Challenger Deep (14 page)
Authors: Neal Shusterman
The voices can’t be real, but they’re very good at making you forget that.
“They’re telling me it’s the end of the world if I don’t stop whatever is going to happen.”
“Who’s telling you?” your mother asks.
But you don’t answer. You don’t want your parents to know about the voices, so you just moan, and think about all the movies where one person is chosen to save the world.
“You’re our only hope,”
those movies always say. So what if those heroes never faced their destinies? What if they just lay there in bed and let their mothers rub their backs? What if they did nothing? What kind of movie would that be?
The captain calls me into his study. Just him and me. The parrot is nowhere to be seen. Last I saw, the parrot was down in the galley, hopping from shoulder to shoulder, peering in sailors’ ears to make sure they still had brains. Now the parrot winks at me any time he sees me, to remind me of our secret conversation.
“Do you trust me, Caden?” the captain asks.
If I lie, he’ll know it, so I tell him the truth. “No,” I say.
My answer makes him smile. “Good boy. That means you’re learning. I’m proud of you. More proud than you could know.”
It throws me for a loop. “I thought you hated me.”
“Far from it!” he says. “The trials I put you through are to burn away the chaff. To purify you. Make no mistake, boy, you are the
brightest hope for this mission. All of my hopes are on you.”
I’m not sure what to say to this. I wonder if he says this to all the crewmen, but somehow I sense that he’s sincere.
“Truth be told, I am greatly concerned about things on my ship, boy. Not the ocean without, but the tides within.” Then he leans close. “I know she speaks to you. Calliope. She tells you things that she tells no others. That’s proof that you are special. That you are chosen.”
I don’t say a thing. Not until I know where this is going.
“If there are things she knows, you are the one she’ll tell.”
Then I realize that maybe I’m finally in a position to have a little bit of power. “If she tells me things, she tells me in confidence. Why should I break that confidence and tell you?”
“I am your captain!”
And when I don’t respond, he growls and storms back and forth behind his desk. “Or maybe you answer to the parrot.” He pounds his fist against the bulkhead. “That mutinous fowl! He sows seeds of sedition among the crew even as he sits on my shoulder.”
Then he grabs me and looks at me closely with his good eye, just as the parrot had. “Does Calliope say there’ll be a mutiny? Does she say the bird will prevail?”
I stay calm. “I’ll ask her,” I tell him.
He is relieved. “Good boy. I knew you were loyal.” Then he whispers, “When the time comes, I shall let you do the honors.”
“What honors?”
He smiles. “The honors of killing the parrot.”
When I was younger, whenever I looked at dollar bills, I always had a strange sense that Washington was glaring at me. It was funny, and a little bit creepy. It wasn’t just Washington. Hamilton was totally judgmental with that perpetual smirk. Jackson was the worst. That disturbingly high forehead, and superior gaze, accusing me of spending my money unwisely. Only Franklin was friendly, but it wasn’t like I got to see him often.
Maybe this should have been a sign that something was seriously up with me. Or maybe everyone thinks nutty, quirky things like that. I mean, it’s not like I thought they were really looking at me—it was just a funny thought I’d bounce around for no particular reason. It never stopped me from actually using money. At least not until recently.
We always look for the signs we missed when something goes wrong. We become like detectives trying to solve a murder, because maybe if we uncover the clues, it gives us some control. Sure, we can’t change what happened, but if we can string together enough clues, we can prove that whatever nightmare has befallen us, we
could
have stopped it, if only we had been smart enough. I suppose it’s better to believe in our own stupidity than it is to believe that all the clues in the world wouldn’t have changed a thing.
“We’re going on a trip,” your father tells you. You know he’s been crying.
“What kind of trip? Is it a cruise?”
“If you like,” he says. “But we’ve got to go; the ship sails soon.”
You can’t remember the last time you slept. Insomnia doesn’t cover this. It’s anti-somnia. A viral wakefulness that’s so contagious, it would wake the dead if you got close enough. You truly believe this. You fear it. Every thought that comes into your head becomes a truth to fear.
The voices are still speaking, but they haven’t slept either, so now they just grumble nonsense. You pick up the feelings behind their gibberish, though. Those feelings are not good. They brim with foreboding, bitter warnings, and hints at your importance in the universe.
You don’t want to take this trip. You have to stay here to protect your sister. She’s off with friends now. Away from home. But you need to be here when she gets back. And then you look into your parents’ bloodshot eyes, and you realize they want to protect her, too. And that it’s you she needs protection from.
You’re in the car now. Your parents talk, but their words are as jumbled as the voices inside, and although you know the car is just the trusty family Honda, your parents in the front seat begin to feel further and further away. Suddenly you’re in the back of a limo, and someone is sucking out the oxygen. You can’t breathe.
You try to open the doors and jump out on the freeway, but the doors won’t open. Someone has put on the child safety locks. You curse and scream, and say the most horrible things. Anything to get them to stop and let you out, but they don’t. They try to calm you. Your father can barely drive the car with the commotion you’re causing, and you wonder if the horrible thing you’re worried about is a car accident that will kill you all, and maybe you’re the one causing it, so you put your head in your hands instead of trying to escape.
You go down a steep hill. Suddenly the car’s not a limo anymore, it’s a padded elevator, and you’re going down the diagonal slope of the black pyramid, into its hidden depths—deep, deep underground.
The vehicle pulls into a parking lot at the bottom of a hill. A sign out front says
SEAVIEW MEMORIAL HOSPITAL
, but it’s a lie. Everything is.
Five minutes later, your parents sit across from a chipmunk-cheeked woman with glasses too small for her face. They fill out paperwork, but you don’t care, because you’re not really here. You’re watching from an untouchable distance.
To keep yourself from pacing, you focus on the fish tank. A liquid oasis in a desert of uncomfortable institutional chairs. Lionfish, clown fish, anemone. An ocean, condensed and captured.
There’s a small child pounding the glass with his palm. The fish dart away, bumping their noses against the invisible barrier that contains their world. You know how this feels. Tormented by something incomprehensible and so much larger than yourself.
You know how it feels to want to escape, only to be limited by the dimensions of your personal universe.
A mother calls to the boy in Spanish, then pulls him away when he doesn’t come, and you begin to wonder,
Am I on the outside or the inside of that tank?
Because the rules of “here” and “there” don’t have a clear place in your head anymore. You are as much the objects around you as you are yourself. Maybe you are in the tank with them. The fish may be monsters, and you may be afloat on a doomed vessel—a pirate ship, perhaps—unaware of the breadth and the depth of the peril it sails upon. And you hold on to that, because no matter how frightening that is, it’s better than the alternative. You know you can make that pirate ship as real as anything else, because there’s no difference anymore between thought and reality.
I am trapped in a conspiracy of conspiracies. On one side, the parrot and I plot mutiny. Not so much with words, but with glances. Nods. Clandestine winks of his single seeing eye. My artwork seethes with secret messages for him. Or at least he thinks so.
On the other side, the captain and I plot the parrot’s end. He, too, winks at me with his one working eye, and decorates the walls of his quarters with what he calls “the telltale visions of a captain triumphant.”
“Share with no one the secret meaning of your creations,” he whispers to me. “We shall feed the parrot to the beasts of the deep, as your drawings suggest, and none will be the wiser.”
I know these two plots will come together like matter and antimatter, annihilating me in the explosion, but I see no way out. No way to stop it. It’s coming as surely as are the beasts that protect the mysteries of Challenger Deep.
The hospital paperwork is signed. The deal with the devil is done. The lady with the cheeks and small glasses looks at you with a gaze of false but practiced kindness.
“It’s gonna be okay, sweetie,” she says, and you glance behind you, wondering if maybe she’s talking to someone else. You and your parents are led to a different wing of the hospital. A specialized wing. Your parents grip each other. A single creature with four weeping eyes.
You think you’re okay with this, because you still watch it all from a distance, until it’s time for your parents to head for the door, and you realize there is no distance at all. You are here and about to be stranded terrifyingly alone. You are about to be keelhauled, and all the premonitions join together into one and you know for a fact beyond any doubt that something terrible will happen to you, to your parents, to your sister, to your friends, but
mostly to you if they leave you here.
So you panic. You’ve never been violent, but now your life depends on fighting your way free from this. The fate of the very world depends on you being anywhere but here.
But they’re shrewd. They’re sly. Brawny men in pastel scrubs descend on you from nowhere. They grab you and hold you back.
“No!” you scream. “I’ll be good! I won’t do it anymore!” You don’t even know what “it” is, but whatever it is you’ll stop if you don’t have to be left here.
Hearing your pleas, your parents hesitate by the door as if they might change their minds—but a nurse in a pastel-pink outfit comes between you and them.
“The longer you stay,” she tells your parents, “the harder it will be for him, and the harder it will be for us to do our jobs.”
“They’re killing me!” you scream. “They’re killing me!” And just by hearing yourself say it, it becomes true, but your parents turn around and escape through a series of doors that open and close like canal locks, going out into a night that seems to have fallen from daylight only seconds ago. Now you think that maybe you were right. Maybe they’re not your parents at all, but impostors.
Your adrenaline makes you almost stronger than the three pastel men holding you. Almost. In the end they wrestle you into a room, and onto a bed, and you feel a sharp sting in your ass. You turn just in time to see a nurse pulling away a hypodermic needle, its lethal load already delivered. In seconds your arms and legs are secured in padded restraints, and you feel the shot begin to take effect.
“You rest up, dear, everything will be fine,” the nurse tells you.
“You’ll be better for this.”
Then the poison they put in your ass reaches your brain, and your mind spreads thin like an oil slick on the surface of an ocean.
And you discover, for the first time, the White Plastic Kitchen. A place you will visit again and again. A gateway to all the places you don’t want to be.
78. Realm of the Forgiving Sun
I have this dream. I’m lying on a beach someplace where they don’t speak English—or if they do, it’s only because so many American tourists are there, spending money they don’t have on things they don’t need, and burning lobster-red beneath an unforgiving sun.
The sun forgives me, though. It forgives all of us—my mom, my dad, and my sister. It sheds warmth and light upon us without any threat of consequence. No sunscreen required.
The sounds here are all sounds of joy. Laughter. Children playing. The voices of bargaining beach vendors who sell shiny wares with such charisma that people can’t resist them. Happy tourists walk away festooned in silver and gold, their new jewelry jingling like Christmas bells with every step.
My sister plays in the gentle turquoise surf, looking for shells. The hiss of waves breaking at her ankles is a gentle sigh, as if the sea itself has found lasting contentment.
My parents hold hands and walk along the beach. My father
wears his favorite white straw fedora, saved exclusively for tropical vacations, because it looks so ridiculous anywhere else. There’s no talk of bills or taxes, and he has no numbers to crunch. Mom is happily barefoot, and no matter how warm the sun is, the sand stays cool. She has no one’s teeth to clean today. They both stroll with an easy pace that speaks of no destination.
As for me, I sit in the sand, enjoying the gritty feeling as it sifts through my wriggling toes. In my hands is a tall glass with a cool drink beaded with condensation that catches the sunlight, refracting it like a kaleidoscope. I sit there on the beach, and I do absolutely nothing. I think absolutely nothing. I am satisfied just to be in the moment.
In this place, there is no kitchen except for an outdoor grill serving up shrimp further along the beach. The aroma is pleasing; a carnal incense like burnt offerings to the God of Infinite Vacation.
In this place there is no ship but the sleek racing yacht sailing out of the bay, blown by a custom-made zephyr, sending it off to points even more exotic than this.
Everything feels right with the world . . .
. . . and the sad thing is that I know it’s a dream. I know it must soon end, and when it does I will be thrust awake into a place where either I’m broken, or the world is broken.
So I curse the perfect beach, and the cool, quenching drink that I can feel in my hand, but can never, ever raise to my lips.