Sherwood Nation (62 page)

An Excerpt from Benjamin Parzybok’s novel
Couch

Chapter 1: The Couch

From above, from a thousand feet up, an eagle’s-eye view, it’s a strange spectacle still. A six-legged insect, stiff and ungainly, too long on the grape vine gone to vinegar.

From five hundred feet one sees a mutant, an insect with three heads, each imbued with its own purpose. Each with a desire to carry its midsection somewhere else. First moving one way, and then the next, drifting here and there like three hands on a Ouija board.

From one hundred feet up, the height of a mere eight-story building, it becomes obvious that each pair of insect legs is joined at a human torso, with human heads, and between them, the three, they share a burden. A piece of furniture, seemingly.

From ten feet, a guardian angel’s view, the view this tale will take, three men carry a couch. An orange, knit couch of considerable size.

Thom moved his meager possessions into Tree’s apartment. It was a high-ceilinged, early twentieth-century affair that had obviously been reworked in the seventies, destroying much of its charm. He put his books in the living room in an attempt to add some sort of decorating touch, and they sat there like moldering sea chests.

Thom moved his chairless desk around his room, trying to figure out how to fill in the emptiness that a lack of dresser, bed, and every other item that a person usually owned caused. He occasionally glanced toward the window across the corridor between the buildings to see if he was being spied on, at once trying to hide his actions and trying to make them presentable and interesting on the off chance there was a single woman across the way who might be interested in a fairly intelligent, bumbling ogre of a man with a slightly below-average self-esteem.

Slightly?
Thom’s brain said.

“Yes, slightly,” Thom replied firmly. Brain was the entity of indeterminable size that sat somewhere above Thom’s right eye, one inch in. The origin of headaches. That Muppet cynic gallery that studied his every move from some disappointed forefather’s eyes. Part logician and part patriarch, brain intruded on Thom’s consciousness primarily as a backseat driver.

He uncased his laptop, tracked down a wireless signal, and got on his knees in front of his desk to check his email. “As if to pray,” brain said. “I know, I know,” Thom replied.

Erik burst through his door, knocking after the fact as he had done the other three times Thom had encountered his new, somewhat excitable roommate. Erik was in his mid-twenties and would be considered handsome but for an utterly uncombable head of dark hair.

“Donuts!” he said like a herald, like the king had arrived. He lowered a giant box of donuts to Thom’s eye level.

“Ah,” Thom said. “I can’t eat them. They look good though.”

“Can’t eat them?”

“I can’t eat wheat,” he intoned for probably the millionth time in his life, knowing it always led to confusion. “I have sort of a strict, ah, strict eating habits.”

“Good Lord, man. This is a celebration. We’ll go running in the morning. There’s a park around here. I’ve seen it on the map, and I’m going to find it. We can get up at dawn, get our one-twos in.”

Thom repressed a shudder. “It’s not a diet diet—it’s a stomach sort of thing. Gluten intolerance, among other things. I can’t eat wheat.”

“Gluten, huh?” Erik raised his eyebrows. “
Glutentag
,” he said brightly. “Okay, man, they’ll be in the kitchen if you change your mind. Nice room you got here. Like the desk placement. What kind of games you got on that thing?”

“Nothing much, really.”

Erik nodded vigorously. “Alright, man, see you around. I’ll be in the living room if you need anything.”

Thom shook his head. He was fairly sure he wasn’t living with any of the chosen people.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: bad news

Hi Thom,

I’ve got bad news for you. ShopStock has decided once and for all that in this economic climate, having a strong web presence for a local grocery store is just not practical. Ahem. As we’ve known all along. So they’ve decided, effective immediately, to cut the web development team.

I’m sorry about this. I know you could use the money. Email seems like a bad way to break it, but knowing you I thought it’d be better. I’ll keep on the lookout for other jobs for you. How’s the apartment hunting coming? Let’s have a beer soon and talk more about where spammers fit into Dante’s Inferno.

Richard

Thom put his head in his hands. The last three months had been a spiral in which life seemed bent on unhinging him from every stable situation he’d had a feeble grasp on. At least he had an apartment. His stomach churned. He opened up his website and thought about how to phrase his newly found freedom in a way that wouldn’t read “laid off.” “Now available for freelance work! ;-)” he wrote, and then deleted the idiotic smiley. Then deleted the entry altogether.

He fretted about how to write his self-descriptive summary at one of the many job-networking sites he belonged to. “I am professional (still have all my teeth!),” he wrote as filler text to keep his fingers busy while he thought, “stable (no longer living out of a hotel!), competent (kung-fu coder still can’t code his ex-girlfriend back), and motivated (as big as an ogre and twice as bright).” Then a migraine took over and he closed his laptop without saving.

“Thom!” said Erik. “Have a seat, big guy.”

Thom sat on the couch between Tree and Erik. The couch was miraculously large and held the three of them without testing his personal-space requirements. It was comfortable too. It sucked you in and gave you the impression of continually sinking.
The Simpsons
was on, and there was silence among them until a commercial. You did not talk during
The Simpsons
.

Tree tucked a long strand of hair behind his ear and picked up a spool of baling wire from the floor. He drew a length and cut it with a pair of needle-nose pliers and began to twist. His thin hands moved with great agility, making quick definitive bends to the wire, working its straightness to a ball of something. And then, to Thom’s astonishment, Tree opened his palm to reveal a perfectly shaped three-inch horse with a long horn on the front of its head. A unicorn. Thom studied the couch to make sure Tree hadn’t discarded the wire and plucked the unicorn from somewhere. Thom beamed his approval, but Tree seemed unconscious of him.

Tree fashioned a tornado from the same spool and twisted the bottom of it into the green shag-rug carpet so that it stayed upright. A tornado on shag-rug plains. He planted the unicorn in the rug so that its horn just pierced the midsection of the tornado. A battle in miniature.

“Just like jousting windmills,” Thom blurted loud enough to make Tree jump.

Erik stared at it. “Well,” Erik said. “Here we all are.” He rubbed his forefinger vigorously across his mustache.

“Yes,” Tree said.

“There you have it then,” Erik said.

Thom counted his teeth with his tongue—twenty-seven? Could he really have an odd number?—as a defense against whatever words his brain might try to dislodge into the quiet air like a donkey’s bray.

“I lost my job.” Thom pulled at a string on his pants. “Just got an email.”

“Alright, buddy!” Erik gave an irksome punch to Thom’s arm. “Join the club. How about you and me drive down to Labor Ready in the morning after our jog? Guaranteed payment daily, can’t beat that. They’d love the likes of you.”

“I’m not sure about the jogging part.”

“Just jumping jacks then, no problem.”

“I’m not sure about the Labor Ready part either.”

“I don’t really like to work,” Tree said. He hugged his knees up against his slim frame.

Erik and Thom stared at Tree.

“Except lawn care.”

“It’s the middle of winter, amigo. You won’t be doing lawn care for another five months.”

Tree looked thoughtful. “Maybe something will come up.”

“Get a rich girlfriend. That’s the ticket,” Erik said.

Hearing the word “girlfriend” made Thom’s stomach ache, a compost pile too long in the sun, methane fuming from the bottom of the heap. “My girlfriend broke up with me,” he blurted out, belched.

There was a long pause in which nobody was sure what to say.

“I’ve never had a girlfriend,” Tree said.

“What a bunch of freaking sad sacks!” Erik said.

Thom started to chuckle. The chuckle gained momentum into a giggle, and then he was holding his gut and belching and giggling and the others were caught by surprise by the cacophony until they joined in laughing, laughing the laugh that only the bottom rung laughs, crying laugh tears.

If one were to graph the traffic through the front door of the apartment, a downward-sloping curve would begin to emerge, so that by the end of the week it would be apparent the door was being used half as frequently as at the beginning.

The apartment’s gravity drew them in like some amassing black hole. Each outward foray grew more difficult and less successful. As their comfort level with each other increased, and with no great purpose outside, the path of least resistance lay in the hallways of their apartment.

Monday morning found Thom in his shiny clothes on the streets of Portland, wielding a résumé laden with tech acronyms and buzzwords: Ruby, Python, Perl, XML, PHP, SQL, C++. He paced through the downtown corridors, traveling the route from Internet startup to established technology company, finding them either closed for good, moved to the suburbs, or “weathering the storm.” And even those he suspected had room to grow were looking for sharp shooters, sharp talkers, sharp lookers from other failed tech companies, not veterans of ShopStock who wore overly baggy clothes, couldn’t find the right words at the right time, and towered over them. More than once a startled remark was made: “It says here you have a Master’s in English Literature—oh, that’s too bad, we’re really looking for someone with an MS in
Computer Science
.” Never mind that most colleges still weren’t teaching the skills that the companies needed, skills that Thom possessed from being a part of the actual movements that had created the software. Thom was not one to point this out. He failed to mention, too, certain legal troubles he’d had concerning a certain slightly less than legal thing he’d done which would certainly, beyond a doubt, prove his computer expertise.

Possibly to address the question
Why are we here?
or to toy with creationism versus evolution, Tree created a lineup of wire figures from fish to monkey to hominid on Monday, planting them into the back of the couch in order. He admired them from a distance and several angles and then, not yet satisfied, added a larger manlike creature at the beginning of the line that sculpted wire fish out of a bundle of its own wire. In his bedroom, he picked up his shrinkwrapped Bible and then put it down again without unwrapping it. Then from under his futon he pulled a spiral notebook full of pages wildly scrawled in pencil. As always, he studied the handwriting, marveling that it was his and so different from his daytime script. He read and reread the last five dreams. In the hundred or so dreams before this, not one of them took place within the last several thousand years, and now these. He closed the book and passed an hour he wouldn’t recall later staring at a fixed point. He folded some clothes, then arranged some wire sculptures, setting scenarios and adding roommates. He washed dishes and then made a large batch of split-pea soup and waited for Thom and Erik to come home. The phone rang three times, and each time the caller hung up when Tree answered.

Erik spent the first hour of the first day of the week trying to unplug the toilet using improvised instruments—a spatula, vinegar (did vinegar even work?), a soy-sauce bottle—still wondering how what had come out of him could really have come out of him.

Then he prepared. He shaved his mustache, did fifty push-ups and all the Tai Chi he could remember, put a baseball cap over his unruly plug of hair, donned a silk shirt and headed out along trendy Twenty-third Avenue to see what turned up. At Twenty-third and Flanders a possibly stranded young woman stood on a street corner, and Erik took it as an opportunity to introduce himself and offer his navigational services. Not long after, he was having coffee with the young Wisconsinite and talking about airline safety in Third World countries, with an emphasis on Latin America. By four o’clock Erik had a lipstick stain on his chin and fifty-eight dollars in his pocket that she had given him to buy tickets to a “three-day dinner-theater performance” he’d mentioned that they absolutely must go see together.

Alone, he headed up to Forest Park and ran through bushes for a half hour to punish himself for being such a snake, hollering, stumbling on the wet ground. Rotting leaves clung to his shoes and pants. With his face sufficiently bush whipped, he dropped by the grocery store, picked up a case of cheap beer, and went back to the apartment to celebrate his earnings with his roommates.

Night found them embedded in the couch, drinking Erik’s beer, eating Tree’s popcorn, watching TV, while the fishing line of their collective fates intertwined, became inseparably tangled. The couch cast the late-night spell that couches cast on their occupants the world over. And they became comfortable with each other—if by no other way than by the proximity of their bodies.

On Wednesday Thom completely reworked his résumé to accentuate his Master’s in English Literature degree while muttering curses at various employers at high-tech companies he wished would get trapped in Porta-Potties. He printed fifty copies and spent the first half of the day farming out his statistics to law firms looking for research assistants, newspapers looking for junior editors, businesses looking for copy editors and, frankly, anyone else who’d listen. He carried his massive form dutifully from office to office, crowding doorways, looming over desks, frightening secretaries. He wished for some shred of success he could use to ground in truth his increasingly fictional emails to his mother. By two in the afternoon he’d had all the human contact he could take and headed home.