The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira by César Aira

until that day he had
never heard of this man, and the family name was totally unfamiliar to him. But
that only magnified the effect. He knew there were very important people who
maintained a “low profile” policy. And it had to have been really low to go
unnoticed by a snob of his caliber. An unknown celebrity was as if on another —
a higher — level.
    But before all that, and as if obscured under a leaf
storm of circumstantial and psychological motives, his acceptance had a much
more concrete cause: it was the first time he had been asked. Like so many other
phenomena in our era dominated by media fiction, his fame had preceded him. His
own myth surrounded him, and the myth’s mechanism had continually delayed him
from going into action, until there came a point when doing so had become
inconceivable. These wealthy barbarians had to come along with their ignorance
of the subtle mechanism of the esoteric for the unthinkable to occur. In fact,
Dr. Aira could have gotten out of it by telling them that there had been a
mistake, a misunderstanding; he was a theoretician, one could almost say a
“writer,” and the only thing that linked him to the Miracle Cures was a kind of
metaphor . . . At the same time, however, it was not a metaphor; it was real,
and its truth resided in this reality. This would be his first and perhaps last
chance to prove it.
    They wanted to know when he could begin the procedure.
They felt a certain urgency due to the very nature of the problem: there was no
time to lose. They managed to include in their proposal a discreet query about
the nature of his method, of which they obviously had not the slightest idea
(this was obvious, above all, because nobody did).
    Swept into the vortex of the blind impulse that had led
him to accept the job, Dr. Aira said he needed a little time to prepare.
    “Let’s see . . . Today is . . . I don’t know what day it
is.”
    “Friday.”
    “Very good. I’ll do it on Sunday night. The day after
tomorrow. Does that work for you?”
    “Of course. We are at your disposal.” A pause. They looked
quite intrigued. “And then what?”
    “Then nothing. It is only one session. I figure it should
last one hour, more or less.”
    They exchanged glances. They all
decided at once not to ask any more questions. What for? One of them
wrote the address down on a piece of paper, then they stood up — serious,
circumspect.
    “We’ll expect you then.”
    “At ten.”
    “Perfect. Any instructions?”
    “No. See you on Sunday.”
    They began to shake hands. As could be expected,
they had left the question of compensation for this already marginal moment.
    “Needless to say . . . your fee . . . ”
    Dr. Aira, categorical:
    “I don’t charge. Not a cent.”
    As awkward as his gestures, his facial expressions, and
his tone of voice usually were, in this case, and only in this case, he had
struck just the right note.
    There couldn’t possibly be a question of money, not for
anybody there! And yet, that’s all this was about. Money had been left out, but
only because there was so much of it. In spite of this being the first time he’d
ever dealt with such affluent people, Dr. Aira had responded with the almost
instinctive confidence that only long habit can provide, as if he had done
nothing his whole life but prepare himself for this moment. It must have been in
his genes. In fact, someone as poor as he was couldn’t charge people as rich as
they were for his services. One simply places oneself in their hands, places the
rest of one’s life and one’s children’s lives in their hands. After all,
billions of dollars were involved. As it was a question of life or death, it was
as if the entire family fortune had been translated into wads of bills and
stuffed into a briefcase. The amount was so colossal, and what he could charge,
or want, or even dream of, was such a minuscule fraction of it, that the two
quantities were almost incongruent. No matter how hard he tried