Couch

by Benjamin Parzybok

  “How come you know Spanish?” Tree said.

  “Oh . . . I’ll tell you all about it sometime, dreamboy. Alrighty! What’s going on here? Why’s everybody looking so glum? Missed me, I reckon. Shin, I’ve heard all about you now. No hard feelings even if I don’t trust you farther than I could throw you.” Erik reached out his hand.

  “Thanks, Erik.” Shin shook Erik’s hand. “I’m flattered.”

  “Death threats,” Thom said.

  “What about them?”

  “We’ve got them.”

  “Oh boy, we’re really in a movie now. But what are they going to do, send missiles out?”

  “They’re sending a ship.” Shin adjusted his baseball cap, and a shock of silver hair stuck out at an angle. “We have no idea when they’ll get here or how strong they’ll be, and I can’t really tell the captain. We’re not supposed to talk about the couch at all to people who don’t know about it, for one, and secondly, to him you all are stowaways. He’s got his job to think about and would hand you over in a minute if the boat seemed authoritative.”

  “Well, handing over the couch sounds right nice to me.” Erik put one leg over the bench seat on the table and sat, “I’ve already had a whole load of fun. Looking for a stand-up job in Portland sounds just fine.” He pared several carrot sticks down to nothing like a chipmunk.

  Thom let out a deep sigh and went through the various possibilities for what the couch might be, watching Shin to see if he would reveal belief in one theory over another. Thom realized he was in the quest until the end. He neglected to tell Erik that someone had offered a hundred thousand dollars for the couch.

  “Well, geez,” said Erik. “That’s quite a story. What do I believe?”

  “This is something I can tell you,” Shin said. “Since you’ve left with the couch, people in Portland are sitting on their own couches less.”

  Erik spent the next four minutes guffawing. “You’re delusional, old man. What, you think we’re carrying King Couch or something?”

  “Yes.”

  Erik guffawed some more. “Why aren’t you guys laughing? Can’t I have some solidarity here?” He looked at Thom. “Come on, you’re Mr. Science Guy.”

  “Well it’s kind of different for me now. There are too many little things that add up. And I just got a death threat, Erik. It tends to make you believe that something rather serious is going on.”

  “Doesn’t mean you can’t laugh about it a little. People in Portland are sitting on their couches less? How do you survey that? Isn’t that one of the funniest things you’ve ever heard?”

  “I guess so,” Thom said.

  Shin smoothed the front of his white chef jacket and smiled. “But what that means is that for perhaps the first time in their lives, people are noticing what’s going on around them. They’re being released from a spell, they’re leaving their TVs, they’re leaving their houses, they’re paying attention. They’re taking a look, really, at what humanity has fallen to.”

  “I’m convinced,” Thom said, a chill traveling up the back of his neck. He noticed Erik staring at him with disbelief. If only Erik had been there a week before, they could have stood up to the weirdness together, but with a week to himself Thom had refashioned himself into a hero. “We need a plan,” he said. “We need to get off the ship as soon as possible. How far are we from Ecuador?”

  “We’re close, maybe a day’s journey.”

  “That means we’re off the coast of Colombia somewhere,” Erik said. “My dad lives there. I’m almost home.”

  “Lives there?”

  “Yeah.” Erik raised both hands in quote marks and said with drama. “He’s a terr-or-ist.”

  “A guerilla?”

  Erik nodded. “Not the group who does the kidnappings. They’re just plain, old-fashioned, unsuccessful peace-and-justice fighters. Socialists. That old shit. You know.”

  “That’s why you speak Spanish.”

  “We moved there when I was eight. I’m not sure where my mom is. She wasn’t all gung-ho about the guerilla life. She might be in Ecuador. I heard from her several years ago when she lived in Quito.”

  “I take it you don’t get along with them too well,” said Thom.

  “Not so much. I rather wanted a nice North American childhood. I ran away when I was sixteen and made it back to the States. Had to go wetback with a coyote across the Mexican-U.S. border, just like everybody else, because my parents burned all our U.S. identification. They hate the States.”

  “Damn,” Thom said. “I guess my childhood was cinchy.”

  Shin slapped the tabletop. “Talk about it later. We need a plan now.”

  In the moment of silence afterward they heard the engine’s note change, and a panic rose in all of them. Shin spoke with furious speed. “Go grab the couch and make sure you’re on the opposite side of the ship from wherever the oncoming ship is. I’ll try to talk them out of it, but you may have to jump overboard and stay out of sight. They’ll probably spot you anyway.”

  “This is fun.” Erik grabbed another fistful of carrots. “I just learned how to speak English again, and now I’m getting back in the drink on the couch.”

  Shin snapped his fingers at Erik, and he shut up. The four raced upstairs. From the deck they saw a smaller, armed ship approaching. “Colombian coast guard,” Shin yelled. “Go!”

  The couch was incredibly light. They pulled it around to the side of the ship opposite the coast guard and considered the prospect of hurling themselves the twenty-five feet down to the water.

  “What if it’s just, you know, some coast guard guys?” Erik said.

  “We should jump now,” Tree said. “I know it. This is the time we jump.”

  “It would suck to jump for nothing,” Thom said. “I don’t feel like getting wet.” The sun beat down on the ship, and the metal of the rail burned to the touch. With the speed cut, the wind was gone, and everything began to sweat and steam. He wondered how these things worked. Did the coast guard get on the ship, or did they just yell from where they were? The water below frothed around the hull. How did they know they wouldn’t be churned up and spit out by the propeller? What about sharks?

  “Let’s listen for a second, Tree.” He pushed down on the end of the couch that Tree was trying to maneuver over the railing. Tree gave him the driven, wild-eyed look that seemed to haunt his face more and more, like he’d begun to fade—become a ghost, only inhabiting this world peripherally. He gave Erik a keep-a-watch-over-Tree look and stole over to where he could see the coast guard boat. To his surprise, four well-armed men were already on board. A great fear crept into him. He started to turn back, to say throw it overboard, even though they’d certainly be found, but something in Shin’s voice stopped him. Shin and the captain were speaking to the armed men. Shin looked like a lackey in his cook’s outfit among the uniformed men. Thom could just barely make out the words.

  “We’re going to search your ship until we find it,” one of the uniformed men said. He was obviously the leader. He spoke English without an accent and had blond cropped hair under a coast guard hat. His pistol was drawn.

  “Of course you are,” Shin said. “But we’re not carrying arms. We’re carrying televisions.” Thom heard a kindness in Shin’s voice he hadn’t heard before, like he was speaking to a grandson he was proud of.

  “We’re looking for a couch,” the leader said with annoyance. “I never mentioned anything about arms.”

  “Of course, you’re right, but if you’ll come with me you’ll see that our cargo is full of televisions. This is a peaceful ship of commerce.”

  Thom could feel that something was at work, and for a moment he wondered if the ship were carrying arms. He saw the leader’s brow knit together. His eyes focused on his pistol and then jerked straight again.

  “We’re not looking for arms,” the man said, but there was a questioning lilt to his voice.

  “You wouldn’t want them to fall into the hands of the rebels,” Shin said
. “I understand. Please feel free to have a look at our cargo. You’ll find there isn’t a gun on board.”

  The leader nodded, resignation in his posture, as if he’d been caught stealing candy.

  “I’m sorry that you have to go. Perhaps when we come back through you can stay for dinner.”

  The leader nodded again and holstered his pistol. The men climbed over the side and down a ladder out of Thom’s sight. A few minutes later, the coast guard ship pulled away from the freighter. Thom saw for the first time that far away in the distance, through a haze, there were juts of land sticking up.

  “You sure handled them well,” Shin said to the captain. “It’s strange they would come looking for arms on a licensed freighter.”

  “It sure is.” The captain jumped to life. “I don’t like armed men boarding my ship. I’m going to call this in to the company.” The captain turned and left.

  Thom approached Shin from behind the wall where he’d been hiding. “They were looking for arms?”

  “They were looking for you.” Shin had a troubled look.

  Thom paused, confused, a memory that couches had been talked about slowly surfacing from some depth.

  “I talked them out of it, but the main fellow was difficult. He had training. Not enough, but some. He suspected. We’ve got about forty-five minutes to an hour. He’ll be back, and he’ll know what he’s dealing with this time.”

  “You . . . did something with your voice,” Thom said, feeling a new awe for Shin.

  “Schoolboy’s trick. I don’t have time to teach it to you now, but it’s easy to overcome if you know how and you’ve practiced. I should have been teaching you some things all week, but I assumed I would be going with you. Now I see I’ve got to stay. Look, we need to get you out of here. Let’s get a lifeboat ready. We’ll slip it over the side, and you’ve got to go like hell.”

  “Teach me how to avoid the voice thing.”

  “There’s no time.”

  “But I want to learn.” Here was something else, something new, another magic. “It’s just like—hey, it’s just like—”

  “Well where do you think Tolkien got it?”

  “No—Obi Wan Kenobi!”

  “We don’t have time for this.”

  “But what—” Thom tried to find a starting place for the enormous number of questions he had, “is it some kind of vocal frequency or—”

  “It’s nothing. Alright, quickly. I’ll teach you how to ignore it. I’m going to convince you to lie down. To stop me, focus on something around you, and repeat its name over and over until I stop speaking. Got it?”

  Thom nodded and stared at Shin’s ugly, cooking-stained tennis shoes and repeated his newly learned Spanish word for “shoe.”

  “You’d feel so much better lying down, Thom,” Shin said. “You should take it easy on yourself.”

  Zapato zapato zapato zapato zapato, Thom said to himself.

  “Your knee would stop hurting if you just rested a little.”

  A sharp pain coursed through Thom’s knee and his teeth felt like he was chewing on aluminum. He repeated furiously, Zapato zapato zapato zapato zapato.

  “You’re so tired, your knee hurts, rest cures all. What a nice place to lie down you’ve chosen.”

  Zapato. Thom did feel tired. Zapato. All this running about, worrying about couches, and what with his bad knee. He knelt and put his hand behind himself to ease back.

  “Thom! I haven’t got time for this now.”

  Panic surged through Thom, and he remembered the coast guard was coming back, and then remembered zapatos, and he was lying down. “Holy crap!” Thom said. “How’d you do that?”

  “You’ve got to practice, only focus on one thing. Come on, let’s go.”

  Thom followed Shin in a daze, still fighting the urge to lie down. He’d lost all sense of time and was surprised to see Erik and Tree still struggling with the couch—Tree trying to push it over, Erik holding it back, the two bickering. The image looked like something he’d dreamed about weeks ago though he knew he’d just left the scene for a few moments.

  “Tree,” Shin said. “Stop.” The two stopped as if frozen and put the couch back onto the deck. “Use a lifeboat, for God’s sake.”

  The three of them looked excitedly up at the orange, spaceshiplike, covered lifeboat anchored to the side of the ship.

  “We can’t use that,” Shin said. “They’ll notice that missing. There’s an old ship’s boat below. I’ve got to go buy us twenty minutes with the motor cut. I’ll be right back.”

  They hauled the boat up from below, a six-person aluminum affair that had been used mostly for sport and fooling around. When they ran across crew members, Shin would proclaim, “We’re going fishing!” And by the time they reached the railing and were lowering the boat down to the waterline, Erik and Tree were excited about the fishing trip and Thom was repeating zapato to himself like a mantra.

  They managed, with not a little hassle and jostling, to lower first Erik and then the couch onto the rowboat. They set it crosswise, where it hung precariously over each side. Erik organized the boat while Shin, Tree, and Thom ran around gathering up gear, getting Thom’s laptop, and getting ready to set out. At the last minute Shin came up with a motor and a five-gallon tank of gas. Shin worked his voice for interested crew members who came to have a look. They went away believing they had important business elsewhere, and occasionally Tree would wander off with them, looking for his important business until Shin called him back.

  “The voice is a real pain sometimes,” Shin said. He lowered a box of hastily packed foodstuffs down to Erik. “It’s like herding cats. The mind thing is better, but I can only do one at a time, and I can’t be doing other stuff at the same time. What you need to know is any time you feel a seed of suspicion, keep focused. Practice your focus all the time. You’ll only get a second where you feel like someone is telling you something very strange, and then the voice will take you over. Sometimes you’ll have a physical reaction,” he shrugged. “It’s different for everyone. My toes hurt when I hear the voice.”

  Thom nodded, now wary of anything. Pazato pazato, he said to himself for good measure. Was that the word for shoe? “You can’t come with us?”

  “I’ve got to deal with the coast guard when they come back. I’ll catch up.”

  Thom felt a pinch of fear: alone again with nothing but the couch and the water. And then they were all in the boat with Erik in control of the motor, Tree in the very front, and Thom wedged uncomfortably against the couch. Shin waved encouragingly while the anxiety of being in a rowboat in the Pacific Ocean swelled over them. They had no idea where they were going. Only Tree had a vague direction in mind. Before they’d left, Shin had pointed to where he thought they were on a small map of South America. The plan was that Tree would point the way, under the assumption that he had some internal navigator, and that they would work it out as they went.

  They were quiet. The small gas motor a tiny bee buzzing them onward. They kept an eye on the distant speck of the coast guard, watched the freighter diminish. Water bounced off the sides of the boat and wet the underside of the couch.

  Occasionally Tree would urgently point and Erik would roll his eyes and bring the front of the boat around. Thom busied himself with going through their foodstuffs, passing around potato chips, and then sodas, and then raisins, and then whatever else would help pass the time. In not too long, if they were not killed by the coast guard or swallowed by sharks, if they were not marooned or capsized, if the sky did not fall or the earth come up to swallow them, if the couch did not make them sleeping beauties or decide it wanted to go back home, they would be in a foreign country. The only foreign country Thom had ever been to was Canada, and even there he’d felt culture shock. The money, the walk signs for crosswalks, the strange food, even the pigeons had seemed different. Cooing in some northern dialect. He’d gone around in a paranoid daze, waiting for people to start pointing at him, the giant from the U.S., a
representative from the land of big money and movies and warlike politics. But no one had noticed him. He hoped it would be like that in Ecuador.

  Shin was gagged and tied—a strip of duct tape forcefully applied over his mouth—before he could speak a word. Ten men boarded with automatic weapons, some of them were Colombian but most of them were American. They searched every corner of the ship.

  “Where is it?” the leader asked.

  Shin stood where he was, hoped against hope the captain might cover for them.

  “I don’t see how a couch is your business,” the captain said, still baffled and angry at having his cook trussed up. “We found it floating in the middle of the Pacific! I’ve made a call to the company. If there’s something your government would like to bring up with us directly, I suggest you have your superior contact mine. Otherwise I consider this trespassing.”

  “These are our waters. We know that couch was on this vessel. It carried an illegal substance, and those three that were with it are under arrest. We can dock you for harboring criminals and”—he nodded at Shin—“assisting criminal activity.”

  The captain sighed, and Shin tensed, knowing the captain was going to tell all.

  “Some of my crew spotted them getting into a boat about an hour ago. They headed . . .” The captain closed his eyes, swayed ever-so-slightly. “They headed north.”

  “Get out!” The leader yelled at Shin. “Get out of his mind!” He handed his gun to one of his men, grabbed Shin by the shirtfront, lifted him mightily in the air, and threw him over the railing to the water.

  “Hey!” the captain yelled. “Goddamn you! We’re a licensed freighter. Do you know how you’ll be penalized for not following international law?”

  The leader waved at the captain. “Get him out of here.” He watched Shin surface and struggle to stay afloat with only his feet free to tread water.