Couch by Clayton Emery

Couch

A Science Fiction Story

Another "flash" story that popped into being full-blown. I've been told the premise is a cliché, but what isn't?

I didn't wake up on the couch. I woke up in a field of yellow grass, with the breeze blowing around my ears.

I'd had enough cracking the books. Even a third cup of coffee couldn't keep me awake. I'd left the cup on the floor and fetched the alarm clock. I set the alarm for one hour and turned off the light. My canaries would squawk at being in the dark without their cover, but they'd settle down. One hour of sleep, more coffee, and I'd get back to my million-item list. Right then my brain was sliding out of my head.

I sat up in the grass. The sky overhead was brilliant blue. No clouds. Yellow grassy hills stretched away in every direction. No trees, no birds, no buildings. Just grass and sky. And some people.

I walked to the next hilltop where someone slept. It was a man with a foreign look. He had a conservative punkish haircut, and black clothes without trimmings. And narrow sunglasses. I thought he looked like a ---.

Like a ---. I stopped. I couldn't conjure the word. A ---. A person from ---, across the --- Ocean. I couldn't think of where he came from. I bent and shook his shoulder.

"Wha?" He opened his eyes and jerked upright. He scuttled away from me as if I would hit him.

"What happened? Where is this place?" He did have an accent, a --- one. (There was the blank again, like a hole in my memory.)

Calmer than I would have believed, I said, "I don't know where we are. I just woke up myself. My name's ---." What was my name? Rats! I held my chin and thought. , I could remember my whole life except for names. I remembered growing up as a kid in ---, at the seashore. And vacationing on a lake, in a town called ---. I could even picture the main street, and the hardware store named after the town. I'd worked in the hardware store for three summers, made out a million receipts. Couldn't remember.

I waved a hand. "Never mind what my name is. It'll come to me. There don't seem to be so many of us that we can't keep each other straight." Other people, scattered around like cows, were waking. A tall guy in overalls was walking our way. He looked tall for a --- person from the land south of mine, where it's hot and they speak ---.)

Do you know where we are?" he called. He had an accent, too. What with all these nationalities around, I guess I did too.

I shook my head. I suggested we round people up and call a town meeting. There were twenty-two of us, all men, all speaking a common language, although we couldn't name it. No one could remember his name. We would have to remain, "the guy in uniform" and "the tall guy" for a while. Someone told me I was "the guy with the strawberry mark". Okay.

We swapped ignorance for a while, then someone came up with the million-dollar question.

"What do we do now?"

I could see the answer coming in like a jet.

The guy in uniform said, "We have to get organized."

I cut that one right off. "No thanks."

I walked away quickly. After a while the tall guy and the guy with the sunglasses caught up to me. We cantered along until we were out of sight of the main party.

The guy with the sunglasses asked, "What is your objection to being organized?"

I looked back, but no one was following us. I kept walking. "I don't like taking orders and I don't like giving them. When anarchy hits, when people lost touch with the established order, they get worried. They willingly give up personal freedom for secure control. That group will be drawing up a constitution and starting elections as soon as they find a piece of paper. I don't want to be part of a twenty-two man hierarchy." I laughed at myself. "Sorry. I'm a doctoral candidate in social history. Why did you walk away?"

The guy with the sunglasses shrugged. "Where I come from people are very organized."

I nodded at the tall guy in overalls. He just shrugged and stayed with us. That made sense. Farmers don't care about politics as long as the taxes stay low and it rains regularly.

We came to the last hilltop. At the bottom of the hill a forest started and went on forever. The edge of the forest was as straight as if ruled with a pen.

I whispered, "Jesus." The forest was what you would expect, although the trees weren't quite oaks. Nor were there any birds or animals. But what bothered me most was that there were no dead branches on the ground. There weren't even a lot of dead leaves. Someone might have vacuumed the forest floor just before we got here. The guy with the sunglasses commented that the forest reminded him of home, which was odd, because it reminded me of home, too. When I asked the tall guy, he said it reminded him of a forest near home.

Suddenly we found a type of tree I'd never seen before, all by itself in a clearing. It looked vaguely tropical, but it was alien. Or, as I knew now, the tree was native and we were the aliens. Hanging in the branches were kidney-shaped pods. I plucked one, broke it open, and finally tasted it. It was good, like pineapple. A little bland, maybe. We plucked as many fruits are we could carry and kept walking. The sun never moved from overhead. We found a stream and all stood looking at it.

"Okay, I'm the guinea pig." I knelt and drank. Then we waited for a couple of hours. No cramps, no diarrhea. Nothing. On an alien planet, no less. They drank.

We decided on a nap. Our foreign companion (foreign to me, anyway) asked if we should post watches. I told him to go ahead if he wanted to, and sacked out with my head on my arm.

I awoke to two people screaming. The guy with the sunglasses had evidently opted for a nap, too. He was being attacked by a nut. A large fat guy in prison clothes, perfectly normal except for the crazed look on his face, was clawing and biting at our buddy. I scrambled over to them, gauged for a moment, and planted a kick in the fat guy's ribs. He tumbled off the guy with the sunglasses and came at me. I went down under a hail of blows and kicks. Then the nutcase collapsed on top of me.

The tall farmer rolled him off. He'd hit him with two locked fists. Now he twisted the nut's hands behind his back.

"How did he come here?" asked the guy with the sunglasses. He shook allover. It was a hell of a way to wake up.

I said, "I don't know. He wasn't in the original party."

"What do we do with him?" asked the farmer.

I had to think about that. "Well, he's obviously mentally disturbed." He sure was. The nut champed his teeth at us nonstop. I was glad the farmer had him pinned. "We can't leave him loose."

Sunglasses declared, "We can't take him with us."

I agreed. But...

Farmer said, "We'll have to kill him.

I didn't like the idea, but I couldn't fault the logic. "How about we don't do it right now? Let's tear up his clothes and tie him to a tree. By the time he gets loose we'll be gone." The others agreed, although why anyone should take my suggestions is beyond me. I make more than my share of mistakes.

Ultimately it didn't work. Later in the "day" the nutcase came screaming up at us. Good trick, I reflected, since we left no trail on the clean forest floor. The farmer had armed himself with a stout stick. While the nut rushed at me, he stepped behind and dented the guy's skull. Then he folded in his temple. "Like a sick chicken," he said. "Nothing you can do."

I nodded, sad. I wondered if my canaries would be okay. Time passed. It must have been weeks. We were entirely sustained on the fruit, which didn't make sense on the surface. But my brain kept churning, day after day, and I finally had a theory. How to test it, though, was another thing.

One day the forest ended and plain began. There were no more breadfruit trees around. And one morning when we awoke the fruit we had collected was gone.

I looked at the plain. I asked my companions, "Well, what's it going to be? Walk across the plain or stay in the forest?"

Sunglasses said, "There's food in the forest."

"Don't bet on it." When he looked blank, I explained, "I'll bet those trees are gone. Like the fruit. I'd say it's all part of a ---" There it was again, the holes in my memory. My frustration hit an all-time high. I shouted, "DAMN IT! HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO COMMUNICATE IF I CAN'T EVEN --- --- ---

The man in overalls said, "What are you saying?

"Never mind!" I snarled, and set out onto the plain. The two of them followed.

We walked over this plain for who knows how long. The sun never set, never moved. But neither the ground nor the air ever got any hotter. It was a perfect 75 degrees all the time, with a very light breeze. I felt like a character in a low-budget cartoon, one where they didn't fully paint the backdrops. Every once in a while, when our thirst got painful, we'd find a pool of fresh water. Sparse little blue flowers had buttons we could munch. I couldn't say which was worse, the hunger or the boredom. "You'd expect to find antelope on a plain like this. And millions ofmice. At least ants," I commented more than once. No one replied.

At one point I turned to the farmer to say something, but he was gone. Vanished. No track in the grass going away.

"I wonder what'll happen next."

What happened next was we came to a forest. Or bush, like they have in --- (land of kangaroos and koalas). The trees were about fifteen feet tall, dark-colored and fuzzy. They were spread out, never closer than thirty feet. The ground below them was flat and clear. There was only the low yellow grass. No dead branches, very few leaves.

My partner and I entered the woods and wandered around. They seemed to go on forever, like an overblown park. You could see a long ways. After a while I could smell water. Sure enough, there was a bank and then shallow water. Cypress-type trees grew in the water. The lake or swamp or whatever continued out of sight. The water was incredibly clear. I didn't see any fish or crawdads. There weren't even any bugs. What kind of a stupid ecology doesn't have bugs?

We followed the bank. Our stomachs' rumbling was the only sound. Later we saw a flash of white up ahead. The flash of white had a head. A small wimpy-looking guy was knocking nuts out of a tree with a club. We called. The wimpy guy snapped his head up, took one look, and fled through the brush. We picked up the things he'd been gathering. They were egg-sized nuts, like big walnuts. They made our mouths water. I broke one open and immediately threw it away. It smelled like a rotten egg dipped in gasoline. Someone had screwed up, because no human could eat these things.

As we stood there looking at the food we'd just thrown away, there was a commotion in the water. A couple of large yellow dogs, like dingoes, came splashing along chasing a duck-like bird. The dogs didn't look too big, and they seemed to be in good health.

"There you go, " I told my companion, "food. We can kill the dogs and eat them. Or the duck. It looks slow."

The other guy wrinkled his nose. "Eat dogs?"

"Sure. The --- used to do it." I could picture red people with feathers, living in tepees on the plains, but I couldn't say their name, or even think of it. "They used to keep dogs, feed them on garbage, and eat them. You just have to cook them carefully. Or maybe we're supposed to befriend the dogs and eat just the ducks. But it doesn't make sense that they're here."

"What does it not make sense?" My partner was rapping the root club against his palm, salivating all the while. The dogs had the duck trapped in a den under the bank and were trying to dig it out. They never acknowledged our presence.

"It doesn't make sense that there should suddenly be all this food around. Why reintroduce food when -"

A squeal went up behind us, "Look! Mushrooms!"

We whipped around. There were women. Two. The first one was pretty, about sixteen, with soft brown hair. Leggy, wearing rabbit skins. The other was a six-foot tramp with mammaries like a cow. She had on an evening dress. The women were wholly interested in the mushrooms they'd found, even though we stood not twenty feet away. My partner smacked his lips, now torn between the dogs and the women.

"You like 'em big and blonde, right?"

Distracted, he said, "Yes."

"That figures. I like them sixteen and plain."

He ignored the comment. His loins and his stomach wrestled for control of his brain. Finally he said, "Let us get them before they get away. You can have the young one."

But I stood rooted, thinking. The neo-savage shrieked and charged the women, who suddenly picked up their heads and saw us. They screamed and ran off, with Neo in hot pursuit. I watched them out of sight.

I stood and thought, for a long time. This had to be done right.

Casually I looked over the bank at the hole the dogs had dug. The animals were gone. I picked up one of the nuts and broke it open. God! they smelled awful! I broke open several more at arm's length. Then I forced myself to wolf them down. I got down six and knew I was going to lose it. I leaped up, lurched down the bank as if for water, and stumbled and fell. I just missed bashing my head on a large rock. But I lay there as if stunned for a long time. Eventually I fell asleep.

When I awoke there wasn't a soul around. I rinsed out my mouth, letting water and drool trail down my shirt. Then I shambled up the bank.

I peered around, dim as a twenty-watt bulb. I climbed the blue nut tree. I got as high as I could before the branches broke, then held the trunk and hurled myself outwards. Sure enough, the whole tree keeled over like an umbrella stand. I poked at the root structure. Very shallow, no tap root.

I stuffed my pockets and shirt with the evil-smelling nuts, went to the mushroom patch and ate sloppily, like an animal. When they were gone I took a stick and probed the earth to about a foot. Just dirt.

I got bored with that and threw the stick down. Then I spotted the women's tracks. Their prints were faint but still fresh in the soft grass. I followed them back to where their tracks started: they'd dropped into being about three hundred feet away. I parted the grass, probed the earth with a branch, leaped into the air swinging my arms. I wandered over the area again and again.

There was a pop of displaced air behind me. I turned --

And woke up on the couch.

My beard rasped on the pillow. I sat up. It was daylight. The clock had run down. My half cup of coffee had evaporated, leaving a dark residue in the bottom. I felt my shirt. No nuts. But the red dirt was still under my fingernails. My canaries were dead, presumably of thirst, which made me sad and mad. Mail and newspapers clogged my front hall. The paper carrier must have had to hammer them in the last few days. I looked at the date on the top. It was six weeks since I'd laid down for a nap. I'd missed my orals. Crap.

But it had worked. I was out. ~

Obviously, the whole thing was an experiment. Somebody Somewhere checking out human behavior. Aliens, or gods or something. They picked up a slew of humans and dumped us on a strange planet to see what we'd do. We each perceived the place just a little differently so we would feel at home. We found food and situations we recognize. It was a mock-up, like that episode of Star Trek where the crew kept running into things from their imagination': white rabbits, samurai, Stukas, and other things from Hollywood back lots.

That we couldn't use names, or talk to one another about where we come from, made us all strangers in a strange land. Occasionally we failed to see one another, as the women initially failed to see us. Probably there were any number of aliens with clipboards jotting stuff down just inches away, and we couldn't see them.

At first we had plenty of food. We were all reasonably well-adjusted men. The men met up, drifted apart. Nobody molested one another because there was plenty of food, and everyone was still finding their feet. For a while the place is Paradise. Then the crazy bastard came along and we had to kill him because he disrupted the local ecology --us. After a few weeks the food starts to run out --the breadfruit disappears right from under our noses --and we have to scrounge. Just as Sunglasses and I were getting really hungry, we find this wimpy-looking guy with the nuts. Given no morals, we would have killed him for it. But it turned out Someone goofed, because the food was inedible.

The Someones were stymied for a moment. With no food at all, would we attack one another, until the last one cannibalized the rest? No, that would be messy and unfulfilling. They made it more interesting by reintroducing Paradise with a few snakes. They brought back food in abundance (the dogs and duck), then introduced women. Another level of emotion, another bar to push. Would we rape and enslave the women, cozy up to them, kill them, or what? My partner had had no doubts about how to proceed. Where would all this eventually take us? Would we set ourselves up in caves, near a water source, with proto-agriculture nearby? Gather more people? Have 12 children? Set up a tribal system, then a fascist government, then democracy? Have wars? Found civic organizations? Build shopping malls? Whatever we did, it would amount to rats running in a maze. We pull a lever here, check out a corridor there. But something happened to this one rat. Maybe he was poisoned by the diesel-flavored nuts, or his central nervous system was distressed in contact with that rock. Whatever, he stumbled now, and drooled. He picked up the foul nuts even when he couldn't eat them. He became destructive --he pulled over the tree for no reason. He probed the roots of the tree (that had been stuck there ten minutes before), looked for the source of the mushrooms (no spores, no dampness, no reason for them to be there), hunted for the hinged panel the women dropped through. If we leave that brain-damaged rat in there, he'll screw up the experiment. He'll find the cracks in the walls, or climb over the top of the maze or something.

Better pull him out and stick him back in his cage. Or in this case, couch.

I'd have to get busy. Explain this to a lot of people, get things on tape and paper, because I could disappear at any minute. I'd be branded a nut, your usual talk-show asshole, another Atlantis-seeker. But it had to be done. Someone was screwing with the human race.

I might be just a rat, but I know it's easier to crack a jail from the outside than the inside.

I'll show them who's dumb.

END

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