“Wow,” Joe said. “What a babe your mother was. I’ll bet you had a few lustful thoughts along that line.”
“Probably,” Parsifal said. “But no more than average for a kid. After all, she was still my mom.”
“Hmm,” Joe said. “Do you mind if I make a copy of this for your file?” He walked over to the cheap copy machine in the corner of his office, took a pile of paper off the top, and put in a quarter.
“Go ahead,” Parsifal said.
The machine whined for a while and, after about a minute, a copy wriggled out.
“What about your dad?” Joe said. “Does it seem at all odd to you that you haven’t really made much of an effort to contact him since you left the forest and moved to the city where he’s supposed to work? Or, for that matter, wouldn’t you think that with all the publicity surrounding the Happy Bunny tragedy that he would have attempted to contact you?”
Parsifal thought about it. “When I first arrived here, mostly I was concerned with survival. Insofar as the preschool was concerned, I imagine he might well have been embarrassed.”
“Hmm,” Joe repeated. “And since then?”
“Well,” Parsifal answered, “I guess what with me starting my own pen repair business at your suggestion and all, my dad just hasn’t been a priority for me. By the way, I meant to tell you that the pen repair business is coming along pretty well, even though it’s still in the early stages.”
“Glad to hear it,” Joe replied. “But let this be a warning: It seems very likely to me that you are now in the process of beginning to confuse me with your father. This is called transference, and it’s a pretty common thing in the analyzing profession, something we analysts see every day. I’m not sure what you can do about it, but the main thing for you to remember is that if this transference between your father and me is ever actually completed, then our therapy will have to come to an end.”
“I don’t think there’s much danger of that,” Parsifal said. “For one thing, Conrad dressed very differently than you.”
“Yes,” Joe said, “I expect he did.”
Who was it that said our sole glory as humans is to leave behind a record of our crimes and desires?
Using a fountain pen to do it.
Climbing a small hill, Parsifal stops for a moment to catch his breath; he must have been almost running in the forest without even knowing it. Watch out, he tells himself. If you injure yourself in this wild spot, it might be curtains. Beneath him, he can’t see more than a hundred yards in any direction. The leaves of some of the trees are starting to turn various colors, and above him the sky is starting to assume its winter blue. The bird has returned (or never left), but is higher than ever.
He wonders if Misty is having sex with Cody or Black Dog. Possibly, seeing as she appears to be under the influence of drugs, and anything can happen under those conditions. His heart begins to race. For that matter, seeing as drugs are in the picture, why not with both men at the same time?
Parsifal can feel his face turn hot.
He walks back down the hill. He has to find that cup.
Parsifal supposes that trudging through the woods, hour after hour without any signs of hope, might be discouraging to many people, but for him, alone again in the woods, it seems almost as if his scars, from the fire and other things, have disappeared, except, of course, for the mark left by lightning.
His ankle feels a little better.
With Cody and Black Dog?
When Parsifal thinks about blindness, he thinks about all the ways that people can lose sight: some at birth, some later, slowly or all at once. Others lose it, then get it back again, then lose it forever. And just as the way in which blindness arrives must inevitably alter its effect, surely the varieties of not-seeing must differ as well. Some see black, others purple, red, explosions of color, and possibly even experience moments when the curtain between the eyes and the world is parted for an instant, then comes crashing shut again. Or things may dissolve over weeks or years, like a dark lozenge left in a glass of water, until over time the actual lozenge is invisible, a part of the now-dark water. Or the field of vision may become covered with spots, like splotches on a shower door, until it’s impossible to see if there’s anyone else there in the bathroom along with you. Or that same field, once large, may start to shrink, like the closing credits of a cartoon, a circle growing smaller until nothing’s left but a dot, then black.
So Parsifal had been walking and thinking this and that, when suddenly he came upon a sight that stopped him cold: a rectangular hole in the ground, about three feet wide and six feet long. It looked to be about two feet deep and was not the result of any falling object. Or that’s the way it is now, he thought, with increasing excitement. Twenty or so years ago the hole would have been deeper, empty of debris, the sides steeper, and the bottom filled with the sort of deadly pointed stakes that he himself had pounded in as a child, the sharp ends pointing upward.
Twenty or so years ago it would have been a perfect trap for catching a deer that, walking down its usual trail, would not have noticed that a pit had been dug there overnight and covered with branches and leaves so it looked the same, except for the pile of dirt to one side, as the rest of the forest floor. Then the deer, as frequently happened, would stumble in and be unable to get out. The following morning, or next day, or the day after that, Parsifal would find the unfortunate animal, usually still alive, impaled on the pointed stakes he had set in the ground and in terrible agony, and he would dispatch it with a rock. After it had finally ceased to move, Parsifal would lower a ladder made of sticks to climb down and lift it out. Then he would drag its body back to Pearl, who would skin and cook it for their dinner. She said that living in the forest had made Parsifal strong for his age.
His infinite wisdom.
It was not just the odd deer he caught, either, because, skilled in woodcraft as Parsifal was, he frequently helped his mother by making snares for small animals (rabbits, possums, and squirrels) and deadfalls for medium-sized ones (raccoons and badgers and the occasional fox). But now, finding what may well have been a pit that Parsifal himself had dug twenty years ago meant two important things: First, that he was in the right forest. Second, the location of his old house must be nearby, because even as strong as he had been in those days, he still tried to dig his pits so his victims would be within easy dragging distance of home.
Parsifal had to be sure, however. Carefully, he lowered himself down the sides of the pit to the bottom, where, much as he expected, he sank another few feet into the collection of leaves and branches that had collected there over the past two decades. Were there pointed stakes? He had avoided them by staying close to the walls, but now he reached toward the center and fished around beneath a pile of debris. Yes. His fingers closed carefully around what seemed to be a pointed stake, and he carefully tugged it out of the ground. The point had been dulled by time, and the bottom had almost completely rotted away, but there it was. He was the person who had dug that pit, and sharpened the stakes, and lined the bottom. This pit was his.