Epilogue

Epilogue

The nurses simply shook their heads, 'Impossible.'

"Well, here's your shirt, ... you're free to go."

His mother was there to pick him up. He'd been at the hospital for almost three weeks. He'd slept for maybe a couple hours throughout his stay, if any at all.  That is, at least, that he could remember.

His mother looked at him with the only adulation any mother in her situation could, "I'm so glad you're coming home now, son."

On the way home, he saw a person on the side of the road. It was a girl that looked somewhat familiar, ... it was Jenna! She saw Maxwell and waved giddily.

When they arrived home, Maxwell went straight to his room with the intention of taking an immediate nap when suddenly he heard a voice from inside the room. " ... Maxwell?"

He took his shirt off and turned around. It was Primi! "What are you doing here?"

"This ability is inside of everyone, I've only just begun to learn how to use it. I'm actually in India right now communicating to you through my inner thoughts."

'For real?,' Maxwell thought, 'incredible.' "The world is changing Christopher, the universe is evolving. Everything, not just humans, but plants, animals, technology, literature, the laws of physics, it's all changing all around us every single day. Are you ready for this ride we're about to take?"

He knew in that moment what his purpose in life really was. He now understood how he was always meant to teach the knowledge he was to obtain, for there was precious little time to waste. There was no time at all in fact.

He slowly turned around. "What's on your back?," Primi asked, in some form of interested amazement.

"Oh that? That's just a tattoo of a cross that I got at Sunnydale."

"They put a tattoo on you while you were in a hospital?"

"No, I actually got it from, ... well, from something different."

Premi looked confused for a moment, then smiled, "I think I know what you're talking about."

At just that moment there was a knock at the door. It was Jenna! Jenna, Jimmy, Vince, and several of the other kids as well! They were all there to see him, and just like that, Premi was gone. Maxwell somehow knew he'd be seeing her again, though. They were partners now, and they'd be working together soon and in the future, of this he was absolutely for sure.

"Oh Maxwell, I'm so glad you're okay!," Jenna said as she wiped tears from her face, "It's so unfair what they did to you."

"It's not really unfair.  If everything that ever happens comes attached to some kind of fairness then it simply wouldn't be possible." Upon saying this his face exemplified an expression of pure security.

Precisely at that moment the phone rang, then suddenly stopped., Either his mother picked up, or it wasn’t that important of a call.

"Hey Maxwell, I gotta tell you about this dream I had last night."

"Let's go downstairs, I'd like to hear it." As they both began to walk, Jimmy slowly began, "Okay, my dream was like this, ... it was so rad. Okay, mankind as we know it is only a teenager."

Maxwell thought about this and smiled, then he asked Jimmy to continue.

"When we were younger we used to have a relationship with God. We were like pets, or children even. We were what it would be like if children were pets. Okay, moving on, we looked up to God with all of our innocent being. Here was this dude that took care of us, made sure we made it into every day, and was always there to catch us when we fell in his own godlike way. I mean, he'd really take care of us. It was like we had a little walkie-talkie in our brains, like direct communication with God. It was back when we were still human-like-animal-like beasts, still growing but not yet grown up.

It was the transformation of consciousness within its cultural self that severed these ties that set us ‘free.’

Maxwell was very interested in what he was hearing. They all made their way from the stairs into the hallway and made their way into the kitchen where his mother was talking on the phone.

"So, as the humanity-child grows older, it leaves it's home but it's original source never forgets. The transformation was always okay with Him from the beginning. He was aware of what was going to happen even before it began, so it was always completely alright that it actually happened the way it did. Now that we have this super-conscious mind-stuff, it's actually talking back to us, beginning to tell us what to do, ... the creation itself i mean. It's as if our walkie-talkies began sending transmissions to themselves over the past few thousand years on a more frequent basis. A few of those people still call home every now and then, and a few of those people actually do get to hear something back, but nonetheless, mankind is growing older and gradually beginning to grow out of its adolescence."

The group paused to put their shoes on as they were about to go outside.  Jimmy continued, "So what exactly does humanity do as it grows up? It grows a lot wiser! It starts to remember things! It remembers what everything was originally supposed to be like, what love inside the very leaves of the trees around us were originally supposed to feel like, and how this originality never really left us from the beginning. Going back to the very start is the same thing as completing the journey to the very end. We're all growing up, Maxwell. All of us, every single one of us, in our own very unique and special way."

Maxwell rubbed his hands upon his face. He could hardly believe what he was actually hearing from the mouth of his very best friend. As he lowered his hands he also realized he hadn't felt any zits on his face, 'I really must be getting older, the world really is changing.'

"You really dreamed all that stuff, Jimmy?"

Jimmy laughed, "I want you to know that no matter what, no matter where we go, we're always going to be alright. I mean we really are going to be taken care of for real, so there's nothing ever to worry about. It's what some people call being 'good to go'."

Maxwell's mother walked in carrying the cordless phone, "I just talked to Dr. Schmidt and apparently it was discovered that your urine sample was somehow tampered with, therefore they had to throw it out. This means that you're now cleared to attend any school you wish next year, including North Laurel."

His friend's faces spread smiles of happiness as they began to move towards the front door and outside.

"Jimmy, you remember when you asked me what the perfect computer might look like?" "Yeah buddy, I remember." Maxwell smiled, "Well, I think I have an idea what it might actually look like."

It was then that Maxwell and the rest of his friends had walked into his front yard. He closed his eyes and opened his arms as he slowed his breath in the gentle breeze, the sun feeling so perfectly warm upon his skin. As he opened his eyes again, it seemed as if they were opening for the very first time in a very long time as a whole new world unfolded in front of him, one that he was now walking into all on his own, ... ...

"I think Jimmy, it might look a lot like this."

Upon saying this, the wind gusted.  It was summertime.  Jimmy, Jenna, Vince, and Maxwell were all together now.  They had never in the actuality of things, never really been separated. 

Maxwell, for the first time in his life, knew without a shadow of a doubt God’s true existence, His divine nature.  It was overwhelming in its wonder and beauty. 

And as they walked in the natural beauty and grandeur of the world ‘outside,’  Maxwell was happy.

chapter twenty four

Chapter Twenty Four

            "If you're frightened of dying and then you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away.  If you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels freeing you from the Earth." – lyrics from “Rabbit in Your Headlights, by U.N.K.L.E. 

           

            Days turned into what seemed like weeks.  Occasionally Maxwell would fall into some form of delerium induced slumber.  It wasn't so much sleep as it was his mind shutting off from complete overload.  The brief respite would then turn back into nightmare.  Sounds of laughter continued to haunt his fraying sanity.

            'These pills are what's making me crazy,' he thought to himself.  He rolled a couple of the pills around in his hand in a way that made them appear to be saying something.  Hallucinations of pink and purple and green pills shouting at him, "It ain't us sonny boy, we ain't the ones going crazy, it's definitely you that's the one going crazy!"

            "Why can't I just die?  Where are you God?  Where's your son right now?"  He prayed and tried to give up his fear, "Why is this happening to me?"  He could feel his mouth forming these sentences but couldn't tell for sure if any sounds were actually coming out. 

            Maxwell closed his eyes.  He fell into another faux sleep and after a couple of seconds, ... he was quickly back awake. 

           

            He rubbed his eyes.  He was still inside the belly of the beast.  Any 'sense' that anything made was beyond all conceivable logic.  His brain felt like it was being ground and squeezed and then picked into tiny pieces by a giant machine-like beast of some sort.  He stumbled into the bathroom in an attempt to splash cold water onto his face, but it didn't come out when he turned the knob; rather, something red and metallic yet still fluid-like flowed forth.  It looked like prana, the stuff Tom would smoke from his pipe.  

            The bizarre stuff slowly filled the sink, transforming rapidly into a large red diamond-like shape into that of a heart.  'This can't possibly be real; I can't believe it's real even though it appears to be completely real.'  His mind rushed in an attempt to find some form of answer to the nonsensical logic before him, grasping at any notion that might restore the world back into some conceivable type of sanity. 

            He glanced perplexingly at the diamond for several seconds.  What in the name of God is this thing?'  He lifted it out of the sink with his bare hands.  The smooth, finely cut surface was warm as it began to flicker.  The heat intensified, but still Maxwell held onto it.  Smoke began to waft through the air. 

            'Is it coming from the diamond?,' he found the smell absolutely putrid yet completely intoxicating at the same time.  It began to glow vibrantly as Maxwell recognized that the rock itself was no longer smoking, it was his own fleshy tissue that was aflame.  His left hand was searing, freshly branded from the diamond that was ever growing hotter and hotter. 

            'Ahgh, ahh ahaahhh!,' he rolled it onto his other hand and yet still, he held onto it.  His left hand had a deep, red, second degree burn impressed upon itself from the jewel, a giant welt that rather resembled the stigmata of Jesus Christ.  

            When he could no longer hold onto the diamond in the other hand, he dropped it to the floor.  The fresh burns in both his hands now matched each other.  The pain was almost impossible yet very very real and calming all at the same time.

            An impossibly deep neon red was blazing upon the floor.  Flames began to dance around it's perimeter in radiating outward circles.  The fire spread soon to engulf the entire room.

            "Thank you Jesus, I'll burn in this fire and finally achieve true relief."

            The flames engulfed him.  'This is what it's like to die,' he thought, 'this is how it feels to have nothing left inside of you.'  He watched as the skin that covered his body began to melt away, sloughing off like the skin of a cicada.

            Blink, blink.

            There was a snake upon the floor amongst the flames.  It slithered toward him and stared into his eyes, fanning its neck and flicking its tongue.  The snake had the appearance of a cobra.  Wings began to protrude from its scaly flesh, its tongue darting in and out in a true reptilian style.  Maxwell could no longer describe the fear, the pain, and the absolute horror of this ordeal.

            The snake-bird serpent-creature shifted form in front of his barely believing eyes.  The beast serpent morphed into the form of a robot- mosquito-man.  Maxwell watched as all the students from his classroom were being fed upon by this machine-like insect-beast-monstrosity.  It gorged upon their very souls, claiming their thoughts as well as their creativity, rendering them forever dull, ignorant, and incapable. 

            'No!,' Maxwell tried to cry, but his mouth wouldn't move and his words wouldn't form.

            The robot-mosquito-man picked up the diamond, holding it in front of his perfected chrome body.  The glow was now so intense that it created a ripple inside the 'essence' of space-time, something akin to a shock wave shooting out from a black-hole.  The reverberation of the crunching contraction propelled outward from itself the raw existence of a fruit, ... a fruit in the form of an apple, ... an apple that he somehow understood as forbidden.

            He remembered something about a Bible study he'd gone to when the topic of discussion had been the Tree of Knowledge.  He remembered one of the older participants saying how the Tree of Knowledge was symbolic and the story of creation was a myth.  He recalled the man saying how Christianity had arisen from Judaism and contained many pagan characteristics, many of which had existed for thousands of years before the time of Christ. 
           The Tree of Knowledge produced a form of ultimate cognitive truth of which transcended the differentiation between that which is right and that which is wrong.  The apple represents the 'discerning intelligence' possible in humankind.  

            The separation from the Father then presented the need to differentiate between that which is right from that which is wrong.  We take our own path inside this duality and thus create our own heaven and our own hell within the essence of our own ideological being. 

            'Okay, this is it, there's no more time at this point, ... there's no time at all in fact,' and in that very moment, he knew in his heart what he must do. 

             He could feel the presence of Tom.  He could feel Father Wimbly, Dr. Schmidt, and his mother as well.  He could feel Jimmy, he could feel Premi, he could feel Jenna and they were all right there with him in that moment, all watching him, concerned for him, as if they were watching a football game where their team was down and driving the field in the last half of the fourth quarter.  Maxwell knew that nothing mattered more in his entire life than the very moment before him.

            He grasped the apple from out of the robot's possession and pulled it into his arms.  Then, looking directly into the center of the beast's demonic red eyes, Maxwell gave the mosquito-serpent the most devilish of grins as he immediately sank his teeth into an impossibly large bite.  From the very core of the apple's essence he might be able to give witness to the beast.

            A surge of impossibly charged energy flashed completely throughout his being.  His skin began to rip apart.  A cross of flaming white light, whiter than what has ever been possible came directly out of the sky to land forever hard upon his back.  It was so unendingly heavy that he was immediately forced upon the ground.  Any attempt to move was utterly impossible, and suddenly, ... he began to laugh.

            ... deep within himself, to the source of the very beginning of laughter inside the consciousness of his own being, ... it all revealed itself to him, ... it made him smile.

chapter twenty three

Chapter Twenty Three

            The nurses took off his clothes, put him in a gown, and led him to his room. 

           

            The room he found himself in was simple.  There were three beds, one for Maxwell and two more for other patients, a window with bars on it, and a bathroom.  Maxwell was given a brief moment to say goodbye to his mother. 

            He was fully coherent at this point, and the reality of being locked up in a behavioral health facility was starting to collapse in upon his mind.  He immediately lay down upon his bed.  He didn't have the strength or the desire to peruse the grounds.  His nurses, Mr. Watterly and Ms. Vargas, came into his room after some time to let him know that dinner was being served.  Maxwell still wasn't very hungry and didn't feel like moving so they simply let him be.  They'd given him several colorful pills and told him how they'd see him again the following morning.

 

            He was at 'Sunnydale Farms', an imaginary place that he'd talk about jokingly with Jimmy when gossiping about the kids in his class.  Now he was actually a patient and the place was most definitely very real.

            His doctor, a strange old and cold man named Dr. Alfred North, had just diagnosed him as manic depressive, narcissistic, borderline schizophrenic, with a touch of delusions of grandeur, all added to the post traumatic stress disorder that Dr. Brown had already applied to him.  He was literally a smorgasbord of insanity, so it seemed. 

            'So this is it,' he thought, 'the truth finally comes out, I'm a nut-job.  Everything I've witnessed, all the weirdness and all the signs and synchronicities I've experienced have only been my diseased mind playing tricks on me.'  Anxiety and sadness rose up from deep inside his stomach and rapidly overwhelmed his entire being.

            His mind wandered to his class project.  Had he even been given a chance to speak?  He couldn't exactly remember.  He'd lost control of his consciousness, 'the projector was hijacked' so to speak, and scenes of horrible and impossible things filled his hazily recalled awareness.  His teacher had told him he'd failed a drug test.  Maxwell had never had any inclination before in his life to take any drugs.  Was it possible that while he'd blacked out in some unaccounted for chunk of time that he'd actually purchased and consumed drugs in some way?  But why?  He didn't even know the first thing about how to acquire or actually use drugs in the first place!

            Nothing made any sense to him anymore.  How for granted had he taken his normal life where events travelled in a logical and linear fashion?  Cause and effect no longer even applied.  'Everything,' he thought, 'has basically turned itself upside down and inside out around me.'

           

            What did his classmates think?  As if he weren't enough of a pariah already, now he had this to deal with!  What did Jimmy think about his best friend?  He must by now figure Maxwell had been ditching him to secretly do drugs the past few weeks.  What did Jenna think?  It didn't matter that she was currently single or had even shown mild interest in him anymore.  There was simply no way she'd be interested in him now, not with everything he'd done in class, all of the trips he'd made to the principal's office and the fact that he'd been suspended for drug use.  She was out of his league before any of this had happened anyway.

            It all seemed like a joke to him the more he thought about it.  Minutes passed.  He could actually hear giggles!  It seemed to be coming from every direction around him but there was nothing in his room.  Surely there weren't any speakers in the walls.  Then he remembered why he was in this room in the first place and quickly realized there really wasn't any actual noise around him, anything he heard was probably just all inside his head.

           

            What did his mother think?  What about Dr. Schmidt?  They'd actually been the only two people that had actually cared about him.  Now they'd surely chalk him up as just another troubled loser, someone barely worth wasting their time with.  How incredibly disappointed they must be.  His mind played back over the scene in the office earlier in the day and how his principal was hardly able to keep eye contact with him.  Feelings of depression continued to intensify inside Maxwell's being.

            The hours slowly ticked away.  There wasn't a clock in his room, but the sunset gave way to the moon barely shining over the trees in the distance.  There it was, 'the man in the moon.'  Even 'he' seemed to be laughing at this whole spectacle before him.  'The universe has conspired to make my life a living hell,' he thought nonchalantly, and then recalled the story of Job.  The parallels were simply uncanny.

            The night was long and he couldn't sleep.  Images of the beast from his nightmare flashed through his thoughts.  Every now and then he seemed to lose his body and fall into the worst negative emotions he'd ever felt only to be brought back a few minutes later.  He felt like he were a castaway in a stormy ocean, gasping for air as each tidal wave pulled him further beneath the water's surface. 

            Still no sleep, even though he was so completely exhausted.

 

            Eventually the sky began to change, and the darkness gave way to a feathery pastel, a shade of purple, then into a deep red into a true orange and finally blue skies filled as fluffy cottonball clouds began to occupy the atmosphere. 

            He was caged inside this place, ' ... for how long?'

            The doctor came by to check on him.  He was given more medicine.  The nurses came by every now and then to check on him and clean him up.  The food was terrible.  He still didn't have an appetite, so it didn't really matter.

            Probably around four in the evening, his mother was able to come by and visit.  She stayed for an hour or so talking about this and that while Maxwell remained completely silent, all the while looking at the floor.  He felt strange, like he wasn't really there anymore.  He wondered if the medicine they were giving him made him feel this way. 

            Then his mother left.  The sun eventually began lowering again over the trees.  Maxwell felt like he was a million miles away, no other person in sight.  He couldn't feel anything.  This was a brief relief, but soon the feelings of depression and anxiety began to creep back into his head.

            The moon, again, stared at him, laughing at him, ... mocking him.

            'You knew about this too, didn't you,' he wondered to himself, or did he actually say it out loud?

            Again he couldn't sleep.  Shadows flickered against the walls.  There were no lights outside, 'Must be my mind playing tricks on me.'  He could hear voices, cackling voices, crying voices, souls that were lost in nether-realms never to be seen by their loved ones again.

            He could feel sadness so great that it felt as if every man, woman, and child on the entire planet had dumped their negative thoughts into a bullet that had invaded the heart of Maxwell's very soul.

            It wouldn't go away, and he couldn't fall to sleep.

 

            The sun was back.  The doctor came in.  The nurses soon followed.  He never said a word.  His mother brought a board game, but he didn't feel like playing.

            Again he didn't fall asleep.

           

            He'd been expelled from school.  He was going crazy and he was only twelve years old.  He'd been imagining that he'd had a friend named Tom this whole time, a man that had lived in an imaginary cave, a cave inside the woods of his own backyard.  Maxwell was crazier than this imaginary bum and Dr. Schmidt combined!

            The night was long and the thoughts continued to speed up in his mind.  More and more the visions, hallucinations, and terrible sights of demons and people all around the world suffering flowed through his mind-channel.  He felt the world suffering, her temperature rising.  He saw the icecaps melting as helpless polar bears struggled and splashed to their watery deaths.  He felt the screams of girls forced into prostitution all over the world.  He felt the last of a dying species being snuffed from existence.  He felt thousands of acres of rainforest being burned and destroyed never to return again.  He felt the pains of a boy who'd not eaten, living with a hunger so overwhelming he couldn't remember how both his parents had been killed in front of his very eyes only days before. 

            This all made sense to Maxwell as if he were the one experiencing these hardships.  He saw images of young children intentionally hurting defenseless animals, then saw their stories and understood how they came to be the way they are through the pain the world had given them from birth.  All of this sorrow continued to fill the depths of his very soul, and soon he began to drift from consciousness, ... but he did not sleep.  

            All around him was that of total darkness, and yet he was still aware, somehow still aware, and trapped inside a nightmarish world where everything that had ever been wrong forced itself into sense and understanding upon him. 

            Breathing, ... Maxwell had finally met the face of the beast, the nightmare of unconscious-awareness within itself.

chapter twenty two

Chapter Twenty Two

            When he entered the cave, Tom wasn't inside the apartment.  Maxwell searched the caverns and crevices, and still he found nothing.  He went back to the apartment and just sat there.  His anxiety slowly began to melt away into the usual feeling of euphoria he would begin to experience.  He closed his eyes and centered his mind.  Colorful planes twirled and twisted into hyper-dimensional geometric figures.   Calabi-Yau structure, and fanciful fractals.   The shapes had a grid pattern, and in between the lines he could see the texture of the objects.  The surface bubbled and foamed wildly with activity, like a boiling pot of water, but only more subtle and furious.  Out of the bubbles, like a geyser from a spring, a stream of numbers sprang forth.  He watched all of this in curious admiration and amazement.  The numbers themselves meant something.  Maxwell wasn't sure what it was, but he had a pretty strong intuition that it was the mathmatical representation of something truly grand, like pi or Euler's number.

            He sat in amazement.  It felt like wisdom was all around him, trapped inside space-time.  Maxwell was in a trance now, and were it not for the rapping of a hard and gnarled cane banging against his skull, he might've stayed in that beautiful place forever.

            "Ouch!  Don't do that, what's happening!?"  Darkness swallowed him whole as he opened his eyes.

            "Looks like your flashlight died," said a familiar voice, "Here, let me help."  Immediately the room was filled with Tom's typical bio-luminescence.  "This is the last time I'll see you for a while.  I have work to do, but so do you.  I figured it's only polite that I should tell you this so that you'd know not to bother wasting your time trying to find me."

            "Where are you going?  What kind of work are you going to be doing?"  Somehow he was sure these were pointless questions.

            "Don't worry, you'll find out soon enough.  Just know that I'm never as far away as you might think."

            Maxwell nodded.  He was surprised at how this news made him sad.  He'd managed to grow somewhat fond of this old bum.  Tom was his old bum.  Tom put the pipe to his mouth and took a strong drag.  The light radiating from his body intensified.  "I can't stress to you enough how important it is that you listen to me very closely.  Remember this when I say to you that things are not always as they seem.  You've seen things, and they're more significant than you might realize.  It'll be hard for you to understand, and even harder for those around you.  Remember to be friends with the world."

            He took a few more puffs, "Right now is a special time for your species on this planet.  It's a special time in evolution here.  The evolution of the cosmos is at a critical junction.  It's at a bifurcation point, where society and its relationship to all living things and to the living planet are in it's greatest state of instability.  In the final moments before the new age there will be escalating difficulties, up until a point in which I have called the bifurcation, where humanity either crumbles from its destructive force, or it takes its place as it ushers into a true heaven on earth.  You are one of these ushers.  There are more like you out there in the world right now."  He raised his cane and pointed towards the world above.  "There'll be many more to come, but not until after much suffering.  The earth has a fever and is employing built-in mechanisms to cope with humankind's destructive nature.  Wars, drought, widespread famine, global warming, new diseases, new drugs, mental insanity, humanity is at a stage of isolation, trapped by its own insanity.  Televisions and computers have replaced human to human contact. 

            Mankind is fragmented.  The self has become cut off from the community.  The ego of man has forgotten the much greater sea of consciousness of which it has always been a part.  A return to Eden is not only possible, but is eminent to those who choose to deliver it.  Earth will give way as the gates of heaven open up and flood the hearts and minds of every creature who chooses to accept it.  Go.  Be strong.  The lord is with thee.  Thy kingdom come, your world is one, for all and for forever."

 

            In a blaze of incredible light Tom dematerialized and the cave gave way to his bedroom, and he slept the deepest and most peacefully serene sleep of his entire life.

            The next day, when he awoke in his room, he realized he couldn't remember walking back, but wasn't that surprised, nor that alarmed.  He got dressed, ate cereal, then he and his mother went to church.

            Maxwell noticed a real difference. 

            His mind was absolutely quiet. 

             He was no longer lost in his own thought, and every word Father Wimbly said penetrated his mind and resonated inside his head.  Father spoke of Job, a servant of God who worshipped and remained faithful even though his world increasingly turned to shit. 

            God had blessed him greatly in his life and bit by bit, allowed everything to be taken away.  He lost his family, his health, all his money, livestock, and all his friends.  He grew old and ill, and yet still, he remained a fervent disciple.  God saw the faith of his son, and gave everything back to him and then some.  "The point, I believe, is to have faith no matter what, no matter who, no matter when.  We're being watched.  God may look like an impartial, detached, and even ambivilent god, but he is with us, and he is inside us, whether we want to believe it or not, and if we have faith, miracles can take shape inside our lives.  Furthermore, God is so wonderful that no matter how terrible this material world appears, it isn't as bad as we might think, because this material world is only an illusion, illusory, transient.  We'll all die and our bodies will decompose and our cities will crumble and Earth will descend into the Sun, but it's only a change that's taking place.  Our time here is short.  It's up to each one of us to fill it with meaning and purpose.  Like the larval caterpillar, we assemble our cocoon.  Someday we'll wake up transformed and fly away into the sun."

 

            This sermon resonated all sorts of truth inside Maxwell.  It seemed like slowly the picture that was once very blurry in his mind was beginning to clear up.  His life, which had been chaotic and messy for such a long period of time, was finally slowing down, but then again in many ways it was actually accelerating, and everything seemed to make more and more sense to him.  The context of things seemed to mesh together as if a tremendously deep understanding were merely inches away, ... and his eye suddenly twitched, ... but only for a moment, ... then it was gone.

            The next week went by quickly and was rather uneventful compared to recent weeks.  Maxwell felt pretty alright.  He didn't have any otherworldly visions.  It was, all in all, a pretty good week in fact, mainly in that it was very normal.  Ms. Mooseknuckle didn't give him any trouble, and he didn't act in a way that might even remotely draw negative attention to himself.  He was very busy with his project.  His team met up every night that week to prepare their case for evolution. He was quite infatuated with Jenna, and she seemed to at least show a mild interest in Maxwell in return.  She always laughed at him and Jimmy, who fed off of each other in the way only the best of friends know how to do.  She seemed to pay particular attention to Maxwell, and if he didn't know any better, he might've even gotten the impression that he actually stood a chance with her.

            Then, on the night before the last schoolday, the night before the final project, she showed up at the library in tears.

           

            "What happened? Are you alright?," Maxwell quickly inquired.

            "Yes, I'm fine.  Its just, ... "

            "Just what?  What happened?," Maxwell asked frantically.

            "Its nothing, really.  I just had a terrible fight with William.  He called me some pretty terrible things.  I told him to stop, he was mad at me for nothing, but he wouldn't stop, he just went crazy."

            "I'm sorry to hear that," Maxwell felt badly for her, and hated to see her crying.  He was also upset at William who didn't have any appreciation for how lucky he was to be with someone as awesome as Jenna.

            "Don't be sorry, I broke up with him.  Its okay, he can't get away with treating me like that."

            Maxwell was surprised by this response.  He was even more surprised that he was starting to feel sorry for William, even though he was a classical jerk.  He was mostly surprised by what Jenna said next. 

            "He was mad at me because, ... well, I guess he was complaining to me about how much time I spend with you and Jimmy, and he was upset that I always talk to him about you and how funny and smart you are."

            'What?,' Maxwell's heart, he was sure, had swollen to the size of a watermellon.  He felt dizzy and laughed giddily, "You didn't, ... I mean, he was upset because you were hanging out with us?  We were working on a school project for Christ's sake!  What's up with that?"

            "I know, but we started arguing and he was just saying incredibly mean things and, ... we really need to get to work, this project is due tomorrow."

            Maxwell wasn't able to pay attention at all the rest of the evening.  Everytime he looked at Jenna, he felt pangs of feelings he'd never experienced before.  He felt stupid in a way, but he didn't care. 

            They wrapped everything up and said goodnight.

            Maxwell got home that night and couldn't sleep.  How could he after what had just happened?  He kept thinking about what Jenna had said and how much he'd totally love to hug her and tell her how he felt, that is if he could actually put words to what it was that he felt, which he was pretty sure he couldn't.  He eventually went to sleep and just like that, his alarm clock was blaring in his ear. 

           

            Maxwell got ready for school with an unusual pep in his step.  His mother was taken aback when she saw him at the breakfast table before she'd even gotten downstairs.

            "You look handsome this morning," she said, "and you're smiling, too!  That's a good look on you, maybe you should try it more often!"

            "Yeah yeah," Maxwell said as he poured another bowl of cereal.

            Once he got to school there wasn't any time to waste.  Ms. Mooseknuckle was determined to get the class underway so she could get to summer faster.  Either summer or the buffet, but it was definitely one of the two.

            Team Creation started first, and a kid named Ackley Wilson was the first to give his speech.  Then another kid went up and talked, and then another, until all the kids from the opposing side gave their opinions.

            Then, it was Team Evolution’s turn to present their arguments.

            Maxwell felt the most curious thing during this whole demonstration.  He listened to each of the students, and he agreed with them, each and every one.  He couldn't have explained it if he tried, and on top of that, he saw a different radiant light coming out of every single student who spoke with the strongest light of all coming from none other than Phil Dick.  It was something truly innocent and pure.  With Phil, innocence and purity didn't really go together, so something had to give.

            Then it was Team Evolution's turn.  Vince went first.  As Vince spoke, Maxwell reviewed over everything the other side had said. 

            One kid, whom Jimmy called Bumpkin, talked about how the Bible didn't say there was evolution, so there couldn't have been any evolution.  Maxwell laughed at the idiocy of the statement, but then as he continued thinking about it, he realized that this wasn't terrible logic.  Not for a country kid, another endearing term conjured up by none other than Jimmy.  This Bumpkin kid was raised to believe the Bible was the whole truth and nothing but the truth and to question nothing, so to him, it really was everything. 

            Another kid, who Maxwell referred to as boy genius, eloquently stated that, "people didn't come from monkeys.  I've never seen a monkey born from a human being, except in the paper at the checkout at the grocery store, but they were monkey-alien hybrid babies."  This made sense to Maxwell as well, as dumb of an argument as it were.  Monkeys never really could be birthed from a female human.  In fact, each feeble argument that the creation side had come up with, Maxwell agreed with on some level.  

            Vince finished his speech and gave way to a kid named Ernie.  "Evolution is one hundred percent verifiably proven by science to be true because fossils show verifiable evidence of creatures that existed well before the time of Genesis.  Carbon dating has shown this to be the case, and, ... blah, blah, blah," was all Maxwell could hear at that point.

            Just as he heard this, another strange sentiment washed over Maxwell as now he started seeing the problems presented by his teammates retorts.  Evolution really wasn't proven to be true by science at all, it was only a theory.  There were all kinds of holes and things that no scientist could explain about evolution.

            Then Jimmy spoke, and then Jenna.  They both spoke very well and made lots of interesting points.  But Maxwell was thinking even more crazy thoughts right now and didn't know if he was even going to be able to speak because his mind was swimming with the ideas of all of the kids in the class and his incredible and sudden loss of trust in all the scientific research he'd sifted through over the previous few weeks.

            "Alright Jenna, thank you very much.  That'll be our last speech of the day, you'll all be getting 'A's for participating, class dismissed."

            "But Maxwell didn't get a chance to speak!," Jenna exclaimed. 

            "Yeah!," said Jimmy, "you forgot Maxi-pad!"  

            As it turns out, he wouldn't have to give any speech at all, which was probably a good thing because the class was literally blinding Maxwell from the light radiating off the students.  His mind was swimming away, far away, ... he felt like he was about to lose it again in front of everyone, that is, until Ms. Dick tapped him on the shoulder.

            "What?  Where am I?"

            "You're in the principal's office.  Son, I'm sorry to say that you won't be able to go to school here anymore.  We have a strict zero-tolerance policy for drug use in our school system.  We wish you the best of luck next year at, ... well, at wherever your mother decides to enroll you." 

            Dr. Schmidt was at his desk.  When Maxwell looked at him, incredulously, he turned away.  This left Maxwell speechless, 'how could this possibly happen?'

            The room began to swirl, ... but slowly he maintained his composure.  He couldn't think as his head began to throb with the worst migraine headache imaginable.  The next couple of hours became fuzzy to him.  The world seemed to be coming apart by the seems.

            Before he knew it, he was in front of his mother as she shook her head in disbelief.  He told her he'd been expelled from school as the headache intensified.  There was a definite ringing in his ears.  The room was beginning to swirl again, and Maxwell blinked a couple of times in an attempt to make it all go back to normal. 

           

            The world was falling apart around Maxwell and he was completely helpless in every possible way, no longer at all in control of his body.  He thought to himself, 'on some level, deep inside of my very soul, ... go within, ... go to, ... the cave.' 

            He was in the woods now, standing in front of the great monstrosity.  The headache now was even worse.  He felt a burning sensation shooting from his spine into his forehead, and his stomach seemed to bulge with a painful gas.  The ringing in his ears intensified.

            He looked inside the cave, and he was sure, if only for a moment, that it actually had a pair of eyes looking back at him.  Two fiery red eyes, blinking at him.

            He was still dizzy, as if he could fall down and pass out at any moment.

            The beast was inside the cave, he could feel it's presence.  It had him now, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

            Blink, blink.

            His head was pounding furiously.  If it got any worse, he was sure he wouldn't be able to take it, and it actually did get worse.  The ringing now became a roar.  For a moment he blacked out as a cross flashed in front of his face, then he was back in front of the cave again. 

            "NOW I HAVE YOU!" 

            "Who said that?," Maxwell looked around, there was nothing but the forest behind him.  The colors and the leaves and the grass and everything was melting and merging together.  He blinked his eyes and it was normal for only a second, but the ringing was getting louder, ... Maxwell felt like he was about to pass out for sure, and then he turned around to, ...

            "Maxwell, what are you doing out here!?"

            Blink, blink, ... the headache was gone.  The ringing was gone.  Everything was, ... back to normal.  There he was, in the middle of the woods in his own back yard, with his mother, standing there, looking at him.

            "What are you doing out here?  Are you okay, son?  You look like something was bothering you and I tried to get your attention, but you just looked at me like, ... like I don't know, ... like you weren't even there.  You looked like you'd seen a ghost!"

            "I'm fine, mom, everything is, ... fine."  Maxwell sighed in relief now that it was over, "I was just coming out here to go into the cave, see?  That's it right there!"

            His mother looked at him blankly.

            "Well?"

            Her expression now turned to complete perplextion, "Well, what?  Where's this cave you're talking about?"

            "It's right there, can't you see it?"  Maxwell turned around to point, but there was nothing there for him to point at, nothing except trees, a few shrubs, and a small creek flowing through the undergrowth.

            "I don't see anything, Christopher."  Her confused look changed into one of growing anger, "This isn't funny young man.  If you're joking around with me, so help me God, ... "

            "But it really was just there,"  Maxwell found himself feeling very confused, exasperated in fact. 

            It really wasn't there. 

            In this very moment Maxwell slowly understood how completely arbitrary and malleable this reality actually is. 

            Not more than twenty minutes later Maxwell's mother was on the phone with Sunnydale, a behavioral hospital for the wayward and disturbed.