Couch

by Benjamin Parzybok

  Erik nodded. Things were going just fine. If only he could understand what the hell the guy was saying.

  “Pero mi perro no tiene dientes!” Erik heard and looked around for which of them had said such an idiotic thing. It was Thom, smiling idiotically.

  Julio widened his eyes in surprise. “Tampco mio!”

  Thom looked at Erik. Perhaps he’d made a terrible mistake.

  “He said his doesn’t either. I think. Now neither of your dogs have teeth.”

  Thom smiled idiotically at Julio again.

  “Well, apparently you guys have found something in common,” Erik said. “I’m glad you’ve gotten that established. Julio, que milagro que te encontramos, puedes ayudarnos ir a la costa? Que has visto, no tenemos una vela.”

  “Tell him I dreamed about him,” Tree said.

  “Tree.” Erik sighed, scratched at his mustache compulsively. “I’m not going to tell him you freaking dreamed about him, you freak.”

  “Then ask him if he’d help us get to shore.”

  “I just did,” Erik snapped.

  “Nadar.” Julio mimed swimming.

  “He says to swim.”

  “No! Tell him about the sharks,” Tree said.

  “Uh, that’s going to look kind of pansy. Look at his boat.”

  The sail had about forty patches in it and the faintest painting of a giant bottle of champagne across the dirty smudge of canvas. The logs were shaped vaguely boatlike at the ends, carved up out of the water, except at the back there was a large chunk missing out of the logs that could have been negligent driving or sharkbite.

  “Lo que sea mejor por el pais,” Thom beamed. Whatever is best for the country.

  “Would you. Shut. Up.”

  Julio chuckled. “Beno, beno.” He followed this up with several paragraphs of what seemed to be witty conversation, chuckling every few sentences. He pulled his sail tight, and it began to catch the wind.

  Tree and Thom looked at Erik, and Erik shrugged. “Maybe we should just hold the rope and see what happens?”

  “I thought you spoke Spanish.”

  “I do! That guy is hardly speaking Spanish. He . . . speaks, he’s chopping all his words up, talks too fast.”

  The rope went taut, and Julio looked back at them from ten yards in front and gave another wave. They all waved back cheerfully, and Thom restrained himself from saying his third and last Spanish phrase. Better not blow them all at once, he thought.

  The couch moved slowly toward shore. On the beach was a line of boats similar to Julio’s. Gulls and pelicans hovered nearby, begging for morsels. A row of shacks lined the beach, and Thom recognized the word restaurante on each. A town sprawled at the end of the beach and up the hill. A small crowd of fishermen gathered, it seemed Julio had caught something other than corvina.

  They came to the breakers, and Julio angled his boat and caught the waves like a surfboard, riding handily to shore while feeding out more rope to let them manage on their own.

  “Okay,” Erik said. “Okay. Hold on!” He prepared to paddle-surf to shore. The couch began to squirrel around and rock severely in the waves. Those on the beach were watching the arrival with interest.

  A strong wave launched the three of them, in their underwear and sunburns, off the couch. The couch bucked and turned and didn’t get any closer to shore, and only Thom’s toes could touch the ground. He heard Tree shrieking and saw him flailing about.

  “Tree! What’s wrong?”

  Tree gave him a wild, panicked look. “Erik!” Thom shouted. “Take Tree to shore. He’s shark-freaked. I’ll get the couch,” he said and wondered just how he was going to do that. He could see at least thirty amused fishermen following their progress. Watch out, the civilized world has arrived, Thom thought, come to colonize for the umpteenth time in their underwear and on their floating couches.

  He swam behind the couch and pushed. Bumped headfirst into it with each wave. He struggled toward shore, the couch grounding with each lull between waves and then jerking forward with each crest. It was going to take him no less than six months to get the couch to shore this way. He looked toward shore to see if he could get a hand, but everyone seemed focused on Tree and Erik. In about four feet of water, he stood up and picked up one end of the couch to see if he could angle it one corner at a time and was startled by how light it was. What was that about lightness that Shin had mentioned? He lifted the corner high and then angled his back underneath the bottom, getting knocked off balance by a wave. Back on his feet, he squatted weight-lifter style and exhaled. With one quick thrust he picked the entire couch up, balancing it awkwardly on one shoulder, his arm bracing the side. Balance was the tricky thing, but the weight was negligible, not more than forty pounds, Thom thought.

  He turned toward shore, focusing on where he stepped. It wasn’t until he was in six inches of water that he looked up to see the stunned and gawking crowd. The crowd of brown men and two white boys in their underwear. The fishermen averaged around five feet in height. And then Thom saw what they saw: a giant white whale of a man with a large couch over his shoulder, arriving from the sea, a giant stepping out of a legend, six foot six, his thighs like tree trunks, forearms the circumference of masts, feet the size of life rafts and a head the size of the sun, stumbling from the sea carrying an impossibly large object, carrying a house on his shoulders, approaching like a mirage, blocking out the light. Wishing more than ever he was a skinny little thing—a lithe horse jockey or an acrobat, not the giant of the circus—he considered turning and walking the other way down the beach. Maybe they’d forget about him. But he didn’t. He walked right into the center of the motley crowd of short people, the ground shaking with each footfall, put down his couch, and announced, his voice a slow, self-conscious boom, “Pero mi perro no tiene dientes!”

  There was a stunned silence followed by raucous laughter. Fishermen stepped forward to squeeze his biceps, and someone handed him a beer. They’d made it to Ecuador.

  Thom and Erik and Tree shook hands and smiled and introduced themselves, drinking beer, wondering what the hell they were going to do next. The sun was falling from the sky, casting an orange glow over them, and Thom wished that just as darkness would erase differences in skin color and height, it would enable a common language between them. How nice to be a fisherman here on a tiny sailboat, feeding the pelicans and drinking beer and eating fish, escaping the hype and noise of American airwaves forever.

  Erik asked Julio about a place to stay, and then the whole crowd was moving toward a parking lot. Thom hoisted with the couch back on his shoulders, trying to act the part they’d mistakenly pegged him with. They arrived at a 1974 Dodge Colt that was more rust and dents than vehicle. Julio popped inside and failed at starting it for several agonizing minutes, the engine choking in whining exhaustion. Julio smiled all the while, nodding at his American friends reassuringly, once tapping vigorously on the passenger-side heating vent, where the secret to internal combustion was apparently housed. And then six fishermen whoopingly pushed the car around the parking lot until Julio managed a push start. They piled the couch on top, and the three otherworldly, underwear-clad gringos got into Julio’s car and waved good-bye to a great chorus of shouts and cheers. Thom and Erik reached through the windows and held the couch tight as Julio’s car sputtered along.

  Julio talked without ceasing to Erik while Thom and Tree watched the town go by: signs in Spanish stuck at every odd angle, dirt sidewalks, street vendors with lurid-smelling smoke emanating from the coals. They passed a soccer field, and Julio slowed, talking rapidly and pointing to the fourteen-year-olds playing. Then to the expanse of sea, startling and ultra-blue between buildings. Everywhere there were people on the street. Girls and boys in smart-looking school uniforms and backpacks, jostling and laughing and teasing. Old men on park benches in slacks and button-down shirts. A limping dog with open wounds and an entourage of birds. Women walking down the street with great bundles of vegetables, long black hair draped
down their backs, crowds of men smoking and conspiring. Julio turned the car down a paved side street with an acne of potholes and nearly ran down a goat. He drove with the gas floored in second gear, the engine running at a whine and the car swerving frightfully around corners and obstacles. At every corner, the couch strained to launch itself off the roof.

  Erik gleefully pounded the window well and joked with Julio.

  Thom and Tree exchanged smiles that failed to hide how overwhelmed they were; through the car window a kaleidoscope of foreignness it would take months to begin to understand.

  Tree patted Thom’s great leg, looked at him once more, said, “We’ll be okay,” and managed to make it sound like it wasn’t a question.

  Thom nodded. “We’ll be fine. Just fine.” He wiped sweat from his forehead. “Erik speaks Spanish. Which is great but, wow,” he lowered his voice, “it means we’re a little dependent on Erik.”

  Tree watched Erik talking to Julio. “Erik will do fine too, Thom,” Tree said with that tone of his that signified he had other knowledge, that the future was indicated to him in his dreams, that everything and everybody had a unique purpose to fill.

  He managed to say it without irony, Thom noticed with amusement, even though his predictions had been spotty and had led them five thousand miles from their home. Five thousand miles, Thom thought, and tried desperately to keep himself from falling apart.

  At Julio’s house they shuffled in, leaving the couch on the roof of the car. They met his wife and three boys, all of them somewhere between the middle of Thom’s chest and his belly button in height. Julio spent the first half hour filling in the details of the odd story of the couch’s arrival to what Thom thought were excessive giggles from the family. It was a dark, two-story concrete house with a strange scattering of wealth and poverty. The house lacked an oven and, as Thom found out later, hot water, but it had a large TV (one station: soap operas, soccer, and advertisements for American products) and a computer with, it appeared to Thom, an internet connection. I have a son in New York, Julio explained through Erik, pointing at the things of value in the house. The floors were cold and bare of rugs, and the walls were concrete and adorned with grime and images of the Virgin Mary and brutal, bloody pictures of Jesus on the cross. While Julio’s family listened to the tale, and Julio’s wife prepared some kind of hot alcoholic cinnamon drink, Thom felt himself irresistibly drawn to the computer. Standing there, still in his underwear, helplessly exposed, there was one area of familiarity in the room, one thing he knew. Nobody else seemed to be wearing much more than he in the sweaty dimness of the casa. In a moment when one of Julio’s boy’s attention seemed to waver from Julio’s storytelling, Thom shyly pointed at the computer. The boy, a kid of about sixteen, with just a touch of hair going rebellious and a black AC/DC T-shirt, belted out half a dozen sentences of Spanish. Thom stared at him, feeling like an embarrassed astronaut. The boy, who Thom thought had introduced himself as Carlos or Ricardo or Juan, saw that he didn’t understand. He shook his head and drew his finger across his throat. Thom shrank back and looked at the floor. What did that mean? He’d kill anyone who touched it? Thom was way out of his element.

  “He says it’s broken, silly,” said Erik with a glint of amusement at Thom’s discomfort.

  Erik blended in, Thom saw. Even in his underwear he looked as relaxed as a human could be.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Thom said.

  Julio’s dog, bearing a strange toothless smile, walked toward Thom’s voice and stared expectantly up at him.

  Erik and Carlos or Juan exchanged some more Spanish, and then Erik shrugged. “I don’t know any of those words. Driver? Something about disks? Hell if I know. You’re the nerd.”

  “Can I look at it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Maybe you should ask him?”

  “He already said you could.”

  Thom stumbled over himself, eager for that bit of familiarity. He sat down in front of the computer, the toothless dog in tow. His heart racing, he switched on the power supply, powered up the monitor, watched the memory line up, DOS talking to itself—of course it would be a Windows system. He wondered if open-source software had caught on here. The Windows icon showed on the screen, and then the screen blanked out, lines through it. Video-monitor driver needs to be reinstalled. Thom restarted into safe mode and brought up the system, and when it fully booted up it was like someone had socked him in the gut. Everything was in Spanish. But of course it was. They’re not going to use an English system. “Mis labios estan cerrados,” he said, and Juan in his AC/DC shirt stared at him. But then Thom realized the language wasn’t important. He’d memorized the positions of the commands, and he could steer himself through the various labyrinths of the operating system oblivious to what went on in the room around him except to smile up at Juan occasionally. By the looks of him, the kid was probably training to be one of those Third World virus writers, a seventeen-year-old genius who brought the Western business world to its knees for twenty-four hours, and for that reason Thom desperately wanted to be friends with him. He felt hands around his waist, and he looked down to see Julio’s wife wrapping a tape measure around him.

  “She’s trying to determine if your body would be big enough to feed the family for a week,” said Erik.

  The hairs on the back of Thom’s neck stood up.

  “Come on, man, you’ve got to relax a little. She’s going to make you some clothes, because there’s no way in hell we could find clothes big enough for you here.”

  “Oh.” He tried to smile. “Of course.” Tree and Erik were already dressed, he saw. Tree looking smart in a button-down shirt and slacks, Erik in the same but slightly more ill-fitting. Tree had backed himself quietly into a corner, and although he’d lost his needle-nose pliers in the sea, he was working a six-inch plug of wire that he’d found in the street. He was thoroughly preoccupied with the strip of wire, shutting everything out the same way that he was, Thom realized. Erik was drinking a beer and speaking at a rapid-fire pace with Julio. One of Julio’s boys was strumming what sounded like a Rage Against the Machine song on a guitar. Two bare lightbulbs hung from the ceiling, lighting the room. He was a long ways away from an office, from a swivel chair and desk, from a manager who wanted to see his work.

  Thom fixed the video-driver problem, and Juan announced the fact proudly to the room. He got some thumbs-ups, some back patting, a lot of Spanish was spoken, a beer was brought. Time to dial in, the reward. He could be here, what surely must be the middle of nowhere, and still touch the rest of the world. An error popped up in Spanish. Thom checked the modem and saw that there was no phone cord attached.

  “Phone?” He pointed.

  Juan spoke to Erik, but the meaning was clear. Thom’s mood went into freefall.

  “They don’t have a phone.” Erik shrugged.

  “But they have a modem!”

  “Welcome to Latin America, Professor. Land of irony. It probably takes about a year to get a phone installed here, and probably costs about as much as that computer.”

  Thom hung his head, so close to home. He was going to miss the rendezvous with Jean in Guayaquil, wherever that was.

  “Speaking of Ecuador,” Erik said, “there are legends about every damn little thing here. And it turns out there’s one about us.”

  “About us?”

  “Yeah, Fernanda remembered it.” Erik pointed at Julio’s wife, who seemed to be cooking, sewing, and making drinks all at once. The one woman in a house full of boys. She had a giant, electric blue sheet in an old-fashioned sewing machine. Thom shuddered, sure it was destined for him.

  “At least it seems like it’s about us,” Erik said. “It basically says that a long time ago, the seat of power, throne, whatever, was removed from the center of the world. It’s an Incan thing, maybe, or Cañar, or one of the others—there were millions of different groups here before the Incas came in and wiped everybody out. Then the Spanish came in and wiped them out. But so
mehow the legends survive, get mixed up, blended into Catholicism, each other. At any rate, having this seat of power far from where it should be has imbalanced the world and opened it up to all kinds of bad things. And it says that three, ah, lost people I suppose is a good way to translate it, or losers is another, will come from far away to return the seat where it belongs.”

  “That’s amazing. Do you think . . . do you think it’s true?”

  “Uh . . . no. I don’t. Do you? Do you believe in Noah’s ark? Even if you did, I seriously doubt there’s a legend about us. I wouldn’t put a lot of stock in it, but then again there are legends here for everything, like I said, and a lot of things come true here that don’t happen in the States. This is South America, man!”

  Thom was beckoned to the table, where a beautiful plate of fried fish, rice, beans, onions, and avocado awaited. Erik talked with the family, and Thom smiled whenever someone looked at him.

  After a while, Erik said: “Where are we going from here?”

  “Tree thinks we’re going to see popcorn.” Thom tried to say it straight-faced.

  Tree looked up from his plate and nodded. “Where there are butterflies like popcorn.”

  Erik grimaced.

  “Where is the center of the world supposed to be? Seems like every culture has a center of the world,” Thom said.

  Erik spoke with the family and then said, “They think maybe the Andes, just a guess. Though,” he smiled, “they also mentioned Washington D.C., and Hollywood.”

  “Ah, right. That’s a lot of backtracking.”

  “We need to stay off of the roads,” Tree said.

  “How are we going to get there then?”

  Tree shrugged.

  A bottle of something called Zhumir was brought out and passed around and Thom began to feel a sweet tipsiness that deepened with each round. His outfit was finished, a giant tent on the floor, the drunkenness bringing out the cavalier in him, allowing him to put it on, tamping down what fashion sense he thought he had. A giant, electric blue bodysuit. Black buttons down to his waist, a limp collar. One giant bright green pocket covered his right buttock. When he put the suit on, there was a chorus of unabashed laughter. Erik grabbed his gut and snorted.