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.
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