No wonder she had burned to death in the fire.
Parsifal walked on, the ache in his ankle growing worse.
And then, there he was, sitting with his back against an ancient oak, eating the last half of his last energy bar (it made the pain go away), when a shower of silver paper clips darkened the sky. Even falling from a great height, they weren’t heavy enough to do serious harm, so Parsifal stayed where he was and simply raised his backpack above his head to protect himself until the storm had passed.
Parsifal was fine, and there appeared to be no major damage to the forest except that a few leaves had gotten sliced up pretty badly. But paper clips? He wondered. He no longer believed the sky would ever run out of ammunition — and this was disturbing. But suppose instead that the clips were intended as a kind of warning, like those pamphlets dropped by the US Air Force over Nagasaki. (Did we drop pamphlets? Parsifal was pretty certain we did not, but he couldn’t remember for sure, and, actually, thinking about it, Nagasaki was kind of an afterthought, with no warning at all, like the story of someone who is cold and, looking around for something to make into a small fire, finds a few milk cartons and old coloring books that he might burn to keep him warm.)
During Parsifal’s early days of therapy, Joe confided to him that before becoming a therapist, but after his days in the army, he had worked for several years as a stockbroker, rising to near the top of his profession. But the pressure had gotten to him, Joe said, and that was probably the explanation for his present slovenly attire. “I may have overdone the casual part as a reaction to all my years in the business world, where snappy dressing is de rigueur,” he added, kicking off his sandals and wiggling his fat, hairy toes as if to demonstrate his freedom.
“Oh,” Parsifal said, “then maybe you knew my father. He was a well-known stockbroker, too.” He told Joe his name was Conrad.
Joe thought for a bit, and then wrote something down on his yellow pad.
“As a matter of fact,” Joe answered, “I’ve never known anyone at all whose name was Conrad.”
And then — assuming that his field of vision was like the screen of a television set (albeit one that needed adjusting) — from the right of the TV screen, out of view behind a stand of maples on the other side of the broad meadow that stretched out before him, Parsifal could once again hear the sounds of voices singing — no, chanting — although they were too far away to make out the actual words. He listened as the sound moved slowly across the hypothetical screen, still behind the meadow, but now obscured by a stand of sycamores, the sign of riparian woodland, the trees indicating that there was probably a source of water, maybe even a creek, nearby.
He sat still and listened. The chanting sounded like “Give me a dollar,” but he couldn’t be certain, muffled as it was by leaves and branches. Then, as if the group — it had to be Misty, Cody, and Black Dog — had come upon a gigantic catapult abandoned in the wilderness and suddenly they had shot themselves all the way to the left of the television screen, the chanting, without ever having passed through the center, now came from behind a scraggly group of oaks on the formerly silent left side and had reverted once again to the unintelligible.
“Wait,” Parsifal called out, but even as he did, he knew in his weakened condition that his voice would not carry that distance. He rose and began to hobble quickly toward them. It’s just possible that I can negotiate a couple more energy bars to tide me over until I can find my way out of here, he thought. But my ankle hurts too much for the long haul.
Then, as the sound disappeared altogether, Parsifal sat there, leaning on his cane and gasping, and the television screen went blank.
Pain.
Parsifal lay on his back, looking up at the sky and breathing through his mouth, when a shadow blocked the sun.
“Look everyone,” Misty said, “the Pen Man is still here.”
Cody walked closer and poked Parsifal with his foot. He groaned and opened his eyes.
“He’s alive,” Cody said. He seemed neither happy nor particularly unhappy about that fact.
Black Dog, however, sat a few feet away in a kind of Indian squat, and kept his face hidden in his hands. “This is so bad,” Black Dog said. “This is such a bummer.” He was wearing the same leather pants as when Parsifal had first seen him, and they certainly were not improved by their use.
Cody took Parsifal’s pulse and unstrapped Parsifal’s wristwatch. It was operated by a quartz battery and kept really good time. Cody put it in his pocket. “His pulse is pretty good,” Cody said.
Parsifal should have complained, but he seemed to be thinking of something far away that he could not quite name at the moment.
“Shit,” Misty said. “What are we going to do?”
In Parsifal’s opinion, Misty had never looked better. Maybe it was the fresh air, maybe the three were on some sort of fast and purification thing, he didn’t know, but her cheeks were red and her eyes sparkled. God forbid it could have been the results of group sex. But on the other hand, Cody and Black Dog seemed not in the least better for wear, so maybe that was not the case. Misty was a woman who never needed to apply makeup, Parsifal thought.
Then he felt something strange at his hips. It turned out to be Cody, who was going through his pockets. Was Cody looking for a health insurance card? Parsifal doubted it, and besides, he didn’t have one. Cody finished, and stuffed everything back and gave Parsifal a sort of farewell poke with his foot.
“Well,” Black Dog said. He said it very slowly, and it seemed to last a long time. He began to chant, “Give me a dollar, give me a dollar,” but Parsifal couldn’t make any more sense of it then than the first time he’d heard it. Still, it seemed to settle Black Dog down.
Misty sat cross-legged by Parsifal’s head and stared at him. “Not so fast,” she said. “We have to think this through.”
There was silence, and no one moved.
“If we try to carry him out of here there may by trouble.” She looked hard at Cody. “But if we just leave him here, there’s a good chance he may die.”
“Give me a dollar,” Black Dog said.
“On the other hand,” Parsifal heard Misty continue, “karmically speaking, it doesn’t make any difference at all whatever we choose to do, because Pen Man’s fate has already been predetermined by his own actions, and what is dying anyway besides simply moving to another plane of existence?”
Cody began to unlace Parsifal’s boots.
“Stop,” Misty said. “You want to have people looking around afterward to try to figure out what happened?”
“So,” Cody said.
“So let’s get out of here,” Misty said.
Black Dog stood up and Cody shrugged.
“Oh, and Cody. .”
Cody waited for Misty to finish.
“Put the watch back.”
In the distance Parsifal heard that strange chant, Give me a dollar, grow fainter.
All voices the same voice.
All requests the same request.
Was this a dream, or did it really happen?
When Parsifal regained consciousness he had his watch and his boots were still laced, but by the time he remembered to look for footprints he had traveled too far to turn around and go back, even considering the fact that technically he didn’t know if he was going back or forward, and his ankle hurt a lot.