Fortunately, he was not at a loss for words. He waved the Eversharp he was holding (it was in two sections at that moment) and said, “It appears that you’ve come to the right place.”
“It appears I have,” she said.
When he remembers that time by the ocean, Parsifal decides that the children’s father would probably have been angry if they had returned home having forgotten the rope and would have beaten the boys for losing it.
“My name is Misty,” the beautiful woman said.
“Misty,” Parsifal replied.
“Yes,” she answered. “My parents told me they named me that because I was conceived in an unusually heavy fog, one that blanketed the entire coast where they had gone for a vacation. It lasted nearly a week, during which time driving, even walking, was considered too dangerous for anyone to attempt, so they decided to be intimate instead.”
Misty grimaced as if the memory was somehow disturbing, and added that the ink flow of the Waterman was inadequate for her needs.
Then Parsifal told her he could not be certain whether the problem lay in the feed itself, in some problem with the seating of the nib, or even in the flexibility of the sac, without first taking the pen apart for an examination. “Can you leave it for a day or two?” he asked.
“Yes, I can,” she answered.
Frequently Parsifal would ask himself what other kind of bird besides an albatross made such large circles in the sky. Or maybe they were spirals. He was no expert in these matters, to be sure, but he thought it could also have been a hawk or an eagle. Even a vulture.
“His infinite wisdom,” Parsifal remembers Mother Teresa having said.
Back when he was still living in his house in the forest (not even a house, really, but more an accumulation of branches into which his mother and he crawled each night), Parsifal opened the door (how an actual door had come to be there was a complicated story) to find a bear inside. The bear was an ordinary black bear, though with a white spot on its chest, and of medium size, similar to many others that lived alongside them in the forest, mostly harmless to humans, but once inside their house — which was only a single room — the bear had eaten a dozen eggs his mother had been saving for dinner, as well as the pet squirrel that Parsifal had raised from a baby and had not yet gotten around to naming.
Basically there are four kinds of pens if you do not count dip pens, which Parsifal does not, because it is his opinion that dip pens are really not much more than pointed sticks. The kinds of pens are Cartridge, Sac, Piston, and Eyedropper. Of this list, he feels the most reprehensible is the cartridge, because it is nothing more than a prepackaged tube of ink, on to one end of which a person adds a pointed stick. And even though some cartridges you can squeeze and then release, forcing them to suck ink inside, which is the way a sac works, and other cartridges are made to work like a piston, in the end a cartridge is neither a sac nor a piston, but only a cheap piece of plastic crap, and if a person chooses to believe otherwise he or she is fooling no one but him- or herself.
Entrar.
Which librarian told him about the opera Parsifal he can’t remember, only that he was with her in her kitchen, which smelled of cinnamon and lavender, and she was using her oven to heat up a coffee cake with crumbs on top. Whoever it was, that person told him the opera was essentially about a young man who achieves enlightenment in one way or another.
“Maybe that’s what’s on deck for you,” she added. “You never can tell.”
“Lights up a purple sky,” Pearl used to sing.
The next type is the sac, which is more or less a balloon with ink. A sac fills by being squeezed shut by a lever, or by fingers, or by something else, and then released. “Think of a baster for a Thanksgiving turkey,” Parsifal likes to say, “but with a metal point at the end to write with, and you are thinking of a pen with a sac.” Would you want to compose an intimate letter with a turkey baster?
Parsifal would not.
Eyedropper pens really are nothing more than hollow tubes that people fill with ink by using an eyedropper to transfer the ink from the bottle to the pen — the same type of eyedropper people use to put drops in their noses or ears or eyes, and which really is just a miniature turkey baster.
Thus for Parsifal, the only true pen is one in which the ink-holding mechanism is not auxiliary to the pen, but a part of the pen itself: the piston type. In the piston type, the piston built into the pen sucks up ink on its own — and also expels it, if needed. Where other pens are passive, the piston is active. “Think of a squid moving along the floor of the ocean in darkness and silence by means of taking in and expelling seawater,” Parsifal says. That would be a piston pen, only substitute ink for seawater, though come to think of it, a squid has ink as well — and uses it to hide.
If only he could hide, he sometimes thinks, and then, when everything has passed, come out again.
But what is everything?
The Lady Waterman looked as if it needed a good cleaning. It used a sac and not a piston, but sometimes, as Parsifal had learned the hard way, if a person wanted to stay in business, it was necessary to compromise his ideals.
To enter.
Meanwhile, in response to the increased bombardment from the sky, the earth seems more intent than ever on filling the sky with particles of ash and smoke. In other words, it appears that the earth is bent on replacing particles of the air with particles of itself by activating more volcanoes and setting more forest fires, some of the latter stretching for miles. If this method proves successful, eventually the air will no longer exist, Parsifal thinks. Instead of air, it will be a half-air-and-half-earth mixture. If this happens, then the sky will be as much like earth as the earth itself and no longer the sky at all. If this happens, then the earth will have won.
“You know what happens to a little boy who asks too many questions, don’t you?” Parsifal’s mother used to say. “The bear will bite his tongue off. You remember your squirrel, don’t you, what’s-its-name?”
He thinks: to enter the forest.
II
if there was a door between the earth and the sky, what would it look like?
Naturally, there is no reason such a portal would be an ordinary door or resemble, for example, the door to Parsifal’s house in the forest. The door to Parsifal’s house there was made of oak, had four panels, a heavy latch, a doorknob, and a brass knocker that was pointless because, as his mother used to say, you could hear anyone coming for miles by the sound of snapping twigs. So the door between the earth and the sky would not have to be a door like that door at all. It could be a flap, the kind of a flap used to let pets in and out of a house, or a tube to crawl through, like the escape hatch of a submarine, and the truth is, because no one has ever discovered a door between the earth and the sky, there is no reason it has to look like a door at all. It could have a different shape entirely: a plant, for example, or a leaf, or a cup, even a bird, an animal, or a person.
As much as his mother pretended to admire it, the door to Parsifal’s house in the forest was heavy and difficult to open. This was because instead of it being attached by hinges, as most doors in most homes are, Parsifal’s father had drilled holes along one side of it and passed through them vines and a few pieces of rope, which he tied to a tree trunk. In fact, the two of them — the son and the mother — seldom opened the door, but most often entered the house instead through a tunnel they had dug beneath the door.