Authors: Neal Shusterman
Challenger Deep (25 page)
Her mother hands me a pen from her purse, and I write on the scrap of paper as legibly as I can.
“Here’s my email address, so you can write to me,” I say. We’re not allowed email here, but my in-box will still be there if and when I get out of this place.
She takes the paper and holds it tightly in her fist, treasuring it. I can see tears in her eyes. “Thank you, Caden.”
“Maybe you can give me yours, too?”
Callie hesitates, and looks to her parents. She’s so different around them—so subdued that I don’t know what to think.
Her parents look to each other, as if I’ve asked something unthinkable.
And that’s when I realize that I can’t take her email address. Not because of her parents, but because of her. Because I promised I’d set her free.
“Forget it,” I say like it’s nothing, even though it’s everything. “You can write to me first. And if you do, I’ll write back.”
Callie nods, and gives me a pained but sincere smile. “Thank you, Caden.”
Her father tries to take the slip of paper from her, but she clutches it to her chest, as if she’s still holding me.
I think about how Callie was when I first met her. She is now clearer. It’s in the way she holds herself, the way she speaks. It’s in her eyes. She is on the other side of the glass now. Part of the outside world she so needed to observe.
I want to hug her, but I know I can’t in the presence of her parents. Their boundary of appropriateness is a no-fly zone miles wide. I shake her hand instead, and she meets my gaze, surprised by the gesture, and maybe a little disappointed, but she understands the necessity. Strange, but shaking her hand feels much more awkward than keeping her warm in my bed.
We must be holding each other’s hands for too long, because her father finally says, “Say good-bye to him, Callie.”
But in subtle defiance of him, she doesn’t actually say good-bye. Instead she says, “I will miss you very, very much, Caden.”
“I will always be there on the horizon,” I tell her.
And with infinite sorrow, she says, “I believe that. But sadly I am no longer looking out of that window.”
135. Which Is More Horrifying?
“I want to leave,” I tell Poirot at my next assessment.
“You will, you will. I assure you that you will.”
But his assurances mean nothing to me. “What do I have to do to get out of here?”
Instead of answering me, he pulls out one of my recent works of art from his drawer. He uses them against me like bullets to the brain.
“Why all the eyes?” he asks. “It’s fascinating, but why all the eyes?”
“I draw what I feel.”
“And you feel this?”
“I don’t have to tell you anything.”
“I’m concerned about you, Caden. Deeply concerned.” He bobs his head a bit in thought. “Maybe we need to adjust your medications.”
“Adjust my medications, adjust my medications, that’s all you ever want to do is adjust my medications!”
He maintains his composure as he looks at me. I see his eyes—both the live one and the dead one—in the numbers of the ticking clock, in the motivational posters on the walls. Everywhere. I can’t escape.
“This is the way it’s done, Caden. This is what works. It’s not as fast as you would like, I know. But give it time, and it will get you
where you need to be. Where you
want
to be.” He begins to write a new prescription. “I’d like to try you on Geodon.”
I slam my fists against the arm of my chair. “I’m angry! Why can’t you let me be angry? Why do you have to medicate away everything I feel?”
He doesn’t even look up at me. “Anger isn’t a productive emotion right now.”
“But it’s real, isn’t it? It’s
normal
, isn’t it? Look at where I am and what’s happened to me! I have a right to be angry!”
He stops writing and finally looks at me with his one good eye, and I think, how can this man possibly have perspective on me when he has no depth perception? I expect him to call for Angry Arms of Death to restrain me. Maybe order me up a shot of Haldol to send me to the White Plastic Kitchen. But he does neither of those things. He taps his pen. Considers. Then says, “That’s a reasonable argument. It’s a sign that you’re getting better.” He puts away his prescription pad. “We’ll stay the course for one more week, and then reassess.”
I am escorted back to my room, feeling much worse than I did before my evaluation. I don’t know which is more horrifying—the thought of being here for another week, or the thought that maybe the medication that I so despise might actually be working.
Something’s up with the navigator. He’s more into himself, more lost in his charts than ever before. He refuses to look at my drawings, and now that my gut has gone silent, he refuses to take guidance from it. He’s in a mood, but it’s more than that. His skin is paler, and there’s a rash on his arms that’s beginning to peel.
“Accompany me to the crow’s nest,” he says in one of his rare social moments. “I’m in need of a view.”
We climb to the little barrel atop the central mast. As always, what appears to be only a yard in diameter is dozens of yards across once we climb inside. It’s an off hour. Just a few other sailors sit alone watching the jumpers, or just watching the olives in their drinks wink at them. The navigator gets his cocktail from the bartender. It’s not time for mine yet. I’ll have to come back later.
His drink swirls with blue sparkles in a cloudy orange brine. “I am far too numb,” he tells me. Then he slowly pours his cocktail on the ground. Radioactive liquid pools in a depression in the copperized wood, but as I watch, it’s sucked in by the black pitch between the metallic planks. The pitch appears to writhe and squirm, but I know it must just be a trick of the light. The bartender is at the far end of the bar, serving someone else, and doesn’t see what the navigator has done.
“It’s our secret,” he says. “If I am to navigate us to the dive
point, I need my brilliance to be untainted. I must calculate our journey without any outside interference. Interference, perseverance, persecution, evolution. I’m evolving, is the thing; I’m a god becoming a constellation.”
“The constellations are mostly demigods,” I point out. “And they didn’t get to be constellations until after they died.”
He laughs at that, and says, “Death is a small sacrifice to become immortal.”
Without Calliope on our bow, I feel a profound loneliness that nothing can penetrate.
“Take it day by day,” Carlyle tells me, “and each morning you’ll feel a little bit better.”
But I don’t. The captain acts as if Calliope never existed. For the captain there is no history, no yesterday, no memory. “Live for the moment and the moment after,” he once told me. “Never for the moment before.” It’s a creed that defines him.
Calliope was our eyes on the horizon, and without her, it seems the horizon is gone. The sea fades into a haze that blends into the sky. There is no telling where one ends, and the other begins. Now the heavens are unpredictable and the sea fickle. Up above, clouds will billow out of nowhere into dark monstrosities, pregnant with
malevolent intent, and a clear blue sky is like a magnifying glass for a punishing sun. As for the sea, there is no rhythm to the waves anymore; no reason to the ocean’s temperament. One moment the sea is as smooth and tranquil as a mountain lake, the next, it’s roiling with rogue waves.
“We have crossed the point of no return,” the captain tells me as I struggle at the tiller to keep the ship zigzagging like a cargo ship in wartime. Traveling a straight line would be suicide now. The best chance of avoiding and confounding the beasts that lie below is to be as unpredictable as the sea and sky.
My hands are rough and calloused from manning the tiller. My palms are faintly green, for like everything else on the ship, the tiller wheel has turned to copper and has oxidized green in the salt sea air.
“Was there ever a point of return?” I wonder out loud.
“Pardon?” says the captain.
“You said we crossed the point of no return, so does that mean there was a time we could have gone back?”
There is little warmth to the captain’s grin. “Well, now we’ll never know, will we?”
I suspect there was never a returning point. This journey was destined for me before I set foot on deck. Destined from the moment I was born.
The navigator races up from below, waving a brand-new navigational chart in his hands. His scribbled knots of lines are measured in leagues and compass degrees with painstaking detail. The captain looks it over, nods, and hands the chart to me. My zigzags are
not random at all. Or at least it’s not my randomness that we follow, it’s the navigator’s.
The captain slaps him on the back with pride. “This will most certainly get us to where we are going.”
The navigator beams with the captain’s attention. “I’m plugged into the power now—deeply connected to the deep,” the navigator says. “Connected, infected, ingested, digested—I can feel our destination in my gut. It’s the only nourishment I need!”
The captain knows that the navigator hasn’t been drinking his cocktail. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why the captain is so proud of him. The captain turns to me. “You should follow his lead, Master Caden. Our navigator’s vision is clear. Is yours?”
But there are other things that come with this “clarity of vision,” as the captain calls it. The navigator’s charts are more convoluted than ever, and yet he is adamant that they are the key to getting us where we’re going. And the scary thing is that I believe him.
“Shun the crow’s nest and your enlightenment will be sweeter than its poison intoxication,” the captain tells me. “Look at the navigator!”
I worry, though, that the navigator’s enlightenment is as dangerous as fireworks in the hands of a child. If he’s tuned into the deep, what is the deep telling him? The depths certainly do not mean us well. Now, when the navigator walks, I notice that the pitchy ooze that fills the crevices of the ship sticks to his heels. When he touches a wall the ooze grows thicker, drawn to his hand as if he’s become a gravity well for the darkness—and it occurs to me that the dark must be in love with the light. Yet one must always kill the other.
138. Marksman on the Fields of Color
In a moment when the sea is calm and the sky clear, the captain pulls out a pistol. An old-fashioned one. A flintlock, I think it’s called. The kind of weapon that Aaron Burr used to kill Alexander Hamilton in their infamous duel.
“I hear you are an expert shot,” the captain says. This strikes me as odd, because I’ve never fired a gun in my life.
“Who told you that?” I ask, not wanting to deny it.
“Word gets around,” he says. “It’s well known that you’ve dispatched many an adversary on the fields of color.”
“Oh. You mean paintball.”
“A marksman is a marksman in any medium, and the time of action is upon us.” Then he puts the gun in my hand, also giving me a small pouch of gunpowder, and a single lead shot. “One shot is all you’ll need to do away with the bird.”
I look at the gun, trying to appear less frightened of it than I am. It’s a heavy thing. Much heavier than it looks. I turn my eyes up to the sails, but can’t find the parrot. He has made himself scarce since baring his intent to kill the captain. Now he perches high in the ratlines and the high beams of the masts. The time of action is upon us, but I remain ambivalent as to what action I should take. It does feel good, though, to be at the wheel, and in the captain’s good graces.
“Wouldn’t it be more satisfying to do it yourself?” I suggest.
The captain shakes his head. “Even with one eye, that plumed
serpent of a bird is too shrewd to be caught unawares. The deed must be done by someone he trusts, and who I trust to do it.” He grasps me by the shoulder with something resembling pride. “Lure him into a liaison. Keep the weapon concealed until the last moment.”
I slip the pistol into my belt and cover it with my shirt. The captain nods his approval. “When we are free of the parrot, then we shall truly be free.”
I realize that my choices are impossible, and I have no idea what I’m going to do.
If you want to talk to anyone about mental misfirings, Raoul’s got the right idea. Talk to Shakespeare.
My brain fries when I try to read Shakespeare, but my English teacher would not accept “my hound hath eaten my volume” as an acceptable excuse for avoiding
Hamlet
. Funny thing, after reading for a while, I actually started to understand it.
The doomed prince of Denmark is a dude faced with an impossible choice. The ghost of Hamlet’s dead father tells him to avenge his murder by killing his uncle. For the rest of the play, Hamlet agonizes. Should I kill my uncle? Should I ignore the ghost? Is the ghost real? Am I insane? If I’m not insane, should I pretend to be insane? Should I end the agony of impossible choices by ending
my life? Will I dream if I kill myself? And will those dreams be any better than the nightmare of my dead father telling me to kill my uncle, who, by the way, is now married to my mother? He agonizes, and ponders, and talks to himself until he’s stabbed by a poisoned blade, and all his tormented self-analysis gives way to eternal silence.
Shakespeare had a thing about death. And poison. And insanity. Hamlet’s beloved Ophelia really does go insane and drowns. King Lear loses his mind with what we, in modern times, would call Alzheimer’s. Macbeth is totally delusional and has hallucinations of ghosts and a pesky floating dagger. It’s all so on target, it makes me wonder if Shakespeare was writing from experience.
Regardless, I’m sure people accused him of being “on something,” too.
140. The Time of Words Is Over
I have yet to follow the captain’s order to kill the parrot. I have yet to take the parrot’s dire warning that I must kill the captain. I am paralyzed by my inability to act, one way or the other.
But everything changes the day we face our next threat from the deep.