The Couch
Exorcising the defiled totem.
I don’t have extensive archives of my writing that I’m terribly proud of, but this piece is an exception. It is a true story, which I recorded during the summer of 2020. I’ve decided to share it here, but not as a newsletter—just a quiet addition to the collection. It’s similar in tone and voice to some of what I’ve written recently, and I still like it, years after the fact. On the other hand, I shopped a draft of it out a year or two ago; the only feedback I remember was from a (relatively) accomplished poet. Nothing at all on the first page; on the last, just “WTF?” scribbled in the margins of the last paragraph. So, caveat lector, or whatever.
Squinting against the midday August sun, I watched as the two young men hoisted themselves into the back of their black pickup and began to unravel the knot of canvas straps binding my old nemesis to the truck’s bed. In victory, I felt a pang of shame and averted my eyes from that gaudy green- and white-striped flannel, now laid bare, her upholstery finally failing after years of losing battles to cats’ claws.
I didn’t choose the couch—it was well into its tenure when I moved into my apartment almost seven years ago. The last tenants had abandoned it unceremoniously, and it was perhaps this fact, more than anything else, that persuaded my wife Hannah and me that the couch was an immovable object, that it was a necessary fixture in our lives, like death or taxes. By our count, it was wider than the doorway of our second-story apartment by at least two inches and impossibly heavy. For the first year—if we did not exactly revel in the paradox—we were at least not utterly mirthless in the face of this koan-turned-flesh. But as our fortunes turned—as the problems of life mounted conspicuously with only the couch remaining constant—we became convinced that it was the sentient totem of some ancient, malevolent evil, and we the proximal victims of its indiscriminate geas.
We both hated the couch, it’s true, but never in equal measure. Repentant—but always, eventually, recalcitrant—I could not quite quit my long-suffering, nostalgic fondness for it, the roughness of its fabric, the garishness of its vulgar stripes. Even its incomprehensible shape—somehow room-spanning and yet not quite long enough to lie down on—for me held a rose-tinted, parochially charming appeal. Hannah, on the other hand, harbored no such sentimentality. For her, the couch was the ultimate bottleneck, an irredeemable blight on an already troubled apartment. Energies of every kind—financial, physical, emotional—were captured in the well of its gravity, unable to muster sufficient velocity for escape. The couch was blasphemous, a sin against feng shui, and its very presence grew increasingly intolerable to her, constituting a sort of depraved spiritual water torture.
Et tu, Benji? I heard the sofa cry out to me as the movers muscled its backside humiliatingly into the air, diesel smoke billowing around their Ford as if to blot out the sun. It was a sweltering day, hot and cloudless—probably the worst day of the year to haul a couch to the dump, and yet, here we were. Whatever humor the movers might have ordinarily brought to their work evaporated in that heat, and—like the vacating tenants before them—the sweat-drenched, sunburned men were unmoved by the weight of the couch’s faded, magnificent history.
Their movements: uncalculated, animal reflex. Their violence: impassive, spiteless. They knew not what they did. Once they had hoisted the couch’s girth into an unnatural, vertical position, they callously tipped it out and over the bed of the truck. One side thudded into the dry pavement of the transfer station, sending up a scandalized cloud of hard-luck dust. Memories accrued over a decade—quarrels and truces, dead skin cells and cat hair—shed in an intransigent instant, squandered by that old brute, gravity. A silver quarter and a permanent marker toppled out from the couch’s depths, a race of long-extinct cave dwellers banished from their garden. Too little, too late. Lost, now, for too long to be found.
I’m sorry, I whispered under my breath. You’ve been in our way, now, for so many years. You’re not right for our apartment—you do know that, don’t you? It’s never been a good fit. You somehow block the air conditioner and the refrigerator door at the same time, even though they’re on opposite sides of the room.
Is that so? I could hear her wounded reply, dripping deep into my subconscious with the venomous fury of a woman scorned. I don’t recall any complaints from that night when you and Hannah made up after your first fight. I seemed fine enough, then.
I cringed. I had hoped the couch had forgotten about that time. It was undignified, uncouth of her to bring it up—a below-the-belt, desperate tactic, employable only by those old friends who are witnesses to one’s basest self, and who leverage that knowledge in moments that transcend mere cruelty. I mean—yes, you were good for that. You were a good couch. Please, don’t think me ungrateful.
It occurred to me that I was having a conversation with a couch, which—on a hundred-degree day—might be a sign of heatstroke-induced delirium, but I couldn’t help myself and added: I promise I won’t forget about you.
My apology fell flat, synchronizing awkwardly as it did with the movers as they forced the other side of the couch off the tailgate. The second thud was weaker than the first, a mercy killing in the wake of a fatal but sloppy blow.
Impulsively, I snapped a picture of the couch in its death throes and sent it to Hannah. She would be pleased to know that I’d finished the job, and wasn’t all this for her, after all? The immediacy of the photo, so close now in my palm, made me regret the boorish act instantaneously. There were those soiled green and white stripes, disgraced remnants of a once-mighty empire. There was that hole where stuffing spilled through shredded fabric, a gut-shot soldier abandoned behind enemy lines.
The men finished and didn’t dignify the couch with their touch again, even to reposition it amongst the refuse heap. They drove the thirty or so yards to where I waited in the sun without looking back. The movers had worn their coronavirus masks in the house, but had removed them now in the safety of their vehicle. Neither was older than twenty-five.
“How much do I owe you, gentlemen?” I asked, hoping to sound casual, composed, trying to disguise furtive glances at my unburied adversary, so unjustly sentenced after its years of distinguished service. Like a shell-shocked Sherlock I stared, stunned, into the already-vacant eyes of my dying Moriarty. Panic mounted as I realized how unsure I was of the person I might become, now, in the absence of my historical foil. I forced my gaze away, and I could feel the history of our mutual war disintegrating, threads irrevocably severed.
The driver fiddled with his phone for a minute, calculating a fair wage. Neither thought to kill the pickup’s diesel engine, and I started to feel sick in the heat and the exhaust. Finally: “It’s a hundred forty-five,” he said, “and I need you to sign here and here.” He had marked a document with x’s, and I signed without reading, would have pledged my very soul to be done with the bloody transaction. I had a check prepared and leaned against the truck to finalize it. The sun-soaked steel of the hood scalded my fingers; I grimaced and continued. One hundred forty-five dollars and no cents, I printed, and scribbled a signature before my resolve could falter.
I handed over the check and a cash tip, their thirty pieces of silver, like some sort of bureaucratic Judas—or was I Judas-In-Reverse? The latter thought gave me a measure of comfort. Overcome with profound regret after betraying his Savior, Judas Iscariot hung himself (or disemboweled himself—accounts differ in grisly detail). But before all of that, he’d been a disciple, favored, beloved. And who, if not Judas, had made mankind’s ultimate deliverance possible? Was it not his fated infidelity that snatched victory from grave and neutered death of its inimical sting?
Perhaps my betrayal was like—in kind, at least, if not degree? Perhaps now, no longer eclipsed by the couch, that space of all possibility whose chaotic weave had seemed so hopelessly knotted would unspool, breach all boundary, become infinite.
Perhaps, in the light of this act and its brute finality, some forgotten, incoherent tongue would be rendered comprehensible at last, as time’s inflexible, deterministic clockwork unwound itself to reveal, as the grand finale, an ultimately benevolent universe! Or—if benevolence is too strong a condition—then behind that crooked veil a benign cosmos, a toothless grin, smiling the hapless goodwill of senility.
Here in the shadeless noon, I was the betrayer, but I felt certain that from this point, time would flow in all directions. Linear causality would cease, replaced by the recursive, sweeping loops of a gentler, more humane history. All those intractable tragedies that had seemed so necessary, exposed now as mere contingencies, provincial, inconsequential, and eternally mutable. A spark like hope as I realized that in this fresh past, I might have been a believer, might have found salvation. With sweat stinging my eyes, I bowed my head in salty prayer: Forgive me, entropic Sublime! Redeem me, senescent Creator, so that I may go forth and spread the Good News, preaching the gospel of change.
Comments? Questions? Concerns? Leave them in the comments, or send ‘em my way at benjimahaffey@substack.com. As ever, thanks for reading.
WTF?