Challenger Deep (2 page)
Authors: Neal Shusterman
I don’t know many of the other crewmen. Or maybe I just don’t remember them from one moment to the next, because they all have a nameless quality about them. There are the older ones, who seem to have made their lives at sea. These are the ship’s officers, if you can call them that. They are Halloween pirates, like the captain, with fake blackened teeth, trick-or-treating on hell’s doorstep. I’d laugh at them if I didn’t believe with all my heart that they’d gouge my eyes out with their plastic hooks.
Then there are the younger ones like me: kids whose crimes cast them out of warm homes, or cold homes, or no homes, by a parental conspiracy that sees all with unblinking Big-Brother eyes.
My fellow crewmates, both boys and girls, go about their busywork and don’t speak to me other than to say things like, “You’re in my way,” or “Keep your hands off my stuff.” As if any of us has stuff worth guarding. Sometimes I try to help them with whatever they’re doing, but they turn away, or push me away, resentful that I’ve even offered.
I keep imagining I see my little sister on board, even though I know she’s not. Aren’t I supposed to be helping her with math? In my mind I see her waiting for me and waiting for me, but I don’t know where she is. All I know is that I never show up. How could I do that to her?
Everyone on board is under constant scrutiny by the captain, who is somehow familiar, and somehow not. He seems to know everything about me, although I know nothing about him.
“It’s my business to have my fingers curled around the heart of
your
business,” he told me.
The captain has an eye patch and a parrot. The parrot has an eye patch and a security badge around his neck.
“I shouldn’t be here,” I appeal to the captain, wondering if I’ve told him this before. “I have midterms and papers due and dirty clothes I never picked up from my bedroom floor, and I have friends, lots of friends.”
The captain’s jaw is fixed and he offers no response, but the parrot says, “You’ll have friends, lots of friends here too, here too!”
Then one of the other kids whispers in my ear, “Don’t tell the parrot anything. That’s how they get you.”
The things I feel cannot be put into words, or if they can, the words are in no language anyone can understand. My emotions are talking in tongues. Joy spins into anger spins into fear then into amused irony, like leaping from a plane, arms wide, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can fly, then discovering you can’t, and not only don’t you have a parachute, but you don’t have any clothes on, and the people below all have binoculars and are laughing as you plummet to a highly embarrassing doom.
The navigator tells me not to worry about it. He points to the parchment pad on which I often draw to pass the time. “Fix your feelings in line and color,” he tells me. “Color, collar, holler,
dollar—true riches lie in the way your drawings grab me, scream at me, force me to see. My maps show us the path, but your visions show us the
way
. You are the compass, Caden Bosch. You are the compass!”
“If I’m a compass, then I’m a pretty useless one,” I tell him. “I can’t find north.”
“Of course you can,” he says. “It’s just that in these waters, north is constantly chasing its own tail.”
It makes me think of a friend I once had, who thought that north was whatever direction he was facing. Now I think that maybe he was right.
The navigator requested me as a roommate when my old roommate, who I barely even remember, disappeared without explanation. We share a cabin that’s too small for one, much less two. “You are the most decent among the indecents here,” he tells me. “Your heart hasn’t taken on the chill of the sea. Plus, you have talent. Talent, talons, tally, envy—your talent will turn the ship green with envy—mark my words!”
He’s a kid who’s been on many voyages before. And he’s farsighted. That is to say, when he looks at you he’s not seeing you, but instead sees something behind you in a dimension several times removed from our own. Mostly he doesn’t look at people. He’s too busy creating navigational charts. At least that’s what he calls them. They’re full of numbers and words and arrows and lines that connect the dots of stars into constellations I’ve never seen before.
“The heavens are different out here,” he says. “You have to see fresh patterns in the stars. Patterns, Saturns, Saturday, Sunday,
sundial. It’s all about measuring the passing day. Do you get it?”
“No.”
“Shore to boat, boat to goat. That’s the answer, I’m saying. The goat. It eats everything, digesting the world, making it a part of its own DNA, and spewing it out, claiming its territory. Territory, heredity, heresy, hearsay—hear what I say. The sign of the goat holds the answer to our destination. It all has a purpose. Seek the goat.”
The navigator is brilliant. So brilliant that my head hurts just being in his presence.
“Why am I here?” I ask him. “If everything has a purpose, what is my purpose on this ship?”
He goes back to his charts, writing words and adding fresh arrows on top of what is already there, layering his thoughts so thick, only he can decipher them. “Purpose, porpoise, dolphin, doorframe, doorway. You are the doorway to the salvation of the world.”
“Me? Are you sure?”
“Just as sure as we’re on this train.”
Doorway, doorframe, dolphins dancing on the walls of my sister’s room as I stand in her doorway. There are seven dolphins. I know because I painted them for her, each representing one of
Kurosawa’s
Seven Samurai
, since I wanted her to still appreciate them when she’s older.
The dolphins glare at me tonight, and although a lack of opposable thumbs makes swordplay unlikely, I find them far more threatening than usual.
My father is tucking Mackenzie into bed. It’s late for her, but not for me. I’ve just turned fifteen; she’s about to turn eleven. It will be hours until I sleep.
If
I sleep. I may not. Not tonight.
My mother is on the phone with Grandma downstairs. I hear her talking about weather and termites. Our house is being chewed to bits. “. . . but tenting is so disruptive,” I hear my mom say. “There must be a better way.”
Dad kisses Mackenzie good night, then turns and sees me standing there, not quite in, but not quite out of the room.
“What is it, Caden?”
“Nothing, it’s just . . . never mind.”
He stands up and my sister rolls away to face her wall of dolphins, making it clear she is ready for dreamland. “If something’s wrong, you can tell me,” Dad says. “You know that, don’t you?”
I speak quietly so that Mackenzie can’t hear. “Well, it’s just that . . . there’s this kid at school.”
“Yes?”
“Of course I can’t be sure . . .”
“Yes?”
“Well . . . I think he wants to kill me.”
There’s this donation bucket at the mall. A big yellow funnel collecting for some children’s charity that’s really unpleasant to think about. “Limbless Children of Foreign Wars,” or something like that. You’re supposed to put your coin in a slot and let it go. It spins round and round the big yellow funnel for like a minute, making a rhythmic whirring sound that gets tighter and tighter, more intense, more desperate as it spirals closer to the hole. It keeps spinning faster—all that kinetic energy forced down the neck of the funnel until it’s blaring like an alarm—then it falls silent as it drops into the black abyss of the funnel.
I’m that coin on its way down, screaming in the neck of the funnel, with nothing but my own kinetic energy and centrifugal force keeping me from dropping into darkness.
“What do you mean he wants to kill you?” My dad steps out into the upstairs hallway and closes the door to my sister’s room. Dim light comes at a cautious angle from the bathroom farther down the hall. “Caden, this is serious. If there’s a boy at school threatening you, you have to tell me what’s going on.”
He stands there waiting, and I wish I hadn’t opened my mouth.
Mom is still on the phone downstairs talking to Grandma, and I start to wonder if it really is Grandma, or if Mom is just pretending—talking to someone else, maybe about me, and maybe using code words. But why would she do that? That’s nuts. No, she’s just talking to Grandma. About termites.
“Have you reported this kid to your teachers?”
“No.”
“What has he done? Has he openly threatened you?”
“No.”
Dad takes a deep breath. “Okay, then if he hasn’t actually come out and threatened you, maybe it’s not as bad as you think. Does this kid bring some sort of weapon to school?”
“No. Well, maybe. Yeah—yeah, I think he maybe has a knife.”
“You’ve seen it?”
“No, I just know. He’s the type of kid who’d have a knife, y’know?”
Dad takes another deep breath and scratches his thinning hair. “Tell me exactly what this boy has said to you. Try to remember everything.”
I dig down and try to find the words to explain, but I can’t. “It’s not what he said, it’s what he
hasn’t
said.”
My dad’s an accountant: very left-brained, very linear, so it doesn’t surprise me when he says, “I don’t follow.”
I turn and fiddle with a family picture on the wall, making it crooked. That bothers me, so I quickly make it straight again. “Never mind,” I say. “It’s not important.” I try to escape down the stairs, because I really want to hear the conversation Mom is
having, but Dad gently grabs my arm. It’s enough to keep me from leaving.
“Just wait,” he says. “Let me get this straight. This kid that’s got you all worried—he’s in a class with you, and there’s something about his behavior that you find threatening.”
“Actually, I don’t have any classes with him.”
“So how do you know him?”
“I don’t. But I pass him in the hallway sometimes.”
My dad looks down, doing some mental calculations, then looks back up at me again. “Caden . . . if you don’t know him, and he’s never threatened you, and all he’s ever done is pass you in the hallway, what makes you think he wants to hurt you? He probably doesn’t even know you.”
“Yeah, you’re right, I’m just stressed.”
“You’re probably overreacting.”
“Right, overreacting.” Now that I’ve said it out loud, I can see how silly I’ve been sounding. I mean, this kid doesn’t even know I exist. I don’t even know his name.
“High school can be unsettling,” Dad says. “A lot of stuff can make you anxious. I’m sorry you’ve been carrying around something like that. What a thing to be thinking about! But sometimes everyone needs a reality check, right?”
“Right.”
“So, you feel better now?”
“Yeah, I feel better. Thanks.”
But he keeps studying me as I walk away, like maybe he knows I’m lying. My parents have been noticing how anxious I’ve been
lately. My dad thinks I should take up a sport to release my nervous energy. My mom thinks I should do yoga.
9. You Are Not the First and You Will Not Be the Last
The sea stretches in all directions. Before us, behind us, to starboard, to port, and down, down, down. Our ship is a galleon, weathered from a million voyages going back to ages even darker than this.
“She’s the finest vessel of her kind,” the captain once told me. “Put your faith in her and she won’t steer you wrong.”
Which is good, because there’s never anyone at the tiller.
“Does she have a name?” I once asked the captain.
“To name her is to sink her,” he told me. “That which we name takes greater weight than the sea it displaces. Ask any shipwreck.”
Above the arch of the main hatch is a sign burned in wood that reads
You are not the first and you will not be the last
, and I marvel at how it makes me feel both insignificant and singled out at the same time.
“Does it speak to you?” the parrot asks, perched above the hatch, watching me, always watching me.
“Not really,” I tell him.
“Well, if it does,” instructs the parrot, “write down everything it says.”
I visit the White Plastic Kitchen almost every night. The particulars change each time, just enough that I can’t predict the outcome of the dream. If it was the same, at least I would know what to expect—and if I knew, I’d be able to brace myself for the worst of it.
Tonight I’m hiding. Scarce few places to hide in the kitchen. I’m wedged in a state-of-the-art refrigerator. I shiver, and I think about the captain. How he called me a shivering pup. Someone opens the door; a mask I don’t remember. She shakes her head.
“Poor thing, you must be cold.” She pours some coffee from a full carafe, but instead of offering me some, she reaches right through my navel and retrieves the milk from somewhere behind me in the refrigerator.
11. Nothing Awful Is without Its Beautiful Side
Beneath the main deck are the crew’s quarters. The crew deck is much larger than the ship appears on the outside. Impossibly so. There’s a long hallway that goes on and on and never seems to end.