chapter eleven

Chapter Eleven

            The next morning came all too soon and Maxwell once again found himself awakened by the familiar sound of his alarm clock.  As he got out of bed, his body painfully reminded him of his adventure the day before.  His muscles ached all over and all the bruises and scratches he'd received from banging around in the cave were extraordinarily tender.  Maxwell grimaced as he pulled himself out from under his sheets.  The day would go on, and there was nothing he could do but go along with it.

            He slowly got dressed and combed his hair which was now a disheveled mop that he couldn’t quite control.  He then brushed his teeth and splashed cold water onto his face, hoping to somehow wake himself up a bit more. 

            Gingerly, he made his way into the kitchen.  His mother was already sitting at the table with her newspaper and coffee.  She had made him bacon and eggs, which  made Maxwell wonder what the special occasion might be.  Unknown to him his mother felt badly for her son.  She felt badly about him being suspended and having to go to a psychiatrist and for all the other outrageous things he'd endured lately, so she wanted to give him a reason to smile.  Her plan didn’t work, though.  It wasn't that he was ungrateful.  In fact, he was very grateful, but his heart was very heavy this morning.  He was so lost in his thoughts that his face remained hardened.

            They said their 'good mornings' as Maxwell eagerly devoured his breakfast.  He'd been very hungry lately, no matter how much he ate.  This all made him remember the fact that he didn't have any lunch money. I sure hope that old bum got some use out of that twenty and didn’t just spend it on booze. Realizing that he'd never make it through the day without eating, he grabbed a toaster pastry, quickly stuffed it in his pocket, and joined his mother in the car. 

            "Are you excited about going back to school?," his mother asked him.

            "Is that a serious question?," Maxwell replied laughing.

            His mother, appearing somewhat annoyed by this response didn't have anything to add and so off they drove into the morning light.  As they pulled out of the driveway, the sun shined directly in Maxwell’s eyes.

            "You know Max, you really should try to enjoy these days while you still can," his mother said as she squinted to navigate the road ahead.  "Someday you'll be all grown up and you'll have more responsibilities.  It won't get any easier than it is right now, you know."

            "Is that supposed to make me feel better?  I can't imagine it being much worse."  His mother just shook her head.  She wanted to say something to make him feel better, but every time she tried to give her son a little perspective, it never seemed to work.  So she simply said nothing, and on they drove into the silence.      

            That is until Maxwell broke it.  "Mom, have you ever known me to sleep walk?" Naturally he had been wondering how he ended up in the cave all morning long, and no matter how much he tried wrapping his head around the circumstances, it just didn't make sense.

            His mother didn't respond immediately, but rather scratched her head in contemplation.  "Not that I can recall," she replied finally, still contorting her face as if querying the deeper recesses of her psyche.   After a few minutes of silence, she retracted her last statement, "Actually, when you were much younger there was this one time.  You were very sick if I can recall it correctly.  You'd been running a high temperature for several days, and you were laid up in bed.  One evening your father and I were watching the eleven o'clock news when you came down the stars and began talking to us.  You didn't really make any sense.  You were rambling on and on about some kind of beast or something.  It was all kind of funny, really.  You suddenly woke up mid-sentence and looked very confused!  You had no idea what you'd been talking about, or how you'd even gotten into the living room at all!"

            Maxwell vaguely remembered this occurrence.  He remembered having strange and terrible emotions during that dream.  "What exactly was I talking about when I was mumbling about a beast?," he asked.  He was thinking about the beast-like thing he'd seen during his first “picture” dream.

            "It's hard to remember exactly, it was such a long time ago.  I just remember you were going on and on about some beast, or animal, or something.  You said it was everywhere, and it was coming after you.  Strange, huh?  I wonder what you meant by that?"

            Maxwell wondered as well, The beast is everywhere?  It's coming after me?'  At this point they arrived at the school.  She gave her son a kiss and wished him a good day.

            "Mom do you have to do that?," he moaned as he wiped his mother's kiss off his cheek as if she were contagious from an orally transmittable disease. 

            "You're still my baby," she replied, "and you'll always be, so that means I'll always be able to kiss you on your cheek, okay?"

            He rolled his eyes and walked toward the building.  As much as he'd never admit it, he was glad his mother showed him affection.  He just didn't like feeling so lame all the time. 

            Maxwell got into his seat just as Ms. Butterball began taking roll.  The classroom was getting loud and Maxwell had a sidesplittingly painful headache to go along with all his generally uncomfortable bumps and bruises.  He wished that everyone would just shut their yaps, but of course that was not likely to happen, not in this class at least, not with these students.

           

            Throughout the morning lectures, Maxwell's mind would continue to go back to the mysterious cave.  Nobody would ever believe that he'd somehow slept-walked himself into some hole in the middle of his back yard, so after much deliberation, he decided it would remain his “secret.”

           

His mind shifted gears.

             Three things stood out in mind.  For one, it was how he'd come to be in the cave in the first place.  It was hard enough finding his way out of the cave when he was awake, so how in God's name did he get in there while he was still unconscious?  Secondly, as he was crawling and climbing and splashing his way through the dark of the abyss, how is it that he felt like he wasn't even in his body any longer?  It was like a state of no-thingness, ... it was a state of action without thought.  Pure animal-like instinct got him out alive.  He was no longer in control, no longer in his head so to speak, just like when he clocked Phil in his nose.  He doubted he would have ever been able to make his way out if he'd been in his head the whole time pretty much 'thinking' instead of 'reacting'.  Perhaps it was a lack of sensory stimulus that made him feel as though he were no longer inside his body.  He couldn't say for sure what exactly it was that was inside of this kind of sensation?  After he finally did get out of the cave, and for a couple hours thereafter, he found himself in a state of ecstatic bliss.  He didn't have any anxiety, and he certainly didn't have any concern.  Everything looked so wonderful and so fresh and so completely alive, and everything seemed as if it were perfectly in it's right place.  He'd never felt anything remotely like that before in all his entire life.  The feeling didn't last for long, though, but it was a nice departure all the same.  He wanted to have this feeling again.  He was even willing to chase after this feeling if he had too.

            Meanwhile the morning continued, and Ms. Butternut droned on and on.  He glanced over at Jenna every so often.  She and William would pass notes back and forth and giggle at each other.  This made Maxwell very jealous and even more upset.  He couldn't imagine liking any girl ever as much as he liked Jenna, and he hadn't even talked to her before.  She'd never feel that way about him.  Then he remembered how she was on his group-project team, and this caused him a great deal of anxiety.  What would he say to her?  He knew he'd end up stammering and saying something dumb, and that would make him feel even more worthless.

            Even for Maxwell, this was a very negative sort of morning.  Something just didn't feel right.  His mind didn't feel right.  It was probably a good thing that he was seeing a psychiatrist.  Maybe there really was a cure for whatever it was that was making him feel so terrible.  

            Just then, out of the blue, his eyelids began twitching again, and for about twenty seconds both eyelids blinked simultaneously, completely involuntarily, then suddenly they stopped.  Maxwell had come out of the clouds and was back in his classroom, completely present and very on edge.  'This can't be happening again!,' the nervous tick-telegraph, 'not after I'd just gotten rid of it yesterday!'  So he sat there, completely still, mind completely silent, ... waiting.

            "Now we're going to talk about Plato and some of his concepts," Ms. Butternut continued in her lecture, "more specifically, we're going to talk about his allegory in the cave."

            Obviously this caught Maxwell's attention.  He wasn't even surprised by such coincidences at this point, but he knew he'd better start listening to his teacher right about 'now-thirty'.  He had a feeling that she might say something pertinent to his current situation.  His eyelids, it seemed, were alerting him to this very lecture.  Perhaps Ms. Butternut had something important to say after all!

            "Settle down now children, settle down," Ms. Butternut pleaded.  "The allegory of the cave.  Imagine that you're a prisoner inside a far away cave.  Your feet are chained to the floor, and they've been chained that way for as long as you can remember.  You've never seen anything but the cave itself, and therefore you have no idea that anything but the cave itself exists.  On top of being chained in place, your head is locked into place so that you can only see what is directly in front of you.  That's all you've ever seen, only that which is directly in front of you.  And in front of you is a wall that acts as a screen.  Now behind you is a road, and behind the road is a giant fire which burns perpetually.  This road is travelled on by other 'cave people', and so a shadow depicting the cave people is thus cast from the light coming off of the fire onto the wall in front of your eyes."

            Maxwell, for the first time in weeks, had his notebook out and was busily jotting down notes.  He was so excited that his heart felt like it was going to jump out of his chest.  His palms were getting sweaty and his fingers began hurting because he had to clutch his pencil so tightly just to prevent it from slipping out of his hands. 

            "Imagine now that 'you' are this cave prisoner, and all you've ever seen in your entire life are shadows dancing on a wall in front of you.  What logical conclusion would you make?"

            Maxwell immediately raised his hand.

Ms. Butternut, senile as she was, did not see Maxwell’s hand raised.  So she began to answer the question, herself.

            "You would think that the “real thing” was the shadow itself, rather than the cave dwellers casting a shadow from the fire, which the prisoners weren't even aware of."

            Maxwell slowly dropped his hand, hoping that no one would notice he'd even raised it.  This wasn't the case though, as several girls began quietly giggling behind him. 

            "Put your hand down, queer!  Stop embarrassing yourself.”

            Maxwell got so upset at this remark that he could actually hear his heart beating in his ears, 'What on earth would compel someone to be such a jackass?'  His jaw was clenched as his teeth began grinding together.  Embarrassment, and to a greater extent, rage, was swelling up from deep down inside.

            All of a sudden, the lights cut out.  The classroom went silent.  After a few moments, the power flickered back on

             Ms. Butternut continued with her lecture as if nothing had happened.  She didn't even seem to realize that the lights had gone out at all.  Maxwell shook his head and slowly began to drift back into the depth of the thoughts of his intellect.