Parsifal thanked him, and soon afterward he stopped asking that question of strangers.
How many days had Parsifal been in the forest? Two? Three? Four? Time was doing funny things, and he was beginning to lose track, but honestly, that didn’t bother him. According to The Old Trapper’s Guide to Wood-Craft, one of the secrets of survival was to change from “city time” to what it called “wild time.” Accordingly, Parsifal came to the resolution that he would go on searching for Fenjewla as long as he possibly could, but if he had to stop before he achieved his goal, that was all right too, because he would return to the city knowing he had done all that he was able.
For that matter, he could always return and try again later, and maybe bring a compass and a metal detector the next time, so that leaving the forest on this trip without finding Fenjewla would not really bother him all that much. What did bother him — troubled him, he supposed, like something that had been resting in the back of his mind the whole time he was in the forest, walking and sleeping and zigzagging and whatnot — was that not once had he ever actually encountered one of the forest’s edges — some place where the trees ended and a person could look out and see a distant steeple, or peer through a screen of blackberry bushes at a family in their backyard as they prepared their barbecue.
It wasn’t a huge deal, but as he said, this thought regarding the forest’s absence of boundaries was pretty much there in some form every minute.
Along with the panic.
Along with Misty.
The last time Parsifal saw Joe, Joe was wearing what Parsifal believed were called “cargo shorts”—shorts, in any case, with lots of pockets — and a yellow Hawaiian shirt with purple parrots and green palm trees.
“You know,” he said as soon as Parsifal sat down, “you’ve come a long way from the mess you were when I first began seeing you, and I must say I’ve enjoyed our conversations. It’s seldom I find a patient so unusual, so stimulating, so able to dredge up details of a past as unique as yours. That’s why I’m feeling sad to tell you I think it’s time we called it quits, not only because the funds for your treatment allotted to me by the state have run out, but also because over the past few sessions”—and here he consulted his yellow pad—“this transference thing seems to be getting a whole lot stronger.”
Parsifal, totally unprepared for what he’d just heard, remained temporarily frozen, and could only stare at the picture hanging on the wall of Joe’s office, one he’d never really looked at before. It depicted a room in one of those early, primitive mental-health institutions in which several lightly clad female patients were being sprayed by fire hoses directed by brutal attendants. The women looked justifiably angry, even as the thinness of their garments, clinging as they were to their lush bodies, made them, if anything, more attractive than ever.
“Once again, I repeat, I don’t exactly see how that could be the case,” Parsifal answered, “because at least insofar as your respective styles of dressing are concerned, you and my father are complete opposites. You are casual to the point of being slovenly, while my father was formal to the point of being fastidious. As a person you are open and interested in long conversations centered around my feelings, while my father wanted to hear nothing about how I felt, but took pride only in teaching me the principles of bookkeeping. Your face is hairy and my father’s was smooth-shaven. My father, for all of the sedentary work he did in the city, managed to stay in remarkably good physical shape, and was capable of carrying over his shoulder for miles a heavy sack of peanuts or dried beans, not to mention bags of extra stuff tied to his belt at his waist. In your case, while I understand that criminal psychiatry is pretty much of a sedentary occupation, you appear to have succumbed to it completely and, considering your diet, which seems to be mostly coffee, donuts, and Chinese takeout, I’d say it’s remarkable that you’re alive at all.”
Joe wrote a line or two on his pad. “It seems to me I’m detecting some hostility here. I understand where you are coming from, Parsifal. And without years of intense psychological study most people would find it nearly impossible to believe that it is in precisely such cases, where the psyche is able to trick itself into believing that there is no connection whatsoever, that the transference issue I am speaking of most easily takes place.”
Parsifal doubted Joe was right, but what choice did he have? Parsifal knew it was Joe’s right, as his therapist, to terminate their relationship, just as any parent can leave a child behind whenever he wishes. Parsifal was very sorry, of course, but that was that. He shut the door behind him, walked outside, and stepped over the beginnings of a small sinkhole that had begun to form at the foot of the stairs and that was probably caused by a leaking water pipe.
It was the last time Parsifal was to see Joe alive because, in what was an amazing coincidence, the following week when Joe left his office one night, the deficient-in-night-vision therapist stepped straight into a pit someone must have dug in front of the steps. Whoever they were — plumbers or construction workers — and whoever they had been sent by — Joe’s landlord (who claimed to know nothing) or the city — the men had left behind in the bottom of the pit several sharpened copper pipes that had been pushed into the earth so they were sticking straight into the air, one of which went right through Joe’s heart when he toppled onto it, still holding a bag of corn chips, completely unaware that the pit must have been dug while he had been inside his office, filling out Medicare forms or court papers, or doing whatever.
Parsifal felt sad, naturally, but couldn’t help wonder whether Joe might still be alive if he had not terminated their relationship prematurely, because if Joe had not, then Parsifal surely would have been able to warn him about those plumbers when he arrived for his appointment on that fateful night. Or possibly, if Joe had prolonged their conversation — something Joe claimed to enjoy while at the same time enforcing the limitations of what he called “the therapeutic hour”—and talked with Parsifal for just a short while longer, by then those plumbers would have returned and covered their dangerous pit with boards. Or at least removed those pipes.
Parsifal guessed that no one would ever know the answer to this for sure.
So Parsifal moved through the forest. Curiously, the result of having worn a blindfold for a while, and then not, was to see the world through different eyes (was his vision starting to blur?). Parsifal saw a colony of gigantic fungi in the shape of human hearts, red, fist-sized, and pulpy, throbbing in the leaf-filtered light. He saw a huge tree he could not name, but which was laden with small fruit, the size of figs, clearly rotting where they hung, refusing to drop. Instead, each liquefied from within, and at the bottom of each fruit its moisture collected into a single drop until, with a gentle plop, it fell to the barren ground around the tree. Parsifal walked up and touched the liquid at the tip of one of those fruits with his finger and put it to his mouth. It was not sweet, as he had expected, but salty.
Parsifal passed dejected willow trees, encountered a clump of bushes that hung their fuzzy heads in shame, strolled by a stand of agoraphobic alders, looked out over a small pond covered with a layer of hallucinated scum, climbed a low, repressed hill, kicked up a troubled patch of moss, passed beneath an anxious sycamore, a bulimic waterfall, an obsessive nest of wasps, a panicked porcupine, more than one repressed log, a paranoidal swamp, a narcissistic. . well. . narcissus, walked beneath a passive-aggressive set of overhanging branches, over an enabling path, through several patches of toxic poison oak, near a manic maple, and beneath a neurotic nuthatch fixated on something on a distant branch.