Couch

by Benjamin Parzybok

  His brain called upon the memory functions and memory answered: _________.

  For comic relief, brain presented the image of the Fonz jarring the jukebox with his elbow, the jukebox spinning to life. Memory? Calling out in the fog, calling out into spaces the size of which are unknown. Is this dark cave five yards wide, or five miles? There was no memory.

  For a long time his body relaxed into the new information, until the strain of being conscious lessened. Brain suggested trying to tap into sight again. Which required movement. Which will bring pain. Send the signal, open the hatches. A great struggle to pull the earthy lids back. Input: blackness, but with the possibility of definition. A topography of black.

  “Thom—Thom! Thom’s eyes are open.”

  There was the sound of relief in this, and also panic.

  “Thom? His eyes opened, did you see? Did he do that? Everybody come quick, the professor is awake.”

  Sound. In a recognizable language. The translator from sound to meaning cranking up. Oil splashed into the gears. A panic, a reply required. Was a reply required? It’s all you brain. Your ball. Call it.

  “Hey . . . Gilligan,” Thom said. The lips chapped, the tongue a sloth in the mouth, fur having grown there thickly. “Think we’ll . . . get off this island?” The words came like pencil scratchings in the air, the faintest of speech bubbles.

  “Would we want to?”

  A weight against him, the voice coming closely now. “Hell, this is paradise. But they’re trying to kick us out. We brought evil to paradise.”

  Brain worked this. Biblical imagery. Utopian literature. A Joni Mitchell song. Travel brochures. Adam and Eve. Lost peoples. Lost empires. A couch.

  “I’m on the apple?”

  “Yep.”

  “Erik. What . . .”

  “What do you remember?”

  “You’re hurting me,” Thom said.

  “Oh! Sorry!” Erik realized he’d been clapping Thom on the chest.

  “Where’s Jean?”

  “She’s with the villagers—long story. They’ve uh . . . they’ve been drinking since noon.”

  Relief: first blink. A re-wetting of the glassy surface. More definition, a series of tubes at right angles to another series of finer tubes. Coal black. Tar black. Beetle black. Eyes tracking along a tube to where the surface met with another plane. A wall. The black topography was a ceiling. Brain received a complaint. Systems failing. She can’t hold together much longer at this speed, Captain. A submarine with a breached hull. The eyes failed to recover from a second blink. Sound melded to static. Red telephone to brain, wire cut.

  Later. A fragment of consciousness returning. First: the memory of being shot. An opening up of the body, inside parts that should stay inside pouring from him. Then: an awareness of people around him. The fire crackling. His eyes closed, relieved at the anonymity of sightlessness, the effortlessness of it. Listening.

  “It’s a what?”

  “A lost city.”

  “What do you mean, lost?” A woman’s voice. Jean.

  “That it can’t be found. It—”

  “Then how do you know it exists?”

  Pause.

  “We don’t.”

  A fork being moved around a mostly empty plate. A plastic plate.

  “Well . . . what makes you think it exists then? I’m just having a hell of a hard time believing that with satellites and airplanes and whatnot, a city can just be lost. And can’t the people who live there find the outside world?”

  “Maybe they don’t want to be found. And they’re still finding Incan and pre-Incan ruins here all the time.”

  “Yeah, but, yeah”—Erik’s voice—“they’re covered under hundreds of years of shit. Grass and trees and stuff. You guys are talking about a city with living . . . people. Right?”

  “We think so. Living or something.”

  “I don’t think you understand the scale here, Erik.” An unknown voice, a voice like cigars and turbine engines, like earthquakes and clay. “We’re in about sixteen thousand square miles of completely unpopulated terrain. Some of the rockiest, highest, cruelest terrain on Earth. Terrain that is mostly immersed in fog or cloud layer all year round. And beyond that area it is incredibly sparsely populated, and more or less the—”

  “Which brings me right back to my original point. How in the fuck are we supposed to—”

  “Same way you got this far, boyo.”

  “Uh, Dad, have you seen my . . . errr . . . fellow questers?”

  “Thom will be fine. You’ve seen what she’s done already. She’ll get him ready.” That same voice, a growling bear. Dad? “Tree’s not going to be so hot. You will have to carry him on the couch.”

  “Listen, all I’m trying to say is, don’t you think this would be a hell of a lot easier if there were a bunch of us and we all sort of spread out? I don’t know, like what about walkie-talkies? This is the modern age. Certainly that makes a load more sense than sending three young city slickers and a couch into, as you’re saying, twenty thousand square miles of hell.”

  Pause.

  “And what the hell are we supposed to do when we get there? Drop off the couch and run? Shake hands? ‘Hey! You old blokes been missing this?’ And how do you expect us to get back, or is that in the plan?”

  Pause.

  “I’m sorry about this, Erik. I’d be scared stiff if I were in your shoes. The legend calls for three. We think that if more people go, you’ll never find—”

  “I could go in Tree’s place.” This was Jean again, lovely Jean.

  “Any of us would love to go in Tree’s stead, Jean, but we think only these three will be able to make contact.”

  “What legend? Or I should say, which legend? We’ve heard a million already.”

  “I know, I know.” Sigh. “Nobody knows which is which. Or what is what. Just hazy ideas. But that’s the way it works. You use the legend that suits you best at the time. The Cañari one you heard already. Three people will return the seat of power to the center of the world. Another one says it’s a vessel protected by—whatever—and inside are the remains of the first humans. The first humans. Listen, nobody else has found this city. And we’ve looked for a long time. I think they are keeping us out. If we go with you—”

  “But come on, let’s be reasonable. Like, for example, why don’t we rent a plane”—Erik’s sarcasm deepening to its sharpest value—“and fly over the place so we know at least where not to look?”

  “Can’t. Do that.” It was Tree! Good old Tree, sounding like he’d been run over by a semitruck. “The city . . . presents itself.”

  “I knew it, I knew it,” the bear’s voice said.

  “Okay then, a moving city. A moving city.” Snort. “How about we take a GPS thing so at least when we start to starve to death after a couple of days, you’ll know where to find us?”

  A new voice with an accent, like speaking from the bottom of a well: “The Lug-o-naut has room to—”

  “The Lug-o-naut 147, you’ve got to call it what it is!” Erik said. “We agreed on the number.”

  The new voice, more slowly: “The . . . Lug-o-naut 147 . . . has room to carry fourteen days’ worth of provisions.”

  “A real thrill machine.”

  Hurried steps and a new voice, out of breath.

  “Jason, there’s an encampment at the pass.”

  “Is it them?”

  Pause.

  “They didn’t show any signs of packing up tonight. But there’s a lot of them, maybe fifteen.”

  Rustling and movement. Then: “You have to leave tonight.”

  “What!? Look at these guys.”

  “I’m alright,” Thom said, without having any idea he was going to say it. He opened one eyelid to 40 percent. “Lo que sea mejor por el país.”

  “Thom!” Jean said.

  And then he was being kissed.

  Thom felt like he was made out of clay. His body still unidentifiable as his own. Frankenstein’s mo
nster. A golem. A poured cement statue someone had set free. He’d been full of bullet holes. What had the woman done to make him whole again? He stood where someone had helped him walk, the stars a Jackson Pollock painting above. He wove slightly, didn’t dare take a step. Around him, the village had come alive to get the quest back on track. Tree was lying on the couch which had been loaded on some kind of wheeled structure. Thom shuffled to it, squeezed Tree’s arm—the boy was asleep and breathing raggedly—and felt hopelessness bear down on him so heavily that he needed to lean on the cart.

  Provisions were dug up from the villagers’ private stores. Machetes and firewood and water and food. Blankets, a tent. Guns. Bottles of what they were calling trago, a clear liquid that set one on fire—someone had given him a swallow to get him out the door, and it had carried him this far. He’d need a hell of a lot more of it to get up the mountain they kept pointing at. Human figures ran around between the points of fire in the village, a village of wraiths. From somewhere in the dark came a stamping of hooves. A whinny of horses.

  Gear for fourteen days. The number seemed so unbelievable to him he didn’t dare contemplate it. He wanted a waterbed, a health spa, a massage. He’d been dead, hadn’t he? Come on, people. Give a hero a break! He turned his head slowly to follow the passage of the wraiths, and Jean emerged from the blackness. She grabbed him about the middle.

  “I wish I could go with you.”

  “You’re crazy. I wish I could stay here with you.” It felt like a long time passed between each phrase as he gathered energy for the next.

  Jean put her face into his chest, and he felt something had happened to bring them closer. He did not know what it was, but was glad for it. He no longer detected the wary edge of people new to each other. There was an inexplicable comfort to the embrace.

  “Come back,” Jean said. “Let’s spend some time together.”

  “Yes. We will. I will. In fact, I was thinking of slipping someone else in my place. My, uh, joints seem a bit Super Glued. How about that guy that’s so excited about this couch carrier?”

  In answer she squeezed him tighter, and he realized his fate was set. A number of people here would go in his place. But apparently they couldn’t. Thom felt like he’d been underwater for a week. Like everyone had watched the same soap opera for the last year except him, and now he was expected to write a dissertation on it.

  Rosita hobbled up and rested her hand on the arm of the couch and was quiet. Then she nodded and gave it a pat. She briefly felt Tree’s forehead and smoothed back his hair.

  She delivered a package she’d had under one arm to Thom and explained to Erik: one spoon of the brown liquid per day for Thom; one spoon per day of the gray for Tree.

  After she’d finished she gave Thom’s bicep a squeeze. “Suerte.”

  Then they were walking. There’d been a hurried round of hugs and well-wishing. The couch, Thom noticed, was disintegrating. The fabric worn, part of the wood structure falling apart. It was the weight a couch should be. They stopped frequently in the thin air to catch their breath.

  Erik had the Lug-o-naut 147 strapped to him, pulling the contraption behind, Thom stumbling after him, trying to keep his distance from some propeller affixed to the back of the cart. Relearning the movements of walking. They looked like something from the ninth century, three boys on a crusade, traveling at night, bent and burdened, escaping the plague. Other groups of three villagers each were up in the hills as distractions and as watchers to make sure they got out safely. Thom watched the seven points of fire from the village move farther away, dim. They were on an old trail, headed deeper into the Andes. Erik in front of him swearing. Tree on the couch unconscious. Thom the sleepwalker bringing up the rear, vaguely aware of others above them, behind them, stealthy shadows, keeping the way safe, ensuring they took the evil object away.

  They walked the trail all night. Watched the quarter moon rise behind them, set in front. Followed where the moon had landed. The trail was muddy and rocky, but the Lug-o-naut did well over the terrain. An organic mechanism with spidery reflexes that bounced and climbed well.

  The villagers and guerillas had drifted off long ago, and he and Erik walked into a frightening silence at an altitude with few living animals and little plant life. The trail climbed out of the valley up a mountainside onto a higher rocky plain. A moonscape where little else grew but moss. A brook through the center of it.

  Thom walked like a zombie. He’d step forward, and there was the memory of the bullets, there was his body opened up, his insides bared. Step forward again and the memory disappeared.

  Only movement kept them warm.

  Following through, Erik thought. What a pain in the ass. But here I am, look here, Erik following through.

  “Tree,” Erik called over his shoulder. “Tree!”

  There was no sound from the couch.

  “Thom, would you wake up Tree and ask him if this is the right direction?”

  Thom caught up to the Lug-o-naut and shook Tree lightly. “Tree. Wake up.” The kid was burning up. If he survived the trip it’d be a miracle, Thom thought.

  “Where are we?” Tree said, his eyes not quite focusing.

  “We’re lost in the Andes,” Erik hollered over his shoulder into the silent landscape. “Where the effk do you think we are? Can you give me an idea if I’m still hauling this thing in the right direction? It’s going to kill me if I travel even one step out of my way.”

  “I . . . I don’t know where to go,” Tree said. “The dreams are gone.”

  “What!?” The cart came to a grinding halt. “What in the hell are we supposed to do?”

  “Is it because of the fever?” Thom asked.

  “I . . . don’t know.” Tree’s voice faded back to unconsciousness.

  “What are we supposed to do, Professor?”

  “Camp. I’m exhausted. We’ll see if he knows in the morning.”

  There was a sudden barrage of shooting stars. A buzz, a whir, and twenty stars went at once together across the sky. Meteors that traveled for the last five hundred thousand years to reach their destination: a fiery atmosphere, a bright death, the transformation to gas. They blazed over the sky like fireflies set free.

  “Wow,” Erik said. “I tell you.”

  They passed the night shivering in the small tent. Thom and Erik slept on the outsides. Tree was pinned between them, shaking alternately from fever and cold. When Tree woke for an instant through his delirium he displayed frighteningly yellow eyes, the pupils lone black dots.

  A gray luminance made the walls of their tent glow dully in the morning. They’d gotten only a few hours of sleep, and the ground was too uncomfortable for more. Tree was even less lucid, answering questions that hadn’t been asked and giving answers unrelated to the questions that were. He looked terrible, his skin an unnatural hue, lips cracked, his hair matted with sweat.

  Erik pulled out Rosita’s package and dutifully made Thom and Tree take a spoon of their respective liquids.

  They ate breakfast and packed, and then Erik and Thom stared at each other expectantly, not having the faintest idea where to go next.

  “He’s up there,” Tree said.

  “It’s okay, buddy,” Erik said. “We’ll get you some help.”

  “On the shelf,” Tree said.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “On the rock.”

  Erik nodded sharply, exhaled. Tree’s eyes seemed to drift back out of whatever sort of consciousness that was, and Erik tried to remember if he’d given Tree medicine yet. Oh yes, just at breakfast. Was more in order?

  They put the couch back on the Lug-o-naut 147 and gently hoisted Tree on top. The landscape was gray, desolate, heavy on boulders, with pepperings of mossy areas. Steep rocky juttings like skyscrapers climbed violently from the valley floor.

  Thom and Erik were silenced by it.

  With a loud thwok!, the cart shuddered and a thunderous rumbling erupted over the valley.

  “Shots!” Thom cri
ed and launched away from the cart, weaving wildly, his body high on adrenalin and the memory of previous gunfire.

  Erik stared at the couch and saw a hole a mere two inches above Tree’s head. He ducked and then heard a scream from somewhere far off. He saw Thom paused a hundred yards away, bent double out of breath and looking up at the hills around them. Whoever had screamed seemed gone—there had been a finality to the sound. The moonscape was quiet and still as if nothing had happened. Either the marksman had fallen off a cliff or something had befallen him. When Erik looked back at the couch, the hole had sealed itself. A flattened slug lay on a board of the cart, apparently spit out by the couch. He shuddered.

  Thom picked his way back to the cart, ducking skittishly.

  “Hey,” Erik said.

  “Shots.”

  “I know. One hit the couch, just above Tree’s head. You heard the scream?”

  “Let’s get out of here. Let’s get the fuck out of here now.”

  In all directions were sharp mountains, rocky slopes with low underbrush scaling up the sides.

  “We’ve got to take it off the cart and see which way it wants to go,” Thom said.

  “I don’t think that works anymore. Does that still work?”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  “Dude, this isn’t exactly the best of places. You noticed we’re getting shot at?”

  Thom shrugged. “You heard that guy’s scream? We’ve got to go the right way.”

  They each took a side and lifted—the couch felt like a couch with a sleeping man on it ought to—it was heavy.

  “Go that way first,” Thom gestured with his chin toward the trail on the left. They took a few steps, backed up and tried the other trail.

  “Same,” Erik said. “Right? I didn’t notice anything.”