Authors: Neal Shusterman
Challenger Deep (15 page)
79. Submitted for Your Approval
Consciousness is a relative concept when you’re pumped full of psychoactive meds. It’s not an either/or proposition. It’s as if the interface between being asleep and being awake has gone supernova, exploding and swallowing everything around it with cosmic shrapnel. Nothing survives but an abiding sense of being
elsewhere
. A place where time isn’t a straight, predictable line, but is more like a toddler’s knotted shoelace. A place where space bubbles and twists like a funhouse mirror in four dimensions, and everyone’s a scary clown. You are the little faceless figure falling through a world of shadow and substance at the beginning of
The Twilight Zone,
cottony thoughts leaking from your oblong head.
Rod Serling must have been severely psychotic when he came up with that show.
Sometimes you realize you’re on a bed in a hospital. Sometimes you’re convinced it’s the White Plastic Kitchen. And other times you’re certain that you’ve been sewn to the billowing sails of a ship. The dizziness is real, and some of the faces are, too, but good luck figuring out which ones, and what they really look like. They tell you that you were only “restrained” on that first night when
you appeared to be violent, but it still feels like you’re tied to the billowing bed.
People come and go, talking to you, and you hear yourself respond, but don’t feel your lips making the words. You don’t feel your toes or fingertips either.
“How are you feeling?”
You’re asked this a lot. Or maybe you’re only asked it once, and the other times are just echoes.
“Salted snail,” you hear yourself say in a medicated slur. “I think I peed myself.”
“Don’t you worry about that. We’ll take care of it.”
You think maybe they’ll put you in one of those adult diapers, and then realize that maybe they already have, but you can’t tell, and don’t want to find out. You want to retreat into your shell, spiraling in and in and in, but you realize you don’t have a shell. You’re more of a slug than a snail. You have no protection at all.
Through all of it, the voices in your head are still talking at you, but they’re too stoned to have much impact, and you realize this isn’t all that different from chemotherapy for cancer. They bombard the whole body with bad crap, hoping it will knock out the disease, and leave the rest alive. The question is, will poisoning the voices kill them, or just make them really, really pissed off?
“Today,” says the captain in his most commanding voice, “I shall share a tale of these waters that I do not need a lore-master to verify, for this one I know by heart.”
The parrot, growing wary, takes a healthy sidestep away, perhaps not wanting to associate himself with anything the captain says.
“It begins with a great captain, name of Ahab,” he tells us, “and ends with another captain, name of Nemo.”
And although I know I’m risking another brand on my forehead or worse, I say, “Excuse me, but I don’t believe those two fictional characters ever met.”
“They did, boy!” says the captain, with far more patience than I expected. “In fact, they were fast friends—which was part of the problem. However, this story is less about them, and more about their great Nemesi.”
I consider pointing out that
nemesi
might not actually be the plural of
nemesis
, but I figure I’ll quit while I’m ahead.
“The
Nautilus
, that mysterious submarine that carried Nemo for twenty thousand leagues and more, was under endless siege by the giant squid that threatened to take her down to the depths. As the
Nautilus
raced away from the squid, it chanced to encounter the
Pequod
, and Ahab, in pursuit of the white whale. There was a collision, and the
Pequod
was sunk.” Then he looks at me and says mockingly, “
You
would tell me that it was the whale that took the
ship and its captain down, but Melville was wrong. His story was a fabrication told to him by Ishmael, who was sworn to keep the captain’s secret.”
The parrot whistles with either disgust or appreciation at the spandex flexibility of the yarn.
“Be that as it may,” continues the captain, “Nemo rescued Ahab from the water, and in a single glance, the two captains realized they were men of like minds, and sailed off in the submarine until they found the Sea of Green, and thus lived happily ever after.” He pauses, perhaps expecting applause, but receives none, so he continues. “Their beasts, however, found no such affinity for each other.” Then the captain spreads out his arms and his eye goes wide. “Huge they were, the white whale and the giant squid. Grotesque freaks of nature, but of opposing sorts. Sentient and strange was the squid, confounding the sea around it with inky darkness. An eight-armed monstrosity—a beast of chaos that defied all logic. The whale, on the other hand, was all sense and seemliness. Its great echolocating brain could calculate dimension and distance. It knew everything worth knowing about the world it inhabited, while the squid saw nothing beyond the cloud of its own ink. Naturally they despised each other.”
Then he pounds his fist on the table so hard it makes all of us jump, and the parrot flaps his wings powerfully enough to lose a few feathers. “Great men of the sea must never abandon their beasts!” the captain announces. “Now, thanks to those two neglectful men, their Nemesi are doomed to wage war against each other until the end of time, growing angrier and angrier with each passing year!”
He takes a moment to stare each of us down before he says, “Any questions?”
We all look to one another. Clearly there are plenty of questions, but no one wants to put any forth. Finally Bone-boy apprehensively raises his hand, and when called on says,
“Huh?”
The captain takes a deep breath and empties his lungs in an exasperated sigh that I can feel like a gale. “The moral of the story is that we must not free ourselves from our beasts. Nay—we must abandon all else in this world
but
our beasts. We must feed them as much as we fight them, submitting to loneliness and misery with no hope of escape.”
The girl with the pearl choker nods approvingly. “I get that.”
But it sits so badly with me that I can’t stop myself from voicing disagreement. “It’s not right!”
All eyes turn to me. I can already see a
minus
being branded next to my F
.
“Elucidate,” the captain growls. I know it’s a warning, but it’s one that I refuse to heed.
“If those captains found a way to leave their monsters behind, they deserve whatever peace they find. They deserve resolution. And the beasts . . . well, they deserve each other.”
No one moves. No one but the parrot, who grooms himself. I can’t help but sense he’s proud of me for what I’ve said. It annoys me that I care.
Whatever patience the captain had is now gone. He looks like a volcano about to blow. “As usual, Seaman Bosch, your insolence
can only be surmounted by your ignorance!”
And then the navigator comes to my rescue.
“Insolence, ignorance, ignoble, Chernobyl. Don’t go nuclear, sir—the crew can’t survive the radiation.”
The captain considers this, then chooses to vent the pressure of his fury by safely releasing it in another gale-force sigh. “Opinions are like sandstorms, Seaman Bosch,” he says. “They have no place at sea.” Then he tweaks my nose like he might a naughty child, and dismisses us.
As soon as we’ve left the map room and are out on deck, the navigator scolds me. “When will you learn? You walk in step with the captain, or you walk the plank—which, being copper, will not give you the proper bounce for a graceful dive.”
It occurs to me that, while I’ve seen crow’s nest jumpers, I’ve never seen the ship’s plank. But now as I look out across the open deck, there it is, poking rudely off the side of the ship like a middle finger. It doesn’t surprise me that it appeared at its mention. I’ve learned not to be surprised by anything here.
Before we go below, the girl with blue hair turns to me. Each time I talk back to the captain, I seem to earn a little more respect from her. “I’ll bet our captain has a pretty bad beast, too,” she says. “Do you think we’ll ever run into it?”
I look up to see the parrot swooping from the map room to a high perch on the foremast.
“I think we already have,” I tell her.
82. Deep in the Throat of Doom
In the middle of the night, I am abducted by crewmen I don’t know and taken to clean the cannon. Punishment, no doubt, for talking back to the captain. I try to fight, but my limbs have turned to rubber just as completely as the ship has turned to copper. My arms and legs bend and stretch in strange directions, and give me no support when I try to stand, no assistance when I try to fight. My arms flap like noodles at my abductors.
Down a dark hatch we go where the massive cannon awaits. “Everyone must clean the cannon at least once each voyage,” I am told. “You’ll do it whether you like it or not.”
The place is dark and dismal with a stench of grease and gunpowder. Cannonballs are stacked in pyramids, and there in the middle sits the cannon, impossibly heavy—the copper planks beneath it buckle from its weight. Its dark mouth is even more intimidating than the captain’s eye.
“Isn’t she a beauty?” says the master-at-arms—that grizzled, muscular career seaman, covered in leering skeletal tattoos.
Beside the cannon is a bucket of polish and a rag. I dip the rag in the polish with my rubbery arms, and begin to slather it on the barrel of the great gun, but the master-at-arms laughs. “Not like that, you fool.” Then he grabs me with his powerful arms and lifts me off the ground. “It’s not the outside that needs cleaning.”
I hear more laughter, and for a moment think that there are others hiding in the room—but the laughter is from the skull faces of his tattoos. Dozens of voices cackle at me.
“Push him in!”
they yell.
“Shove him in!” “Cram him in!”
“No! Stop!” But my pleas are useless. I am pushed headfirst into the mouth of the cannon, sliding down its cold, rough throat. Tight. Claustrophobic. I can barely breathe. I try to squirm, but the master-at-arms yells at me:
“Don’t move! The slightest motion can set it off!”
“How can I clean it if I can’t move?”
“That’s
your
problem.” He and his ink laugh long and loud—then there’s silence . . . and then he begins pounding on the barrel
of the cannon with an iron pole. In a constant rhythm so loud it resonates in my skull.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Hold still, please!” the skull tattoos yell. “Or you’ll have to do this again.”
After what feels like forever, the rhythm of the banging changes.
B-B-B-Boom! B-B-B-Boom B-B-B-Boom!
The endless percussive symphony makes my brain want to slide out through my ears and run away—and I realize that must be how it happens! That’s what chases the brains out of sailors’ heads! But I don’t want to be another mindless sailor. I don’t want Carlyle mopping my renegade brain into the sea.
Clang-Clang Bang! Clang-Clang Bang! Clang-Clang Bang!
The pattern of the pounding cycles through twice more, louder each time, until the world is all noise and my teeth are rattling in my head, and I know that no one is going to stop this. I am alone in the barrel of the gun and no one can save me.
Your parents come once a day during visiting hour, like a pair of clockwork robots. You convene in the rec room, and each day you beg and bargain with them to take you away.
“There are
crazy
people here!” you tell them in a hushed voice so the ones you’re speaking about can’t hear. “I’m not one of
them! I don’t belong here!”
And although they don’t speak the words, their answer is in their eyes.
Yes you are, and yes you do.
You hate them for it.
“It’s only for a little while,” your mother tells you. “Until you’re feeling better.”
“If you didn’t come here,” your father insists, “you would just have gotten worse. We know it’s hard, but we know you’re brave.”
You don’t feel brave, and you don’t trust them enough to take their word for it.
“There’s some good news,” they tell you. “Your MRI came back clean. It means you don’t have a brain tumor, or anything like that.”
Until they mentioned it, it had never occurred to you that you might have had one. And now that it’s been mentioned, you don’t believe the results.
“It wasn’t so bad, was it? The MRI?”
“It was loud,” you tell them. Just thinking about it makes your teeth start to rattle again.
Your parents come and go, come and go. It’s the only way you can measure the days. And they talk about you when they think you’re not listening—as if somehow it’s your sense of hearing that’s been affected, not your mind. But you can still hear them across the room.
“There’s something in his eyes now,” they say. “I don’t know how to describe it. I can’t look at them.” And that almost makes you laugh, because they don’t see what you see when you look in
their
eyes. In everyone’s eyes. You see truths no one else can see.
Conspiracies and connections as twisted and sticky as a black widow’s web. You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees a bottomless pit in yours.