The Sofa
1.
In his heart, Randall thought that the bungalow on 6th street wasn’t comfortable enough for White tenants. Times had changed. Growing up in that little house, Randall and his brothers and sisters had been happy enough. It was crowded and smelled of fried onions and sauerkraut and the toilet as well and there were always dogs underfoot and sobbing toddlers. The men and boys in his family showered in the basement among spiders and house-centipedes darting across concrete block walls moist with dark continents of mold that seemed to map out the family’s destiny and Randall’s mother and sisters bathed in an old cast-iron tub in the upstairs bathroom and the ancient furnace grunted in the winter like an angry sow and the pipes rattled with hot water coursing through the radiators and cold drafts made the air feel electrified around the loose-fitting windows. There was next to no insulation in the attic so that in January and February the space was an ice-box; in the summer, the asbestos shingles absorbed heat and the attic became so warm that creosote and tar oozed out of the pine boards and joists framing the roof. Randall’s father died and, then, his (Randall’s) siblings went away to school or married and bought their own homes and, at last, his mother was alone in the house, still cluttered with school souvenirs, framed pictures of family members and holiday reunions as well as winter coats and sweaters worn forty years earlier but now abandoned. At the end, Randall’s mother couldn’t climb the steps to the toilet any longer and, so, she moved into assisted living and a dumpster was parked at the curb to receive the heaps trash remaining in the house and, at last, when the rooms were empty and vacant, Randall rented the place to refugees, first a family from Sudan, then, some people from Ethiopia who worked at the plant, and, at last, to a couple with their children who had fled from either Burma or Myanmar or some other steamy place in southeast Asia. Although Randall believed that most of his friends and neighbors would not be willing to live in the cramped and antiquated house, he believed that people from deserts or from the foreign jungles, poor folk who had cowered among ferns and vines in swampy places while planes bombed them, would be happy to have a roof over their head.
But immigration policy changed. The new administration was less hospitable to asylum-seekers and, without much notice, the family from Burma or Myanmar disappeared and the house again was empty. Randall’s tenants had abandoned a big sofa in the living room. It was an unwieldy piece of furniture that required Randall and three buddies to wrestle the thing out of the bungalow’s side door – the sofa didn’t fit through the front – and the task was difficult, men moaning and complaining of back sprains and fingers pinched between the davenport and the door frame. Muttering and cursing, they dragged the sofa to the curb and left it there, hoping that some other immigrant family with a pick-up truck would collect the thing and give it a new home. (The landfill’s charge to accept the davenport made it prohibitive to take there.) But the sofa, with overstuffed cushions, and a high upholstered back had a disheveled appearance. A puppy had gnawed the veneer off the squat, stiff legs under the sofa, exposing white splinters under the dark paint, and there were sinister-looking stains on the pillows and one of the armrests was frayed, the work of a dog, or, perhaps, a cat. The upholstery smelled of cocoanut milk and curry and the sofa sat like a beached skiff on the boulevard on 6th Street for a couple weeks without anyone showing interest in salvaging it. Randall invited some friends to his house to watch the Superbowl and, at half-time, persuaded them to ride with him to the rental property and drag the hapless couch from the curb to along the side of the house to where there was an alley bisecting the block. Randall and his buddies were a little drunk and the alcohol made light-work of the sofa – it was like lifting a feather, someone said, and this seemed strange because all of them recalled the agony of tilting and twisting the davenport to get it out of the house.
Facing the alley and the neighbor’s backyards (where chained dogs bayed and growled), the couch rested on an ankle-high bank of lawn overlooking the scabby asphalt, split with fissures and pocked with potholes full of ice. The upholstery was dark, even gloomy, but the massive davenport had a regal aspect – it was like a throne perched above the alley. One of Randall’s friends sat atop the sofa, drinking a can of beer that he had smuggled outside in his winter-coat.
“You know,” the man said, “this is pretty comfortable. You could fall asleep on this thing.”
“If your wife made you sleep on it,” Randall said.
The man with the beer shoved the can between the cushions so that it was concealed. Then, they hustled to the pick-up and hurried over the Randall’s house in time for the second-half kick-off.
2.
Early in the morning, two hours before dawn, Randall walked his dog. When it was below zero, he wore a heavy brown coat over several sweaters and a nylon jacket. His routes varied, eight or nine blocks in one direction and, then, back home. His house was in a subdivision that had been new thirty years before but was now folded into the city, a residential neighborhood among other newer (or older) tracts of housing. Most of the blocks over which he traveled were lined with sidewalks, straight flat rows of pale concrete slabs lined-up like box cars between fan-shaped, sloping driveways. Before and after Christmas, some of the houses were outlined in colored lights and the trees decorated as well, diagrams of branches and boughs above balloons shaped like reindeer or snow-men or billowy figures of Santa Claus glowing in the pre-dawn darkness. Street lamps were scattered along the way, every couple blocks but it was mostly very dark in the sleeping neighborhoods. Sometimes, the moon whittled to a wan curved blade hung overhead, changing location in a confusing way as Randall walked – either the moon couldn’t recall where it was located or Randall, keeping his eyes trained on the haunches of his dog and watching for ice on the concrete, lost track of either its position or, perhaps, the direction in which he was moving. The wind swept out of the open country around the edges of town and coursed between houses and, on porches, wind chimes slapped together and filled the icy air with the sound of bells chaotically ringing.
Sometimes when it was very cold, ten or fifteen degrees below zero, Randall felt the weight of his heavy coat and the sweaters packed around his chest and belly as a burden that made his shoulders ache and his legs feel sluggish. The thick coat and the pace that he maintained, dragged forward by his large dog, caused him to feel winded, short of breath. His chest ached a little, a tight feeling to the left of the base of his throat, and Randall thought that it would be prudent to pause, catch his breath, and, even, sit down. But there were no benches anywhere along his route, no place to rest. It seemed that the city was heartless, unconcerned about its pedestrians. One day, Randall thought, he would be too old to walk in these neighborhoods without benches on which to rest. The exertion would be too great.
Randall pictured the sofa sitting along the alley next to the rental property. The home where he was raised was across town, on the other side of the athletic fields and the High School, too far away to reach on his morning walk. His current address where he lived with his wife and children and his dog was in a newer neighborhood, more prosperous, 20 blocks from the brick-built center of town.
In very cold weather, zombie cars were parked along the streets, lights on and engine running, but no one inside. As he came near those cars, Randall could see into them, the glowing console, luminous controls and displays, a faint glimmer cast on the plastic seat covers, puffs of exhaust wafted from tail pipe and dissolving in the frigid air. Apparently, these vehicles could be started remotely from inside the adjacent houses and the zombie cars were warming themselves in the pre-dawn darkness. A few years ago, empty vehicles humming alongside the sidewalks were rare, even unknown. But, now, it seemed, that there were many cars of this sort and, when it was below zero, Randall would encounter a half-dozen of them idling along the sidewalks.
Sometimes, when his chest ached and the burden of his winter coat caused him to gasp for air, he thought about breaking into one of those cars and resting there on the front or back seat, the dog panting beside him, catching his breath in the warm air gushing from the front-seat vents. But, he presumed that the idling vehicles were locked against trespassers and thieves. The moon was slippery, shifting position again. When he looked up, the moon had moved into some inaccessible quadrant of the sky. One of the purring zombie cars had its radio turned-on. Randall heard voices inside the vehicle, then, music, a mariachi band playing in the darkness.
3.
A neighbor to the rental house, an old lady who lived alone, called Randall. He relied upon her to watch his house when there were no tenants living in it. The old woman had been friends with his mother when she was younger and, of all the people who lived in the neighborhood when Randall was growing up, she was the last to remain. The other people on the block didn’t speak English or worked night-shifts or long hours and, so, Randall didn’t know them.
The old lady said that the sofa would have to be moved. It was attracting trouble. Sometimes after midnight, the old lady said that she glanced from her upstairs bedroom window and saw that a figure was sitting on the davenport.
“It’s a black man,” the neighbor said.
“You mean an African-American?” Randall asked.
“I don’t know. It’s too dark to see. Just a shadow, that’s all I can make out,” she explained.
Randall asked what the figure did.
“Nothing, he just sits there,” the neighbor replied.
“How long?”
“It varies,” the woman said. “I never see him coming or going. I just look out, down into the alley, and there is someone sitting right in the middle of the davenport. Not every night, no, no...but sometimes twice or three times a week and always after midnight when decent people are in their beds sleeping.”
“Well, you’re up,” Randall said.
“Have to go to the bathroom,” she replied. “You need to do something. We can’t have birds like that roosting in the alley in the middle of the night.”
Randall said that he would respond.
4.
A couple days later, Randall screwed a floodlight with a motion sensor onto the garage next to where the sofa sat. He had been meaning to install a floodlight in that place for several years. At night, kids roamed the alleyway and graffiti in Spanish was smeared on the garage siding across the way.
After dark, Randall came back to the alleyway in his pickup truck. The floodlight snapped on as he slowly drove by the sofa and the bright beams made the couch shine brightly as if it were on the display floor of a furniture store. By the time, he had reached the end of the alley and was turning onto the street, the floodlight behind him snapped off, and the narrow lane between the houses was dark again.
Why didn’t he just enlist his friends again and haul the sofa to the dump? That would have made more sense, but, of course, it was good to have additional light in alley, a bright, white glare that shone mercilessly, raking against the peeling paint on his rental house, casting a halo across the basketball backboard and rusting metal hoop hanging off the old garage. (He recalled shooting hoops with his father from the driveway when he was a boy.) Intruders would be frightened. And the sofa could remain in case some wayfarer in the night needed a place to rest.
5.
Someone was seated on the sofa, half-reclining in the cold darkness. The old woman living next to the alley looked down from her upstairs window. Then, she glanced at the clock on her night-stand: the digital numerals told her that it was 2:45 in the morning. The figure on the couch must have approached stealthily, moving so slowly that the motion sensor on the floodlight had not triggered. Now, the shadow was completely immobile – a deep breath or a tremor in the hand or foot would have activated the light. But it was dark and the figure seemed inert, an inanimate thing. For a moment, the old woman thought that her eyes were deceiving her, that there was no one sitting on the couch, and that the bulbous, misshapen shadow was the product of an optical illusion, moonbeams and starlight interacting with the trunk of a tree or a pipe piercing through a shingled roof. But, peering into the darkness, she thought she made out a torso with arms like flippers under a heavy coat and, perhaps, even a glint of a stray ray of light on an eyeball or tooth. The thing’s legs ended in thick boots that were like tree-trunks embedded in the ground. Sooner or later, the figure would have to move, shift position or, perhaps, cough or sneeze. So she waited for some twitch or flicker of movement to illumine the scene. But nothing happened. The thing didn’t even seem to be breathing – she saw no sign of breath condensing in the icy air under the head of the figure. Her eyes hurt from peering into the darkness and, after a few minutes (the digital display now said 2:52), she decided that she would call Randall in the morning and went back to bed.
The next day, Randall spoke to the elderly woman who lived across from the rental house. He asked her what had caused her to look out the window. It wasn’t the floodlight, she assured him: that never triggered.
“Was it dogs barking?” Randall asked.
“You know, that’s an odd thing,” she replied. “I didn’t hear any dogs at all. They never barked and that’s strange because the dogs here are always yipping and yapping.”
“What caused you to look out the window?” Randall asked.
“I don’t know. I was up to go to the bathroom and, then, I had a sense that something, you know, wasn’t quite right and, so, I looked out my window and saw what I saw.”
Randall said that he understood and would check on the motion-activated floodlight after dark. When he drove down the alley a few hours later, the light triggered and spilled bright, white radiance on the couch.
6.
The temperature was almost 20 below, but Randall was well-bundled and his morning walk wasn’t too uncomfortable. As people say, it isn’t the cold but the wind that pierces through you that makes winter-walking unpleasant and, in the pre-dawn dark, not a breeze was stirring.
About six blocks from his home, Randall encountered two idling vehicles, both of them unmanned. One of the vehicles was a compact SUV, parked along the curb. The nearby houses were all dark, windows dull and black. Perhaps, someone was eating breakfast or dressing for work in an unlit room. The red tail-lights of the SUV grimaced at Randall as he and his dog approached. A half-block farther along, a white pickup was parked illegally, facing the wrong direction along the side of the street so its bracket-shaped white headlights cast their light in Randall’s face. The dog prancing ahead of him cast slender, elongated shadows back against the boulevard and sidewalk, the silhouette of a giant long-legged spider tugging him forward. The glare of the lights falling directly on Randall’s face made it difficult for him to see ahead of him.
The dog pulled up short and whimpered slightly. Something was approaching, emerging out of the blinding glare thrown toward Randall by the zombie truck. A figure backlit by the headlights was approaching on the sidewalk. Who could be out this early in such lethal cold? The form was heavily bundled, almost spherical and small straps and ribbons flopped around the edges of the approaching figure. It approached silently, without so much as a breath sounding, and its feet, somewhere beneath the globular form, didn’t seem to be touching the pavement. Randall couldn’t see a face; the bulge at the top of the round bundle was hooded and the darkness seemed deepest there. The dog didn’t bark and didn’t strain at the leash. Randall stepped to the side, taking four paces into the frozen lawn so as to let the figure pass unmolested on the concrete sidewalk over which it was gliding. Perhaps, this was a homeless person, someone condemned to sleep outside in the deadly cold. At that thought, Randall felt a nauseating sense of horror and grief.
As the figure approached, Randall averted his eyes. The dog was motionless, in a state of suspension. There are some things that it is best not to see.
After the apparition had passed, Randall returned to the sidewalk and passed the idling truck. Exhaust spurting from the tailpipe of the truck parked the wrong way along the curb was blood-red. The moon was somewhere overhead but Randall couldn’t quite locate it. He wondered if he should turn his head and look over his shoulder to see where the figure had gone. But the scarf at his throat restricted his motion and the heavy coat, hanging from him like armor, made it difficult for him to turn. So he didn’t look in that direction.
