Couch

by Benjamin Parzybok

  After the hole was dug, he built a fire and did his best to think of some words to say. You said words over a person’s body as it went into the grave. That was how you did it. Certainly something must be said about the navigator. About the wire sculptor. The cook. The young hippie. The dreamer. The seer.

  He put the beans on to cook. Be practical, brain instructed. Preserve the life that is left. Feed the body. Hoping there would be some change in the conditions. Some fact of life he might have overlooked. “What’s the hole for?” Tree might ask from the couch, leaning up on one elbow. “Oh. Oh that. I was looking for treasure. For lost cities. For the past. Silly me.”

  Thom put the tent up. Arranged two sleeping bags. Put Tree’s sleeping bag over him on the couch. This seemed to make sense. Ate some beans. Brushed his teeth. Damn you, Erik. He couldn’t bury Tree without Erik there. Only one death per night, wasn’t that the rule?

  There was a strange bug on the shovel handle. Black and shiny, body the size and shape of a cigarette, but with three joints in it, something that almost looked like pincers at its rear. Six crooked beetle legs and a pair of long, telescoping antennae. It skittered up the handle when Thom approached and seemed to look back at him over its shoulder. Its shiny black body reflected the orange of the fire. Thom shuddered, picked up the shovel, and walked to the edge of the trees and shook it until the bug dislodged. There were two more on the lid of the pot of beans. “Agh!” He picked up the pan lid and flipped it so that they followed the first one. There was one on his boot, in trying to kick it off he stepped on two others on the ground. Their exoskeletons made a sickening crunching noise with each step. The tent was speckled black with them. The ground crawled. They jumped into the fire, crackling and writhing. Thom yelled for all he was worth, picked up the shovel, and began to beat it against the ground. Shiny black insect parts trailed the arc of the shovel. A rancid, burnt-hair smell to the air.

  Then he remembered the couch.

  Tree’s body couldn’t be seen under the swarming insects, a festering shiny blackness. Thom screamed, flailing his arms around, flinging the insects from Tree’s body, feeling himself being bit, each bite like a fiery poker stabbing. For every dozen he swiped from Tree’s body, a dozen more replaced them, crawling over the back of the couch, up the sides of the couch, up his pant legs, on his arms, shoulders. Thom leapt back and shook his body, stamping and yelling. They were tangled in his hair. Biting his face. He moved toward the fire, throwing the insects into the coals. Then he ran for the tent, unzipped it, threw out the few bugs that had made it inside, zipped up the tent, and buried himself in his sleeping bag. All night long he heard them skittering across the top of the tent, saw the twitching black forms in the dying light of the fire, imagined Tree’s body being devoured. His swollen hands ached hotly, the poison coursing up his veins.

  In the morning, Thom huddled inside the tent. There were welts all over his hands and face and neck, but the swelling had gone down, and all he felt was a vague nausea. He finally risked unzipping the tent a crack. The ground was littered with giant black insect bodies, hacked to pieces. But nothing moved. He opened the tent all the way.

  Erik sat on a stone in front of the dead fire, his head hanging down, his hands against his temples.

  “Erik,” Thom said.

  Erik looked up, a strange, haunted look to his eyes, a great gash across his forehead.

  Behind Erik, the hole Thom had dug was filled up.

  “Did you . . .?”

  Erik nodded.

  Thom got out of the tent, put his boots on, slimed with insects. Pieces of the black shiny husks stuck to the soles.

  “Did you, did you say some words for him?”

  “I thought them.” Erik’s voice was hoarse and damaged.

  “Did you sleep somewhere?”

  Erik pointed to his forehead. “I woke up somewhere.”

  Thom walked to the edge of the trees and threw up the beans from the night before.

  “That makes two of us,” Erik said. He waited for Thom to stop retching. “I couldn’t find my way. I ran and ran but couldn’t get out. If you hadn’t yelled, I’d still be lost. I started running back, and that’s when. . . . I don’t know what happened, but I woke up out there.”

  Thom nodded. “I had some trouble with insects.” He showed Erik his hands. Then, after a long pause, “What about Tree’s body?”

  Erik grabbed two fistfuls of hair, shook his head. “I’m sorry I ran away. I’m so sorry. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Thom said, “We have to get out of here before the insects come back.”

  “Well.” Erik swallowed. “What do you want to do?”

  “How could the couch let Tree die?” Thom said. “I thought there were supposed to be three. He was the navigator.”

  “Maybe they want us lost. I don’t know. Do we go back?”

  Thom thought about what Tree would have done. He thought of Jean and Shin and Theo, of Rosita and the Patulians. He stared at the couch on the cart. It looked untouched by Tree’s death—no insect limbs, nothing left of the feverish boy who’d inhabited it. In the dim forest light and with the memory of it swarming with insects, there was a genuine menace to it, Thom thought, as if it had called in its own army of cleaners. He didn’t know to what degree it was responsible for Tree’s death, but he didn’t want to get too close to it.

  Thom kicked the Lug-o-naut as hard as he could, and it shuddered. Through clenched teeth he said, “No. We go on, amigo. What else is there?”

  “I’m afraid of that.” He pointed at the couch. “I’m afraid of what might happen if we don’t finish things. I want to finish things.”

  Erik scuffed at the fire ring with his feet. “Right. Right. I don’t care what happens now. There’s no way in hell I could find my way back anyway.”

  Thom covered the grave with stones, carved Tree’s name in a piece of firewood with his knife. Set it carefully on top.

  The grave was rough, but there weren’t other options. He picked up a small, rough pebble from near the grave and pocketed it. An exchange. Leave Tree here, take the stone away.

  “Erik . . . ” he said.

  “Don’t think about it,” Erik said, “just don’t think about it.”

  They packed in a hurry and chose a path at random. Thom wondered if it was the path they’d come down. The forest looked the same everywhere. Their tracks were swallowed up by the resilient undergrowth as soon as they’d passed. The trail twisted about, and either side of the canyon was completely obscured.

  They passed hours disoriented, trudging down one trail until it dead-ended, backtracking and taking another. Neither of them spoke except to communicate directions. It had seemed such a small canyon, a crevasse with a bit of forest at its bottom, but they were in an eternity of trees, a lifetime of darkness. Thom’s brain tried and failed to keep direction, to map, tracing trails in his head, trying to overlay that on top of the view they’d seen from above. But it was impossible. Everything looked the same. Through the canopy above them, the sky was dark. They heard thunder in the distance. A heavy rain poured down on them.

  The floor of the forest began to slope upward, and they took it as a good sign. Erik pulled the cart. Both of them feeling an intense hate for the couch. Their cross, their albatross.

  After several hours of incline, the trees thinned and dwindled to nothing. The rain stopped. They could see the canyon walls again; everything above was immersed in fog. The floor of the canyon rose, and the walls lowered and finally they were out. They stopped, looked back, saw only a slim tree-filled crevasse. The ground continued to slope up, and they followed blindly until the sky became too dark and their hunger too intense. They camped, ate what they could find, and went silently to sleep.

  Nightmares awoke Thom throughout the night until he woke finally and realized that a noise outside of the tent was not part of the dream. There was a deep grumbling, which at first sounded like a far-off boulder s
liding down stone. But there was the sound of a pot clanking, a bag being rustled through. Someone was going through their gear! He shook Erik awake.

  “What?”

  “Shhhh,” Thom whispered.

  Erik’s eyes went wide. “What is it?” he whispered back.

  Thom quietly unzipped the tent a notch and looked out. The fog was thinner, and through it several stars twinkled faintly. A giant form on two legs was going through their cart. It had a great head and arms the size of tree limbs.

  “Look,” Thom mouthed. Frozen in fear.

  Erik cautiously peeked out. “It’s a bear,” he whispered back. “Is it a bear? It’s stealing our food.”

  “What do we do?”

  “What can we do?”

  “Where’s the gun?”

  “It’s in the cart.”

  “Fuck. We’ve got to do something,” Thom said. “We have to have food.”

  “We have to stay alive.”

  “I’m going out there.”

  “No, don’t.”

  “Got to.” Thom put on his boots as quietly as he could, unzipped the tent. He saw the bear’s head turn toward him. “Hey!” he yelled. “Get out of here!” His voice came out weak and scared. He tried again. “Gitttaouttaherrrre!”

  The bear turned and walked away on two legs. It ambled slowly into the fog, and Thom saw there were dozens of forms at the edge of the fog. All around them, a perimeter of black shapes, impossible to distinguish in the fog and darkness. Animals? Humans? Creatures. They were being watched. Thom slowly moved to the cart, pulled the rifle out, trying to keep an eye on all sides at once. The visibility was strange, completely black in one direction, fog faintly lit in another. The shapes on the perimeter moving. Thom pulled the cart over next to the tent, snuck back inside.

  “Do you see them?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do we do?”

  “I don’t know. . . . Nothing. Let’s just keep watch.”

  “Here.” Thom handed Erik the gun. “You know how to use this better.”

  Erik propped the gun against his shoulder, sighted down the barrel. “It’s tempting to take a shot.”

  “No, don’t.”

  “Are we sure they’re things? And not rocks?”

  “I have no idea.”

  They watched for hours as the fog swirled in, made its own shapes, distorted those of the watchers. Thom’s eyelids got heavier and heavier.

  “I’ve got to sleep. Wake me up when you want to trade.”

  Thom woke up to Erik shaking him.

  “I fell asleep. It’s morning.”

  Thom looked through the tent door, could see it was morning only by the hue of the fog. It had thickened again so that they could only see a couple of meters out. There was a boxy shape half visible near where their fire ring had been.

  “That’s the couch,” Erik said. “The couch is out there.”

  “Whoa.”

  The cart had been overturned and the couch dragged a few meters toward the rocks. The couch looked the worse for wear. There were tears in the cushions. The right arm could be swung back and forth freely. Thom looked around for footprints, but the terrain was too rocky. He peered out into the fog, but couldn’t discern any shapes. Were they still there?

  “Is it okay?”

  “It’s beat up. Maybe they thought it was food.”

  “Maybe. The bear wreaked havoc with our supplies. It almost looks like he was doing it on purpose. The water jugs are all punctured, and the water has leaked out.”

  “What?”

  “Almost all the food is gone. Little bits left. Crumbs.”

  “No.” Thom inspected the overturned cart. He picked up stray grains of rice. No. He looked up at Erik, who was staring out into the fog. “What do we do now?”

  “Let’s keep moving. The sooner this is over, the better.”

  “We can’t survive long without water.”

  “Maybe we’ll find water.” Erik tenderly touched the swollen gash on his forehead.

  “I don’t know if I’d trust the water out here. It should be drinkable, but everything else is so . . . rigged to fuck you up.”

  “Thom, we don’t have a choice.”

  Thom nodded. “Alright.”

  They ate what they could. A handful of leftover beans that had been in the fire pit. Thom divvied up the rice he’d collected, and they put grains of it in their mouths to suck on. Thom fought nausea.

  Erik dug in his bag and came up with the gray vial. “Do you have your medicine?” he said.

  “Oh . . . ,” Thom said. “No.”

  “Well. It’s gone. There’s one bottle left of Tree’s, you want it?”

  “No.”

  Erik unplugged the vial and drained the contents in a few gulps. “Which way?”

  Thom stared at Erik but felt too tired to comment. He looked without hope into the various directions of whiteness. He walked around the camp and tried to figure out which way the ground sloped. Scouting was out of the question. They’d lose each other in the fog. “That way,” he pointed. Suddenly feeling it. Knowing it. Like a weight in his forehead had tipped a certain way, put him off balance in one direction. “It’s that way,” he repeated, knowing desperately that he wanted it to be right and not something he’d made up.

  They stumbled through the day, taking turns pulling the cart, sometimes going up, sometimes down. They crossed a small stream and each of them drank deeply, but there was nothing left to store water in. They walked through knee-high brush. Erik sampled the leaves to see if they were edible and violently threw up.

  They carried weakly on until they could no longer see for the dark and the fog and then camped. But what was there to camping? Only sleep, a few grains of rice to suck on. They put the couch in front of the tent where they could keep an eye on it and slept.

  The next day was the same, but colder. A foggy terrain. A lost world. Thom pulled the cart. Pulling up reserves of energy from somewhere, placing a grain of rice on his tongue. Drinking from a mud puddle. The way endless. Was he taking the couch to his death? Burying it in the wilderness with him? Bringing the couch back to some forgotten god?

  Another night. Erik found a cigarette that he spent a half hour restoring to smokable condition. Another half hour of despair when matches couldn’t be found. Discovering matches at the bottom of Thom’s sleeping bag. They hovered around the cigarette like it was the last portal to their old lives. The dim cherry the only light in the universe.

  In the morning Erik was feverish, the gash on his forehead deeply infected.

  The wind blew fiercely, and the fog whipped about them, eddying and swirling. They put the couch back on the cart.

  A great wind leapt up, and before they could react, their tent and sleeping bags were swept into the air like feathers on the wind. Thom stared after them, watched them dim and disappear into the whiteness. The hope within him whittled to a twig.

  And then, fifteen minutes after they’d started, the cart spontaneously fell apart.

  Thom continued to walk, oblivious. The harness lighter, he stumbled on until he heard Erik yelling from behind. He turned to see he pulled nothing. The cart was crushed under the weight of the couch. All that was left of the Lug-o-naut 147 was a heap of splinters.

  “Oh,” Thom said.

  Erik was too tired to speak.

  Thom saw that Erik’s clothes were disintegrating, his pants beginning to resemble something the Hulk would wear. The clothes that Per had given them. Had Per searched for this city? His brain turned on him in his exhaustion, saying what he ought to know. Going deeper into the wilderness against all logic, against all instinct for survival. Brain: There is no city. You have been misled. You will die.

  He felt a wave of nausea come over him, leaned over and had a violent bout of dry heaves. He stood up, wiped a few flecks of spittle from his mouth. His muscles and joints and bones ached. He couldn’t trust his eyesight, it blinked in and out of whiteness. Staring at the couch an
d seeing it suddenly as white and without shape. The bites on his hands and face itched. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been dry. Erik swayed back and forth, stared at him blankly, waited for Thom to make a decision.

  If only they could see. Sight would allow them an understanding of the land. Logic would help with the finding. Where would you build a city that wasn’t meant to be found?

  I will find it, brain. He dug his last two remaining grains of rice from his pocket, put them in his mouth to rid himself of the taste of bile. Resisted the temptation to hungrily chew and swallow.

  “How’s it going?” Erik croaked with the careless recklessness of a man who knows all is lost.

  “Fine.” He tried to smile back. Muscles wouldn’t work. “Fine.”

  The burning red under the skin near Erik’s gash had grown. The swelling was obscene. “Okay,” Erik said. “Okay.” He tried to raise his fist in a gesture of carry-on! but it only went halfway. The wind surged up, and Erik lost his balance, tipping sideways, recovered five feet away.

  Thom understood what the options were. He leaned down, grabbed the back and underside of the couch in his big, itching hands, and lifted it in a single, weight-lifter’s motion to his shoulder. Energy welling up somewhere in his belly, up through his chest, a blooming into his throat. He roared as best he could.

  “Yeah,” said Erik. “Yeah!” A dizzy smile. He hugged himself, and his teeth chattered.

  They left the rest of their worthless gear. Pots and pans. Cooking utensils. Gun and knife and matches. There was no energy for anything except carrying the couch.

  Erik fell. Thom turned and, seeing nothing, slowly traced his way back to pull him to his feet again. After that, he kept Erik in front. Watched the fur of Erik’s head dip, lurch back up. Falling asleep as he walked. Hypothermia, Thom thought. Pneumonia.

  The ground sloped upward. The fog stifled their breathing. Thom sucked a condensated drop of water off his sleeve, and then another, but the drops evaporated into the desert of his tongue, inspiring thirst more than quenching it. Somewhere beyond the atmospheric shell about them the sun was going down, and light was wisping away, dissipating into space. Erik stumbled again, fell onto his face, didn’t move.