Samuel opens his eyes. He’s in a car, his father’s one. There is a red moon in the sky, and it is definitely larger than normal.
They are moving, but it’s not the father who’s driving. He doesn’t know who he is. He has never seen it. And he won’t.
He takes the booklet out of his pocket and opens it.
Inside he sees many things. They move. It is the first time he has seen letters and images move by themself. He looks at them motionless. He can’t look away.
The images form writings.
“Mind or Body?”
He knows he has to make a choice, and chooses the first option.
The writings change, and a story begins. A story that starts from his birth.
The story tell about how he was abandoned by his parents to a group of artists and patrons who “adopted” him for a fee. And with them he has trained hard since the age of one year in the use of musical and artistic instruments.
The story goes on telling about his successes. It is very fast but Samuel lives it all and sees how and where he learned to draw, write, play the flute, the violin, to cook… every single art that exists has been learned by him. And once he reach the peak of artistic perfection … a plot twist hits the story.
In the story, Samuel had been abused by the art masters who raised him. He wanted revenge once an adult, but he couldn’t find them, they had escaped, and so he went into politics and took power. He becomed an autarch first, then a real dictator, but people loved him. They crawled at his feet as they would do with a god.
But he crushed them. He crushed human peoples like ants, transformed their cries of pain into celestial choirs, used their blood as ink, their bodies as musical instruments, their cities as canvases … he transformed art into death, and death into art, and with that he gived life to his latest great work.
<<Samuel?>>
The boy wakes up with a blow and casts a frightened look towards his father, who is who is driving <<Y-yes?>>
<< Were you sleeping?>>
Samuel rubs his eyes <<Maybe.>>
<<Come on, go. We have arrived.>>
<<Yes. Thanks dad, see you later.>>
Samuel gets out of the car sleepy and tired as never before. And he is also disappointed by himself because he promised himself not to fall asleep before he got to school, and instead collapsed as soon as he got into the car.
The dream he had,unsettled him though. He takes a quick look at the red book, and notices that it is blank and untitled, just like the first time he took it. Is it like this because it’sfull of guys around it? Then it’s really shy.
Anyway, Samuel didn’t have many opportunities to sleep in class, but he noticed many things… suspicious.
The first thing was his writing. Writing notes, as well as paying attention to the lesson, has never been easier and more natural for him. The hand moves with incredible lightness, it does exactly what it needs to do, its handwriting has become so precise that it looks like a computer’s writing.
On the blackboard Samuel wrote many things, and noticing the naturalness with which he waved his arm, he decided to be more daring … he decided to draw. And the result was incredible. He drew exactly what he had imagined, the arm almost seemed to move by itself.
Needless to say that the teacher who had put it on the blackboard was amazed, but Samuel didn’t care much for compliments, he received dozens of them every day both live and on social media.
He was more interested in understanding when he learned to draw and write so well. He asked that to himself, and a memory appeared in his memory … a patently false memory, a memory of a reality that never existed, a memory that told of how he, as a child, had trained in the use of all artistic instruments, from felt-tip pen to piano.
A false memory that his brain considers true though.