Installation successful.
Alessio opens his eyes. This time for real. And he is the first time in his entire life that he wakes up without fatigue. He doesn’t feel pain, he doesn’t feel tired, he doesn’t feel discomfort… he opens his eyes as if he had never closed them. He wakes up as if he has never gone to sleep.
He is in his bedroom. Our bedroom.
He pulls himself up. The room is clean and tidy, but there are sounds he doesn’t like, aftertaste that indicates hidden disorder… he looks around with a dazed, confused, but perfectly lucid air. He knows what’s going on. He knows what those sounds and lights are. He recognizes everything.
He stands up. Feels great. Maybe too grat. Maybe he should go to the hospital.
Or maybe he should rearrange the room. His eyes tell him it’s okay, but the rest of his senses don’t agree. Those discordant notes, that aftertaste… he don’t like them. He has to understand where they come from.
He start with the school books, the new ones. He moves them until their sound becomes crystal clear and pleasant. Move on to the old ones, the ones that perhaps he was better off reselling when he was still in high school. Technically they are already in “place”, but his ears are not in agreement: they produce a better sound if placed somewhere else.
He then moves on to the other books, the ones he reads for pleasure. Books of medicine and biology, little books written in Japanese, stories that he no longer has the time to read … he puts them all in the place where they sound the best.
What is missing?
The clothes. He opens the wardrobes and a cacophonic melody overwhelms him, followed by a pungent smell and prickly taste. That wardrobe is too messed up. Is that where those out of tune sounds came from?
He empties it, takes all the clothes, divides them for use, folds them and then puts them back.
It only takes ten minutes to do a job that yesterday would have taken an hour. His hands move quickly and precisely, his brain is concentrated and devoid of any distraction … he looks himself from the outside, and what he sees produces a magnificent, rhythmic, clear sound: he is like a work machine, tireless and perfect.
He makes the bed, repositions the objects well on the table and inside and outside the furniture, makes sure that even the pencils and pens are perfectly aligned and separated according to their use, color and brand.
When he finishes he realizes that it took only thirty minutes to give that room a calm and precise symphony.
He is amazed, both by himself and his work. The room is now almost unrecognizable, it’s like those bedrooms you see in real estate offers, too good to be true … yet it’s real. And it was he who made it that way.
He looks in the mirror. His face makes nice sounds, but what about pajamas? It has to change it.
He goes to the bathroom, takes a shower and leaving there he makes sure to leave it clean and dry, and on returning to his room he dresses according to what all his senses suggest.
He looks in the mirror again. Now he’s perfect. He likes what he hears and what he sees.