His infinite wisdom.
The following day was sunny and bright, the air crisp and invigorating — a good sign. Parsifal walked and the scenery flew by. He passed an old guy watering his lawn, and an old woman sweeping her sidewalk, and a three-legged dog. The old woman jumped a little when she saw his face, but the old guy and the dog did not. Most miraculous of all, nothing was falling from the sky, at least not near him. True, every so often, far off in the distance, he heard the sound of a falling car radiator, as mournful as a harmonica played around a campfire by a lonesome cowboy, but other than that, the only sounds were birds, insects, and the wind.
Most people, when they first saw his face, became extra friendly, and that’s all.
The blind man had been right: in nearly no time Parsifal reached the pencil factory and it was an impressive sight. Surrounded by a yellow wooden fence, the factory yard was as big as a football field, with the factory building itself off to one side, squatting between the two thirty-yard lines. At one end of the yard were piles of trees stacked in squares two stories high, and at the other end were gray cones of powdered graphite, looking like the gigantic teepees of some depressed Indian tribe. Between them, sprawling in the sun, was a miniature city made of pallets loaded with boxes of yellow pencils sealed in clear plastic. Outside the gates, heaps of sawdust waited to be hauled away. Parsifal saw that the factory, like many buildings those days, had reinforced its roof to prevent damage from falling objects.
A turkey-Swiss would taste great, he thought, and found a bus bench across from the pencil plant and sat down.
That was when Parsifal noticed the bird above his head.
“To live is to suffer,” a librarian once told Parsifal after they had finished being intimate on her foldout couch. They were watching a documentary about a drought in Africa on the local public television station. Then she added, as an afterthought, “Present company excepted.”
Of course, it was also possible that the bird was not a bird at all, but a remote-controlled aircraft, programmed by some anonymous controller back at “the base” to follow Parsifal day in and day out. But how then would it refuel? There would have to be at least two craft, and one would replace the other when the first had run out of gas, or whatever kind of fuel it used. True, he had never seen the two of them together, but he hadn’t been watching the sky at all times, and they could have traded places under cover of the dark.
Also, there was the question (if it was an aircraft and not a bird) of how it knew it was him. The first possibility was that a camera, possibly infrared, might be on board, and the images transmitted of him going about his daily business would appear on a screen in a room somewhere, in front of a technician trained to monitor such reception. (Parsifal imagined a screen with crosshairs to keep him centered.) It would be the technician’s job to move the aircraft as Parsifal moved. Perhaps a skilled technician could even keep track of two or three such aircraft — that is, assuming there were more people than him being tracked.
A second and more cost-effective explanation was that at one point or another he personally had been outfitted with some sort of homing device, a small metal transmitter that told the drone, or whatever it was, where to find him, where to train its mechanical eye. But how would such a homing device have been attached? When he thought about it, it could have been at almost any time: Just the other day, for example, Ben, his normally genial barber, had apologized for accidentally striking the top of Parsifal’s head with his scissors’ point, but had it really been an accident? Or could it have been his dentist, Doctor Spolidoro? Who knew what went on in one’s mouth when one’s tooth was being filled? Or how about the doctor, whatever his name was, who had performed a colonoscopy a little while back?
Still, once he entered the protective canopy of the forest there was a good chance that whatever it was, whether a bird or a drone, would not find it so easy to follow him.
Well, a pretty good chance.
A fair chance.
Frequently strangers will ask, “Parsifal, are your parents still alive?”
He does not know what compels people to inquire about such things, but he hopes it is sympathy, and not pity. When he tells them they are not, they inevitably add that they are sorry, though why they should be sorry is puzzling, because they have never met his parents, and, when Parsifal points this out, the conversation stops and they walk away.
As a result, these people never have a chance to hear how Conrad, his father, who spent a large part of his life hating the forest and mostly remained a stranger to it, disappeared one day never to be seen again. Or how Pearl, who had spent much of her life believing the forest would protect her, came to be disappointed in the end.
First do no harm.
Which brings up, in a way, that whole business with the Happy Bunny Preschool.
Or it may be that a monster is simply anyone who does not ask the question as to whether he is a monster or he isn’t.
Parsifal thought that was what he should have told the librarian when she brought the subject up, but by then she had disappeared.
He should have asked Joe, but now he was gone, too.
“It rains in my heart like it rains on the town; so what exactly is this sadness that creeps into my heart?” The Frenchman Paul Verlaine would not be asking that question, Parsifal thought, if he had grown up in the forest, wrapped in an itchy wool blanket, lying on a bed of crumpled stock certificates, listening to the drip, drip, drip of the rain on the leaves (so like the tapping of blind men’s canes!), feeling the dark of everything that was the past and the dark of all still to come, secure in the knowledge that any dream in search of a recipient would surely not be able to find its way over the leaf-strewn paths and obscure trails of animals to his home, his bed, his sleeping self.
Nonetheless, when Parsifal thought of that beautiful sadness of his past, which was so unlike the anxious, somewhat panicky sadness of his present, how he longed to feel it once again.
Fenjewla.
He finished his sandwich. It was the turkey-Swiss.
Materials most commonly used for the bodies of pens are resin, acrylic, hard rubber, silver, wood, celluloid, and sometimes, more unusually, gold, abalone, mother of pearl, even deer horn or leather (this latter not a body exactly, but stretched tight to cover the inexpensive plastic core lying beneath it).
Sometimes I take a great notion
To jump in the river and drown
Conrad sang that.
And “Goodnight, Irene” was right.
A mile later, he came to a florist.
Forest. Florist.
That stupid blind man, Parsifal thought, must have had wax in his ears. And despite the popular mythology regarding sensory compensation that comes with blindness, at least in this case the removal of one sense had not strengthened the others.
Parsifal entered the florist shop, just because he was already there.