Challenger Deep (3 page)
Authors: Neal Shusterman
Between the slats of wood that make up the hull and decks of the ship is foul-smelling black pitch to keep the water out. Nowhere is that smell more pungent than down below. It’s sharp and organic, as if whatever life-forms that were distilled by time into the tar haven’t entirely finished decomposing. It smells of concentrated sweat and body odor, and the stuff that collects beneath your toenails.
“The smell of life,” the captain said proudly when I once asked him about the stench. “Life in transformation, perhaps, but life, nonetheless. It’s like the briny reek of a tide pool, boy—pungent and putrid but at the same time refreshing. A wave will pound that shore, sending spray up your nostrils, and do you curse it? No! For it reminds you how much you love the sea. That summery smell of beach that brings you to the most serene place in your soul is nothing more than a gentle wafting of marine putrefaction.” Then he had taken a deep satisfying breath of it to prove his point. “Indeed, nothing awful is without its beautiful side.”
When my friends and I were younger and we were at the mall bored out of our minds, we used to play this game. We called it Psycho Shopping Spree. We would single out someone, or a couple, or sometimes a whole family—although for the purposes of the game, it was always better to single out a person shopping alone. We would then make up a story about the chosen shopper’s secret purpose. Usually that purpose involved an ax and/or chain saw, and a basement and/or attic. One time we settled on this little old woman hobbling through the mall with such pinch-faced purpose, we decided she was the perfect serial killer of the day. The story was, she would buy all this stuff at the mall—far too much to carry, and she would have it delivered. Then she would capture the delivery man, and kill him with the very object he delivered. She had a whole collection of newly purchased murder weapons and dead UPS men in her basement and/or attic.
So we followed her for like twenty minutes, thinking this was hilarious . . . until she went into a cutlery store, and we watched her purchase a nice new butcher knife. Then it became even more hilarious.
When she left the store, though, I made eye contact with her—mainly because I dared myself to. I know it was entirely in my imagination, but there was this cruel and malevolent look in her eyes that I will never forget.
Lately I’ve been seeing her eyes everywhere.
I stand in the middle of the living room, curling my toes into our plush but soullessly beige carpet.
“What are you doing?” Mackenzie asks me as she comes home from school, hurling her backpack onto the sofa. “Why are you just standing there?”
“I’m listening,” I tell her.
“Listening to what?”
“Listening for the termites.”
“You can hear termites?” The thought horrifies her.
“Maybe.”
She fiddles nervously with the big blue buttons on her yellow fleece coat, as if she can button out the termites like the cold. Then she tentatively puts her ear to the wall, I suppose figuring it would be easier to hear them that way than by standing in the middle of a silent room. She listens for a few moments, then says, a little uneasily, “I don’t hear anything.”
“Don’t worry,” I tell her in my most comforting voice, “termites are just termites.” And although there couldn’t be a more neutral statement, it defuses any insectious worries I might have given her. Satisfied, she goes into the kitchen for a snack.
I don’t move. I can’t hear the termites but I can feel them. The more I think about them, the more I feel, and it’s distracting. I’m very distracted today. Not by the things I can see, but the things that I can’t. The things in the walls, and the many things beneath
my feet, which I have always had a weird fascination for. That fascination has infested me today like the wood-eating bugs that slowly lay waste to our house.
I tell myself that this is a good distraction, because it keeps me from spiraling into thoughts of nasty things that may or may not be happening at school. It’s a helpful distraction, so for a while I indulge it.
I close my eyes and feel, pushing my thoughts through the soles of my feet.
My feet are on safe, solid ground, but that’s just an illusion. We own our house, right? But not really, because the bank holds the mortgage. So what do we own? The land? Wrong again, because although we have a deed to the land our house sits on, we don’t own the mineral rights. And what are minerals? Everything that’s in the ground. Basically, if it’s valuable, or might be valuable someday, we don’t own it. We own it only if it’s worthless.
So what is beneath my feet, really, beyond the lie that it belongs to us? When I concentrate, I can feel what’s down there. Beneath the carpet is a concrete slab that rests on earth that was compacted twenty years ago by heavy machinery. Beneath that is lost life that no one will ever find. There could be remnants of civilizations destroyed by wars or by beasts or by immune systems that failed a sudden bacterial pop quiz. I feel the bones and shells of prehistoric creatures. Then I send my thoughts even deeper to the bedrock, where pockets of gas bubble and brew from earth’s intestinal distress as it tries to digest its long and often sad history of life. The
place where all God’s creatures are eventually distilled through the rock into black gunk that we then suck out of the ground and burn in our cars, turning those once living things into greenhouse gases, which I guess is better than spending eternity as sludge.
Deeper still, I can feel the cold of the earth replaced by heat until there are caverns of red-hot, then white-hot magma, swirling under unthinkable pressure. The outer core, then the inner core, to the very center of gravity, and then gravity reverses. The heat and pressure begin to decrease. Molten rock turns solid again. I push through the granite, the sludge, the bones, the dirt, the worms, and the termites, until I’m bursting through into some rice paddy in China, proving that there’s no such thing as down, because eventually down is up.
I open my eyes, almost surprised to find myself in my living room, and it occurs to me that there is a perfect plumb line from my home to somewhere in China, and I wonder if pushing my thoughts down that line the way I just did could be a dangerous thing. Could my thoughts be magnified in the heat and pressure of the earth and come out the other side as an earthquake?
And I know it’s just a tweaky stray thought, yet the next morning, and the morning after that, and every morning from that moment forward, I check the news in secret terror to see if there was an earthquake in China.
Although I have been told by various frightened crewmen not to venture into the unknown corners of the ship, I can’t help myself. Something compels me to seek out things that are better left alone. And how can one be on a great galleon and not check it out?
Rather than heading on deck for roll call one morning, I get up early enough to explore. I begin to make my way down the long, dimly lit corridor of the crew deck. I take my parchment pad, and draw quick impressions.
“Excuse me,” I say to a crew member I haven’t seen before, lurking in the shadows of her cabin. She has wide eyes, runny mascara, and wears a pearl choker that looks like it might actually be choking her. “Where does this hallway go?”
She looks at me with suspicion. “It doesn’t go anywhere, it stays right here.” Then she ducks back in and slams her door. I hold her image in my mind, and on my pad I sketch her face as it looked when she retreated into shadows.
I continue to walk, keeping track of my distance down the unending hallway by counting the ladders. One, two, three. I get to the tenth ladder, but the corridor just continues ahead of me. Finally I give up and climb ladder ten, only to find myself coming out onto the deck through the midship hatch, and I realize that every one of those ladders, regardless of where it is on the crew deck, exits up through that same hatch. I’ve walked that corridor for twenty minutes, yet have gotten nowhere.
Sitting on the railing above me is the parrot, as if he’s been waiting there just to mock me.
“You can’t get there from here,” he says. “Don’t you know? Don’t you know?”
My job on the ship is as a “stabilizer.” I can’t recall when I was assigned this task, but I do remember the captain explaining it to me.
“You shall sense as the ship heels side to side on the sea, and position yourself opposite of the roll, starboard to port, port to starboard,” the captain had said.
In other words, just like a vast majority of the crewmen, my job is to run side to side across the deck and back again to counteract the rolling motion of the sea. It’s completely pointless.
“How could our weight possibly make a difference on a ship this size?” I once asked him.
He glared at me with his bloodshot eye. “Would you prefer to be ballast then?”
That had shut me up. I’d seen the “ballast.” Sailors crammed into the cargo hold like sardines, in order to lower the ship’s center of gravity. If there’s no task for you on this ship, you become ballast. I should have known better than to complain.
“As we near our destination,” the captain once told me, “I will
be selecting a special team for our great mission. Do your job with hearty sweat and vigor, and you may earn your nearly worthless hide a place on that team.”
Although I’m not sure I want that, it may be better than shuffling pointlessly around the deck. I had once asked the captain how far we were from the Marianas Trench, because each day the sea is exactly the same. We seem no closer, and no farther from anything.
“’Tis the nature of a liquid horizon to feel no passage of space,” the captain said. “But we will know as we near the trench, because there will be signs and dark portents.”
I won’t dare ask the captain what those dark portents might be.
When the sea is calm, and I don’t have to run from side to side, I sometimes hang out on deck with Carlyle. Carlyle is the ship’s swabby—a guy with bright red hair in a short peach fuzz, and a smile friendlier than anyone else’s on the ship. He’s not a kid, he’s older, like the ship’s officers, but he’s not really one of them. He seems to make his own hours and his own rules, with little interference from the captain, and is the only one on the ship who makes any sense.
“I’m a swabby by choice,” he told me once. “I do it because it’s needed. And because you’re all such slobs.”
Today I catch sight of rats scurrying away from the water of his
mop, disappearing into dark corners of the deck.
“Blasted things,” Carlyle says, dipping his mop into a bucket of cloudy water and washing the deck. “We’ll never get rid of them.”
“There are always rats on old ships,” I tell him.
He raises an eyebrow. “Rats? Is that what you think they are?” Although he doesn’t offer me an alternate theory. The truth is, they scuttle so quickly, and hide so deep in shadows, I can’t be sure what they are. It makes me nervous, so I change the subject.
“Tell me something about the captain I don’t know.”
“He’s your captain. Anything worth knowing you already must know.”
But even the way he says it, I can tell he is an insider in a way that few others are. I figure if I’m going to get any answers, though, I need to be specific with my questions.
“Tell me how he lost his eye.”
Carlyle sighs, looks around to make sure we’re unobserved, and begins to whisper.
“It is my understanding that the parrot lost his eye before the captain. The way I’ve heard it told, the parrot sold his eye to a witch to make a magic potion that would turn him into an eagle. But the witch double-crossed him, drank it herself, and flew away. The parrot, who didn’t want to be the only one with an eye patch, clawed out the captain’s eye as well.”
“That’s not true,” I say with a grin.
Carlyle keeps his expression solemn as he splashes soapy water on the deck. “It’s as true as it needs to be.” The tar between the planks seems to retreat from his deluge.
The navigator says a view from the crow’s nest will bring me “comfort, clarity, charity, chastity.”
If it’s a multiple choice test, I choose both “A” and “B,” although considering the crew, I may just blacken in choice “D” with my number two pencil.
The crow’s nest is a small circular tub, high up on the mainmast. It’s only large enough to hold one, maybe two crewmen on lookout. I conclude it would be a good place to be alone with my thoughts, but I should already know that my thoughts are never alone.
It’s early evening as I climb the frayed ratlines that drape the ship like shrouds. The last hint of dusk slowly vanishes from the horizon, and in the sun’s absence, the strange stars are coaxed to shine.
The rope lattice of the ratlines narrows as I near the crow’s nest, making the climb feel increasingly treacherous. Finally I pull myself over into the small wooden tub that hugs the mast—only to find it’s not small at all. Like the crew’s quarterdeck, it may look small from the outside, but once inside, the circular space appears to be a hundred feet in diameter. There are members of the crew reclining in velvet chairs, sipping neon-bright martinis with faraway eyes, and listening to a live band that plays smooth jazz.
“Party of one? Right this way,” says a hostess, and she leads me to my own velvet chair, which looks out at moonlight shimmering on water.
“Are you a jumper?” asks a pale man sitting in the next chair, drinking something blue and possibly radioactive. “Or are you just here to watch?”
“I’m here to clear my head.”
“Have one of these,” he says, pointing to his radioactive drink. “Until you find your own cocktail you can share mine. Everyone here must find their cocktail or you’ll be whipped soundly and sent off to bed. That’s how all nursery rhymes end here. Even the ones that don’t rhyme.”
I look around at the dozen or so people enjoying themselves in vaguely psychedelic stupors. “I don’t understand how this can all fit in the crow’s nest.”