Jim Krusoe - Parsifal

The Happy Bunny Preschool was somewhere in the dream as well.

No matter how many librarians Parsifal had been intimate with — and there were lots — he never confused the attributes of one with another. He was able to keep them completely separate, like books on different shelves, sometimes in different sections of the library entirely.

At one point, Parsifal saw a tree he thought he recognized. It was only an ordinary pine tree, with the usual bark, branches, and needles, but Parsifal had the distinct feeling he remembered it, because there were a few cones hanging right where he remembered them, and on one side where he remembered that a few of the bottom branches had been broken, they were barely attached and pointing at the ground.

Yet if that tree had been the same tree he remembered, it would have had twenty years more growth to it. In twenty years the broken branches surely would have fallen off, and the cones would have dropped and regrown twenty times.

His ankle was hurting more.

when he was a child, Parsifal liked to climb trees, and spent many happy hours amid swaying tops, looking down on everything below: Pearl in her leather apron as she sat mending a shirt or stirring some stew or another in a pot, a shy deer stepping into a sunlit glade, a stalking fox, a prideful skunk, a timid rabbit, and a scolding squirrel. He observed them all without being observed. And although sometimes a branch would give way and he would find himself lying painfully on the ground, or at other times he got so comfortable that he dozed off and fell out of the tree, he would always climb back up and do it again the next day.

As earthbound as he had become of late, it was strange to think about those old days— How free my life was back then , he thought.

“And what’s your obsession with librarians?” Joe once asked him. “Don’t you ever date anyone but librarians?”

Parsifal thought about it. He supposed that for every hundred people or so who never dated a librarian, there must be at least one who had. And then for every thousand people, or ten or a hundred thousand people who had never dated a librarian at all (and didn’t know what they were missing!), there had to be someone like him who had dated practically nothing but.

“I don’t know,” he said.

From where he was sitting, Parsifal could see that Joe had written the word TRAUMA on his yellow pad in big block letters and then made little wavy lines around it, pushing outward like flames.

“Okay then,” Joe said. “I think it’s time we got to that Happy Bunny thing.”

Because after all, what sort of parent would send his or her child to something as ridiculously monikered as “The Happy Bunny Preschool,” an institution that had based its entire identity on a single large and garishly painted children’s slide with plastic bunny ears attached to the top and a set of yellowing foam tubes at the slide’s base, apparently meant to represent whiskers? The slide was located in the front yard, only feet away from the street and within easy striking distance for any potential child molester or any car whose wheels left the pavement in an uncontrolled skid. What kind of parent wouldn’t show more sense?

Were they some kind of monsters?

It was only noon, and already Parsifal was growing faint with hunger, despite the wisdom of woodcraft that reminded him starvation is what bodies were designed for. On the other hand, Parsifal also knew from spending considerable time in the reference section while waiting for Jocelyn to get off work that the human body wasn’t designed to last much more than forty years or so. He was already on borrowed time.

His head ached and his ankle was sore. He needed to settle down to find a peaceful stream and then follow it out of the woods, because, as woodcraft had taught him, all streams lead to a lake or, better yet, an ocean. All he had to do was find one and to follow it, and then, when he hit the seashore, turn right or left, and sooner or later he would come to a port, maybe even to a nude beach.

Parsifal thought: All I need is to find a stream .

He seemed to be regressing.

Strangely enough, that very word, trauma , which Joe had so painstakingly written on his pad, was a reduction by about one-half of the phrase humongous trauma , which Parsifal’s lawyer, Walter, had used to describe what he said Parsifal had suffered back in the forest, the very condition that, thanks to Walter, had allowed Parsifal to be released from the jail where he had been awaiting trial with only probation under the watchful eyes of a certified therapist following the Preschool Thing.

“You would like to see a real monster,” Walter practically yelled at the judge (whose mother happened to be a children’s librarian), “but instead you are looking at a poor victim, and the Parsifal standing here before you now is not a monster at all, but only the shell of the child who was eaten by the monster.”

Which didn’t make much sense to Parsifal, but Walter had told him never to interrupt when he was in the middle of summing up, so Parsifal sat quietly with his hands folded on the table. “You can either punish him for having been a victim or set this poor youth free (under supervision, of course) to find his inner child again.” Walter winked at the judge and then sat down.

Parsifal couldn’t tell if the judge had returned Walter’s wink.

But also in Parsifal’s favor was the testimony of the fire marshal who had spent considerable time analyzing the explosive qualities of the actual Happy Bunny plastic slide after which the school had been named. “It’s only two steps away, chemically speaking, from the stuff used by terrorists,” the man had told the judge, shaking his head in apparent disbelief. The marshal was dressed in a yellow slicker and black boots because, he explained, he never knew when he might have to leave for an emergency. He also described the stash of weapons and mostly pornographic photos — all heavily imprinted with the fingerprints of the preschool’s director — that his firemen had discovered in the secret closet inside the director’s office once the fire was put out.

In the end, with public outrage focused on the self-righteous German couple who had run the place — plus Walter’s genius tactic of continually referring to the Happy Bunny’s owner, Alf, as Adolf throughout the entire trial — Parsifal was practically hailed as a public servant, a person who, like an undercover officer, had just let things get a bit out of control in the course of his investigation. It happened all the time.

Also, given Parsifal’s looks, the judge probably figured he’d been punished enough.

And as a matter of fact, who would have guessed the Happy Bunny Preschool didn’t have a sprinkler system? Parsifal thought there must be building codes exactly for that kind of thing.

So, as it turned out, did the judge.

Among the many good effects of spending so much time in libraries was that Parsifal learned the Dewey Decimal System, so it wasn’t long before Jocelyn and he could play little games while they waited for the library to close. For example, one night while waiting at his table by the newspaper rack, Parsifal wrote the number 127 and quietly left it on Jocelyn’s desk when she was busy helping someone else. When he returned after that person had left, he saw that she had written beneath it “The Unconscious and Subconscious Mind,” followed by the symbol for a happy face. That same night he was flipping through the pages of a pen magazine when out of the corner of his eye he saw Jocelyn behind her desk, holding up an index card with the number 716. Quickly, Parsifal found one of the scraps of paper they kept around the place and, using a stubby yellow pencil, wrote down “Herbaceous Plants.” Then, pretending he was just another library patron, he brushed by Jocelyn’s desk and dropped it where she might find it. When it was time to leave, Jocelyn signaled Parsifal by holding up a card with the number 021: “Library Relationships.”