No, there was nothing monstrous about this crowd. True, the twins’ mother had scooped up all the pats of genuine butter and stuck them in her purse before anyone else had the chance to take one; the blind man stuck his finger in each pot of jam to test the flavor; and the old Danes began their meal by clearing their throats and depositing whatever they had found objectionable in them in the grass at the base of their chairs; but within minutes they all were refilling each other’s coffees and slapping each other’s backs as if they’d been friends for years. Even the twins had gone outside the tent to play with the Labrador, who, understanding his master was in good hands, had decided it could relax.
So what had they ever done to Parsifal?
Sometimes Parsifal liked to listen to the sounds of old performances of music that had been recorded in front of audiences.
The dead applauding the dead.
Whether or not that circling, or spiraling, bird or drone — whichever it was — was still above Parsifal after he had finished the breakfast he couldn’t tell. The morning mist was especially heavy, and it was impossible to see much higher than the tops of the surrounding trees. Parsifal poured himself two cups of coffee, ate a slice of melon and two pieces of dry toast with raspberry jam. Then he walked outside the tent to eat a third piece of toast, this one with a drizzle of honey. In the daylight the motel looked even more rustic, if that was possible. The tent was striped in green and white. Strewn around the lawn were statues of squirrels and raccoons and tiny deer. The other guests were still eating, but it was time for him to leave.
“You have a real love of books,” a librarian once told Parsifal. “I bet it comes from your name.”
So Parsifal had just walked back inside the tent to say good-bye to his fellow guests, when one of the twins was killed by a falling propane cylinder. At first, all Parsifal knew was that both children had been playing outside and there was a terrific thud, but when he, along with everyone else, rushed outside to see what had happened, they found a hole in the earth with a bloody hand lying next to it. There was no mistaking that small hand even if they had wanted to. The other twin stood and watched, as the Lab held in his mouth a yellow tennis ball he had found somewhere.
This was the first time Parsifal had personally witnessed the lethal power of an attack from the sky. But as bad as it was (and it was bad), he also knew there was nothing he, or anyone else, could do, so after several minutes had passed he took advantage of the confusion among the other guests to slip away unnoticed.
On those days when Pearl was feeling optimistic, she would add to the end of every sentence: “But don’t worry, one day things will change.”
“Why couldn’t it have been the blind guy?” Parsifal heard the twins’ mother ask.
One afternoon as he was squatting by the stream in the forest, watching tadpoles growing their legs and shrinking their tails, et cetera, his mother called him. “Parsifal,” she said, “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. I have a terrible feeling your father has just killed himself in remorse over a collapsed financial transaction, one in which his investors lost millions. Don’t ask me how I know,” Pearl said. “I just do.”
But then a couple of weeks later Conrad returned, his back bent nearly double under a sack of lentils this time, his briefcase, containing a new supply of defunct bond certificates, tied to his belt.
Groups gather around a corpse.
Parsifal used to fear that in one of the earth’s great counterattacks on the sky his forest might be set on fire again, that those trees he had loved and grown up with, the animals, too — the deer, and squirrels, and raccoons, and field mice, and opossums, and foxes — would be turned to smoke and ash for no other reason than spite: to choke the sky with their reconstituted bodies. But now that he was there, at the edge of his forest, looking at it in daylight, for no good reason at all Parsifal felt confident that this would never happen.
But then, Parsifal had never thought his mother would die in a forest fire.
It was an interesting experience to be seated across from the blind man at the continental breakfast and to be able to peer so deeply into his eyes, whose irises reminded him of the bottoms of mushrooms — those little flutes, or gills, or whatever they are called.
The silence of a falling star
Lights up a purple sky
Pearl sang that.
Frequently, as a special treat when Conrad was leaving to return to the city, Pearl made him promise that when he arrived back in town he would find a pizza shop and place an order to be delivered to their house in the forest. Pearl always chose an extra large, half pepperoni for Parsifal, and half ham and pineapple for her, claiming that they could save whatever was left for lunch the next day. Then they would wait with anticipation until at last, days — once even a week — later, a disoriented and bedraggled delivery person would find his way to their door, bearing a large, square box covered in dirt and leaves that contained an extralarge pizza. The pizza would be cold by then, and soggy, and usually the pineapple would have started to turn sour, but of all the meals Parsifal ever ate in the forest he cannot remember any he savored more completely.
Fountain pens are uncommon enough that it’s not unusual for Parsifal to meet people — most often someone younger, but at times those his own age also, who should know better — who say, “Oh, I’ve never seen a pen like that. How does it work?”
Could that photograph on the wall of his room at the motel, the one of the family staring at the hole in the ground, actually have been of Parsifal and his parents? It would be surprising, considering how rare it was for Conrad to visit the forest. But if by some crazy chance it was, then what was the hole? Also, who took the picture? Needless to say, Parsifal had no memory of such a picture ever being taken, or looking down at a hole like that one, either.
Why had all the women been librarians? Parsifal can’t begin to guess, though certainly in his first weeks out of prison, he spent most of his days among the library stacks and periodicals trying to adjust to his new life. Did the smell of paper remind him of trees?
Maybe, but it must have been more than that. Most likely it was the kindness of the librarians themselves. Parsifal imagined that, given the multitudinous variety of reprehensible human behavior represented on the shelves, his own qualities seemed less unusual. Or possibly the sight of a young man whose muscles had been hardened by years of living amid the forest, a young man whose shyness must have been a refreshing change from the bossy questions of senior citizens wanting help on their taxes and the rowdy teens the librarians were forced to discipline on a daily — no, hourly — basis, might somehow have stimulated in them a desire for intimacy.
He still remembered the first time he was seated at an oak table poring over books as closing time approached, and a sweet, bespectacled woman walked up behind him and started to massage his shoulders. After that, she inquired if he had a place to spend the night and, if not, would he like to come home with her?