Jim Krusoe - Parsifal

“You are a monster,” she had told Parsifal the first time he said he had to leave.

And when he left her the last time, her blouse at her feet and the chain from her eyeglasses wrapped around one of the buttons of her sweater, she shouted at him, “Go away, you monster.”

Sometimes when Parsifal walks through a market and sees the meat wrapped in its tight skin or plastic or stacked naked in the butcher’s case, he thinks: Surely they also wanted to live .

It is said that some women actually prefer monsters.

Parsifal wonders if Misty might be one of them.

It was this same librarian who once told Parsifal the following story: A man, forced to spend the night in a graveyard, stumbles into an argument between two ghosts, one of whom is fat and the other thin.

“You will be our judge,” says the thinner ghost to the man, and so the man becomes the judge of their argument. Finally, after listening to both sides, he decides the matter, whatever it was, in favor of the thin ghost. And that is when the man’s troubles begin, because the losing ghost, the fat one, becomes so outraged he bites off the man’s arm and eats it then and there.

Whereupon the thin ghost, the one who has won the argument, feels so bad that this is happening to such an unbiased judge that he takes one of his own arms and replaces the man’s arm with it.

So it goes the entire night: the fat ghost eats a part of the man and the thin one replaces whatever has been eaten with a part from himself until, at the end, when morning arrives and the man still has two arms and legs, he can’t be sure how much of him is still a man, and how much is a ghost.

Or how much of any of us is past, and how much present? How much is memory, and how much action?

Or , Parsifal added to himself, how much flesh, and how much scar?

“This is a very old story,” the librarian said when she had finished.

Panic: n. A sudden, overpowering terror. From Greek panikos: of Pan (who would arouse terror in lonely places) . This according to The American Heritage Dictionary .

In Parsifal’s happiest memories, Pearl is holding Fenjewla as she sings to him:

The silence of a falling star

Lights up a purple sky

That’s Hank Williams, she would say, and then, more often than not, she would spit, because living in the forest, particularly in spring with all its pollen, aggravated her allergies.

“But I love the forest,” she told him. “And I love you, too.” Then, using a rag and the pail of water kept near the door, Pearl rinsed the soup from Fenjewla and handed the cup, clean again, back to her son.

A few days after Parsifal left his message on Misty’s answering machine, he thought he saw her on the opposite side of a crowd he had joined. The crowd was examining a huge crater in the ground, arguing whether it had been dug for some reason and the dirt carried away during the night or if it was the result of some new enormous falling object. Nobody had the answer, but the crowd numbered in the hundreds. However, because of the size of the hole and the fact that people had completely surrounded the perimeter, Parsifal could not reach Misty to repeat his message in person before she went away.

If he had reached her, he would have said, “I left you a message. Your pen is ready.”

Cannot help but praise what?

Another time, Parsifal returns from the market to find the entire block around his house occupied by many more blind people than usual. This time they are practicing tapping their canes, then tucking them beneath their arms and clapping their hands, before returning their canes to normal use. He guesses that this routine might be some new form of echolocation, but has no way of telling if it’s successful or not.

and

as

I

wonder

where

you

are

I’m

so

The World of the Forest: The World of the City:treescementbrown greenblue grayno scarsscarsno shoesshoesseed pods and berry juicepens and inkfoxes and bearsdogs and catsnot seenseenmotherfatherfirefirenaturelibrariesnot many clothesclothesraw mushroomsfrozen vegetablesmeatmeat

How much of Parsifal is awake, and how much sleeping?

And, come to think of it, why hasn’t Parsifal seen a blind woman among all those blind men who for so long have surrounded his modest house?

Lightning .

parsifal cannot be completely certain, but it seems that the sky is darker than it used to be; quite a bit darker than, say, when he thinks about his forest days, although his eyes were sharper back then. A lot sharper, he remembers, especially because of late he’s had some difficulty seeing.

Is there anyone he can check this with? Certainly not Pearl. Are records of such things as brightness kept anywhere? Do libraries have this information? Certainly, the blind men would be not so good to ask, but he could begin by bringing this up with Misty, if she ever arrives to collect her pen, which is working quite well. He knows this because sometimes he’ll pick it up and write a line or two.

All journeys end in lovers meeting.

“Journeys end in meetings,” people say, but are they right? Do we really need to travel to meet with those we love? Parsifal wonders. The Old Trapper’s Guide to Wood-Craft , a book his father gave to him, said that if a person is lost in the woods, all he needs to do is stay where he is until rescuers arrive. That is all that is necessary, the book said. Whatever you do, the book said, do not move.

On the other hand, there is the lightning.

On the other hand, there’s his name. Or namesake.

So it is settled: Parsifal must journey back to the forest, where he will search for the missing cup, although even if Fenjewla is still there, it isn’t guaranteed that he will find it, buried as the cup may be beneath leaves, or fallen trees, or even beneath the bodies of animals who crawled into his old house to die, the way they used to do. When he still lived there, Pearl made him take them outside and dig a hole to bury them. He liked digging holes. A lot.

True, Parsifal knows, it is unlikely that his old house, as poorly constructed as it was, will still be standing, because, frankly speaking, it was always pretty flimsy, and in the years since he lived there, with no one to climb up and replace the branches that had blown off the roof during the night, the house would have to be even worse. For that matter, would the forest even be there? Would the whole forest have been cut down to make space for suburbs?

“Regression,” Joe would say.

But if the forest is still there, then the door might be too, though possibly covered in branches or buried by leaves. And if he can find the door, then the cup might be nearby, still hanging on a branch or crushed beneath the roof. Unless, of course, someone has already found the door and taken it away to use for his own house, maybe in the suburbs. An unlikely scenario at best, however.

Because it was a very heavy door and, really, how far could a person carry a door like that?

And speaking of unlikely, the nib of the Lady Waterman that Misty left with him did not have the rounded tip that ninety-eight percent of pens have. This one had been ground by someone to a left oblique and retipped. Had Misty done it herself, or had the pen been a gift from a former or present boyfriend? The pen was old, so there was no telling when the work had been done. Parsifal resolved to sound Misty out on the subject the next time they talked, but he would have to do it carefully.

He didn’t want to “creep her out,” as people say.