The Dreamseller_ The Calling - Augusto Cury [88]
A desperate mental patient was moaning on the other side of a closed door. The camera moved in as the door opened slowly. A patient rocked back and forth on a bed, covering his face with his hands and tearfully calling out, “Leave me alone! Get out of my life!”
The patient was wracked with uncontrollable anxiety, trying to flee from the monsters haunting his mind. He continued covering his face with his hands and rocking back and forth, like an autistic child. He was wearing a rumpled white shirt with its buttons in the wrong holes and his hair was disheveled.
The person filming him asked, “What’s making you depressed?”
The sound was muffled, but possible to make out:
“I’m scared! I’m scared! Help me! My children are going to die! Help me get them out of this place!” he moaned, panting, overwhelmed by unfathomable panic.
The one filming him repeated the question. “I’m here to help you. Calm down. Why are you so worried?”
Shaken, he replied, “I’m inside a house that’s collapsing, a house that’s fighting against itself.” Then the hallucinating patient spoke to the entities only he could see and hear. “No, no don’t destroy yourself! I’ll be buried alive! You’re suffocating me!”
The people in the stadium fell into a suffocating silence. We, too, felt our throats tighten. The patient said that the house itself was beginning to fight ferociously against itself. We were confused by the film. No one understood anything. We had never heard of a house battling itself. It was the height of insanity. We couldn’t understand why the filmmaker would record this patient’s mental breakdown. Maybe the dreamseller would come along and rescue him later in the film?
“Tell me what you see,” the cameraman asked.
Still covering his face, the patient’s voice trembled:
“The roof is screaming, ‘I’m the most important part of this house! I protect it. I and I alone can withstand the sun and the storms . . . ‘”
The filmmaker wanted to know more about the hallucinations.
“Tell me more. The more you let out, the better you’ll feel,” the cameraman said.
The patient began to shake and writhe in fear.
“The paintings! The paintings on the wall are shouting back!” he roared. “They complain and complain and won’t stop!”
“What do they say?”
“We’re the most important things in this house! We’re the most expensive, the most precious thing you have! Everyone who comes through the door admires us!” the patient said. He broke out in a cold sweat and begged for the voices to stop yelling.
“Get out of my head! Leave me alone!”
At that moment, I remembered myself on top of the San Pablo Building. As much as I might have been suffering, I hadn’t lost my mind; I hadn’t been seized by hallucinations; I hadn’t felt like a man trapped inside a dungeon his mind had created. I, who had been ready to kill myself, couldn’t imagine the pain and suffering of this young man, who had fallen into the darkness of madness. His suffering sent shivers through the audience.
Monica, who had experienced the valleys of emotional misery in her own life, said, in a frightened, almost inaudible voice, “What could make the human mind collapse like this, to make it reach the depths of despair?”
The suffering shown on the screen was so great and so captured our attention that some of us forgot why we were there. The dreamseller remained on center stage, his back to us, his gaze fixed on the screen. I couldn’t imagine what he was feeling. He must have been sharing the same sadness we all were.
The patient turned his face into the corner and said, “No one understands me! All they do is give me drugs!” He continued talking about his hallucinations. The furniture, he said, wanted to cannibalize other parts of the house. He shouted: “The furniture wants to swallow the paintings. It’s yelling at them! It’s saying, ‘We’re the most important parts of this house! We give comfort and add beauty!’”
I looked over at the executives of the Megasoft Group and saw them smiling. I thought to myself: “How can they smile