Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 26 (18 page)

COUCH

a novel by

Benjamin Parzybok

“An argument for shifting your life around . . . for getting off the couch and making something happen.”—
The L Magazine

JOAN AIKEN

THE SERIAL GARDEN

The Complete Armitage Family Stories

“Joan Aiken’s invention seemed inexhaustible, her high spirits a blessing, her sheer storytelling zest a phenomenon. She was a literary treasure, and her books will continue to delight for many years to come.”

—Philip Pullman

When I was a boy, and my mother had just died, I had vivid dreams of the land of the dead.

2

My father began the train set after my mother died, in our apartment in Toronto. It filled the time he spent when he wasn’t working.

I felt like I was a ghost of my mother, among his trains, with pieces of her face looking up at him.

My father filled the green hills of his train set with Restoration-era cottages, and cities with both Gothic cathedrals and industrial bridges. The passengers of the brass and wood trains were tiny robotic gentlemen in top hats and monocles, sipping oil. Carriages with steam-powered horses carried people to train stations and picked up people from train stations. Larger robots wandered the hills, fixing and repairing and re-filling everything. Everything moved and nothing sat still and the tiny robots and men went from train to carriage to train and nobody ever arrived at a destination.

When the train set was too big for the apartment, we moved to a house in the mountains above Vancouver.

3

My neighbor’s horrible girls hid from me, and I sought them.

The girls were twins. One of them was bigger with brown hair. The other had gangly legs and bony arms and red hair. They had the same ugly face. They were both bigger than I was.

I walked around the bushes in my backyard, to reach the shed at the edge, where the mountain woods leaned over the fence like a frozen green avalanche.

There wasn’t supposed to be anything in the shed. My father and I had come from our small apartment in Toronto before my mother died. We couldn’t fill up our new, large property yet. The shed smelled like lead paint and concrete dust. It smelled like rot.

I found a man there. He looked at me like he didn’t care if I said anything or not about him being there.

I had never met anyone like that before. I had seen the dirty drifters everywhere around here. They staggered through the alleys and crawled through the parks and sprawled in the streets unashamed of their dirtiness. Cops knew them all by name, and talked with them.

And now, I saw one in my dusty shed, and I could talk to him like I was a cop.

I asked him what he thought he was doing there. He offered me a cigarette. I took it from him. He lit one up for himself. I pocketed the one he gave me.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here, but here I am,” he said. He had an old voice. He blew smoke at me.

“Have you seen two girls trying to hide?”

He shook his head.

“If my dad finds you, he’ll call the cops.”

“Would you rather call the cops or play hide and seek with those girls?”

I heard giggling somewhere in the trees. Giggling was a bad sign. I looked over my shoulder.

“I might be better off hiding here with you.”

“Go find the girls,” he said. “You can take ’em.”

“They’re bigger than me.”

“Bruises mean they like you,” he said. “People hurt the ones they love.”

The giggling got closer.

I bolted for the house.

They were faster.

They tackled me. They pinned me down. The bigger one held me to the ground. The gangly one pulled my pants down.

They had found a dead animal—I couldn’t tell what it used to be but it was probably a cat or a dog or a huge rat—and they had picked it up with a stick. They had decided to shove it down my pants.

The gangly one hit me with the stick she had used to carry the dead animal, as hard as she could. It hurt. Red welts rose from my skin.

I didn’t cry out. What good would it have done? The man in the shed wouldn’t help me. My father was in his basement with his trains. I bit down hard. I didn’t even struggle. They wanted me to struggle, and I wouldn’t give them that.

After the gangly one had gotten bored whipping me, she used the stick to pick up the dead animal. She placed it on my buttocks. She gingerly tried to work my pants back up, and over the corpse. This lasted until her skin made contact with a patch of rancid fur. She squealed. She shook her hand like it was on fire. She ran off. The bigger one ran after her sister, giggling like a princess.

I looked behind me at what the girls had done.

I listened to the sound of the ravens in the air. This mountain was full of ravens. The girls must have chased a few off to get their prize.

4

When I was just a boy, and my mother had just died, I had vivid dreams of the land of the dead.

When I closed my eyes, my spirit roamed the hills of Elysium, searching for her. I called out her name among the ethereal trees and grasslands. The ground there was built of the dead single-cell life that crowded up everything like mud with their protoplasmic soul-energy. The dead grasses and trees attached themselves to the spirit mud with wilted branches, no flowers, no fruits, and no wind to make them dance. The people and animals lounged about, waiting until all their memories of life had faded.

The lion curled up with the lamb not because they were at peace, but because they could not remember that they were at war. The poets and mystics there tried to speak with empty voices, but they made no sound. Some took to sign language, and I watched them briefly while soaring past them. They gestured with their hands in a language no living mortal could translate. Even the greatest of philosophers could only speak in signs that none could validate without a world to serve as the foundation of the symbols—no better than trying to speak with mouths.

A few signed to me when they heard my voice breaching their darkness. I did not recognize them. They did not recognize me. My voice was the only sound in this shadow realm, and it had no echo. I suspect they wanted me to stop and give their hand signals the meaning of the living, but I did not. I was not there to help dead philosophers. I was looking for my mother.

The realm of the dead is far larger than anyone can fathom. I saw alien beasts and sea creatures swimming in the sky. I saw giants. I saw cavemen with their ape faces and straight backs. Herds of woolly mammoths and feathered dinosaurs ambled carelessly among the humans.

They all looked numb.

My visions stopped when I got older. My father and I bought the new house in the mountains above Vancouver. He worked in his office on the top floor. He built new bodily organs to run on blood steam, and he played with trains in the basement when he wasn’t working. In between, he made meals for me and shuttled me to and from school in the city. He told me to play with my new friends next door. His mind was always lingering in his basement, and his sprawling retro-Victorian train models.

5

I needed to tell my dad, because I needed to tell somebody, about what the girls did this time. But I didn’t think he’d do anything.

I pulled my pants down, and shook off the dead animal into the bushes. I went inside. I took a shower. I changed my clothes. My dad was in the basement, with his trains. Should I have even bothered him, when I knew he would do nothing?

I had a black eye, once, and he asked me what I had done to the girls. He had told me not to hit back. I had cuts and scrapes and he scolded me for blaming the girls.

My father wore a dapper period costume complete with ruffled shirt, tweed trousers, and a monocle he held in his eye by squinting. He kept a flask of gin in an ankle holster and a small laser under his shoulder.

The laser was custom made to look like something from the early twentieth century. He used the laser for high-detail wood-burning and soldering and it wasn’t strong enough to hurt anybody bad.

My father was building steam-powered zeppelins as big as shoes that would fly around the air above the trains along invisible fishing lines like skytrains with gossamer tracks.

I considered tapping his shoulder. Part of me thought that if I stopped my father’s work, his little world would stop, too. The trains would stop; the robots would stop; the steam engines all over the basement tables would stop.

I noticed something new. Little women in hoop skirts carried tiny parasols and wore fine silks as if small spiders had woven gorgeous doll clothes just for them. The robot men that dressed like my father—robotic with silver skin and painted eyes—strutted stately from one train to the next. They now had women on their arms.

The last time I had noticed something new it was the larger robots. Larger robots—as tall as cottages—with broad shoulders, square jaws, and claw arms made of rubber tubing, turned cranks in the cities. Stoplights changed. One robotic-horse-drawn carriage halted to allow another to pass.

I tried to get my father’s attention by waving my hands in his face. I touched his shoulder. He was too engaged in his zeppelins.

“Father,” I shouted.

His hand slipped. He bent the aluminum shell of his flying machine into a rounded heart. A tiny hiss of air escaped from the broken zeppelin. He turned to me, and pulled his monocle down. He took a deep breath. “Yes?” he said.

“I don’t want to play with those girls anymore,” I said. “They pulled my pants down and whipped me with a stick. They put a dead animal down my pants. They left marks,” I said. I tugged at my pants. “I have welts all over. I can show you the marks.”

My father grabbed at my hands. “If they whipped you like you say, you must have done something to anger them. Things happen for a reason. No one exerts themselves so hard without a prior cause. If they didn’t break your skin, you’ll be fine. It’s nothing but a prank. They’re the only children around here. We moved here so you could be closer to children.” He glanced at a clock on the wall. He frowned. “It is almost dinner-time, isn’t it?”

I wondered what it would be like to kill the girls, and send them to the land of the dead.

I had never told my father about my night visions, after my mother had died.

6