Challenger Deep (28 page)
Authors: Neal Shusterman
“But . . . but . . . who will mop the feral brains?”
He chuckles. “Plenty of that going on without me,” he says. “You take care, Caden.” Then he touches his security card to the reader. The inner door opens, admitting him into the little air lock designed to keep patients from escaping. Then, once the inner door closes, the outer door opens to the world beyond, and Carlyle’s gone.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know who to yell at. The bartender won’t have it, and although Angry Arms of Death is around, he and his skulls are just happy that they’re not rolling around with Dolly and the rest.
I leave the crow’s nest, and burst in on the captain to voice my complaint, telling him that Carlyle’s headless body just walked the plank—but the captain is unfazed.
“Swabbies come and go,” he says, with a head under each arm. “I’m going below to do some bowling. Care to join me?”
147. Genetic Life-form and Disk Operating System
“Well, good morning! I’m Gladys, your new facilitator for morning group.”
The room tone is as belligerent as a classroom in an alternative high school. And today there’s a substitute teacher.
“The first order of business is getting to know one another.”
Gladys doesn’t look like a Gladys. Although I really don’t know what a Gladys should look like, except for the ones in old black-and-white TV sitcoms. She’s in her midthirties, with permed blond hair and a slight deviation in her facial symmetry that’s worse when she smiles.
“Why don’t we start by giving our names.”
“We know our names,” someone says.
“Well, I’d like to know them, too.”
“You do,” says someone else. “I saw you reading our files before you came in.”
She gives us a mildly asymmetrical smile. “Yes, but it would be nice to attach names to faces.”
“That would probably hurt,” I offer. I get a courtesy chuckle from Skye and a couple of others—but a courtesy chuckle isn’t
enough to keep the snark going. Just to get this over with, I say, “I’m Caden Bosch.”
It goes around clockwise from me. To my surprise, nobody gives names like “Dick Hertz,” or “Jen Italia.” I guess I threw a wet rag on the possibility by giving my actual name.
My new roommate has joined the group, along with a random new girl. A couple of people who I already can’t remember were discharged a few days ago. The faces change, but the production remains the same, like a Broadway show.
Very few people share today. I know I don’t want to share anything with Gladys. Ever. Then someone subtly begins calling her GLaDOS, which is the name of the evil computer in the classic
Portal
games—and if this session wasn’t a travesty before, now it definitely is. A bunch of us take turns making game references that fly under her radar—like the kid who asks if there’ll be cake when we’re done.
“No,” Gladys says, asymmetrically perplexed, “not that I know of.”
“So . . . ,” says the kid, “you’re telling me that
the cake is a lie
?”
Even the kids who have no idea what he’s talking about snicker, because it doesn’t matter if they don’t get it—the only thing that matters is that GLaDOS doesn’t get it.
I might feel sorry for her under normal circumstances, but I have no clear idea what normal circumstances are anymore, and anyway, I don’t want her to have my sympathy. I know Carlyle’s firing wasn’t her fault, but she’s the piñata in the room, and I don’t mind swinging a bat along with all the others.
I lie on my bed and wait for the world to end.
It must end eventually, because I can’t imagine it going on like this. This procession of gray days in a mental fog must eventually cease.
I have not heard from Callie. I don’t expect any communication from her here; we are not allowed phones or computer access, and I don’t expect she’ll write a letter. I went so far as to ask my parents to check my emails. I gave them all my passwords because privacy has little meaning anymore. I don’t care if they read my spam, which, at this point, is all I’ll be getting, in addition to something from Callie. But she hasn’t written. Or my parents tell me that she hasn’t. Would they tell me if she had? I trust their answer just as much as I trust anyone who tells me that Hal is still alive. If everyone has convinced themselves it’s okay to lie to me for my own good, how can I believe anything anyone says?
Are they lying when they tell me I’ve been here for six weeks? Probably not. It feels more like six months. The fog and the monotony make it next to impossible to measure the passing time. They don’t call it monotony, though. They call it routine. The routine is supposed to be comforting. We have a genetic predisposition for same old-same old that dates back to the earliest vertebrates. Safety in sameness.
Except when they choose to create change.
Like sticking me with a new roommate who I refuse to talk to.
Or like firing the one person who made me see the slightest glimmer of hope.
I silently curse everyone for these things, knowing deep down I should be cursing myself, because none of it would have happened if I had broken my promise to Hal, and told on him.
“If you continue making progress,” one of the nurses told me earlier today, “I see no reason why you shouldn’t be going home in a couple of weeks.” Then she added, “But don’t quote me on that.” Noncommittal is rampant among the committed.
I don’t feel the progress the others see. I’m so encapsulated in the moment that I don’t remember what I was like when I arrived. And I think if
this
is better than
that
, is this what I can look forward to when I go home? Same old-same old?
A nurse arrives in my room with our evening meds. First she tends to my roommate, and then to me. I look into my happy little paper cup. My current but ever-changing cocktail now provides me three meds in the evening. A green oblong pill, a blue-and-white capsule, and a yellow tablet that dissolves in your mouth like flavorless candy. I take them one at a time with a cup of water she gives me that’s slightly larger than the cup the pills are in. Then, knowing the drill, I open my mouth and pull my cheeks apart with my fingers like I’m making a face at her, to show her that the medicine has truly been swallowed.
After she’s gone, I go to the bathroom and fish the blue and white capsule from way back in my mouth, which I hid like a squirrel, high in the gum line. She would never have found it without running her fingers through every inch of my mouth. If you’ve
been caught cheeking your meds, they actually do that. But I’ve been a good boy. Until today.
I know there’s nothing I can do about the dissolving tablet, but maybe, with practice, I can squirrel away both the capsule and the green pill. Whatever Hal was feeling when he did what he did, at least he was
feeling
. Right now, even despair would seem like a victory. So I drop the pill into the toilet and pee on it for good measure, then flush, happy to medicate whatever foul creatures live in the sewers.
Then I go back to my bed, lie down, and wait for the world to end.
I know more about psychoactive medication than is safe for any one human being to know. Kind of like the drug dealer who’s done everything, and can speak with authority on the various forms of high.
Most antianxiety meds act quickly, do their business, and then are caught by the liver—the policemen of the body—which flushes them out in less than a day. Ativan can calm you down instantly if injected. In less than an hour if taken orally, but its effects wear off just a few hours later.
On the other hand, Geodon, Risperdal, Seroquel, and all the other heavyweight antipsychotics have a much longer half-life,
evading the liver for quite a while. What’s more, the “therapeutic effect,” as they call it, builds up over time. You gotta take the stuff for days, even weeks, before those meds start doing what they’re paid to do.
Of course most of the side effects of those drugs are immediate, making you feel within an hour that you’re something other than human. When you suddenly stop taking them, if you don’t have seizures and die, those side effects go away within a day or two. It takes longer for the actual therapeutic effects to vanish, just as it took a longer time for them to begin.
In other words, for a few golden days, you remember what it feels like to be normal, before you plunge headlong into the bottomless pit.
Morning mist burns away, leaving a myriad of cotton-white clouds from horizon to horizon. They move quickly across the sky, the day strobing between sunlight and shadow. Below that dramatic vista, the sea is as glass—a perfectly reflective surface, mirroring the sky. Clouds above, clouds below. There seems to be no difference between the heavens and the depths.
Not even the relentless momentum of our ship—now carried by a steady wind—can stir these waters. It is as if we are skating upon the sea, rather than sailing through it. I know the Abyssal Serpent
follows us somewhere beneath the glassy surface of the water, but like the ship, it travels in complete stealth, leaving no evidence of its passage.
Neither Carlyle’s nor anyone else’s head rolls about the crow’s nest anymore. In fact, the place has entirely lost its magic. There is no bar, no chairs, no inebriated customers lost in neon cocktails. The crow’s nest is now on the inside exactly what it appears to be on the outside: a barrel, three feet wide, just large enough for a lookout to stand and scan the horizon.
“Like any other appendage,” the captain tells me, “it has atrophied from lack of use.”
Without the cocktail to dull me, there’s a clarity to my senses as sharp as a butcher’s blade. It cleaves through flesh and bone, revealing places within that were never meant to be exposed to the light of day. It purifies me, leaving me scoured both inside and out.
It’s just me and the captain now. The rest of the crew is gone. Perhaps they abandoned us during the night. Or perhaps creatures of the deep dragged them overboard. Or perhaps they were pulled down between the copper plates and digested by the living pitch that holds the ship together. I don’t miss them. In a way it’s as if they were never really there to begin with.
The captain stands behind me at the helm, and pontificates to his congregation of one.
“There is hell in both the day and the night,” he says. “I have sat in the burning heat of day under a relentless sun, and under the stone gazes of a disinterested humanity.” He touches the copper railing, running a single finger across it as if checking for dust. “You long for the slightest copper, but resent it when it arrives. Do you follow?”
“I do.”
He slaps me hard across the back of my head. “Never follow! Always lead.”
I rub my smarting scalp. “How, when there’s no one left?”
The captain looks around, seeming to notice for the first time that there is no one else on board. “Point taken. In that case, you should revel that you are the last man standing.”
“What are we looking for, sir?” I ask, peering out at the clouds both above and below the horizon. “How will we know when we arrive?”
“We’ll know,” is all he says on the matter.
I hold my position at the tiller. With no navigational charts, I turn the wheel on impulse and whim. The captain does not disapprove of any of my choices.
Then something up ahead comes into view. It’s just a speck at first, but as we draw closer, it resolves into a post protruding from the water. I steer us toward it, and as we come closer still, I can see that it is more than a post. There is a crossbar, and a figure limply attached to it.
A scarecrow.
Its arms are stretched wide, its eyes are tilted toward the cloud-spotted sky in eternal supplication—and it occurs to me that all scarecrows look as if they’ve been crucified. Perhaps that’s what frightens the crows away.
There are no crows to scare this far out to sea, however. No gulls or grackles, no birds at all, not even a parrot. Like so much else in the captain’s world, the scarecrow is dedicated to a pointless task.
“The scarecrow is the final sign,” the captain tells me with a solemnity to his voice. A hint of fear in a man who shows no fear. “Directly beneath him is the deepest place in the world.”
As we near the scarecrow, the wind, which has been so steady that I had tuned it out, suddenly diminishes and disappears, leaving a silence so complete, I can hear my heart beating in the blood vessels of my ears. Above us, the sails lose their stiff convex tone, and sag limp and lifeless. We coast a bit more until the captain drops anchor, the chain rattling out until it pulls taut. The anchor’s depth is nothing compared to the depth of the trench beneath us, but the mystery of an anchor is that it never needs to touch bottom, or even come close, to keep the largest of ships in place.
The scarecrow is still a hundred yards ahead, at about eleven o’clock to port. “This is as close as I dare get, boy,” the captain tells me. “The rest of this journey is yours and yours alone.”
Yet there is still not a bathyscaphe or diving bell. Nothing to get me to the bottom.