cauldron and the air about him an airborne toxic event.
“Interference like those guys with shotguns?” Thom said. “We didn’t get much help there.”
“Sorry about that. I underestimated a little. Believe me, it’ll be far worse when you get to South America.”
“Far worse?”
“Speaking of which, be careful what goes up on your website.”
“You know about that?”
“Of course I do. The collectors know too. And encryption is certainly not going to stop them.”
The hairs on the back of Thom’s neck stood up.
“No one knows what it is, but everyone has ideas and the power of it is clear,” Shin said. “There are many objects with power associated with them, an artifact from an Egyptian tomb or an old piece of artwork that collects power as it is viewed thousands of times. We are an uninformed age, an ignorant age, and we have few objects of power that aren’t a creation of science. This is the material age, the scientific age, and much of the rest of human possibility is ignored. The couch . . . the couch is The Object. If there are things more potent, then they haven’t surfaced. I don’t think we’re supposed to know what it is, where it came from. But right now Portland is changing in the absence of the couch, and that change is spreading across North America.”
“How is it changing?” Thom tried to quell exclamations of disbelief, to stifle a sardonic smile.
“It’s too early to tell, but it’s changing positively.”
Thom shook his head. He realized that the empty cup he’d reluctantly allowed his mind to become had just begun to overflow with unbelievable things. “Okay, I think I’ve heard enough to get me started. I’m going to have to finish up on this another time.” He let the first cloud free with a drum roll. “Sorry,” Thom said. He frowned and stared at the tabletop, used to the embarrassment. “Gluten intolerant. I can’t eat wheat.”
“You should have said something. Why did you eat that?”
Yes, why? he wondered. “I don’t know,” Thom said. “Sorry.” He reddened. “Maybe we should go move the couch?”
The couch was gone. Shin raced off surprisingly quickly for someone his age, counting lifeboats on each side of the ship. Thom held his stomach and wondered what his specialty was.
Shin came back breathless. “All the lifeboats are here. I bet it’s in the sick bay.”
“In the sick bay?”
“Someone is trying to kill Erik,” he said and strode off down a hallway.
“Erik is dead!” Thom heard his own voice bursting out with exasperation, and his stomach rumbled over, filling the hallways behind them.
Shin looked over his shoulder and snapped his fingers, barely veiling a look of disgust, either for the fumes they were leaving behind or Thom’s lack of knowledge. “We just rescued Erik.”
Thom remembered reading books about people, upon hearing good news, whose hearts sung. He wondered if there were any remaining organs that weren’t working on some soliloquy.
Erik was the wrong color, and the darkness under his eyes seemed to go too far down his cheeks. He had a full, bristling mustache and seemed surprisingly thin and frail for only several days at sea, as if his body had begun to eat itself. Someone had moved him off the sick bed and onto the couch. He was as still as snow.
Shin grabbed under his arms, Thom grabbed his feet, and they moved him back to the bed. Shin took his pulse, felt his forehead, listened to his heart.
“He’s still alive. I thought the depression you said the couch causes might push the life out of him. It doesn’t put you into a coma. It takes away your will to wake. The person who moved the couch here probably knew this.”
Thom admired Erik’s mustache. Alive. The guilt seeped out of him.
Shin pointed to a beer cooler in the corner. “They spent a good while prying his hands away from that thing. He wouldn’t let go.”
“So that’s how he stayed afloat. I was trying to picture him swimming.” Thom eyed the cooler as he eyed everything now. Perhaps it was magic too? An ancient beer cooler from aliens or gods. Some Mesopotamian artifact, a casket, a trove, an ark. An ice chest, said brain.
“Move the couch to your room, keep an eye on it at all times. Someone else is here. This was a chess move, a smart one. Without Erik, the errand cannot be completed. I’m grateful they didn’t abandon ship with it, but then they would have been easy to catch. They want the couch, but ensuring you fail is their first priority.”
Thom nodded, temporarily tamping down the fear. Someone else. He sat on the bed and put his hand over Erik’s heart and left it there. He could feel the muted, slow thump. The Mouth was back.
Tree came in and sat on the bed and smiled. “I knew there was supposed to be three. We can go on now.”
Erik opened his eyes and recoiled when he saw Shin.
“Hijo de puta, qué haces, no me toques.”
Thom stared at Erik and wondered for a moment if it weren’t Erik after all but a Hispanic kid they’d picked up.
“Shh, you should rest.”
“Pinche pendejo, vas a llevar el sofá o no?”
“The sofa? Over there.”
“Te voy a matar, cabrón, sin no me dejes, voy a matarte.”
Shin sighed. “Well, his Spanish will come in handy in South America. I don’t have the faintest idea what he’s saying.”
Thom looked nervously at Tree. “Is he okay?”
Tree shrugged.
“Erik,” Thom said, “can you speak English?�
�
Erik’s eyes did a focusing dance, skittering between Tree and Thom. He raised his head, and then his eyes gave up, rolled back under the lids, and he passed out.
“Ah,” Thom said. “I guess not. Is there something we can do for him?”
“I’m going to go chat with the medic to see if he knows anything about the couch. Other than that just let him rest. Talk to him when he’s awake. See if you can bring him back.”
A week passed on the ship. Thom’s waistline kept on diminishing as he relied on Shin’s simple resources for wheat-free diets, and from carrying the couch before that. The roommates were together again. Even though Erik mysteriously hadn’t found his English tongue despite the ship doctor’s fastidious attention, Thom and Tree used Carlos, a Panamanian crewmate, to translate. Thom took it as an opportunity to learn some Spanish, finding that he could ask Erik in English and he’d reply in Spanish.
“Teach me some good phrases, Erik.”
Erik was still confined to bed by ship’s orders. He’d passed from hypothermia into a fever and was only now beginning to resemble his old self, minus his native tongue.
“Lo que sea mejor por el país.”
“What does that mean?” Thom asked Carlos.
“He means, what is there that is better for the country.”
“Whatever is best for the country,” Thom said and repeated the Spanish phrase. He wrote it into a little notebook he’d taken to carrying around. He wrote everything he had trouble believing into the notebook. “I guess that’s useful, Erik. I was thinking of stuff more like, Where’s the bathroom? How much does this cost?”
Erik smiled. “Mis labios estan cerrados.”
“Mis labios estan cerrados,” said Thom slowly, laying a thick, deep-throated, syllable-slurring accent across the phrase. “What does that mean?” He turned to Carlos.
“My lips are closed.” Carlos shrugged.
“Erik? How’s this going to help me?”
Erik bit his lip, and his eyes twinkled mischievously. “Son muy buenas, muy importantes, estas oraciones.” Erik spoke toward Carlos. “Es cierto, él no tiene la oportunidad de aprender español que podría usar antes de que llegemos. Entonces, le enseño unas cosas que pueda decir. Es mejor que parezca misterioso que tonto.”
Carlos smiled nervously toward Thom.
“Aquí es la mas importante,” Erik said. “Puedes usarla en cualquier situacion: Pero mi perro no tiene dientes.”
Thom looked at Carlos, a pained expression on his face in expectation of what Erik had said.
“He said this one is most important.” Carlos bit down on a smile. “My dog has no teeth.”
“Erik! That’s the most important?”
Erik nodded vigorously.
Thom practiced his three new Spanish phrases until he’d mastered them, mouthing them to himself as he wandered around the ship’s metal hallways, staring off to sea, thinking of his mother, Clare, Sheilene. Thinking of the city of Portland receding into the distance like some passed comet.
His mind fixated on Jean, their forsaken journalist. There had been energy there in the way she seemed to speak only to him.
Come to S. America, Thom wrote her, Erik is alive! This is a story, join us. He sweated in the computer chair, tapped on the desk, wrote: I’ll need a salsa partner.
Thom rarely saw Tree that week. Whenever he went looking for him, he was either sleeping or having hushed conversations with Shin. And so he spent the week feeling the weather warm as they traversed ever farther south. The itch of paranoia always at his back, he expected their mysterious pursuers to loom like a police car in the rearview mirror. He obsessively checked on Erik. He sized up crew members to find out if one of them was a “them,” as Shin had said. The one who’d moved the couch.
to: [email protected]
from: [email protected]
Thom,
Obviously you are playing with me. But if you will sell the couch, I will pay the 100k. Yes, it’s an absurd amount of money, and shame on you for being so greedy. But I want it, and I don’t want to play any more games. I’ll transfer the money this moment, give me the word.
-dem
————————————-
to: [email protected]
from: [email protected]
You have no idea what you’re doing or what you’re playing with. A ship is coming to meet yours, hand over the couch or face the consequences.
————————————-
to: [email protected]
from: clare@nyc_library.ny.state.gov
subject: Double Header
Hey boyo, remember that historian I mentioned, I told him about your couch deal, and he’s become extremely interested and went weak in the knees. He’s doing some further research but I showed him the letter I wrote to you and he thinks that perhaps several of those were the same couch! That is, maybe the wizard barbarian king guy had a hold of Adam and Eve’s couch, etc. Who knows, who knows, but thought I’d pass it along. If you’ve really got that couch, you seem to be tapped into a real mystery. He’s going to try to get me something more substantial and mentioned wanting to meet you. But truthfully he’s a little bit of an oddball and I got concerned over his level of interest . . . I told you him were going to S. America thinking that would discourage him. Loved the photos you sent, how did you get on a boat again? Your friends sound nice. So you’ve got a possible interest? Tell me all about her. Yes, I’ve heard of a language being jarred out of somebody’s memory by an incident, so I’m going to guess he’s not just playing with you. Just count yourself lucky that it’s a language he knows and not one he’s making up. In no way does being on a freighter in the Pacific seem to be heading this way.
love, clare
—————————————
to: [email protected]
from: [email protected]
subject: Re: false alarms and drowned monkeys
Hola Thom! You’re going to S. America then . . . that’s a bit out of my range, normally. I’ve been talking to my editor, though, and it looks like there’s a chance I might just make it. We’ve talked about the possibility of 4 articles with vague S. American leanings, plus yours, plus adding in some vacation time. Why am I doing this? I don’t know, I honestly don’t. You really think you have a story? What have you got for me? Or? If you think you can actually keep one of your promises, though, let’s meet up somewhere. How about we meet in Guayaquil at the Museum Nahim Isaías Barquet around noon. Their website says you can see genuine shrunken heads. What do you think? I get there the day before you.
Erik lives!
-Jean
(she-who-would-learn-salsa)
—————————————
to: [email protected]
from: [email protected]
subject: south american rendezvous
I’ve got a whole three Spanish phrases now, so I’m ready to tackle the southern continent. Yes, you should come. Yes, we have a story. Yes we’ll stumble over each others’ toes to a latin beat. There’s all kinds of excitement here. We’ve got death threats! Resurrections! It now seems that I can promise you the fast-lane of journalism. I’m trying to pretend that I’d like you to come down and meet up with us solely because “it’s such an interesting story.” I’m failing. But I understand if your motivation is solely journalistic.
Meeting place sounds superb—my brain has outgrown its britches and some shrinkage would do me some good. Onward, to Guayaquil!
-Thom
Thom stood at the ship’s rail, watched the constant undulating sine wave of the water. A hundred thousand dollars for the couch, a death threat, a couch causing trouble throughout the ages, and Jean, not the usual assortment of email. Breathe in Jean, exhale fear-dread-lust.
Thom, Tree, and Shin sat around the kitchen table snacking on carrot sticks and talking about plunging a lifeboat in the Pacific with the couch aboard and setting off separ
ately.
“What about your council thing, can’t they do anything?” Thom said.
“We’re not exactly organized for speed. We’ve been around for a long, long time, and to just go send a rescue boat out in the middle of the ocean before the bad guys arrive is not exactly our specialty. I have to tell my teacher, she tells hers, and so on, the main council might not even hear about it for weeks. We’re, ah, trying to do some reorganization, but in the meantime we’re a bit on the Luddite side, sorry.”
Thom exhaled in disgust. “When you guys want to come into the present, let me know and I’ll set up an email server for you. For crying out loud.”
“We could just put the couch back in the water and float off on that, see where we end up,” Tree said. He opened and closed his pliers—they looked like a fish trying to breathe on land. He had run out of wire, and his hands suffered for it.
“The last thing I want to do is fall asleep on that couch in the ocean again,” Thom said. “That’d be it for us.” Thom’s stomach had given him a week of peace, with Shin’s wheat-free cooking, and very little stress until now.
“Hey hey! I’m alive!” Erik bellowed from the top of the stairs. It was the first time they’d heard Erik speak English in almost two weeks. His upper lip glowed waxily with newly shaven nakedness.
“Erik!” Thom yelled. He got up and wrapped him up in a hug without thinking, and Erik cringed.
“Good to see you too, big guy.”
“Mi perro no tiene dientes!” Thom hollered proudly. “I thought you forgot English. I thought I was going to have to learn another damn language just to talk to you.”
“Yeah, funny that. It felt like I was speaking the right language.”
Couch Page 15