“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.”
It didn’t, and Parsifal concludes his story by telling how his attorney, Walter, had a good chuckle. “You can thank that stain for getting you off,” he told Parsifal when he took him to lunch following the verdict. “I should buy that guy a whole box of pens and see if he’ll use them at every trial.”
This was before Parsifal got into the business.
When Parsifal first came to the city, he began to know people in the following way: he would find a popular event — a theater opening or a sporting match or even a movie — and join the long line to buy tickets. While he was in the line, he listened quietly to the conversations around him. Sometimes he would let people cut in ahead of him, telling them he was waiting for some friends to arrive. No one bothered him or asked him any questions. Then, when he finally reached the ticket window, he would pretend he had forgotten something — usually his wallet — or that he had left a pan heating on the stove, and leave. “I’d hate to have my house burn down,” he’d tell the person standing in line behind him.
In this way he furthered his education in the ways of city people and gained knowledge that served him well in those weeks before he discovered how helpful librarians could be.
The sky had cleared to a brilliant blue, but there was no trace of the bird that had been overhead.
What does it mean to be blind? It means not to see, of course. That time, in the crawl space beneath the Happy Bunny it was cold and dark, and the only way to see and to keep warm at the same time was to set a fire.
Parsifal walked. He listened. He felt the stone rub against the doorknob in his pocket, but he did not hear either Misty or her friends.
What is this obsession with blindness that creeps into the heart?
It was only a few days after his encounter with the first blind man that Parsifal met another one. This second blind man was very tall and elegantly dressed, and standing at a stoplight listening — Parsifal understands now — for the sound of traffic to die away so he could cross the street. This blind man had neither a guide dog nor a white cane, and the only thing that might have indicated his disability was the pair of dark glasses that Parsifal believed at first was there simply to protect the man’s eyes from the sun, for in those days he knew little about blindness.
“Excuse me,” Parsifal asked him, “have you by any chance seen my father?” He then began to describe Conrad, and the more he did, the more the man began to chuckle, until at the end, when Parsifal got to the part about how Conrad was upset by certain shades of yellow — not all of them, he explained — the man was holding his stomach and laughing so hard that various passersby slowed their pace to look at the two of them.
Then the man said, “My son, I haven’t seen anything for over twenty years, ever since, as a young man of about your age — if I judge the sound of your voice correctly — I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going and stepped straight into a pit dug by a crew working on some pipes that ran under the sidewalk. I hit my head on a plank and woke up in the hospital, unable to see. So I hope you will excuse me if I’m having a laugh at this moment, even if it’s at my own expense, over the fact that you’re asking me if I have seen your father. Ha, ha, ha, ha.”