The Dreamseller: The Calling Read Free Page B

extremely good-natured—and from time to time brazen. His short, unruly black hair had gone weeks without touching a comb or water. He was over thirty. Clear skin, high eyebrows. A slightly swollen face concealed the scars of his battered existence. He was so drunk that his legs wobbled as he walked. When he bumped into people, instead of thanking them for keeping him on his feet, he complained in a slurred and tongue-tied voice.
    “Hey, you knocked me down,” or “Let me through, pal, I’m in a hurry.”
    Bartholomew took a few more steps before tripping against the curb. To avoid crashing into the ground, he grabbed onto an old lady and fell on top of her. The poor woman almost suffered a broken back. She cracked him on the head with hercane as she tried to disentangle herself, yelling, “Get off me, you pervert!”
    He didn’t have the strength to move. But hearing the old woman scream, he wouldn’t be outdone.
    “Help! Somebody help me! This old lady is attacking me.”
    People nearby shifted their gaze from the sky to the ground. They pulled the dizzy drunk off the old woman and gave him a hard shove. “Get moving, you bum.”
    Bewildered but petulant Bartholomew stammered, “Thank you, folks, for the ha . . . the ha . . .” He was so drunk it took him three tries to thank them for the “hand.” He tried to brush the dust from his pants and almost fell again.
    “You saved me from that—” he said, pointing at the old woman.
    She lifted her cane, menacingly, and he caught himself in time.
    “—from that lovely lady.”
    He retreated and began to walk away. As he was making his way through the crowd, he asked himself why everyone seemed so intent on staring into the sky. He thought maybe someone had seen a UFO. As if the scene wasn’t chaotic enough, he struggled to stare up at the building and started to shout.
    “I see him! I see the E.T. Careful, people! He’s yellow with awful horns. And he’s holding a weapon!”
    Bartholomew’s drunken mind was hallucinating again. This was not your run-of-the-mill alcoholic. He loved egging people on and making a scene. That’s why he called himself Honeymouth. The only thing he loved more than drinking was hearing the sound of his own voice. His closest friends joked that he had CSS—compulsive speech syndrome.
    He grabbed those next to him, urging them to see the alien only he could see. But they shoved him aside.
    “Man, how rude! Just because I saw the E.T. first they’re green with envy,” he slurred.
    Meanwhile, atop the San Pablo, the man on the ledge was deep in thought. Maybe what he needed, he thought, was a clear mind. His was a jumble of empty ideas and superficial concepts about life and death. Maybe what he needed was to encourage his ignorance—quite a change for a man who always considered himself an intellectual.
    He felt a sudden calm wash over him. And the stranger used that moment to tell the story of a great thinker:
    “Why did Darwin, in the waning moments of his life, when he was suffering unbearable fits of vomiting, cry out ‘my God’? Was he weak to call on God when faced with his draining strength? Was he a coward in the face of death? Did he consider it an unnatural phenomenon even though his theory was based on the natural processes of the selection of species? Why was there such a chasm between his existence and his theory? Is death the end or the beginning? In it, do we lose ourselves or find ourselves? Can it be that when we die we are erased from history like actors who never again perform?”
    The man swallowed hard. He had never thought about these questions. Though he accepted the theory of evolution, he knew nothing of Darwin the man and his internal conflict. But could Darwin have been weak and confused? “Could Darwin have ever given up on life? No. It’s not possible. He surely was much too much in love with life, more so than I am,” he thought.
    This stranger, with his endless piercing questions, had