Couch

by Benjamin Parzybok

  “Se . . . se murió?” Erik whispered, fear in his stomach. Isn’t he dead?

  “No. Le hace sangre,” Rosita said. He’s making new blood. “Perdió mucho sangre.”

  “Hay esperanza, entonces?” There’s hope then?

  Rosita shrugged.

  “Y él?” Erik pointed to Tree.

  “Fiebre. Solo hay que esperar.”

  “What’d she say?” Jean said.

  “Tree’s got a fever and it doesn’t seem like she can do anything for him. Most people survive yellow fever but it’s very painful.”

  “Thom’s in a sort of coma,” Jean said. “He’s got a heartbeat. You should check out the bullet holes, they’re really quite amazing.”

  “Ugh. I don’t know, I never liked the sight of blood much. I used to faint when I was little, never went over very well at camp.”

  “There’s no blood though. That’s what’s crazy. She’s a . . . She’s real, Erik. A witch doctor.”

  Erik gingerly put his finger on the fabric of a hole in Thom’s shirt at his bicep and moved it around to see if he could see where the bullet entered the arm without touching Thom. He saw Thom’s smallpox vaccination mark and kept moving the shirt, but couldn’t find the bullet wound. He looked up at Jean. Maybe he’d found a rip that wasn’t a bullet hole. There was a hole in Thom’s shirt at his gut, just to the left of his belly button. Erik fingered that hole and saw another smallpox vaccination mark. “Uh . . .” he said.

  “They’re healed over. It’s like he’s been here for a month or something. Five months.”

  “Holy shit!” Erik shivered.

  “It’s amazing. I’m going to do an article on this for sure. It’s just that . . . It’s another thing that nobody is going to believe. And then the people who do believe it will all probably be parading into Patul. I’m not sure I’m ready for that.”

  “I’ve seen witch doctors before . . . but I didn’t, I didn’t think they could do this.”

  “It’s because there’s no road,” said a voice from the door. Erik’s father was there without his cap, in a black T-shirt, his eyes red. He took a step in, put his hand against the wall to steady himself. “A bit hungover this morning, how about you kids?”

  “I’m still drunk.” Erik smiled.

  “Yeah,” Jean said. “Same.” She pressed fingers against her temple. “And the smoke isn’t exactly helping.”

  “There are no roads, which means no civilization. Different rules govern Patul than most places. Once roads go in, the logic of science will come in, television will come in, a Western belief system, people will take painkillers and decongestants. They’ll forget about Rosita with the allure of the new science, they’ll believe less, they’ll think she’s the old way and Western science teaches us that new is always better than old. They’ll tell themselves that the healing she did was just a fairy tale.”

  “Is a road coming in?” Jean’s eyes were watering from the smoke.

  “Supposedly, a couple years from now. That’s what the government has been threatening, anyway.”

  “I don’t understand what a road has to do with how she heals,” Erik said crossly.

  “The healing is a symbiotic process between the healer and the one being healed. If the one being healed believes in the treatment, then the healer will be far more successful. Even though your friend was passed out, the effectiveness of the healing is a testament to his willingness to trust outside the normal belief system.” Erik’s father shrugged. “I don’t know. Seen it happen a hundred times though. She would have had generally better luck with him anyway because she was starting from scratch. He was basically dead. And I don’t mean to imply the situation is otherwise yet. What I’m saying is that when the road comes in, her powers will become more or less useless to all but the most traditional people.”

  Rosita stirred the fire. She came to her feet with a groan and pulled a ball of yarn connected to a mass of wool from a shelf in a corner. Guinea pigs squealed before her footfalls, running into the shadows. She sat back down at the fire and began to spin the yarn, thumb and forefinger working the mass into a thick strand, her other hand holding the stick that wound up the spun yarn. With a nod in the style of someone who is accustomed to being obeyed, she gestured for Jason to sit next to her.

  Jason moved gingerly, sat on a rock outside the fire ring. His beard was a collection of twigs and dirt and black hair.

  A young woman entered with a blackened frying pan and a big stewpot and sat on the edge of the couch, her back to Thom. She put the pot of beans on the fire to heat and began to cook scrambled eggs.

  Rosita waved her off the couch harshly and spoke to Jason in a language Erik couldn’t understand. A language that sounded like a combination of Russian and TV static.

  “What’d she say?”

  “She said the couch can’t stay. She said it belongs to the old peoples, and she doesn’t want her people exposed to it. It’s true. You’ve got to get it out of here soon. If nothing else, it’s a lure for your pursuers, and she doesn’t want them coming here.”

  “The old peoples? Does she know what it is?”

  Jason conversed with Rosita. “She doesn’t know. She just feels it.”

  “I was kind of hoping that we were bringing it here.” Erik scratched at his head and mustache furiously. “I’ve had enough of being effking chased.”

  “This place seems like a perfect end to the article,” Jean said. “To bring it to the most isolated place on Earth, a forgotten village.”

  “There are more isolated places, and more forgotten people,” Jason said. “You’ve a ways to go yet. The closer you get, the harder it will be for your pursuers. Your destination will keep them away, keeps everybody away. The only reason you’ll be able to go is because you are being allowed. That is, if the place really exists. If it hasn’t turned to dust.”

  The cooking began to smell good, and the girl worked the food skillfully around the pan. Outside a rooster called out the sunrise, as it had done every fifteen minutes for the last three hours.

  “I have a lot, a lot, of questions,” Erik said. “Like for one who in the hell wants the couch so much that they want to kill us?”

  “Ah.” Jason blew air through puffed cheeks. “I can barely answer those questions. I know legends about the cloud city, and I know the council—”

  “You know the council?”

  “Yep. The council is as old as time. And so are their opposites. I think the council calls them the collectors. I mean old like thousands of years. I don’t know for sure, and you’re getting some of my politics here, but when I think of the collectors, I think U.S. politicians, I think television executives, the people who control North American society. I think of the rulers throughout time. Caesar. Any small group whose aim is to pacify a large group for the purpose of taking advantage of them. Organized religion. The same people who make nuclear bombs and repress technologies that would positively change the way people live. Collectors is a broad term. The people who make the world reliant on oil, because it makes them rich. Like Reagan. Or Nixon or Bush. But like I said, that fits in conveniently with my belief system.”

  “I liked Reagan,” Erik said idly.

  “You did not, you little shit!” Jason stood and feigned a backhand.

  “Ha,” Erik said.

  Jason snorted, sat back down, pointed a comic, threatening finger at Erik. “You little skunk. But anyway, who knows. Those presidents may have been put there by the collectors, or they may just be subscribers to that belief system. Again, these are my politics. Maybe it runs a lot deeper than that. Maybe it goes down to human nature, religion, where we come from.”

  “I just still . . . goddamnit, I just don’t know how I got mixed up in this. Why me?”

  Jason laughed deeply, a bellowing sound. “You take after me!” Jason reached forward and grabbed a handful of the thick hair that jutted from Erik’s head and shook it playfully, causing Erik’s head to bob up and down and his teeth to
clatter. “Damn good to see you, boy. It’s been seven years or so, eh? But really, I don’t have the faintest idea. You’re one of the three. That’s all I know. Something about the three that carry the seat. That’s about as much of the legend as I know. We’ve lost all the legends, which weren’t even legends in the first place. Anyway, you’re in it because you’ve always been where there’s trouble.”

  Jason pulled a gun out of his boot, went through its workings while they waited for food.

  “This village is barely holding off the outside world,” he said. “And to have the couch here much longer is going to endanger it. You’ve got to leave even if the other two are sick. Patul has ten percent of the population it used to have because the outside world has a terrific gravity. Most everyone here will want to talk about Ecuadorian soccer, which they only know about from watching TV in Cuenca. When there’s a big game, they make a pilgrimage to the city, and then they become infected by the advertising, by the sights and sounds. There’re very few young people left here. The allure of possessions and the fast life of cities is almost irresistible. This is no longer a pueblo. It’s a corpse of a traditional pueblo, riddled with the worms of the modern world.”

  “Descriptive,” Erik said. “What about Mom? How are the cooperatives doing?”

  Jason glowed. “We’re back together, you know. She’s living with me. The cooperatives are same as always, same as here. Individualism, Darwinism, survival of the fittest. It’s the same all over. Nobody wants to help everybody else for the common good. It seems impossible to work toward common goals without a hierarchy. They want to see what they can get for themselves. We’ve got a small army of believers, but there are just as many defections as recruits. Even Patulians have convinced themselves that they live in the middle of nowhere. Know what that does for one’s self-concept? They do live in the middle of nowhere in respect to the current paradigm of civilization. But they live near the center of the world in the old ways. If you believe you live in the middle of nowhere, then you believe your life means nothing.”

  The eggs were nearly finished, and the smell called in the others. Hunger was aroused among the still-drunk and hungover.

  My parents are back together, Erik thought. He realized the concept of having parents at all felt strange, exciting, comforting.

  Tree stirred and moaned, and Erik went to talk with him.

  “How you doing, dreamy?”

  “Thirsty,” he croaked.

  Erik saw that there was blood on Tree’s gums. The whites of his eyes had a yellowish hue. “Um, can somebody help me here? Tree is . . . uh . . . not looking good. Sorry to be blunt, Tree.”

  Jason came and looked at Tree and described the symptoms to Rosita. “He’s got jaundice now. Common side effect of yellow fever.”

  Rosita ladled out a cupful of the same liquid Jean was drinking and directed that it should be handed to Tree.

  “We need to carry on,” Tree said. “Is Thom . . .?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked at the room for some kind of answer, and Jason nodded. “He’s in a coma?”

  “We can put him on the couch and carry it.” Tree mouthed the last words, voice failing him.

  “I don’t think so,” Erik said. “You’re not going to be carrying anything, bud. You look like shit. And I’m not going to risk doing any more damage to Thom.”

  They ate breakfast. The guerillas filed in, and the hut became crowded with burliness, beards, guns, excessive politeness. Erik listened to the excited banter about some kind of couch-carrying contraption the men and villagers were building. The news annoyed him, but he hoped it implied someone else might take over. He asked few questions—mostly because he didn’t want to know the answers. He needed a respite and to look after his roommates.

  They waited two days. Erik and Jean watched the fogs engulf Patul, drift out and leave sparkling rainbows in their place. The stars were so thick at night that the ground glowed. They played volleyball and soccer with the villagers, and the trago was passed around liberally. Erik fished in the mornings with his father, and a woman of the village repaired the holes in his clothes with not a few sideways glances at him at the state into which he’d gotten them. Independently of each other, Erik and Jean decided that Patul was the last real place on Earth, a place of magic. During the day, the villagers disappeared up hillsides with herds of sheep, calling singsong to each other across the valley.

  The weather was erratic. With no warning, flower petals fell from the sky. One day a wind came up that threatened to unmake the place. It rushed from one valley end to the other, lodging saddles in trees and tree branches in rooftops.

  Jean stayed up late each night with Thom and Rosita. She sat by the fire and communicated in hand signals with the village curandera. She learned to spin wool and talked to Thom in his coma, remembering their night together, speculating on the future, forming the foundations of a relationship by herself. She wondered what was happening inside him, where he was, if he thought of her. She spoke more honestly and hopefully than she ever would have dared had he been awake. She drew the wool out in her fingers, her palms aching from repetition. Thinking how handsome he looked, this great figure of a man, like a Greek statue, his arms crossed like a Viking on his funeral bier. In his helplessness and quiet, it was easy to talk herself into believing that she loved him. It was easy to love him.

  It looked like a cross between a burn pile and a rickshaw, something that nature had grown or beavers built. A giant wooden thing that surely was incapable of moving, something out of the Stone Ages, with extensions and whirligigs springing from it. Jason was immensely proud of it and immediately began giving rides to everyone in the village. There was not a single wheel to be found in Patul, so the villagers had cut dozens of the strong, flexible switches that grew along the river and lashed them together in circles to form a wheel and spokes. The wooden axle went straight through the bed of the cart and powered a propeller out the back.

  “That doesn’t do anything,” Erik said when he saw the propeller.

  “What? We have a doubter,” Jason said. “Mincho—explain our science to the boy, will you? My son, here is my resident inventor and contraption genius.”

  A short, stocky man with glasses that Eric recognized as one of his father’s men came forward.

  “It’s a fog propeller. You’ll be going through lots of fog.”

  Erik screwed up his eyes at his father. “A fog propeller?”

  The crowd laughed.

  “All this so we can lug that couch into the wilderness?”

  “Yes, sir. And look at this baby here,” Mincho said with a sly grin. “This winds up while you move and provides a levering effect on the ground.” He began to move the cart, which wound a contraption underneath hooked into the axle. “When the tension is reached, well, you’ll see, here.” A number of sticks swept down violently along the underside of the cart, pushing the vehicle forward in a leap.

  The cart was nearly overturned by the force, Erik saw.

  “These switches could also be used as a brake,” Mincho demonstrated. “Come on aboard.”

  Jean bravely climbed into the cargo area and motioned for Erik to take up the runners. He ran her around the grassy, sheep-cropped hill in the center of Patul. Since the whole thing, except the axle, was made of flexible switches, the shocks were amazingly smooth. A daddy-longlegs Cadillac.

  “Rickshaw supercar!” Mincho yelled. He jumped into the cart next to Jean and leaned back like an emperor being taken to a ball. The bottom spring of switches built up enough tension and whipped under the cart, and Jean and Mincho bounced high into the air, coming down rattled.

  “It’ll work better when the couch is on here,” Mincho said, realigning his eyeglasses.

  Some kind of bird. Or a rat. The noise drifted in, had been active there in his body for a while, and brain, like a drunk telephone operator, only now began to sober up enough to patch through calls between the senses and memory. A scrabbling noise, small fe
et on dirt, and a chirp that scaled an octave, a reverse slide. A winged animal. Talking was heard, but in other languages, and the duration was too long for concentration. First things first. Brain going through the files, the sound was identifiable, it had been recorded before, it was in the memory banks. Match a visual image to the sound, or pull from the vocabulary a verbal identifier. Brain opted for visual, filing through hundreds of animal cards until it found one that seemed right, and presented it to consciousness. But consciousness felt uneasy. Some other memory there. It wasn’t a bird, it was some kind of ground creature. Brain went back to work, presented another image. A 1970s-style rat, its hair long and ungainly, bangs obscuring the eyes, ruthlessly out of fashion. Shy. About the size of a shoe. Consciousness accepted the image. With two points, a visual and an auditory, a triangulation could be made into the abstract world of language: a guinea pig.

  Why was he hearing a guinea pig? In a world filtered through one sense, what could be deduced?

  Then sense number two came back in a rush of new data that brain worked feverishly to process: wood smoke. That was easy. Dominating. What must be the smell of guinea pigs. Hay and dirt and wet dirt and wet hay. Cooking, the smell of burned corn. Oil gone acrid. Another animal smell: sheep? Human smell, the thick, iron-rich smell of menstrual blood, the salty diesel of sweat. But mostly wood smoke. Deduction: a barn. A campsite. A tent. A zoo.

  Numb fingers. Numb everything. The memory of ache, a tingling of warning: movement will be painful. Coordinates? Position? On his back, arms crossed on his chest. Brain: How they lay you in a coffin. An uneven heat, the left cheek, down the shoulder, waist, thigh, a warmth like sunlight, like lightbulbs, the other side cool. Brain: wood smoke = wood fire. Deduction: he’d been here for a long while. He was sick. He was not dead. Certainly this couldn’t be death. There was no mention of guinea pigs in the afterlife. Was there?