“That white cane is a sure tip-off,” she said as she rubbed some salve into his scar, “and sometimes you’ll also see a dog with a handle on its back. Those are good indicators that the person you are looking at is unable to see.”
Where there is love, there is sight.
By afternoon the forest had grown warm, though it was undoubtedly cooler than a treeless meadow or grassy savannah. Still, it was fairly hot for fall. As Parsifal walked up and down one hill after another, his face was often struck by stinging branches, and spiderwebs rubbed their creepy greetings onto his eyelids. He had forgotten about them since his old days of living there. He tripped over vines and sliced the top of one hand in a tangle of thorn bushes. Sometimes it felt as if he had never lived in a forest at all, but at other times the words of The Old Trapper’s Guide to Wood-Craft, the book Conrad had given him, came back: Don’t run if you can help it. Make sure your fire is out. At the first sign of rain look for shelter. If lost, stand in one place and wait for help. Don’t sit under a dead limb. Don’t sleep beneath the tallest tree in a lightning storm.
Parsifal was lost, but because he had expected that to happen, that part didn’t bother him. He sat and ate a cherry Danish he’d taken with him from the continental breakfast earlier that day. It tasted good.
“Lost is only wanting to be somewhere you are not,” the Old Trapper had written.
It was only after Parsifal had been thinking about the matter for a while that it occurred to him that all those people who had shared their breakfast with him that morning at the motel — the Danish couple, the twins’ mother and father, and even the twins themselves — were, he would have to say, unnaturally small. It was hard to be sure about the children, true, but even they seemed far smaller than they should have been for children their age, although no one had actually told him the children’s exact age, and certainly, after the accident that had killed poor, small Omar, Parsifal would not have been so callous as to ask how old the child was when he died.
And though at the time Parsifal had not crystallized his feelings about this size phenomenon (except, of course, that he had been conscious of feeling quite large in comparison to everyone else), it was only as he brushed the last crumbs of the Danish from his lap and prepared to take up his search for Fenjewla that he wondered: Why had they all been so small?
Also: Was there a connection between the Danish he had just eaten and that old, spitting Danish couple?
Probably not.
All day nothing fell from the sky to the earth, at least nothing that Parsifal witnessed. Had a truce been enacted? Could it be that news of such a truce had been announced while he was in the forest? Or, alternatively, was the sky merely reloading?
Lightning.
Jocelyn had worked in the reference section where Parsifal had come to find a certain article about button-filling fountain pens. It turned out someone had already checked it out, but one thing led to another, and the two of them talked longer than Parsifal had planned. One of Jocelyn’s legs was considerably shorter than the other, but she made up for it with a thick sole on the shoe that went with the short leg. The result was an attractive, slightly wobbly step that caused her to lean her whole body into Parsifal’s for support as she walked with him to the restroom to open it with the key kept behind her desk, because previously the place had been a sort of nexus for a brisk narcotics trade, ending only when a Thackeray scholar was found slumped over dead in a toilet stall from an overdose. Parsifal found Jocelyn’s way of walking extremely attractive, and he told her so.
“Knock when you’re finished,” she said. “I’ll let you out and lock the door after you.”
When Parsifal had finished, and washed his hands and dried them using the brown paper towels from the dispenser, there Jocelyn was, standing outside the door, waiting for him with her key.
“Thanks,” Parsifal said, and as they walked back to her desk, he noticed that in the process she bumped against him several times, supposedly by accident, but in a provocative way. Her hair was in a bun, and she wore glasses with a chain attached to the sidepieces so she could drape them around her neck and always find them. She smelled of orange blossoms.
“Anytime you need help,” she said, “you can find me at the reference desk.”
“I’m sorry about your limp,” Parsifal said.
If the disintegration of thought into fragments is a sign of honesty, then does that mean the greater the disintegration, the larger the gaps there are between fragments, and therefore the greater the truth? And if so, then is a single fragment — no, the space between two fragments — the truest thing of all?
Parsifal.
It was his twelfth birthday when Pearl called Parsifal to her. He had been busy building a model out of mud and brambles of the city where his father worked. “Here,” Pearl said, “I want you to have this.”
She handed him a package made of bark and stood back as her son opened it.
Inside was a green tee shirt onto which she had sewn three golden anchors, one of them a little crooked.
“Do you like it?” his mother asked.
“It’s beautiful,” Parsifal said.
Along with the cup, he had also left the shirt behind, although by that time he had long since outgrown it.
Parsifaclass="underline" Perse à val. Through the heart, pierced.
Parsifal passed through the forest, alert for any sign of the cup. The closest things he found were a few crushed beer cans and an empty container of insect repellant. Not so bad, he thought, considering our current nation of litterbugs. It was late in the afternoon. Soon he would need to stop and find a place to make camp for the night. One of the things he remembered from his lessons in woodcraft was never to wait until the last minute to make camp. “Spending a miserable night means the following day will be miserable as well,” The Old Trapper’s Guide to Wood-Craft had advised.
Then the earth opened about a dozen feet in front of him and an off-white washer-dryer combination, horribly deformed by the force of its impact, suddenly appeared to have risen out of a spot where there had only been a nasty patch of blackberries. Parsifal stared, and two things occurred to him: 1) that it probably had not risen, but crashed, and 2) if he had not taken a few moments earlier to change his socks, that might well have been the end of his search. Parsifal looked above him, peering through the hole the bulky appliance had created in the canopy of trees. The silhouette of a bird, or of a plane, passed noiselessly by.
He decided to make camp early.
When Parsifal first came to the city he was fourteen, and he noticed that city people expected him to be amazed by commonplace marvels. “What do you think of this?” they would ask, pointing to a telephone. Or, “Isn’t that amazing?” they would exclaim standing in front of a blender when it was obvious they didn’t think it was that amazing at all.
Parsifal’s answer to most of these questions was that he didn’t think much at all about the this-or-that they were asking after, nor did he find city life so very unusual, because he had been prepared for it by building cities out of mud back while he was still in the forest, and by reading books whose characters had spent their whole lives in cities.