Couch

by Benjamin Parzybok

  “Here,” the leader said and took back his gun. He rested the barrel of the automatic on the railing. Shin floated about twenty feet from the freighter.

  “You understand I’m about to kill you,” the leader said. His men gathered along the railing, watching the show.

  “You could just”—he turned to a man on his right—“Bill? What could he do, do you suppose, to save his life?”

  “Where’s the couch?” Bill yelled. “Where are the carriers?”

  “Now that is a good idea. You could tell us where they are.” He kicked the ship’s rail. “What about the voice, though, Bill?”

  “He can write it.”

  “Yes, he could. It’s up to you old, man,” he yelled down. “Tell us where they are, and you live, agreed?”

  Shin kicked with his feet once to keep himself upright. He nodded yes.

  “Oh good, what a relief. Bill, go down and get him.”

  A moment later Bill yelled and the leader looked back and saw Shin swimming away underwater, his body undulating like a fish’s.

  “He dived!” Bill yelled from the coast guard boat, where he’d been trying to hook Shin with a pole.

  “Ah fuck,” the leader said. Shin was about ten feet from making it underneath the coast guard boat. The leader shot into the water until blood bubbled up.

  “Bring me the captain,” he said. “Now let’s see what he says.”

  Just when the drone of the motor had become part of their consciousnesses—a natural force, a breath in, a breath out—just when they’d been lulled into the safety of continuity, the splashing ups and downs, skidding wave to wave, just when the fear began to dissipate off their bodies in earnest, the motor sputtered out.

  “Gee,” Erik said. He looked thoughtfully at the gas tank and motor for a moment, hefted the tank, and then went into a spasm of kicking. He foot-pummeled the tank, motor, and sides of the boat until it was necessary to cradle his foot. He closed his eyes for a count of ten, then landed another kick on the tank, wrenched the tubes out of it, and threw it overboard.

  “Erik!” Thom said. “Erik, Erik. Calm it, man.”

  Erik shrugged, tight-lipped with anger. He stared at the bottom of the boat, his face a deep red. “Oh boyyyyy,” he said and gripped his hair. “Can’t anything be just a little bit fucking easy?”

  The shore still seemed impossibly far away, only the barest hint of something rising from the horizon. Tree had been steering them south, not toward shore.

  “Oars,” said Thom. And they looked around the rowboat.

  “I’m going to kill that old man when I see him again,” Erik said. “Sending us out to sea like this. Haven’t we had enough of this? How do we know they really wanted the couch?”

  “They did.” Thom stretched his legs out and leaned back against the couch, making himself comfortable for the long haul. “I heard them.”

  “Well, we should have given it to them,” Erik said with obvious disgust.

  “Julio will help us,” Tree said.

  “Julio?” Thom tried to remember meeting a Julio. “Was that the big guy on Theo’s railcart thing?”

  “I’m not sure who he is. I just know that he helps us. He’s short, and Erik thinks he talks funny.”

  “Is he in the boat?” Erik said.

  “No,” Tree said after some thought.

  “Is he in the water then?” Erik stood up to get a better vantage point to yell at Tree from. “Is he a mermaid? Perhaps he’s a dolphin? Dolphins talk funny.”

  “Erik, don’t fall in the water. This gives me bad memories already,” Thom said.

  “Maybe there’s a beer cooler out there somewhere—when you’re not moving it’s murder hot.” Erik wiped sweat off his face. He stood up on a seat and looked out over the water, his hand shading his eyes. “Uh-oh,” he said.

  “What?”

  “There’s a boat a’coming.”

  “How far?”

  “Speck-far, at the moment. Should I just go ahead and drown myself again? It seemed to work out pretty well last time.”

  “You’re going to if you keep standing up on that seat. Please be unpredictable and don’t fall in.”

  Tree stood up suddenly. “It’s them!” He grabbed an end of the couch, hoisted it up, and tipped it overboard, rocking the boat so much that Erik launched off the other end.

  “Tree! You fuckall, asshead!” Erik shook his head, spraying droplets of water in a fan, spitting out a mouthful. The couch bobbed in the water. Erik looked at Thom. “I didn’t fall in! Not my fault!”

  Tree dove in after the couch, surfaced, and pulled himself up onto it. “Come on!” he yelled. “We’ve got to separate from the rowboat. They’ll follow that.”

  “Tree.” Thom opened his hands in pleading. “Can we work on some consensus building? Please?”

  Tree waved them over urgently. “Come on, let’s go.”

  Thom looked at Erik treading water.

  “He’s the navigator.” Erik held his fingers up in quotes around the word.

  “Erik, could you pull the boat even with the couch? I’m not going to just jump in with my laptop.” Thom patted his black plastic garbage bag-wrapped backpack. “Plus, having some food and water might come in sort of handy this time.” Thom stared at the couch, remembered Shin’s words: the couch dampens the will for action.

  Tree stayed on the couch, and within minutes he was in a coma-like sleep, his mouth open, his face in full exposure to the sun. From his position in the water, Thom gently covered Tree’s face with his own shirt. They pushed the rowboat away and kicked toward shore. They chatted, trying to keep a low profile, trying to keep the fear of a boat behind them out of their minds. Erik told South American stories, and Thom listened, happy to have someone fill the space of the ocean with sound.

  He wondered what was happening at home. How his mother was doing, what she would think if she knew he was paddling behind a couch in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America. Her face would turn red; the worry would boil up into a sort of hysteria. Poor Mom. Poor Thom, brain said, and he agreed. But there was that tiny sliver of excitement too. He was no longer the doughy computer geek chunking together functions while the rest of the world slept. He had acquired a touch of the exotic.

  After hours of kicking, the shore as far away as ever and their boat permanently lost, they decided to wake Tree up to make him take his turn. Their faces felt the sting of sunburn and saltwater. They shook him and yelled his name until he finally came back from the dead, his face an inhuman mask of incomprehension.

  “Your turn, dreamboy. Get in here and do some paddling. I’ve got to take a rest.”

  “I had the strangest dreams.”

  “Get in the water, then you can tell us.” Erik climbed up onto the couch, a sodden dog. He shook, and Tree backed into a corner.

  “I don’t want to.” Tree clutched the couch. “I’m afraid of sharks.”

  “So am I,” Erik said. “So is everybody. It’s because they have teeth. But you don’t see me shirking. If they bite you, bite them back.”

  Tree took off his clothes, baring his pale, bony frame, and eased himself into the water. With his hands white-knuckled around the edge of a cushion, he began to kick. Snoring came almost immediately from the couch above them.

  “We’re going to the forest,” Tree said. “That’s what I dreamed.”

  “In Ecuador?” Thom said.

  “I think so. I don’t know which country actually. There was a lot of mud, and we were slipping around, trying to carry it. The trail was too small, and I—and Erik had a machete. It was raining, and the direction was confusing, and then there were so many butterflies, like it was snowing popcorn.”

  “That sounds like the jungle.”

  “Yes, maybe the jungle. Somebody there wants the couch.”

  “A lot of people want the couch, Tree,” Thom said, wondering if he wanted the couch. Maybe he could put this furniture-cum-artifact to some use of his own.

&nb
sp; “Yes, but I think this is the person we’re supposed to bring it to. Like. Like maybe we’re taking it home.”

  “All this time we were just a delivery service. I’d been sort of thinking something a bit grander would happen.” Thom checked on the ever-distant shoreline and wondered if they were working against a current. They had two or three hours of light left, Thom remembering the shift in dusk and dawn as they went farther south. Twelve hours of light and twelve of night—had they passed the equator? From his limited vantage point he couldn’t see any sign of a ship, except perhaps some dots near the shore, fishing boats. They paddled in silence for a while. Thom tried to keep his head down to keep from getting too sunburned. A seagull flew over, then another, and then a whole flock circled above them.

  “Agh! Something bumped my leg!” Tree yelled.

  “Are you sure? It could have been my foot. I wasn’t paying attention.” Thom looked down into the water and saw water.

  “Something bumped me,” Tree said with a wild look. “Agh! There it is again!” Tree scrambled monkeylike up onto the couch, stepping on Erik and climbing as high as he could onto the back. He looked like some kind of cave animal that only came out in the darkness. Like Gollum, Thom thought, thin and glow white and dressed in only wet underpants, long wet hair on his shoulders. Some kind of underground troll child.

  “Tree, sharks don’t just eat people. They smell blood or they sense you’re wounded. Most of the shark stuff is hype.” But Tree wouldn’t be convinced. He sat on the back of the couch, nervous and crazy, his eyes jerking about, studying the water. Thom tried to keep himself from thinking about sharks. He wondered if sitting high up on the couch like that would put Tree to sleep too. Then he felt something unmistakably touch his leg. It was a solid bump, and before his brain could calm his body he was sitting next to Tree, as high up on the couch as he could go, trying to balance his weight so the couch wouldn’t tip over.

  “Something, ah, touched me,” he tried to say calmly, and Tree nodded. A minute passed, and they studied the water and gripped the couch, but there was nothing. He’d succumbed to fear. His mind had imagined the bump. Thom checked the position of the sun again; they had to get going. He’d get back in the water. He’d just get in and paddle. On the count of three, he told himself. One. Two.

  The couch bucked like they’d hit a speed bump. Tree’s teeth were chattering. Thom nudged Erik with his foot, talked through his teeth. “Erik,” he said. “Erik, wake up!” In the blue depths, Thom saw a large whiteness that moved, a curved shape that was there and then not there. It’s okay, he thought. Breathe in, breathe out. It’s fish or even a shark, and it’s just exploring. It’s testing. Then one end of the couch exploded out of the water at a forty-five degree angle. Thom and Tree screamed and clutched the couch, and Erik landed in the water gasping and yelling. Thom grabbed Erik’s hair and wrenched him toward the couch. Erik howled. Thom grabbed his arm and pulled him back on.

  “The fuck!?” Erik yelled, standing up on the precariously bobbing couch. His hands tenderly cupped his scalp.

  “Charks!” Tree’s words were chopped off by his chattering teeth. “Chit! Chit down!”

  Erik wheeled around, and Tree and Thom seized his arms and forced him to sit.

  “What!? What is going on?” Erik said.

  “You always fall off the couch.” Thom could see the couch’s sleep haze clearing from Erik’s face, no doubt quickened significantly by the hair pulling.

  “I do not. If you’re talking about the boat, that was Tree’s fault.”

  “Just shut up. It’s like a part of your effing personality. You fall off things.”

  “Is that our food box?” Tree pointed to what was obviously their food box, listing half-submerged about ten feet away.

  “Now how’d that get in the water?” Erik’s voice was thick with sarcasm.

  “I told you. Sharks.”

  “Sharks threw it into the water?” Erik worked on a sneer.

  “They bumped the couch. That’s how you ended up in the water.”

  “Listen, you guys are supposed to be paddling. If everybody is up here, we’re going to fall asleep, and then we’ll be screwed. And go get the food box!” Erik started to stand up, and Tree and Thom pushed him back down. “I did my turn. It’s your turn!”

  Thom realized he’d choose starving to death slowly over getting eaten by a shark any day. “Listen, Erik, there are sharks out there. I’m serious.”

  There was a great splash and a bone-crunching noise and the food box was gone. All three of them screamed. An apple bobbed up to the surface, followed by a few splinters.

  “Well, maybe it’s had enough to eat now,” Erik said with surprising calmness. Thom had stopped screaming. Tree hadn’t. “There were granola bars in there, weren’t there? I could sure go for one of those.”

  Tree was hyperventilating and Thom pushed down on the back of his neck to calm him, then remembered his laptop. He searched the couch for his bag.

  “Where’s my backpack?”

  “Ha ha,” Erik said. “That shark is in for a surprise. Could it get shocked?”

  “Fuck!” Thom scanned the water. There was no sign of it. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” He pounded the couch back with his fists and put his head in his hands. “That was all the money Shin gave us too.”

  They stared into the water, each hoping for a plastic-wrapped backpack to surface like a fishing bobber. The journey suddenly seemed very, very long. South America: penniless. If they made it to shore.

  Tree patted his shoulder. “Sorry, Thom. At least we’re still alive. Maybe the laptop will discourage it. It couldn’t have been good to eat.”

  “Boy, that apple looks good,” Erik said. They all looked at the apple floating just out of reach. “I’m going to get it.”

  “Erik, no.”

  “Might be the last bit of food we eat.”

  Erik dove into the water while Tree shrieked. About thirty seconds later they were sharing a warm, salty apple, and it tasted like heaven, even with Erik’s boasting.

  Another giant whiteness just under the water, like a colossal eye coming in for a close-up. They tensed for the impact and closed their eyes. And then it was gone.

  They waited. Each nervously scanned the water from their end of the couch. And they waited some more, too afraid to get back into the water, and made no progress toward shore.

  And then Tree was asleep, and then Thom. Erik stared back and forth between the water and the land, did his best at a prayer. Please, please, God, he tried, take us to land. I’ll never con again. His fingers propped up his eyelids against the immense sleepiness. He tried to cover his roommates as best he could, but they had very few clothes between them now. Please, please, Julio, whoever you are, and mermaids, and who was the god of the sea? Poseidon, please—or was it Neptune?—just to the shore. He studied a speck landward, and it seemed to be coming toward them, or was that only hopeful delusion? But a great hand of sleep bore down on him. He shook Thom, but his arms were sapped of strength, and at last he gave up, curling into the side of the couch like a cat, keeping his limbs from hanging over.

  “Gringos, gringos, despén, gringos.”

  Erik tried to place what was wrong: had the waterbed upstairs burst again? He felt water thrown over him. He pried his eyes open enough to see a small man standing on two logs tied together. A tall mast jutted up between them from which a ragged sail fluttered.

  “Greeeengohssss,” the man’s singsong voice called.

  Erik, senses coming together one by one, managed to attach the voice to this elfin gremlin with the mischievous smile who was throwing water on them.

  “Okay! Man, that’s enough con el agua, hijo de puta!”

  The little man giggled with great pleasure. “Que ’cen p’qui?” He bared a great smile, showing all three of his teeth, one on the top, two on the bottom. With his fishing-line hand, he adjusted his tattered gym shorts, which, besides a bright yellow baseball cap made up his wardrobe.


  “Qué?” Erik said and leaned closer. It almost sounded like Spanish.

  The line in the man’s hand began to pull, and the man held up his other hand, wait. He did a magnificent dance, boxer prancing barefoot around the two splintered logs as the line wove around the boat, underneath, back out, and finally, after a great struggle, he pulled a two-and-a-half-foot fish on board. He grabbed it tightly by the belly and whacked its head several times against the bamboo mast, which showed evidence of a long history of fish heads being crushed, and then held it up for Erik, all three teeth showing again. “Corvina!”

  “Bravo!”

  The man crammed the fish into a suspiciously familiar beer cooler. The boat began to drift apart from the couch, and the man talked incomprehensibly for a minute before throwing Erik a rope. They pulled themselves back together.

  “’de ’sta la vela?”

  “La vela? Es una sofá, ni un barco,” Erik said. “It doesn’t have a sail, for Christ’s sake. It’s a couch.”

  The man giggled raucously again. “Julio.” He pointed at his chest.

  “Julio! Mucho gusto.” Erik looked down at Tree to see if he’d heard that his dream-savior had arrived. The kid really was some kind of miracle. There was a market opportunity there. Erik repeated the gesture at his own chest. “Enrique. Como va?”

  “Bin, bin!”

  “Donde estamos?”

  “Playas.”

  “Playas?” Erik looked toward the beaches, which were now remarkably closer. “Si, pero las playas donde? En que país, ciudad, región?”

  “Playas, s’el pueblito. Ecuador.”

  “Hey, guys.” Erik kicked at Tree. “Wake up, your guy Julio is here.”

  Tree slowly came to, studied the scene for a minute, and then woke Thom.

  Erik passed introductions around. “Enrique, Tomás, y . . . y . . . Arbol.” What the hell else was he going to call Tree? Arbol would have to do.

  “Arbol?” Julio said and laughed. He pointed at himself, Julio, and then at the two logs he was standing on. “Arbol y Arbol, jo tengo dos arbole.”