For some reason, though he had not traveled so very far that day, he had begun to limp. Falling down as often as he had back in the forest, his ankles were fairly weak, though it was hard to say if they had been weak to begin with or if it was a result of all that falling.
The florist shop seemed more a haphazard collection of plants that had grown up on their own (but in pots) and in no particular order than an actual enterprise. Daisies were with orchids; ferns shared their space with cacti, roses, and lilies; chrysanthemums with irises and carnations; all swept up in the same net, like members of some far-flung criminal conspiracy.
“Your face,” the smock-wearing woman behind the counter said as Parsifal walked in.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and was about to explain, but she produced a wet cloth from somewhere and handed it to him.
“It’s red. It looks as if you’ve been out in the sun.”
He took the cloth and laid it across his face. The cloth was cool, and smelled faintly of lemons.
She was a normal-looking person, with the plump, friendly countenance that might have been on a bottle of syrup or a box of cake mix, except that she was wearing glasses. “Thanks,” Parsifal said and then, realizing it would have been rude for him to simply turn around and leave, he looked for something to buy to show his gratitude.
“How much are those?” he asked, pointing to a bucket of red tulips at the side of the counter.
“Twelve for ten dollars,” she said.
“I’ll take six,” he told her. So the woman wrapped them in cellophane and added a stalk of ferns and a white ribbon. They looked nice.
“Thanks,” Parsifal said, and left. Maybe I ’ll give them to Misty.
Rains in my ________ like it rains on the __________.
Halfway back to his house, Parsifal saw a small red drink cooler fall about sixty feet away and bounce off a mailbox. He walked over to it. The cooler was empty, as he thought it would be, but when he looked up into the sky from where it had fallen, he noticed that the bird, or whatever it was that had been following him, seemed to have added downward swoops to its pattern of circles, as if it were trying to get closer.
The mailbox was completely undamaged.
On the other hand, perhaps Parsifal should not blame the blind man. A librarian once told him that he needed to work on his enunciation.
What Parsifal remembered of his leaving the forest was this: Walking away from trees, a few leaves still stuck in his hair, a few scratches still leaking blood, limping a little, barefoot, the trees becoming smaller, and then, before he reached the city — maybe halfway between the city and the forest, so that the trees were no longer even visible — a woman walking toward him. She was wearing a pink dress and hiking sandals. Her blond hair was pulled back into a neat ponytail, and when she saw him she made a small, startled sound.
So as not to further upset her, he crossed to the other side of the road, which was, at that point, a two-lane highway.
In his memory, this woman resembles Misty, but it could not have been Misty, because at that time Misty would have been no more than a child.
The low-grade nausea that creeps into his heart.
Parsifal wondered if the trails he remembered from the forest were still there or if they had become overgrown. At the exact moment he wondered this, he looked down and noticed he was no longer carrying any flowers.
I must have left them somewhere.
When Parsifal returned home from the florist, he made his way to his front door through the circle of the blind men that surrounded his house. That day, however, their numbers had thinned, so there was not even a circle, but more like two or three very slow electrons orbiting around a nucleus. His house looked the same as it had when he left. It was what people call “a cottage,” though he was unsure what they mean by that. It was covered with gray wood siding and had a front porch he never used. The front door opened and shut easily. When he thought about it, it seemed a little tame after all his time in the forest.
Sand.
Once inside, he ate the leftover sandwiches and fell asleep.
Parsifal woke to a radio bulletin that an entire town north of where he lived had been destroyed by a bombardment of two-wheeled vehicles: motorcycles, mopeds, and bicycles. True, it was not a large town, but this was the first time he knew of that such a large-scale sky-related, concentrated disaster had occurred. Over one hundred people had been killed, the media excitedly reported, forgetting to mention the usual famines, earthquakes, and floods killing thousands.
Never had the sky felt more dangerous to him.
The next day brought a report of a large brushfire in the middle of the state, one that filled the sky with soot for nearly one hundred square miles. The fire had been started by a group of hikers who were burned to death.
His infinite wisdom.
IV
if the source of one’s pain comes from an ill-considered action, does that make the pain any less? If a person hurts his ankle, say, by seeing how many times he can hop on one foot in his kitchen, and then maybe lets his attention wander for a minute to a line of blind men outside his window, so he winds up taking a bad hop and hits his head on the corner of a cabinet, is the pain any less? Parsifal wonders about this.
Or does it hurt more?
According to the map Parsifal picked up the following day at a map store, the forest he wanted to visit was actually not very near his home at all, but about a hundred miles north and to the east of the city. The fact that he had forgotten how far away it was he can only attribute to the clouded state of mind he must have possessed when he first left the forest, a state of mind that compressed the memory of several days of travel, limping and hungry, into only a few hours.
Could he be wrong about other details of his past as well?
Parsifal thought the woman who sold him the map at the store was similar to the woman at the florist shop, the one who patted his hand as she handed him the tulips he had bought. However, while the woman at the florist shop was dressed in a light blue smock and a flowered blouse, the woman at the map store was dressed in a plain brown suit that had epaulettes on the shoulders and many pockets, as if she were preparing to leave at any minute on a journey, making ready to fill each of those pockets with maps. Both women wore glasses.
A collapsible hiking pole leaned against the store’s front counter. The woman’s hair was in a bun. Her muscles were firm and her skin was tan. She was not the sort of person whose face might be chosen for a box of cake mix, but possibly for a granola blend with oatmeal, almonds, and cranberries.
“That’s right,” she told Parsifal when he’d asked if she had ever been there. “It’s not a short walk to the forest from here, but I think you’ll like it.”
He told her that he had lived there for a while.
“Well then,” she replied, “I’ll bet that you have a whole lot of fond memories.”
Somewhere there must be a word, some technical term, for a combination of anticipation, nostalgia, and dread.