[Isto é um texto que me encomendaram sob pena de, se eu não o fizesse, reprovar a inglês].

“The future is now,” Mark shouted, in a single breath, entering the room. “The future,” and he thought he should stressed this, “is,” pause, “now”. His eyes were bulging, as if they were lost from his face, and then he strolled around the office looking us all, scanning us. When he found us behind our blank eyes, he sat down.
He had been doing this for some days then. It was always around that time, someone pointed out, and everyone checked their watches and confirmed that, yes, it was almost ten, as the mechanical ticking of the clock agreed, and yes, the smell of freshly brewed coffee was starting to stick to the walls. Around the plastic cups, everyone just repeated everyday the same things. Some moaned about the constant greyness of the clouds above and others, just arriving at the office door and banging closed the world outside, dripped through the ends of their umbrellas their hate at some fabrics that have the ability to get soaked. “That is a lousy weather, innit?,” someone was bound to say, throwing a vicious glance through the window and returning promptly to the bottom of the empty cup, and then tossing it to waste together with the project of some new, different words.
Mark usually came from downstairs, panting, clinging to the banister, and dropping his “Morning, John” to a different person each day. He would then always walk through the corridor, his arms stretching alongside his freakishly tall body, and would enter the room, his face unshaven, his thick glasses’ frame hanging to the end of his nose, his hair a mess, and would just drop some internal mail on the nearest table, then shout something or other, and fall, heavily, on the corner couch as a tired hunter after a lavish meal.
“What the hell did he mean by that?,” asked some of the heads that had risen from the desks. And, as if reading “No idea” in everyone’s eyebrows, they all returned to sink in their faces on the numbers.
To be fair, I don’t think anyone really knew Mark. He worked in the basement, close to the ground, as close or even more to the earth’s core than worms themselves. That had always fascinated me. Not my colleagues, though. I remember Lynn once saying that that Mark-fellow was way too strange to be a good person. “Why is that?,” I asked, and everyone chose to stare at their plastic cups. “I don’t know,” gambled Lynn, “he just is,” she said with a full stop. “I don’t like him.”
I did. Sometimes I happened to find him catching the same bus that I rode to work. By morning, even with all the exhausts and dust trying to ruin the light of day, he seemed to beam a different glow, as if, somehow, when he opened his windows came in a separate sun, with a different kind of warmth that knew no such colour as grey. I would find myself with narrowed eyes, studying him. Once he did find me across the bus, when for a moment his eyes left his book, and he just nodded, politely, and turned the page.
One day, arriving at the office, I caught him climbing his way out of the ground. I glanced at the mud on his shoes. “Morning, John”, he said. I smiled. “Going up?,” he asked, with his hand already holding the handrail like a rope. I think I spelled a silent “Yes,” and then said “I am”. Then he ran them up. I followed, breathing as strongly as my tie allowed me. He was waiting at the top of the stairs, smirking. Then he turned away.
“Wait,” I breathed out. He faced me again, and I said “What did you mean?”. He frowned. “By what?”, and his shoulders frowned too. “By that thing about the future being now”.
He took a while before he remembered having said that the previous day. He tapped the paperback he carried in his breast pocket. “What do you want to do in the future?,” he asked, to which I wrinkled my face that I didn’t understand.
“What do you want to be?,” he rephrased. “Do you want to be happy?”.
His strange smile sold all the joy he could have.
“I intend to be happy somewhen in the future,” I said. Mark stared at the ceiling. Then he left the lamps alone, and whispered “Well,” and he smiled at me from his eyes, “are you?”.
I laughed a lungful of air through my nose. “Yes,” I said, “I suppose I am”. RC