All journeys end in lovers meeting.
“Journeys end in meetings,” people say, but are they right? Do we really need to travel to meet with those we love? Parsifal wonders. The Old Trapper’s Guide to Wood-Craft, a book his father gave to him, said that if a person is lost in the woods, all he needs to do is stay where he is until rescuers arrive. That is all that is necessary, the book said. Whatever you do, the book said, do not move.
On the other hand, there is the lightning.
On the other hand, there’s his name. Or namesake.
So it is settled: Parsifal must journey back to the forest, where he will search for the missing cup, although even if Fenjewla is still there, it isn’t guaranteed that he will find it, buried as the cup may be beneath leaves, or fallen trees, or even beneath the bodies of animals who crawled into his old house to die, the way they used to do. When he still lived there, Pearl made him take them outside and dig a hole to bury them. He liked digging holes. A lot.
True, Parsifal knows, it is unlikely that his old house, as poorly constructed as it was, will still be standing, because, frankly speaking, it was always pretty flimsy, and in the years since he lived there, with no one to climb up and replace the branches that had blown off the roof during the night, the house would have to be even worse. For that matter, would the forest even be there? Would the whole forest have been cut down to make space for suburbs?
“Regression,” Joe would say.
But if the forest is still there, then the door might be too, though possibly covered in branches or buried by leaves. And if he can find the door, then the cup might be nearby, still hanging on a branch or crushed beneath the roof. Unless, of course, someone has already found the door and taken it away to use for his own house, maybe in the suburbs. An unlikely scenario at best, however.
Because it was a very heavy door and, really, how far could a person carry a door like that?
And speaking of unlikely, the nib of the Lady Waterman that Misty left with him did not have the rounded tip that ninety-eight percent of pens have. This one had been ground by someone to a left oblique and retipped. Had Misty done it herself, or had the pen been a gift from a former or present boyfriend? The pen was old, so there was no telling when the work had been done. Parsifal resolved to sound Misty out on the subject the next time they talked, but he would have to do it carefully.
He didn’t want to “creep her out,” as people say.
On the bark of the tree to which their door was tied Conrad had carved three anchors.
“What are those anchors?” Parsifal asked his father one afternoon when the sun was setting and the canopy of leaves above them was a lovely golden green.
“They represent our family: you, your mother, and me,” Conrad answered, “and I carved them on this tree next to the door to our house because you and your mother are my twin anchors of life, along with me, who makes the third.”
“Which one am I?” Parsifal asked, and Conrad pointed to the smallest of the three.
An hour later Conrad left to return to the city, and Parsifal never got the chance to ask him how a person could anchor his own life.
Too bad, he thought.
“Excuse me,” Parsifal said to one of the blind men who had fallen behind the rest of the blind men who were walking ahead of him in a kind of knot, something that frequently happened, he had noticed, when people “bunched up” because they could not see.
“Excuse me,” he repeated.
So the man, who was better dressed than the others, stopped walking and tapping, and turned to face in the direction of the voice that was speaking to him.
“Do you happen to know if there is a forest somewhere in the vicinity?” Parsifal asked.
This man wore a sort of brownish tweed sport coat and a light blue ascot. He pointed his finger into the air as a signal that he wished a moment or two to consider Parsifal’s question. Then he moved his head from side to side, squinted, and rubbed his narrow cane against the shin of his left leg. Parsifal noticed that his trousers were unusually well creased, and that his cane, like the canes of all the blind, was white. At last, the man aimed the tip of his cane toward the ground.
“Certainly,” the blind man said, “it’s not that far from where we are at this very moment. All you need to do is to follow that road”—here he uncannily pointed to one of the several roads leading to and from Parsifal’s neighborhood—“until you come to a factory that makes pencils, turn left, and continue for about a mile. I don’t see how you can miss it; it’s quite well kept, in its way.”
Parsifal wanted to ask the man how he and his fellows had chosen his neighborhood to practice their walking. How did they arrive? Were they bussed in or did they walk to get there? Did they sleep together in a dormitory somewhere or inside people’s houses? Did they dream, and if so, of what? Instead, he thanked the man, who nodded and continued his moving and tapping away from Parsifal.
Parsifal reentered his house and, using his favorite fountain pen, a classic Parker 51, wrote down the man’s instructions so as not to forget them.
“The sand,” he had told Joe.
Even though, according to the blind man’s directions, the forest was nearby, there was no telling how long it would take him to find his former home — if indeed he could recognize it at all. So Parsifal took out a canteen and filled it with water. He found the travel fountain pen he liked to bring along on trips, a few sheets of decent paper just in case he should be forced to leave a note somewhere, and made five sandwiches — one ham and cheese, two vegetarian-avocado, one turkey-Swiss, and one peanut butter and banana. Also, he packed a hat, a plastic bottle of sunscreen, a fold-up poncho in case of rain, a toothbrush, and a small tube of toothpaste. If nothing else, his years in the forest had taught him the hard way the importance of proper dental hygiene. To all of this he added a box of matches in case he needed to start a fire, an extra pair of socks, and, last but not least, a round compass with a folding top just in case the blind man’s directions should prove inaccurate.
By the time Parsifal had assembled everything, it was too late to set off, and so, after eating one of the vegetarian-avocado sandwiches as an early supper, he transferred the remaining ones to the refrigerator and brushed his teeth. Then he lay in bed wondering if those packages of pork or beef or lamb he sometimes passed in meat departments had friends during their brief life spans. Were there familiar faces they were glad to see, or others, now possibly meat themselves, whose days would oft be brightened by their appearance? He remembered that the squirrel that was later eaten by the bear used to follow him around those hours Parsifal released it from its cage, and sometimes birds had dropped down and called to him. Who had Parsifal been to them that they should be so glad to see him? Did those packages of meat in the meat department also feel love, or something close to it? Did they believe their lives had meaning? Did they enjoy spending time “just hanging out” with their friends? Did they like being alone, and if so, what did they think about during those times?
And when they slept their final sleep on beds of Styrofoam, did they dream?