The Dreamseller_ The Calling - Augusto Cury [35]
The article said that the stranger was the same one who had caused a flurry near the San Pablo Building. And it ended with two questions: Are we witnessing one of the greatest atheists ever, or a man with incomprehensible spirituality? Are we witness to a modern-day prophet, or a lunatic?
When we awoke the next morning, we found the dreamseller off by himself, deep in conversation. It was the second time we’d seen him carrying on this monologue. He gestured as if he were having hallucinations or questioning his own reasoning. Ten minutes later, he came to us relaxed. He seemed to have cleansed his mind of the day-to-day noise.
The sky was darkening, threatening a heavy rain. Lightning ripped across the sky. Dimas didn’t fear the police or jail time, but he was terrified of lightning storms. We were walking along a wide street when the thunder made our usually unflappable friend cower.
I tried to calm him by telling him that by the time we heard the thunder, the lightning—and the danger—had already passed. But the mind is riddled with traps; he understood my words but they could not calm his irrational fears. I couldn’t criticize him, though. I was no different. I had always valued logic over emotion, but it was no consolation from the esoteric pain of my past. It haunted me.
The rain soon began to fall. We quickly sought shelter in a large shopping mall. At the entrance was a vast department store. As we went inside, we heard the earsplitting crack of lightning strike. Dimas dove beneath the first table he found. He was like a child who had seen a ghost. I thought to myself, “The dreamseller is right. There are no heroes. Eventually, every giant encounters obstacles that transform him into a child. All you have to do is wait.”
The last lightning bolt overloaded the mall’s grounding system and the electricity pulsed down the walls of the building. Two painters, cousins, were repainting the store. One of them, who had a stammer worse than Dimas, was working on the walls. When he was nervous, his voice shut down and he couldn’t say a word. The other was on top of a six-foot ladder, happily retouching the steel window frames.
When the lightning bolt hit, it coursed through the walls and bounced into the window, striking one painter. The noise was deafening. The painter fell off the ladder, writhing in pain. His cousin, terrified, rushed to his aid. We started forward, but before we could get there, someone rushed past us, looking to be a hero. I don’t know where the man came from, but he seemed familiar. When I looked closer, I realized it was the Miracle Worker from the wake.
Edson saw the painter lying on the floor, moaning in pain and holding his right ankle. He saw that the man’s foot was deformed. He concluded immediately that it was because of the lightning. Wasting no time, he told the other painter, who was attending the injured man, “It’s OK, I’ve got him. I’m an expert in this kind of thing.”
He rushed over to the man and tried to straighten out his foot but couldn’t. He sat down on the man’s leg and began yelling an order at the ankle, trying to call on his supernatural powers.
“Heal! Repair! Align your bones!”
But the ankle didn’t repair itself. The painter, now in agony, moaned again. The Miracle Worker applied still more force. In his mind, he couldn’t leave such a simple case unresolved. It wasn’t possible, he must have thought, for his moral standing with God to be so low. The painter howled in pain. The crowd gathered and buzzed, which only made the “Good Samaritan” Miracle Worker try harder to show his supernatural powers.
Many of those watching the Miracle Worker thought he was a doctor doing some kind of procedure to alleviate the painter’s suffering. The stammering cousin seemed to want to say something to Edson,