Challenger Deep (12 page)
Authors: Neal Shusterman
It’s not like the car manufacturers are much help. I mean, with modern technology, you’d think our cars could diagnose themselves, but no, all there is on the dashboard is this moronic “check engine” light that comes on whenever there’s anything wrong—which proves that automobiles are more organic than we think. They’re obviously modeled on the human brain.
There are many ways in which the “check brain” light illuminates, but here’s the screwed-up part: the driver can’t see it. It’s like the light is positioned in the backseat cup holder, beneath an empty can of soda that’s been there for a month. No one sees it but the passengers—and only if they’re really looking for it, or when the light gets so bright and so hot that it melts the can, and sets the whole car on fire.
“There is much to teach you,” the captain says, strolling the copperized deck, his hands clasped behind his back. The crisp woolen uniform he now wears is beginning to look almost as natural on him as his pirate outfit had. He even carries himself differently
now. More regally. Clothes make the man.
As he does his rounds, he makes sure everyone is occupied with their particular trivial pursuits. Today my assignment is to be his shadow. Watch and learn.
“Journeys of discovery require more than just a working maritime knowledge,” the captain lectures. “They require intuition. Impulsiveness. Leaps of folly as often as leaps of faith. Do you catch my drift?”
“Yes, sir,” I tell him.
“Wrong answer,” he snaps. “Best not to catch a drift. It could lead to influenza.” Then he jumps on the weblike rope ladder on the mainmast. “Come join me on the ratlines.” He climbs upward, with me right behind.
“Are we going to the crow’s nest?” I ask.
“Absolutely not,” he tells me, insulted by the suggestion. “Only to the sails.” We climb high enough to reach the mainsail. “I’ll show you a secret,” he says. Then he pulls out a knife from his coat and slashes the sail—a gash a full foot wide. Wind pushes through the tear, making it spread like an opening eye.
“What was that for?”
“Observe,” the captain says.
I watch the damaged sail . . . and witness it slowly repair itself. The sail heals like a membrane, until all that remains is a faint scar where the tear had been, a slightly deeper beige than the rest of the canvas sail.
“This ship is more alive than you think, boy. She feels pain. She can be hurt but can also heal.”
As I cling to the rope ladder, a chill goes through me that has nothing to do with the blustering wind. “Is it Calliope’s pain?” I ask.
The captain turns his eye to me. “I don’t know. How is it that you know her name?”
I realize my mistake—but maybe it’s the kind of folly of which the captain approves. “Crewmen talk,” I say. Which is true, so it’s not like I’m really lying. Still, the captain seems suspicious.
“Whether or not she feels the ship’s pain is important to know. ’Tis a question for which I would welcome an answer.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I tell him. I wonder whether he’s just given me permission to speak to her, or if he’s trying to trap me for having done so.
63. People I Don’t Know in Places I Can’t See
“I feel everything,” Calliope tells me as I rest in her metallic arms one night, suspended above an easy sea. “I feel not only the sails, but the hull. Not only the ship, but the sea. Not only the sea, but the sky. And not only the sky, but the stars. I feel everything.”
“How can that be?”
“I don’t expect you to understand.”
And yet I do. “I have connections, too,” I tell her. “Sometimes I feel
inside
the people around me. I believe I know what they’re thinking—or if not
what
, then at least
how
they’re thinking. There
are times that I’m certain I’m tied to people on the other side of the world. People I’ve never met. The things I do affect them. I move left, they move right. I climb up, and they fall from a building. I know it’s all true, but I can never prove what happens to people I don’t know in places I can’t see.”
“And how does this make you feel?”
“Wonderful and terrible at the same time.”
She tilts her neck to look into my eyes, instead of looking forward at the sea. It’s a harder move than folding her arms to hold me. I hear the straining squeal of bending copper. “We are not all that different, then,” she says.
And I know for the first time that I’ve truly pierced her loneliness. And she has pierced mine.
The doctor has a PhD in psychology from American University, which, to me, sounds a little too generic to be real. A framed diploma hangs proudly in the waiting room above a potted ficus with leaves a little too green to be real as well.
“I want you to feel you can talk to me about anything,” the talk-doctor says, speaking with a calmness to his voice, and a deliberately slow cadence—like a snail might, if snails could talk. “Anything you say or do in here is kept in strict confidence, unless you want me to share it.”
It sounds like he’s reading me my anti-Miranda rights.
“Yeah. Confidence. I get it.”
I get it, but I don’t believe it for an instant. How do you trust a therapist when even the plant in his waiting room is a lie?
That’s where my parents are now. They’re in the waiting room leafing through copies of
Psychology Today
and
FamilyFun
, and talking about me. They were here in the room with the talk-doctor and me for the first few minutes. I thought they would launch at him a laundry list of all the things that have been going on, but they seemed uncomfortable when they tried to talk about me to a stranger.
“Caden’s behavior has been”—my father had struggled for the words—“out of the ordinary.”
Both he and Mom seemed relieved when the doctor asked them to leave the room.
“So,” says the talk-doctor now that we’re alone. “Out of the ordinary. Let’s start there.”
I know I have to hold it together in here. I feel as if my entire life depends on my holding it together. This man doesn’t know me. He can’t see into me. All he gets is what I give him.
“Listen,” I say, “my parents mean well, and I know they think they’re helping me, but this is their problem, not mine. They’re totally stressed and overprotective. I mean, you saw them, right? They’re so nervous, they make me nervous.”
“Yes, I can see that you’re anxious.”
I try to stop talking with my hands, and to keep my heels consistently on the floor. I’m only partially successful.
“Tell me,” he says, “have you been having trouble sleeping?”
“No,” I respond. It’s true. I haven’t had
trouble
sleeping, I just haven’t felt like sleeping. At all.
“And how are things at school?”
“School is school.”
He’s quiet for a painfully long stretch. I can’t stand it. I start fidgeting with things within fidgeting distance. I reach for a small cactus on the table beside me to see if it’s fake, too, but it’s real, and I prick my finger. He hands me a tissue.
“Why don’t we do some relaxation exercises?” the talk-doctor suggests, although I know it’s only phrased like a suggestion. “Lean back, and close your eyes.”
“Why?”
“I’ll wait until you’re ready.”
Reluctantly I lean back and force my eyelids to close.
“Tell me, Caden, what do you see when you close your eyes?”
My eyelids snap open again. “What kind of dumb-ass question is that?”
“It’s just a question.”
“What am I supposed to see?”
“Nothing specific.”
“Well, that’s what I see. Nothing specific.” I’m standing now. I don’t remember standing. I can’t recall when I began to pace the room.
The session drags on for a torturous eternity that is just another twenty minutes. We never do get through the relaxation exercises. I never answer his question. I never close my eyes for fear of having to tell him—to tell myself—what’s there. Instead we play chess, although I don’t have the patience to consider my moves, so I intentionally make bad ones to end the game quickly.
When it’s time to leave, he tells my parents we should schedule weekly sessions, and that maybe, just maybe, they should consider having me also see someone with a license to write prescriptions. I knew he was a fake.
What do I see when I close my eyes? Sometimes there is a darkness there that goes beyond anything I can describe. Sometimes it is glorious, and sometimes it is terrifying, and I rarely know what
it’s going to be. When it’s glorious, I want to live in that place, where the stars are just marking a vast unreachable shell, like they used to believe in days of old. The inside surface of a giant eyelid—and when I peel back the lid, there’s a darkness that truly goes on forever—but it’s not darkness at all. It’s just that our eyes have no way to see that kind of light. If we could, it would blind us, so that eyelid, it protects us. Instead we see stars—the only hint of the light we can never reach.
And yet I go there.
I push past the stars into that dark light, and you can’t imagine how it feels. Velvet and licorice caressing every sense; it melts into a liquid you plunge through; it evaporates into air that you breathe. And you soar! You don’t need wings because it supports you of its own accord—of its own will resonating with yours—and you feel not only that you can do anything but that you
are
anything. Everything. You move through everything, and your heartbeat becomes a pulse of all things alive, all at once, and the silence between each beat is the stillness of things that exist, but do not live. The stone. The sand. The rain, and you realize that it is all necessary. The silence must exist for there to be a beat. And you are both those things: the presence and the absence. And that knowledge is so magnificent you can’t hold it in, and it drives you to share it—but you don’t have words to describe it, and without the words, without a way to share the feeling, it breaks you, because your mind just isn’t large enough to hold what you’ve tried to fit into it . . .
. . . but it’s not always like that.
Sometimes the darkness beyond is not glorious at all, it truly is
an absolute absence of light. A clawing, needy tar that pulls you down. You drown but you don’t. It turns you to lead so you sink faster in its viscous embrace. It robs you of hope and even the memory of hope. It makes you think you’ve always felt like this, and there’s no place to go but down, where it slowly, ravenously digests your will, distilling it into the ebony crude of nightmares.
And you know the darkness beyond despair, just as intimately as you know the soaring heights. Because in this and all universes, there is balance. You can’t have the one without facing the other. And sometimes you think you can take it because the joy is worth the despair, and sometimes you know you can’t take it and how did you ever think you could? And there is the dance; strength and weakness, confidence and desolation.
What do I see when I close my eyes? I see beyond darkness, and it is immeasurably grand both above me and below.
66. Your Terrifying Awesomeness
But now my eyes are open.
And I stand at my front door, not in and not out, halfway between two places. I think back to the time I told Max that I was outside of myself. It’s more than that now. I can’t tell the difference between what’s part of me and what’s not. I don’t know how to explain the feeling. I’m like the electricity in the walls. No—more than that! I’m in the high-tension wires traveling through the neighborhood.
I’m moving through everything around me at lightning speed. I realize there is no longer an “I” anymore. Just the collective “we,” and it takes my breath away.
Do you know how it feels, to be free from yourself and terrified by it? You feel both invincible and yet targeted, as if the world—as if the universe—doesn’t want you to feel this dizzying enlightenment. And you know there are forces out there that want to crush your spirit even as it expands like a gas filling all available space. Now the voices are loud and blaring in your head, almost as loud as your mother as she calls you down to dinner for the third time. You know it’s the third time even though you don’t remember hearing the first two times. Even though you don’t even remember going up to your room.
So you sit at the kitchen table, moving food around your plate, and you only shovel food into your mouth when someone reminds you that you’re not eating. But it’s not food you’re hungry for. Maybe it’s because you’re not you anymore. You’re everything around you. Now your body feels like an empty shell, so what’s the point of feeding it? You have bigger things to do. And you tell yourself that your friends don’t connect with you anymore because they’re too frightened by your awesomeness. Almost as frightened as you are.
The captain gathers us around the table in the map room at dawn. The storm still looms in the distance no closer than the night before or the night before that. It retreats as we draw near.