Jim Krusoe - Parsifal

That last part just came out.

“Good handwriting is a lovely thing to have, especially for a boy your age,” Parsifal’s mother said, “but I wonder if you’ve ever thought about the fact that all handwriting, good or bad, is only a form of the ultimate writing, and that somewhere, as fine as your Ws and your Ds may be, there exists a completely perfect W, and a perfect D as well, letters that will make your own attempts (and everyone else’s, for that matter) seem pathetic and laughable by comparison. Perhaps one day you will find them, the perfect W and D, but I doubt it. Nonetheless, it only matters that you try, my son, because all searches are the same search.”

They were sitting on a big oak log, and, possibly because they both were still, by the time she finished her speech Parsifal was not surprised to see a large forest rattlesnake crawl out from beneath a rock where it had been sleeping and stop in a little patch of moss at their feet. The snake paused and put out its forked tongue a few times to test the air. It made almost no sound. Parsifal’s mother did not even notice it, thinking about handwriting as she probably was.

Losing no time, her son wrenched a limb from the rotting log and smashed it into the unfortunate snake’s head, killing it instantly.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Pearl said.

Because the forest had created his scars, as long as Parsifal stayed in the forest the scars were part of the forest. It was only when he left the forest that they became actual scars.

He could not help but notice that as Misty handed him the Lady Waterman, she looked away, avoiding the sight of his face.

Lately, not only had the quantity of things falling from the sky started to increase — someone or something had gotten hold of a fresh lot of auto parts — but also, increasingly, objects had begun hitting humans to a degree that seemed far more than coincidental. An engine block, for example, fell through the roof of a classroom used for people to learn English as a second language, and shortly after that, seven senior citizens practicing tai chi in a local park were picked off one by one by a series of falling Chevrolet water pumps.

This second event was on the local news: emergency vehicles waiting on the street, four old women and three old men in comfortable clothing, their inert forms lying on the grass, several with horrible wounds, one of the latter still wearing a straw hat, in the words of the newscaster, “a futile attempt to protect his head from harm coming from above.” All around them children played on the swings, people threw Frisbees and walked their dogs, stopping every so often to clean up after them.

A childhood memory: One year in the forest, winter came early and on a morning still at the beginning of autumn, when Parsifal tried to leave his house via the tunnel beneath the front door, not only had the tunnel filled with water (as was usual), but the surface on the other side of the tunnel, the outside, was covered with ice. Unfortunately Parsifal learned this after he had already dived down and was forced to use his head to break the frozen surface, leaving a nasty scar at the top of his skull.

Later in the winter, when the same sort of thing kept happening, a person returning home from the outside could always take a stick or rock and bang it hard enough to break the ice. But when leaving the house, or when it got really cold and the water in the tunnel would freeze into a solid block of ice, Parsifal was forced to press all his weight against the heavy door in order to leave his home, and when Pearl had to leave the house she would have Parsifal go first.

The meaning of Pearl is a smooth, lustrous, round structure inside the shell of a clam or oyster, much valued as a jewel. Usually found in the ocean .

In one of Parsifal’s dreams he is standing on the sidewalk in front of his house in the city when he is struck in the chest by a bullet. He doesn’t know who fired it or why, only that he’s been hit. In this particular dream, he lives long enough to be sure that he is really dying before he wakes.

Another time he is hiding in the crawl space beneath some building or another because bombs are dropping outside. It’s hot and hard to breathe because of all the dust, and there are spiders and other insects, maybe even a rat, along with him as well. Then there is a flash, and without thinking anything about it Parsifal becomes a part of that flash and every molecule of him dissolves into whiteness, without a thought, without words, without him.

Parsifal is also the name of an epic poem in German. “It’s kind of a stupid story, really,” a librarian who was only there for one day, filling in for another librarian who had the flu, told him, “but a major theme in it is love.”

She had red hair, and after she said this she blushed.

“Maybe not so stupid,” Parsifal told her.

The only person who had no trouble at all opening the front door, in winter or in summer, was his father, Conrad.

On his visits to the forest, Conrad would bring certificates from defunct stocks, piles of junk bonds with their bright gold lettering, and glossy prospectuses for new offerings. No matter how many he brought, for Parsifal, who had little else to play with besides twigs and leaves, each one was a treasure. His first reading lessons, for example, were from the certificates of a failed industrial-waste-treatment corporation and, after he had grown tired of reading aloud the words “Universal Bonded Sewage,” he crumpled the certificates on which the words were printed into little balls to fill his mattress with, because high-quality paper lasted longer than leaves, which tended to be brittle and break apart after only a few nights.

And though one might suppose that such an early exposure to the life-pulse of capitalism might have engendered in Parsifal a love for the world of investment and finance (the world of his father), in fact it had the opposite effect. Reading the prospectuses of so many failed stocks, tracing out the self-incriminating promises of so many failed corporations, made him more wary than enthusiastic. And ironically, although the flat, white surfaces and the fine paper of these certificates should have provided the ideal medium for Parsifal to practice his penmanship, for some reason he ignored them all in favor of his usual stationery of leaves, flat rocks, the inside of bark, and, best of all, animal skins.

One day, not long after Parsifal met Misty, it occurred to him that she might very well be the sort of person who owned a camper, the kind of vehicle outfitted with a simple kitchen and a bed that could be used to take trips around the country.

He could not say why he thought this.

Not that the forest was ideal, but forever afterward, whether Parsifal was working to repair a pen or simply sitting in a kitchen chair listening to the tapping of the blind, when he thought of the forest he thought of being a child, of being in that state of mind a child has, and it was that state he wished to retrieve. And of the items Parsifal remembered fondly from the forest, the object that always jumped foremost into his mind was the cup that Conrad made for him. It was formed out of metal, but shallow, and more in fact like a bowl with a handle on one side into which, by means of a hammer and a nail, his father had pounded the name of the cup itself, Fenjewla , in a circle around its sides.

“Here,” his father said, “I made this cup for you, and you can use it to drink water from in the summer and eat hot soup from in the winter, though you will have to remember that because the cup is made of metal it transmits heat quickly, and in the case of soup it will be easy to burn your hands.”