Still, what else could he do but pretend everything was the way it had always been?
One day in the city Parsifal stopped a blind man. “Do you mind if I accompany you a while so I can ask a few questions?” he inquired.
This particular blind man was wearing an outfit Parsifal judged to be from the seventies: a Nehru jacket, bell-bottom pants, and a necklace with ceramic beads and an ankh, so Parsifal added, “That’s a nice outfit you’re wearing, though I don’t suppose you can get a good look at it yourself.” The man’s hair was frizzy, too, in the style people used to call an “Afro.”
But for some reason this blind man chose that moment to confront Parsifal. “Who asked you to come here and tell me what you think is nice or not? You think the opinion of a complete stranger is some sort of a gift, and that you are doing me a favor? I don’t know you. I don’t know what else you may like or not like. How would you feel if a necrophiliac said he finds you attractive? I can’t even see how you are dressed, in order to have some possible basis with which I might interpret your so-called opinion, so why would I care what you think? Suppose you just walk back to wherever you came from and leave me alone, okay?”
“Well, okay,” Parsifal said. “But for the record, I’m wearing a nice-looking plaid shirt, chocolate-colored cords, brown wingtip shoes, and an expensive wristwatch with a gold expansion band. Also, though you might not know what one is, I’m carrying a fountain pen, this one a classic Parker 51. So good luck on your lonely journey around the same block day in and day out, with that attitude of yours.”
Parsifal stepped away. Actually he wasn’t wearing any wristwatch at all, but he couldn’t have stood letting the man get away with his superior attitude. Also, his chocolate-colored cords were actually jeans, and his shoes weren’t wingtips. His shirt was plaid though, and he did have a Parker 51, though it wasn’t his; he was on his way to deliver it to a customer.
Who was that person to judge? he thought.
Walking around the forest after breakfast, Parsifal saw that overnight there had been a shower of electric toothbrushes. True, they weren’t especially dangerous, and even if he’d been directly hit when they started dropping, it probably wouldn’t have been serious because most of them had been deflected by the branches overhead. This was the first time, as far as he knew, that the choice of armaments had come from the bathroom.
And curiously, all the toothbrushes appeared to have been used. Their bristles were splayed, and some held preserved particles of old meals.
A librarian once described Parsifal’s eyes as “twin wasps that had dug themselves into a mound of rancid suet in order to lay their eggs.”They were making love beneath a display entitled “Nature’s Friends and Foes,” and even though the library was closed at that time, he did not think there was any way these words could have been intended as a compliment.
“And what do you know about laying eggs?” he asked her.
Her name was Ernestine. She wore her hair pinned up with clips on either side of her head, and once she had told him she felt betrayed over the loss of the file card system in favor of computers for keeping track of books.
“Is that all that’s bothering you?” Parsifal asked.
“It’s the metaphor as a whole I was reaching for,” she explained, “and I’ll thank you to keep my personal business out of it.”
On the whole, Ernestine was far more patient than you might believe based on this exchange alone.
For lunch, Parsifal finished his last sandwich, the peanut butter and jelly. He decided he would search for the cup until it began to grow dark. If he found nothing, he’d go home the next day. Had he already decided that earlier? He thought so, but it wasn’t important, and, strangely, it was that knowledge of an end in sight, as small as it was, that gave him the burst of energy he needed.
For one more day, anyway.
Once, waking at Ernestine’s left side, Parsifal mentioned that the only dreams he ever had forecast his own death, but, he added, those dreams didn’t happen very often. Ernestine’s bed was in the shape of a boat and to climb into it a person had to use the rope ladder at the stern.
“Parsifal,” she said, “surely you know by now that we all dream every minute of the night and part of the day, too, whether our eyelids are trembling under the thrill of REM sleep or are just propped open, as when we are waiting for our laundry to finish up in the dryer of a laundromat. Surely you know that the mind is too active ever to stop, because if it did, then so would we. Therefore I’m forced to say I don’t believe you. The fact that your mind refuses to divulge what it’s doing is not at all the same as you not dreaming. I’d say it actually indicates a deep insecurity of intimacy as well as a suspicious nature.”
Ernestine paused. “Consider,” she said, “last night I dreamed I was trapped in a soft-drink bottling plant, surrounded by giant-sized bottles all wrapped with coils of barbed wire. At the same time, you claim you were lying next to me, dreaming, you say, of nothing. Which of the two of us would you conclude is trying to hide something?”
Parsifal was about eleven or twelve years old when he found his first dead man in the forest. He had been practicing something Pearl liked to call “Numinous Consciousness,” about which she had heard several years earlier from a tape Parsifal’s father had brought her, along with a battery-operated tape recorder to play it on. What Numinous Consciousness meant was that a person could observe things from several points of view at once, including him- or herself. “I’m too old to start something as tricky as that,” Pearl told her son, “but you, you’re young and your mind is still flexible. I’ll bet if you practiced for just a couple weeks you could get the whole thing down pat. I know it would make your father happy.”
The process Parsifal was supposed to follow went like this: He was to sit down somewhere and imagine he was in the center of a circle, its perimeter maybe fifteen or twenty feet away. Then, point by point along that perimeter, he was to imagine what things would look like viewed from wherever that particular object was. On the day in question he was working on his fifth or sixth location when he spotted something shiny, which he couldn’t actually have seen from where he was sitting, but from his new location the shiny object turned out to be a ring around a finger. Beyond that, there wasn’t much to say. The body had been left outdoors enough that the smell was gone, and besides, living in the forest Parsifal had already seen his share of dead things, from deer to dogs to feral cats.
“I’m sure it isn’t your father,” was the first thing Pearl said when her son returned to tell her about his discovery.
“It’s not a bad death, all in all,” Conrad said, when he arrived a few days later and Parsifal took him out to see his discovery, “to be surrounded by the leaves and trees and beauty of the forest. Not bad at all.”
The next time Conrad came back from the city, he brought along a shovel so he and Parsifal could dig a grave and lay the man to rest. Conrad took the ring, which turned out to be a nice-sized diamond, back to the city with him. He told Parsifal he would give it back to the man’s relatives.
The whole experience made Parsifal consider.
By evening, Parsifal still had not found the cup. He was disappointed, but the good thing was that all his wood-craft had been coming back to him over the past couple of days. He was still lost, true, but he hadn’t given in to panic so far, and that was winning most of the battle, according to the book, which added that there were far worse things than going without food for a couple of days. He tried to remember the map he’d left on the kitchen counter along with the compass. The forest could not possibly be all that large, anyway, he thought.