The Dreamseller: The Calling (4 page)

“. . . but he abandoned me when I was a child, without any explanation.” He paused, then added, “I was watching cartoons in the living room when I heard a loud bang from his bedroom. I rushed in and found him on the floor, bleeding. I was only six years old. I screamed and screamed, begging for help. My mother wasn’t home. I ran to the neighbors, but I was so despondent that for a few minutes they couldn’t understand what I was saying. I had barely begun my life and had lost my childhood, my innocence. My world collapsed. I came to hate cartoons. I had no brothers or sisters. My mother, a poor widow, had to go back to work and struggled to support
me. But she got cancer and died when I was twelve. Relatives raised me. I moved from house to house, always feeling like a stranger. I was a difficult teenager, and hated family gatherings. Sometimes I was treated like a servant and had to keep my mouth shut.”

Julio had developed a rough exterior. He was distant, shy, unyielding. He felt ugly and unloved. He buried himself in his studies, and with little help, got himself into college and became a brilliant student. He worked during the day and went to school at night, studying in the late hours and on weekends. And, now, he vented aloud a deep-seated anger he had never overcome:

“But I showed them. I became more cultured and successful than all those who had ridiculed me. I was an exemplary college student and became a highly respected professor, envied by some and hated by others. I was admired. I married and had a son, John Marcus. I don’t think I was either a good husband or a good father. Time went by, and a year ago I fell in love with a student who was fifteen years younger than I. I tried to seduce her, buy her, I took on debts. I ruined my credit, lost everything . . . and in the end she left me. It was as if the earth had opened up and swallowed me whole. My wife discovered the affair and left me, too. When she left, I realized that I still loved her; I couldn’t lose her! I tried to win her back, but she was tired of the cold intellectual who had never been affectionate, who was a pessimist, depressed and, on top of everything else, bankrupt. She left me for good.”

At that moment, he allowed himself to cry. He hadn’t cried this much since losing his mother. He sobbed and wiped his eyes. Whoever looked at him and saw a rigid professor knew nothing of his scars.

“John Marcus, my son, started using drugs. He was always angry and accused me of being a distant father. He went to
rehab several times. Today, he lives in another state and refuses to speak to me. Ever since I was five years old people have been abandoning me. Some through the fault of others, some through my fault,” he said, learning for the first time how to remove his mask.

Pictures of his childhood ran quickly through his head and he remembered the final images of his father, images he had blocked out. He remembered that he had called out to him day and night for weeks after his loss. Julio grew up angry with his father and was convinced he had locked away those injured feelings deep inside.

Now he was reliving all those painful emotions. His notable education was no match for the pain that had been formed in his past. His learning and sophistication could not help him to be flexible and relaxed. He was an intense, rigid man. He never let down his guard before his psychiatrists and psychologists. Instead, he criticized them because he thought their evaluations of him were childish for someone of his intellectual level. Helping this man was a daunting task.

After telling his story openly for the first time, Julio fell silent again, fearing the stranger would offer more of the same glib, useless advice he had often heard before. Instead, the stranger found a way to joke.

“My friend, you’re in a real bind,” the stranger said.

Julio gave a wan smile. He wasn’t expecting that response. And the stranger offered none of the empty advice. He couldn’t feel Julio’s pain, but the stranger was familiar with abandonment.

“I know what loss is. There are moments when our world seems to come crashing down around us and no one else can understand it.”

The stranger wiped tears from his eyes as he spoke. Perhaps his scars were as deep or deeper than Julio’s.

Julio, once again moved, said, “Tell me, who are you.”

The stranger responded with a warm silence.

“Are you a psychiatrist or psychologist?” he asked, believing himself in the presence of an extraordinary professional.

“No, I’m not,” the stranger affirmed with assurance.

“A philosopher?”

“I appreciate the world of ideas, but I’m not a philosopher.”

“Are you the head of some church?” he asked.

“No,” the man replied firmly.

Julio asked impatiently, “Are you crazy?”

The stranger replied with a slight smile. “Now, that’s more likely,” he said, and Julio couldn’t have been more confused.

“Who are you? Tell me.”

He pressed the stranger who was now being watched from below by a confused crowd. The psychiatrist, the fire chief and the police chief strained to hear the conversation, but could only hear murmurs. Seeing that Julio was not going to back down, the stranger spread his arms, raised them to the sky, and said:

“When I think about how briefly our lives pass, about all that has come before me and all that remains to come, that’s when I see how truly small I am in the grand scheme of things. When I consider that one day I will fall into eternal silence, swallowed by the passing of time, I realize my limitations. And when I see those limits, I stop trying to be a god and simply see myself as what I am: a mere human being. I go from being the center of the universe to simply a wanderer searching for answers . . .”

The stranger didn’t answer the question, but Julio drank in the words. His answer made Julio wonder the same thing as so many who would encounter the stranger: “Is this man a lunatic or a genius? Or both?” He tried to fathom the depths of the stranger’s words, but it was no easy task.

The stranger again looked toward the heavens and began to question God in a way Julio had never heard:

“God, who are you? Why do you remain silent before the insanity of some believers and do nothing to calm the doubts of skeptics? Why do you disguise your will as the laws of physics and conceal your designs as simply random events? Your silence unnerves me.”

Julio was an expert in religion—Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and others—but none of it helped him understand the stranger’s mind. He didn’t know whether these were the ramblings of a bald-faced atheist or someone who was close friends with God himself. The renowned professor again wondered: What kind of man is this? And where did he come from?

P
EOPLE ARE PREDICTABLE. LEADERS, TOO. IN MODERN
society, most people don’t inspire emotion or imagination. But what was lacking in “normal” people abounded in the mysterious stranger. Julio was so curious about this man’s identity that he asked again he who was. Though, this time, he asked knowing full well that he didn’t know much about himself, either.

“I don’t know who I am. I need to find myself, I know. But please, grant me just this. Who are you?”

The man flashed a thin smile; Julio was finally beginning to speak his language. And feeling that rush of inspiration, the stranger stood up and faced the horizon, spreading his arms to the fading sun, and said confidently, “I’m a dreamseller.”

Julio was even more confused. The stranger seemed to have plunged from lucidity into lunacy. None of this made any sense to Julio, but it seemed to mean everything to the stranger.

On the street below, Bartholomew’s ramblings reached a fever pitch: “Look, it’s the alien leader! He spread his arms and changed colors.”

The dreamseller looked down on the eager masses below and felt a deep, abiding pity for them.

Julio rubbed his face. He couldn’t believe his ears.

“A dreamseller? What . . . What is that?” he asked, totally lost for words.

The stranger had seemed so intelligent. He had shown such intrepid thinking, had shattered Julio’s preconceptions and helped organize his cluttered mind. And just when he had Julio convinced, this dreamseller had shattered the image with a single word.

The psychiatrist, who was standing about twenty-five yards away, heard the stranger identify himself and quickly sized him up for the police and fire chiefs: “I knew it. They’re both crazy.”

Just then the dreamseller looked to his right and saw a sniper in a nearby building, about a hundred and fifty yards away, aiming a rifle with a silencer at him. The dreamseller quickly pushed Julio to the side and the two fell next to each other on the ledge. Julio had no idea what was going on, and rather than scare him, the dreamseller just said:

“If that fall bothered you, just imagine what would happen when you hit the ground from this building.”

The crowd below thought the stranger had held the jumper back, but they all misunderstood what had happened. The dreamseller looked toward the horizon and saw that the sniper had left. Was he hallucinating? Who could want such a simple man dead? Then they both stood back up on the ledge and the stranger repeated himself, “Yes, I’m a dreamseller.”

Julio was still confused and thought maybe the stranger meant he was some kind of traveling salesman.

“Wait, what do you mean? What
products
do you sell?”

“I try to sell courage to the insecure, daring to the timid, joy to those who have lost their zest for life, sense to the reckless, ideas to the thinkers.”

Julio falling back into his staid thinking, told himself, “This isn’t happening. I’m having a nightmare. I must have died and didn’t realize it. A while ago, I was ready to kill myself because
I couldn’t understand the source of my pain. Now I’m even more confused because the man who rescued me claims he sells what can’t be sold.” And to his surprise, the stranger added:

“And for those who think of putting a period to life, I try to sell a comma, just a comma.”

“A comma?” asked Julio.

“Yes, a comma. One small comma, so they can continue to write their story.”

Julio began to sweat. In a kind of sudden enlightenment, he realized that the dreamseller had just sold him a comma, and he had bought it without realizing it. No price, no pressure, no tricks, no haggling. He placed his hands on his head to see if everything that was happening to him was real.

The professor was starting to understand. He looked down and saw the crowd awaiting his decision. Down deep, those people were as lost as he was. They were free to come and go, but they were missing out on the sweetness of life. They didn’t feel free to express their own personality.

Julio felt like he was trapped in a movie, floating between the surreal and the concrete. “Is this guy real, or is my mind playing tricks on me?” he wondered, in a haze of fascination and uncertainty. No one had ever cast a spell on him like this.

Then this stranger made him a very real offer.

“Come, follow me and I will make you a dreamseller.”

Julio’s mind was racing, but he was frozen. His voice was stuck in his throat. He was physically paralyzed, but deep in thought: “How can I follow a man I’ve known for less than an hour?” he thought. But at the same time, he was drawn to this calling.

He was tired of academic debates. He was one of the most eloquent intellectuals among his peers, but many of his colleagues, and he himself, lived mired in the mud of envy and endless vanity. He felt that the university where he
taught—this temple of learning—lacked the tolerance and creativity to unleash fresh thinking. Some temples of learning had become as inflexible as the most rigid religions. Professors, scientists and thinkers weren’t free to explore. They had to conform to their departments’ thinking.

Now he stood before a shabbily dressed man with unkempt hair and no social standing, but one who was a thought-provoking adventurer, a dissenter from conventional wisdom, free to chase new thoughts. And this man had made him the craziest and most exciting of proposals: to sell dreams. “How? To whom? To what end? Will I be praised or mocked?” the intellectual wondered. He also knew that all great thinkers must travel unexplored paths.

Julio had always been sensible and had never made a scene in public—not until he climbed to the top of this building. He knew this time he had caused an uproar. It hadn’t been for show; he really was going to end his life. He was afraid of using a gun or taking pills, so he’d come to the top of the San Pablo Building.

But the dreamseller’s invitation continued to echo in his mind like a grenade blowing apart all the concepts he held true. A long minute passed. Conflicted, he thought, “I’ve tried to live my life sheltered in the life of academia, but it failed me. I tried to challenge my students to think for themselves but instead taught them only to regurgitate information. I tried to contribute to society, but sealed myself off from it. If I manage to sell dreams to a few people, as this stranger has sold to me, maybe my life will have more meaning than it has had until now.”

And so I decided to follow him. I am Julio, this extraordinary stranger’s first disciple.