Jim Krusoe - Parsifal

“I have a good feeling about this, Pen Man.” She dug into her waist pouch and handed him a stick of gum. “You may as well take this, too.”

“It’s Parsifal,” Parsifal said.

“What?”

“Parsifal is my name.”

“Well, okay, whatever. And now we have a few things to do yet before we go back, so Cody and Black Dog and I have to be moving on, if you don’t mind.” She paused. “Listen,” she said, “it was amazing meeting you out here like this — almost like it was meant to be. I think this could be really important for you, Pen Man. And not just for you, but maybe for a lot of other people, too. Do you ever have the feeling the things you do mean something? I mean in addition to the things you think they mean?”

“Sometimes,” Parsifal said.

“Me too. So you be careful, like I said. I’ll see you when all this is over. Don’t blow it, Pen Man — Parsifal. Okay?”

Then Misty stretched out her arms as if she were flying and ran on ahead, with Black Dog and Cody following.

Parsifal looked down. At his feet was the round stone that Black Dog had been sucking on, lying wet and shiny on the ground. For no good reason whatsoever Parsifal bent down, picked it up, wiped it off, and stuck it in his pocket.

“Sand,” he had answered Joe.

You might think that a person as sensitive to the scrutiny of others as Parsifal would be happy to be surrounded by blind individuals, but this was not the case. In a certain way, whatever gasps his external appearance may have provoked among many sighted individuals (with the notable exception of librarians), he was still left with the comfort that the person who had made such a quick and superficial judgment of him was unable to see beneath his skin to his real, more complex, and creative self.

Conversely, Parsifal’s difficulty with the blind was that he was unable to blame their judgments on any misperception. They, by virtue of not having to depend on externals, were able to plunge straight into a person’s soul, and, like long-deceased Aztec priests, seize the living hearts of their victims (in this case, him) and rip them out. In other words, Parsifal thought, How would you like it if your place of residence was encircled day and night with a ring of dead and judgmental Aztecs?

It was after high school that Parsifal — having run out of such benefits as his social worker had gotten for him, and run out of Mrs. Knightly, too (she got married) — alone and, like so many other high school graduates, without a skill or means of supporting himself (he hadn’t yet discovered fountain pens), chose the crawl space of the Happy Bunny Preschool to make himself a little temporary shelter. It had been a damp day and cold as, curled in the cramped crawl space beneath the schoolroom, surrounded by spiders, rodent droppings, and years of toddler trash, Parsifal suddenly remembered his life back in the forest and the comfort that even a small fire could bring. And so he heaped atop abase of Popsicle sticks a pile of discarded chocolate milk cartons, plus a few pages torn from old coloring books, and struck a match. The cartons, coated as they were with wax, flamed up with a surprising intensity.

The bird circled above, and he was almost positive it was the same one he had seen a couple of days ago, though it was hard to know with birds, considering that they pretty much look alike. Ditto a drone painted to look like a bird.

The librarians in the county jail, he quickly learned, were not to be trusted.

Actually, when Parsifal stopped to think about it, he didn’t even know why that cup was so important, although Misty seemed to agree. Still, what was broken can never be fixed completely — he had learned that from fountain pens. What was broken can be replaced, true — but fixed, no. Or it can be repaired; that is to say, the damage can be halted at a certain point, but once it has already happened, nothing can be reversed. Nothing can be made as good as new. Although a nib can be replaced with a new one, there’s always something slightly different — sometimes better, sometimes worse — but not the same. Never the same.

He just has to get that cup.

One of the first things he noticed when he arrived in the city was that dogs, especially seeing-eye dogs, barked at him far more than at other people. Trained to be calm under all conditions, these helpers of mankind would nonetheless tug at their harnesses as if to pull their masters from harm’s way as he passed, although Parsifal meant no harm. It wasn’t his scent, because after he had washed several times they continued to do it. His best guess was it was something else.

Fenjewla .

If a person will only think about it, the first fountain pen was undoubtedly the human body itself, with its seemingly endless (till death do us part) supply of ink. So it’s not at all hard to imagine some cave person sitting around after a hunt and noticing that he had pricked his finger on a thorn, or maybe even had the tip of his finger bitten off by a wild animal, then discovering he could use it to draw pictures.

Parsifal believes no instrument is more expressive of our bodies and ourselves than a fountain pen in proper working condition. Not the messy brush of painters; not the smudgy smears of charcoal or pencil; not the childish crayon; not the soulless ballpoint so favored by Conrad; not the greasy roller ball; not the unpleasant, percussive smack of typewriters (now mercifully almost extinct); certainly not the silent, eyeball-straining pixels of the computer screen.

And yet, of course, therein lies the downfall of the pen, for what are the letters formed by a fountain pen, whether exact and inerasable or smeared by some careless thumb, but two-dimensional replicas of our three-dimensional selves, our weaknesses to be exposed to the world by the most amateur grapho-analyst, our spellings and misspellings (Conrad!) mirroring the shallowness of our thoughts, the carelessness of our actions, the foolishness of our hopes, leaving behind a record of us for all to see, for all to judge and to find lacking, unlike the bland and infinitely correctable historical record of the computer-generated page.

Yes, better to write nothing at all , Parsifal sometimes tells himself, to vanish without a trace rather than to produce such an Everest of incrimination, such an effluvium of ridiculousness . Yet what else, after all, is there, either exposed for all to see or hidden?

So, is it any wonder that fountain pens, those faithful transcribers of our frailty, are rapidly losing favor to the monstrous aphasia of this world in general?

There’s no need to answer that , he thinks.

Effluvium ?

It occurs to Parsifal that if he can find one single tree from his childhood — its bark, its leaves, its height, its width, the way its branches fork out from the trunk, the way its roots reach into the ground, its age, its health, the colors of the bark, the colors of the leaves, the tops and bottoms of the leaves with the veins that feed them, their textures, the texture of the bark, the smell of the wood, the sound of the air moving through the branches and the leaves, the creaking of the branches in the wind, the shadow the tree throws upon the ground, the sorts of animals that are a part of the tree, from the bark beetles to the cicadas to all those other insects, some of which might be suspended from its branches in cocoons or have laid their eggs directly on the branches themselves; if he can describe the size and shape of the eggs, the birds too, and mammals if there are any, and what their houses look like, their nests, their dens in its roots — and notice here he’s not even talking about those branches that have been broken and how they might heal, or which are beginning to sprout, or which have holes drilled into them by birds and if there are any spiderwebs or tents left by bag worms or other moths, and if there are any vines, and how thick the tree’s leaves are, or how far its branches extend from the trunk and whether they are narrower or wider at the top than at the bottom, and (he almost forgot one of the most important things of all) whether it has nuts, or fruit, or flowers — if he can just find that, then he could turn right around and not have to find a cup at all.