Jim Krusoe - Parsifal

At last it was time to quit for the day. Parsifal looked around for a place that would be dry (they weren’t as hard to find in the forest as many people might think), and almost immediately spotted a cave just a few yards away, its entrance marked by a few wet, insubstantial bushes. It wasn’t tall enough for a man to stand up in it — though maybe a child could — but the low arch of its opening provided sufficient room for anyone to stretch out in relative comfort. Parsifal crouched inside beneath the gentle dome of its entrance. It went back only a few yards, but it was dry, with a clean, sandy floor. There was even a pile of dry twigs off to one side that he could use to start a fire. He backed out and quickly gathered several larger wet logs for later in the evening (it was the afternoon by then) and for the night. He carried them inside.

Parsifal started his fire near the entrance so the smoke would blow outside, took off his socks, pulled on a fresh pair, and propped the worn ones up near the fire with a stick. Despite his clean socks, he realized that he was cold and far more weary than he’d guessed. He rolled out his sleeping bag and crawled inside of it.

A nap would feel good , he thought, and if by any chance I sleep through the night, so much the better .

Parsifal lay his head down and struck something really hard. He shook his head. He must have been tired, because he had just ignored one of the very first rules of woodcraft: always check the ground where you are about to sleep to be sure there are no hidden rocks or roots. He raised himself up and felt beneath where his head had been. His hand touched something smooth, like metal. Parsifal dug around a little more — it wasn’t buried very deep — and pulled it out. It was metal.

It was an old, ornate brass doorknob, without a hole to insert a key, but with a pattern of leaves forming an oval around its flat surface. Parsifal couldn’t imagine what a doorknob would be doing there without a door unless some creature, a porcupine or beaver, had dragged the whole door there, to what must have been its den, and then eaten the wood, leaving behind the knob like a bone. But on second thought, the door would have been far too heavy for a porcupine, even a strong one, to pull along behind it. The doorknob looked familiar. It looked familiar because, he saw, it was the doorknob to his old house, once so important to him, lost, found, hidden, and now found again, and though it was far too late to bring back Pearl or to allow Conrad to return to his family once again, it was undeniably his .

It must be a sign , Parsifal thought, and put it in his pocket.

Three white anchors on a field of green .

the next morning was sunny, and Parsifal was greeted almost immediately upon waking by the spectacle of about a thousand polyethylene cutting boards flip-flopping their way like bright white playing cards down from a cloudless sky. Not to say they couldn’t be deadly if one caught a person with its edge, but protected by the entrance of the cave he was able to simply eat an energy bar and enjoy the sight of them. Parsifal considered picking up a small one that had a handle (they came in assorted sizes), to take back with him, but he didn’t want to lose the focus of his search, and besides, he already was carrying the shovel. Another time, he told himself. The cutting boards were indestructible. They would be there for him if he ever returned.

“You know,” Joe said to Parsifal one Saturday morning, as Parsifal was making up for a session he’d missed the previous week when he accidentally had been researching one thing or another in the library straight through the time for his appointment, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t harbor a lot of resentment over the fact that your childhood was basically taken away from you by having to survive in a harsh environment without a single friend. I can imagine the anger you must have felt seeing those contented children at the Happy Bunny. It must have created an enormous desire in your subconscious to destroy the pleasure of those preschoolers, just as your own potentially normal childhood had been withheld from you during your difficult life in the forest. Does that strike a note, Parsifal?”

Joe sipped coffee from a large paper cup and every so often took another bite from what was left of a bag of jelly donuts he had lying on his desk. He had offered Parsifal one earlier, but Parsifal had refused. Joe had called the donuts his “breakfast,” in what Parsifal suspected was an attempt to make him feel guilty for having missed his appointment a week earlier. For once, Joe’s casual attire had seemed appropriate, and Parsifal watched as the increasingly overweight therapist wiped a corner of his mouth with the smooth paper the donuts came wrapped in. Then Joe rubbed the big toe of his left foot with the bottom of the sandal on his right one. Parsifal didn’t mind his sloppiness, considering it was the weekend, but he did find it somewhat insulting that the man hadn’t bothered to shave. Where were his professional standards?

“Are you growing a beard?” Parsifal asked.

Joe wrote something down on his yellow pad. Parsifal could see that whatever it was, Joe had underlined part of it twice.

“Why do you ask that?” Joe said. “Did my previous question make you uncomfortable? Did your father have a beard?”

“Well, you haven’t shaved,” Parsifal answered, “and actually my father never had the slightest bit of facial hair.”

Joe paused to write something else. “I’m relieved to hear you say that,” he said. “But I was thinking that you seem to be in some denial concerning the unpleasant reality of your early years in the woods. For example, it might not be a bad idea to try to relive them, and by that I don’t mean you’d have to redo the entire time, minute by minute, but if, for example, you were able to hold on to one single thing — by which I mean an object — no matter how small or insignificant it might be, that you associate with your life back in the forest, even a fork or knife or cup — you people did have utensils, didn’t you? — something like that might go a long way toward bringing back up to the surface the massive sense of resentment you are currently repressing. What do you think about that? And then, of course, there’s the scar.”

“It’s possible,” Parsifal had said. “I’ll have to give it some more thought.”

At social gatherings, complete strangers, when they find out what Parsifal does for a living, often come up to him and say, “Parsifal, is there anything really out-of-the-box funny you can think of that happened concerning fountain pens? If so, I’d like to hear it.”

Actually, that is not as difficult a question to answer as you might think, because while pens, especially fountain pens, aren’t exactly known for provoking levity, Parsifal does have a story he enjoys telling: Once, when he happened to be standing in court on trial for arson, and the prosecutor was making his closing argument before the judge, becoming more and more outraged every minute over the supposedly terrible things he claimed Parsifal had done and of which Parsifal knew himself to be innocent, the prosecutor, because he was starting to work up a sweat, took off his sport coat.

But what the man didn’t realize was that with the jacket off, everyone — that is, the judge, Parsifal, Walter, and a whole gallery of curious onlookers — could see that the fountain pen in the man’s shirt pocket had managed to detach itself from its top, which was still clipped there, so that the ink from the body of the pen was running out onto the front of his shirt. The longer the prosecutor talked and the angrier he became — it was impossible to tell if the man was sincere or if he was making it up — the larger the stain on his shirt got. “I could see that the bailiff was beginning to smile,” Parsifal adds, “because he probably was wondering, as I was, if the stain would reach all the way to the guy’s belt before he finished.”