Jim Krusoe - Parsifal

Or maybe it was the scar.

In any case, the library was a welcome refuge after the notoriety of the Happy Bunny Preschool incident, and the harsh ways of the jail that had followed it.

On entering the forest, Parsifal almost immediately became lost. The first reason for this was that he had no idea at which edge of the forest the bus had deposited him. (For that matter, he hadn’t been paying attention to which edge he was exiting from when he left years ago.) The second was that over the past twenty-five years or so there had been considerable growth in trees and bushes and such. And third, there must have been several changes to the boundaries of the forest itself, the pressures of real estate being what they were.

Even assuming that Parsifal was entering the forest at the exact point where he had left it, which was unlikely, there still was no telling if the perimeter was the same or, if it had shrunk, whether it was by feet or yards or miles. Also, third, or maybe fourth by now, Parsifal had to admit that even for a person raised in those woods — a person who once knew every plant, every path, each stream, and every largish rock — the passage of time had left each tree pretty much resembling its neighbor.

So this was his plan: He would simply enter where he was at the moment and keep going straight until he reached the other side of the forest. Then he would turn left and walk as far as he could, and then reverse himself at a slight angle to his right until he reached the end once more, and then reverse himself with a slight angle to his left, and so on and so forth until he spotted some familiar object, or possibly his old home itself. In other words, his path would look like this:

That was how it would work in theory, and of course it was his hope that he would not have to complete the entire sequence before he found the cup he was seeking. Unfortunately, however, Parsifal had no idea at all of the forest’s real shape.

It could be a circle:

Or an oval:

Or even:

Or, troublingly:

Parsifal remembers Trellis once told him that, between worrying about library closures and the defacing of books by careless borrowers, she had had over one-third of her stomach surgically removed. Possibly because of this, she was extremely beautiful.

Here is a woman , Parsifal would tell himself as he gazed at the scar along the outside of her stomach, who has lived in the world of shrinking budgets, of taxpayer shortfalls, of uncertainty, of the pressures of so-called public interest groups calling for the banning of books, and of major surgery as well, while I am still a child, relatively speaking .

Parsifal thinks the dead twin back at the motel was named Omar, but he may have gotten it wrong. Omar may have been the other one.

the fall was a good time to be searching in a forest. It wasn’t winter, when everything was covered by snow, or spring, when all the new vegetation was the same distracting green, or summer, when there was so much growth that it was difficult to see anything at all. Plus there were a lot of bugs in summer. No, fall was when enough leaves had dropped away from the trees to allow for a slightly less impeded “line of sight,” but there was still enough of a canopy to remind a person he was in a forest.

All around Parsifal, squirrels collected nuts and put them in places they’d remember later, while some birds, though not all, were packing up, shutting down their nests for the winter, and about to leave. In addition he was pleased to notice that the smell of warm decay so prevalent at earlier times of the year had been replaced by the pungent crispness of leaves crushed underfoot.

Circling above the forest were several birds, but due to the fact that there were so many of them, he couldn’t say if one in particular had its eye on him.

For all Conrad’s physical strength (and how can Parsifal forget the sight of him trudging forward with those fifty-pound sacks of cornmeal — even potatoes or chickpeas — on his shoulders — uphill, too — while balancing on slippery rocks as he crossed the small stream thirty yards or so from his home?), his father was not without what Conrad called “his mental phobias.”

“I am ashamed to tell you, Parsifal,” Conrad once said during one of their rare father/son talks, “about the irrational terror certain shades of yellow can provoke in me.” Then he paused, and a look crossed his face as if suddenly he had forgotten how to write decimals or do addition.

“True, most of the time I’m fine, and most shades of yellow — that of lemons, for example, or even daisies — affect me not at all, but just let someone walk into a door wearing a tie or pair of socks dyed one particular, almost-greenish yellow, and your old dad has to choke down a scream and make up some ridiculous excuse to leave the room at once. Fortunately, son, occasions such as those, where panic completely takes over my body and I am reduced to an irrational state, are fairly rare.”

After that, the conversation moved to something else.

The variety among librarians never failed to impress Parsifal. For example, Adele, whose job it was to maintain order in the “Teen Readers” section of the library, had sent to the hospital for stitches or with fractures more than one young person who had challenged her authority. And such was the level of respect accorded to Adele by the adult readers that her use of force had never once been questioned.

But with Parsifal, Adele was submissive, like a young adult novel whose pages he could dog-ear to his heart’s content, on whose margins she invited his reader’s notes. “Could you possibly raise your voice a little?” or “Could you possibly chew a little gum as we are being intimate?” he’d ask. And one evening Parsifal put a whole pack of licorice-flavored stuff into her mouth, pleased to see how happy she was to have it.

Not only did certain shades of yellow distress Conrad, but one day when the father and the son were taking a walk around their house to look at the fall foliage, his father began to tremble. “What’s wrong, Dad?” Parsifal asked, but Conrad was unable to answer, only pointed to an ordinary brown caterpillar dangling from a thread suspended from a leaf.

“Caterpillars, too,” was all his father whispered. Then, taking his father’s hand, Parsifal led Conrad home as if he were blind.

A monster, also .

But this time it turned out that Parsifal had forgotten to pack his compass, an expensive model with glow-in-the-dark hands and a cover that snapped shut, a gift from a librarian he once knew. He had remembered to pack it on his visit to the florist, but somehow in between unloading his backpack and repacking it, the compass was left behind. Ordinarily, Parsifal didn’t need a compass. He had a good sense of direction, but he also knew that in the forest it was hard to keep track of the sun because of the overhanging trees — a problem even in the fall — and much of the terrain was uneven, so the compass would have been really useful.