Chapter 1

As Eric Ziegler celebrates his fifteenth birthday on a hot, sunny day in mid-July, he finds himself ... what’s the best way to put it ... in transition? Over the last year or so, it feels like everything around him and about him is changing. Not just physically, although there’s a lot of that going on as well, but perceptually. From one day to the next, things often feel different somehow. Unexpected thoughts and sensations pounce upon him when he least expects them; things he doesn’t fully understand yet. It’s nothing he’s even conscious of, really. It’s just sort of... there. He just feels, well, a bit unsettled.

In hindsight, there was nothing at all mysterious about his feeling at loose ends. Anyone who has survived puberty and somehow managed to claw his or her way into young adulthood, especially anyone who has some rudimentary understanding of the emotional chaos brought about by adolescent physical and hormonal changes would certainly recognize Eric’s condition for what it was. He was in a state of flux, and flux is defined in the dictionary as a state of constant change, and that’s how he had been feeling for some time; like every day brought a new challenge.

Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with it, to make sense of it all. But that’s how that works, isn’t it? It’s very hard to make sense of change when one is right in middle of it, surrounded by it, consumed by it. One really needs to be on the outside looking in to make any kind of objective assessment.

Eric is a bright kid, considerably above average, IQ-wise, so maybe he’s just a little more intellectually sensitive to what’s going on than most kids his age, and it is in his nature to analyze things. While most young people who are pubescent or post-pubescent may be inclined to compare notes with their friends as they try to make sense of so many emerging complexities, Eric, being an only child and pretty much a loner as well, has never felt close enough to his peers to share his inner-most feelings with them, so much of what he discovers as he stumbles and slogs his way through life’s travails he learns through self-analysis.

He isn’t actively shunned by his peers, it’s just that Eric tends to be a bit stand-offish, and he can be rather brusque, sometimes coming off like a teenage Scrooge, so the other kids don’t go out of their way to get to know him or invite him into their cliques and clubs. Most of them probably see him as aloof, unfriendly, and kind of a creep, but that wouldn’t really be accurate because Eric doesn’t make a point of being that way. It’s just that for some reason that may have to do with the wiring in his brain, he feels uncomfortably out of place in social settings, so he simply avoids them. One might think that would lead to feelings of loneliness or isolation, but he’s learned to be content in his own company.

Young Eric has an insatiably curious mind, and that drives him to spend much of his time reading. He’s perfectly content to spend hours and hours tucked up in his room with his nose in a book or scanning the internet for little tidbits of information on just about anything and everything, rather fancying himself a collector of odd and interesting facts. His brain seems to have a boundless capacity for accumulating arcane and, to a large extent, useless information.

On the family front, Eric is an only child who loves his mom and dad, even though, like many youngsters in their early and mid-teens, he sometimes considers them to be clueless nit-wits. Nevertheless, he sees them as otherwise good people who dote on him, probably to excess. They are solid, temple-attending folks of the Jewish persuasion who are generally respected and liked in the community. They’ve done their absolute darnedest to bring their son up to believe in truth, justice, and the American way, as they see it. They have always been conscientious in providing what they believe is a solid role model of responsibility and morality in the Jewish tradition. His bar mitzvah was a very big event, although probably much more so for the proud parents than for the boy becoming a man.

Yet, while he loves his mom and dad, his life experiences, limited though they may be, have taught him to not blindly look to them as the definitive source of knowledge, the resource to help him make sense of the innumerable questions constantly plaguing his volatile adolescent mind. Why is that? It’s because even before he began to descend into the maelstrom of puberty where parent figures often represent all that is wrong with the world, Eric already knew in his heart that a lot of what they had taught him as he was growing up was just so much crap. It was myth, imagined, taken on faith with no basis in fact.

Oh, he knew they weren’t intentionally lying to him; just very much misinformed about a lot of things. The early myths like Santa Clause, the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy had already been relegated to the dust bin by the time he was three, and that was just the beginning. Precocious kids tend to catch on to misrepresentations like that early in life, recognizing for the first time that grownups are often liars.

The boy’s mind is nothing if not logical, and depending on the company one keeps, that can be either a blessing or a curse. Logic tells him that if something is presented as a truth, it should be evidence-based and it should be supported by facts. Ideas like God, religious tenets, folklore, moralistic social and behavioral norms should be able to stand up to intense scrutiny, and much of what he has been taught during his formative years does not, in his humble opinion, reach that bar. He is convinced that the word “faith”, especially as it applies to religious beliefs, is a cop-out and must have been invented by and for those who are too lazy or too lame-brained to seek out definitive answers or even to trust their own instincts.