Couch

by Benjamin Parzybok

  Erik stood over him, the murkiness of dusk about him. Something was wrong with Erik’s face; it was distorted like a mask, an eye socket ballooning with red, his nose seeming to angle off to one side.

  “I’m going to teach you how to fight, my friend.” Erik’s hand stretched toward Thom.

  Thom attempted to focus. He took hold of the hand and held it for a moment. His entire body felt crushed, and it took a moment to identify the specific wounds.

  Erik pulled Thom to his feet. Erik was still without shoes. Thom saw Tree sitting in the middle of the road, his head against his knees.

  No couch, no truck, he thought. Darkness a footfall away.

  “Ohhhhh, fuck.” Thom’s head was a compression of pain. He gently felt his body, determining where he hurt most. His lip was an abnormal bulge. There was a giant goose egg on the back of his head. A cracked rib? A series of pains in his lower back, a swollen knee. Lot of good that fucking council does us. Where the hell is Shin?

  “Look,” Erik said, his arms flailing wide like he was trying to violently hug an overlarge tree. “You can’t just throw roundhouses. This is what you looked like.” Erik mimed a drunk bear. “They’re slow and easy to avoid. Keep your balance.” Erik bent his knees, danced to one side, then the other. Thom was amazed Erik could move. Just watching movement was painful.

  “This is how you throw a punch. Throw it straight. Quickest path between two points is?”

  “A straight line,” Thom answered, tamping down resentment.

  Erik demonstrated jabs. “Your fists in front to block, see? And listen, think about their body. Pushing someone down is not going to do any damage.” Erik approached Thom, fists up. “Throat!” Erik’s fist came within an inch of Thom’s throat. “Groin! Eyes! Kidneys if his back is to you. This isn’t gentlemen’s boxing. This is winning.”

  Thom nodded, noted the pineapple he had to swallow to get the saliva down. He wiped a bead of sweat from the numb, painful area above his eye.

  Tree looked up, his face a wash of mud and tears and blood. “Not going to do any good now!”

  “Hey, hey!” Erik danced boxer-style, threw jabs into the air. “We’ll be ready for them next time. Get up, dreamboy. Let me see you throw a punch.”

  Tree shook his head.

  “Come on, get up.” Erik prodded Tree’s back with the tip of his toe, danced back. “Come on!” He flipped Tree’s hair, jumped out of range, pushed an arm forward, and then Tree had a hold of it like a rabid monkey, his teeth sunk into Erik’s forearm. Erik screamed for all he was worth while Thom tried to separate them.

  “HolyFuckShit!” Erik said after they’d disentangled. “How come you didn’t do that when they were here?” He studied his arm in the growing darkness. “You drew blood!” Erik said appreciatively. “You little fucker!”

  Tree curled his head between his knees again, shoulders shaking.

  Thom’s jumpsuit was torn at the knees and shoulder. His pocket with its small reserve of cash was empty. He swore. “Okay, let’s get ourselves together.” He limped twenty paces up the road. “Come on, let’s get ourselves together,” he repeated, hoping this time he’d have an inkling of how to do so. “This way,” he said. Thinking it was the direction the man had pointed, Naranwhat?

  They limped in silence down the sliver of road, hearing only the sound of each other’s tentative footsteps, their labored breathing. Their homemade clothes were beginning to fall apart.

  “Not much farther now,” Thom heard himself say—a line straight from his mother. A reassuring lie so utterly far from the truth that it served only to redouble his fear.

  From Tree came the low sound of a cornered cat.

  “Hey,” Thom said. “We’ll make it.”

  The mosquitoes were a hungry feeding frenzy about them, Tree taking the brunt. Hours passed. They stumbled on, their hands outstretched to guard against wandering from the road in the blackness. Erik limped along, his bare feet bruised and bleeding. Tree’s shoes failing fast.

  And then there was a light on an incline. At first it seemed like a star, unreachable. They hunted along the road for an entrance toward the light, blind to everything else. Rain fell. They neared the point of pain and misery at which the body draws inward, shuts down the nervous system, turns off the brain. Not finding a road, they slipped and crawled through the trees, a struggle toward where the light must be, obscured by rain and vegetation, a lifetime of mud and wet and banana leaves between them.

  A rooftop surfaced a ways off. A glow of light on the porch of a large house. A house of stone and concrete, hardwood steps, and a railing up to an elaborately carved door. They pounded on it, three half-humans, not caring if murder waited for them on the other side.

  Per leaned on his cane and opened the door to he wasn’t sure what. Certainly three apparitions, three corpses recently dug from their graves, three sizes of human in a state of much disrepair. “Come in, come in, good Lord,” he said in Swedish-accented English.

  The three shuffled in without speaking. They stood in the entranceway dripping while Per summoned his army of helpers. “Rosa, traiga toallas, dios mio, muchas. Esme, hay mas merrienda? Marita, prepara las camas, tenemos huespedes, extranjeros.” Per rubbed his hands together. “My God, you look terrible.” He smoothed back gray hair, adjusted vest and loosened tie, went to look for his wife while his legion of maids went to work.

  Rosa bustled in and wrapped each of the roommates in a towel. They stood frozen, shell-shocked, and while she dried them she chatted idly in Spanish, reassuringly, as a mother would, the towels beginning to drip with mud, blood, rain. She removed shoes from the ones who wore them, went to look for some of Per’s clothes for the giant whose mysterious blue outfit was falling off of him, and then decided to dress them all.

  They waited in the cool entrance, a huge, modern air conditioner blowing air in, and began to shiver.

  Barely cognizant of what was happening, they were towel-dried, hustled into bathrooms, then dressed in dapper outfits. Thom tightly fitted in a 1940s suit belonging to Per, who was a mere half inch shorter than he, but thin as bamboo. The woman named Marita inspected wounds, applied antiseptic or bandages, offered the necessary pobrecitos, sympathy words, pulled their socks on. Tree fell asleep in the bathroom, in the bedroom, in the hallway leaning against the wall.

  Per returned with a woman just over half his height but with the bearing of a matron. The roommates were assembled like children dressed in Sunday best in a hallway lined with antiques. Per introduced himself again, and they found their tongues. Thom thinking, Per like pear, Tree like tree. Per’s wife introduced herself, Alma, which Erik translated later as “soul.” Per was tall and gentlemanly, with sun-blotched skin and eyes watering with age. Alma was stout and fast and cheerful. The roommates were each shown to their own rooms. Two of the rooms belonged to Per and Alma’s grown sons, photos on the wall of half-Swedish, half-Ecuadorian boys, now being educated in the exclusive corners of the world.

  Later they sat at a giant oak table in a stately dining room decorated with china vases, human-figure sculptures, and Expressionist paintings with gilded frames. They were served soup and then traditional Ecuadorian fare, rice and beans, fish, vegetables. Per and Alma hovered and smiled, sipping wine and waiting for conversation to begin. Thom hoped one of his compatriots would step in and make up a story. We’re tourists. We got lost. He dreaded the possibility of Tree’s voice piping up with stories of magic couches. Here they were at the end of the world, and instead of fire there was hospitality.

  But not much was expected of them. Tree fell asleep at the table. Erik drank wine quickly to kill the pain and to dull the coming hangover, bleary-eyed, smiling. Thom did all the polite talking but offered no details, and none were asked. Only, “Where are you from?” “Would you like some more wine? More food?” “Isn’t that a heavy rain out tonight?” Thom maneuvered his fork delicately around his giant lip. Erik’s face was a mess of swelling and color. Per told stories about late f
orties New York, early fifties New Orleans, and Ecuador over the last fifty years. A life full of adventures. He smoked cigarettes at the table, switched to cognac, spoke eloquently in English and dropped in words in Spanish in absentmindedness or for emphasis. He had a smile that crept up wryly at all the years between him and his past. He pointed at the paintings on the wall. “She made them,” he said. His wife, Alma, the painter.

  Not once did they ask what had happened to the three battered gringos at the table. And Thom knew that were he not so tired and grateful, he’d be suspicious.

  The rest of the night was like a mirage. Thom’s room was climate controlled and mosquito free. In the most comfortable bed of his life, he listened to the rain and studied the galaxy of glow-in-the-dark stars left behind by Per and Alma’s sons.

  They passed the next day at Per and Alma’s house. It began with pain and exquisite hospitality, and neither diminished much as the day went on. There was exotic fruit and coffee at breakfast, and then Per took them on a tour of the plantation, bananas as far as the eye could see. Workmen flooded in, and Per greeted them by name, asked about families, shook hands, meanwhile giving the Americanos a lecture on working practices in Ecuador, capitalism, socialism, the conversation leading into a giant Italian almuerzo. The three roommates showed off impressive bruises, eyes swollen shut. They followed along slowly, moaning when they couldn’t help it. Their state did not seem to be slowing Per’s enthusiasm at having guests. Thom and Per drank whisky and played chess all afternoon, talked about mathematics and computer science. Plying each other with veiled questions. Erik stuck to Per’s TV and his children’s video games. Tree went through the fraction of the library that was in English, expressing various anxieties and despairs under his breath to whomever would listen and later posed in Alma’s paint studio. His agitation grew with each moment the quest was delayed. At dinner it finally came out.

  They were drinking an after-dinner coffee, and the temptation of cognac was on the table—fine drinks were never far from Per’s reach.

  “I know that legend,” Alma said. “There are lots of legends. Sometimes that’s all that’s left of history. I didn’t think it would be a couch though.”

  Thom glared at Tree for blurting their story out, wondered at how someone could be so cautious and paranoid yet so steadfastly, idiotically careless at the same time.

  “Sometimes that is history, what history has forgotten,” Per said. He stood with his glass of cognac in one hand, the bottle in the other, a dangerous look in his eye. “Let me show you my collection.”

  “Per, let them finish their drinks. They’re tired,” Alma said.

  Thom nodded imperceptibly. Yeah, tired, please, he thought. After Shin’s talk of collectors, he didn’t like the sound of a “collection.”

  Per waited and they could see there was no getting out of it. Maybe he’s got stacks of couches, Thom thought, and we could just take our pick. Maybe that’s how he ended up down here in the first place. His couch called him here.

  “You’ve got him started now,” Alma said and shook her head.

  He led them to two giant rooms filled with locked cases full of ancient tools, pottery, and musical instruments. A string of rough hewn stones the size of boots we re suspended by cords from the ceiling. Per picked up a small wooden mallet and played them like chimes, made notes that vibrated the room.

  “There are so many mysteries.” Per quieted the last note. “Most of these things we found on the farm. Some I bought from other farmers who think it’s all trash. The locals don’t give a damn. They all give these things to me. Some comes from the mountains, the Amazon. The history that is written down is a hoax. What you learned in school was made up or rewritten to fit someone’s needs. If you ignore the oral legends, which is all that we have left of the people’s history, passed on and distorted from one generation to the next, then what you have of the Incas—and because the Incas conquered everyone before them, the whole history of South America—is from the chroniclers. The chroniclers were Spanish conquistadors who were out to ideologically slander the cultures of the New World so that Spain would think them so base that slavery was deserving.”

  Per cleared his throat, dug in for a lecture.

  “When the Incas told the chroniclers stories, the chroniclers distorted them. The Mayas were the first with writing in the Americas. They had an extensive written history, but the Spanish burned all of their books in the fifteen hundreds. What did we lose? The chroniclers focused on cannibalism and human sacrifices. I know half a dozen archaeologists who say there isn’t a damn bit of hard evidence there was sacrifice here. Not a bit. What do we really know?

  “See these?” Per waved a hand over a collection of carved rock bowls, figurines, and shards. “These date ten to thirteen thousand years before Christ. This is what remains of a culture after fifteen thousand years. Nothing but stone and pottery stands up to time like that. Of course we think them primitive. This continent wasn’t even supposed to have been populated until about eight thousand B.C. Some speculate now that people were here as many as eighty thousand years ago. Are you going to tell me they ate boar meat around a fire for seventy-nine thousand five hundred years waiting for civilization to arrive? What if there were another Adam and Eve, a competing race of humans that through disaster and subjugation and intermarriage has been lost? Archaeologists think people came here over the Aleutian Islands, a land link in the north after the last ice age. They don’t give these people any credit.”

  Erik picked up a rock bowl and sniffed it.

  “Don’t touch that!” Per said, and Erik lowered it with alarm back to where it belonged.

  “The Cañaris in the Andes,” Per continued. “The Incas, Mayas, all have legends about a great flood, cities disappearing under water never to resurface. Noah’s flood was supposed to have happened around 3400 B.C. The Incas built their cities on the summits of mountains, afraid the land was going to sink. North American glaciers were melting from the last ice age. The sea rose. Many of the people believe the forefathers of their cultures came from a people fleeing the great cities that were sinking beneath the ocean. There are one hundred and eighty ancient cities under the waters of the Mediterranean alone. Think of what was lost—just think of it!”

  Per swilled cognac in the glass, took a great gulp. “Ever hear of Kuelap? A city lost in the clouds, built at over three thousand meters and not like any other architecture in South America. Twenty-meter-high walls—that’s over sixty feet for you Americans. Three times more stone used than they used to build Egypt’s great pyramid. Found a bunch of two-meter human skeletons there, tall as you”—he pointed to Thom—“with blond hair. How did they get there, a thousand years before South America was ‘discovered’? Nobody knows why they abandoned the city.”

  Per cursed in what Thom assumed was Swedish. “Archaeologists always say that. ‘For some unknown reason, in such and such time, they abandoned the city.’ Abandoned the city? Where did they go?” Per shouted thunderously across the room. “Where did they go!?” He brought his voice down to a murmur. “Where did we come from? That’s the question.

  “The majority of the world’s populations were coastal before the great flood. The navigators, the boat builders, left their mark all over the planet. We attempt to explain away that which we do not understand.”

  Thom looked over at Tree. His hands were frozen around a wire sculpture, eyes as wide as spoons.

  “How to explain the Egyptian pyramids, Easter Island, Mayan mathematics and architecture? Detailed books in India by the Ramas that explain the maintenance and construction of flying machines?

  “How do we know what God is? The human brain has such a short perspective on time. If something is over a hundred years old, it’s doubted. Five hundred years and it passes into legend, that filmy, elusive word whose meaning lies somewhere between a great historical event and a great story somebody made up to tell his kids. If it happened a thousand years ago, five thousand years ago, the
n it’s myth—that is, except for the fundamentalists, who believe everything is myth except what is written word for word in their Bibles and Korans and whatnot, and they’ve fought to the death over its veracity for thousands of years.”

  Per picked up a figurine with metal rays emanating from the head. “Viracocha,” he said. “This guy Viracocha”—Per put his fingers up into quote marks—“‘The Incan God,’ as he was interpreted by the Spanish, is an example. There’s evidence now that he was just a good inventor, or that he came from another culture bearing great inventions. What does that mean for Zeus? Perhaps Zeus was from some ancient race in which he played the role of Thomas Edison and was misinterpreted into godliness.” Per shrugged. “What is the origin of God? The Titan Prometheus, who gave the Greeks fire—was he a bloke who invented matches five hundred years earlier? Here great men become heroes become legend become myth become gods.” Per, waving his cane around, threw himself off balance, stumbled and recovered.

  “See this map? See this!?” He downed the rest of his cognac and refilled it from the bottle. “It’s a reproduction of a map drawn by a sixteenth century Turkish explorer and pirate named Piri Reis. The map is dated 1513. The fellow himself says he doesn’t know where he got some of the maps he used to piece this together. He said some of them may be as old as Alexander the Great, 300 B.C. But these people didn’t have the technology to make this map either. He says Columbus had the same map. Columbus discovered America, but you may notice that America is already drawn here! Discovered my ass!—he just followed the map. See this part? That’s Antarctica.” Per banged on the map with his cane. “Antarctica! Who knows when Antarctica was discovered?”