Authors: Neal Shusterman
The sea rolls with regular relentless surges. My bedroll is wet beneath me. The pale green tarnished copper ceiling drips with condensation.
The captain stands above me, looking down. Assessing with his good eye. “Welcome back, lad,” he says. “We thought we had lost you.”
“What happened,” I croak.
“You were keelhauled,” he tells me. “Taken in the middle of the night from your quarters, brought on deck, turned inside out, then tied to a rope, and hurled overboard.”
I don’t remember any of this until the moment he speaks of it—as if his words themselves are my memory.
“Someone got tired of hearing you moan about your gut, so they cleaned it out by exposing your innards to the sea, and dragging you over the barnacle-covered keel of the ship, then back up the other side. Whatever was causing your distress has surely been scraped off.”
As he says it, I can feel every barnacle. I can feel my lungs on fire as they fight for oxygen that’s no longer there. Screaming soundlessly into the deep, then filling my lungs with killing
seawater, then blacking out.
“Many a sailor dies of it, or is left broken beyond repair,” the captain tells me. “But you seem to have endured it well.”
“Am I still inside out?” I ask weakly.
“Not as I can tell. Unless your insides bear a close resemblance to your outsides.”
“Was it done on your orders?” I ask.
He looks insulted. “If it had been on my orders, mine would have been the last face you saw when you went down, and the first you saw upon coming back up. I always take credit for my acts of cruelty. To do otherwise is cowardice.”
He orders the navigator, who watches us from his bunk, to go fetch me some water. Once he is gone, the captain kneels beside me and whispers.
“Hear me well. Those who appear to be your friends are not. Those who seem one thing are another. A blue sky can be orange, up can masquerade as down, and someone is always trying to poison the meal. Do you catch my drift?”
“No,” I tell him.
“Good. You’re learning.” He looks around to make sure we are still unobserved. “You’ve had your suspicions about these things for quite some time, haven’t you?”
I find myself nodding, even though I don’t want to acknowledge it.
“I tell you now that your fears are founded. It’s all true; forces are watching at every minute of every day, scheming against you. Against us.” He grabs me by the arm. “Trust no one on this
ship. Trust no one off this ship.”
“How about you?” I ask. “Can I trust you?”
“What about ‘trust no one’ did you not understand?”
Then the navigator returns with the cup of water, and the captain spills it out on the floor, because not even the navigator is beyond suspicion.
My intestinal distress passes, proving it was nothing more than spoiled eggplant. Poirot would call it a victory that I realized my parents didn’t intend to poison me. That I understood such a feeling was just paranoia.
“The more you can disbelieve the things your illness tries to make you believe, the sooner you’ll be well enough to go home.”
What he doesn’t get is that even though part of me has come to sense the things that might be delusional, there’s the other part of me that has no choice but to believe them. At this moment I see poisoned eggplant as very unlikely. But tomorrow, I might be raving that my parents are trying to kill me, and I’ll believe it as completely as I believe the earth is round. And if I suddenly have a notion that the earth is flat, I’m likely to believe that, too.
My one point of stability is Callie, but she’s beginning to concern me. Not that she’s getting worse, but that she’s getting better. She doesn’t spend as much time by the window of the Vista Lounge
anymore. Such a lack of obsessive behavior might tempt Poirot to send her home.
I say an awful prayer that night. The kind that could get me damned if I believed in that stuff, which I might, or might not. It’s still up in the air.
“Please stay broken, Callie,” I pray. “Please stay broken as long as I am.”
I know it’s selfish, but I don’t care. I can’t imagine not seeing her smile. I can’t imagine not keeping her warm. No matter what I promised her, I can’t imagine being here without her.
My parents bring Mackenzie to visit for the first time. I know why they haven’t done it until now. Because I’m scary sometimes. Maybe scary in a different way than I was at home, but still scary. And then there’s everyone else. Mackenzie’s tough, but a psychiatric ward for young people is no place for a young person.
My parents had warned me they were going to bring her, in spite of their reservations.
“She’s convinced things are much worse than they are,” my mom had told me. “You know her imagination. And it will be good for you to see each other. Dr. Poirot agrees.”
So during visiting hour one day, when those of us with visitors are escorted into the rec room by the pastels, I find her sitting at a
table with my parents.
I hesitate when I spot her, having totally forgotten she was coming. It’s like I’m afraid that if I get too close I might break her. I don’t want to break her, and I don’t want her to see me like this. But it’s visiting hour. You can’t run away from visiting hour. I cautiously approach my family.
“Hi, Caden.”
“Hi, Mackenzie.”
“You look good. Except for your bed-hair.”
“You look good, too.”
My father stands and pulls out the one chair at the table that isn’t occupied. “Why don’t you sit, Caden.”
I do as I’m told. I sit down, and do my best to keep my knees from bouncing, but only succeed when I give it all of my attention. When I give it all of my attention, though, I lose the conversation. I don’t want to lose that. I want to shine for Mackenzie. I want to give off an everything’s fine kind of vibe. I don’t think I’m succeeding.
Mackenzie’s lips move, and her eyes emote. I catch the tail end of what she’s saying. “. . . and the Dance Moms practically gouged one another’s eyes out, so Mom, who’s like totally not one of them, found me a calmer dance studio where the people aren’t psycho.” Then she looks down, and goes a little bit red. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
I’m not feeling much of anything right now, but if I could feel bad because she’s feeling bad, I would—so I say, “Well, there’s psycho, and there’s
psycho
. There’s no medication for Dance Mom
Syndrome. Except maybe cyanide.”
Mackenzie giggles. My parents are not amused.
“We don’t use that word here, Mackenzie,” Mom says. “Just like we don’t use the
C
word.”
“Cyclops,” I say. “Because the doctor has only one eye.”
Mackenzie giggles again. “You’re making that up.”
“Actually,” says Dad with a weird sort of pride, “he’s not. The other eye is glass.”
“Both his wings work, though,” I tell her. “But there’s nowhere to fly.”
“Why don’t we play a game?” Mom quickly says. The last game I remember playing was Apples to Apples when Shelby came. Or was it Max? No, I think it was Shelby. Although I know how to play the game, the concept was out of my reach at the time. The rules are pretty straightforward: an adjective is put down, like maybe “awkward,” and everyone has to throw down a noun that best fits. Throwing down an absurd card only works when you’re ironic, not medicated. Last time, I think the cards I played made everyone else profoundly sad.
With all the visitors engaged in playtime pursuits, however, Apples to Apples is the only game left on the shelf, and Mackenzie grabs it, not knowing the sordid history.
“I have an idea,” says Mom when Mackenzie sits down with the box. “Why don’t we use the game to build a house of cards?” Mackenzie begins to protest, but Dad gives her a bulgy-eyed
don’t-argue-we’ll-explain-later
sort of look.
I grin at the house of cards idea, getting the irony that they
don’t. The parrot would call that a good sign. He’d suggest I try to play the game after all. For that reason, I don’t.
Dad starts with the concentration of an engineer laying the foundation of a bridge. Each of us adds cards in turn. We don’t seem to get more than ten cards up before the house falls. Four attempts. The fourth time we actually get further, building a second level before the whole thing flattens.
“Oh well,” says Mom.
“It’s a tough thing to do, even when the sea is calm,” I point out.
Mom and Dad simultaneously try to change the subject again, but Mackenzie won’t let them. “What sea?” she asks.
“What sea, what?” I say.
“You said the sea was calm.”
“Did I?”
“Mackenzie . . . ,” Dad begins, but Mom gently touches Dad’s shoulder to stop him.
“Let him answer,” Mom says gently.
I suddenly feel very, very uncomfortable. Shamefully embarrassed. Like I’ve been caught on a date with my finger up my nose. I turn away, looking out of the window, where I see rolling hills of freshly mowed grass. It grounds me. If only for the moment. Still, the captain must be somewhere, listening to every word I say.
“It’s . . . like that sometimes,” I tell Mackenzie. It’s the only thing I can say that will keep me from imploding in on myself.
And Mackenzie says, “I get it.”
Then she reaches her hand out and puts it on mine. I still can’t look directly at her, so I look at her hand.
“Remember when we used to make forts out of cardboard boxes on Christmas?” she says.
I smile. “Yeah. That was fun.”
“Those forts were so real, even though they weren’t, you know?”
No one says anything for a moment.
“Is it Christmas?” I ask.
Dad sighs. “It’s almost summer, Caden.”
“Oh.”
Mom has gotten teary eyed, and I wonder what I did to make her cry.
It’s late afternoon. Almost sunset. The sun, low on the horizon, casts a hypnotic reflection on the sea. Our sails are full of a steady wind as we head relentlessly west. If indeed the sun still sets in the west.
I’m on deck with Carlyle. He hands me his mop, and lets me do some of his dirty work.
“Somehow I don’t think the captain would approve,” I tell him. “Or the parrot.”
He seems to have no opinion about the captain, but of the parrot he says, “That bird sees everything. I gave up keeping secrets from him long ago.”
“So then . . . whose side are you on?”
Carlyle smiles, and dumps some water from his bucket for me to mop up. “Yours.”
He watches me for a few moments, then says, “You remind me of me when I used to be in your shoes.”
“You?”
“Yep.” He closes his laptop, to give me his full attention. There are others in the rec room with us, but they’re mostly just watching TV. We’re the only ones talking. “You’re lucky. I was also fifteen when I had my first episode, but I didn’t end up in a place as nice as this.”
“You?” I say again.
“At first they thought bipolar one, but when the delusions got increasingly psychotic, and I started to have auditory hallucinations, they changed my diagnosis to schizoaffective.”
He says the words without whispering. He says them without the fearful gravity people on the outside give the words. The idea that Carlyle is one of us troubles me, because what if he’s lying? What if he’s making it up to mess with my head? No. That’s just paranoia. That’s what Poirot would say, and Poirot would be right.
Carlyle explains that schizoaffective is a cross between bipolar and schizophrenia. “Oughta be called ‘tri-polar,’” he says. “’Cause first you get manic, thinking you’re king of the universe, then you go off the deep end, seeing things, hearing things—
believing
things that aren’t true. Then when you come down, you fall into a depression once you realize where you’ve been.”
“And they let you work here?”
“I’m cool as long as I’m on my meds. Learned it the hard way, but I learned. Haven’t had an episode for years. And anyway, I don’t technically work here—I volunteer in my free time. I figured I got this thing, and a master’s in psychology, I might as well use them.”
It’s all too much for me to take in. “So what do you do when you’re not mopping up our mental crap?”
He points to his laptop. “Software company. I design games.”
“No way.”
“Hey, the meds can muddle your imagination, but they can’t kill it.”
I’m amazed, thrilled even. When I turn to look out over the deck, other crewmen are busy with tasks assigned by the captain, or just milling around. It’s a gorgeous sunset, filled with just about every color.
Carlyle wrings out his mop and looks around, satisfied with the cleanliness of the deck. “Anyway,” he says. “Just because it’s a long voyage, it doesn’t mean you’re on it forever.”
He leaves me with that thought as he goes belowdecks. It’s only after he’s gone that I see the captain. He’s standing at the helm, his favorite place for looking down on the rest of the ship—and right now he’s looking straight at me with an acid gaze from his singular eye that could dissolve me into nothing.
Nature, whether natural or not, unleashes its fury with a vengeance as we finally sail into the churning winds of the stalled storm front. The sky instantly turns from unrelenting day to an end-of-time kind of twilight as the ship pitches and rolls like a cork. Lightning flashes around us with thunder less than a second behind.
As I stand on deck, not knowing what to do, I watch the sails shred then heal, shred then heal above me, the scars on the fabric becoming as thick as the ratline ropes. I wonder how much they can stand before they fail. The captain barks orders to scrambling crewmen, who disgorge from the main hatch like ants from a flooding anthill. I’m thinking they should be going the other way. Better down than on deck, where they can be washed away, but perhaps they fear the wrath of the captain more than the wrath of heaven.
“Take down the sails!” the captain orders. “Secure the riggings!” He kicks a crewman in the behind. “Faster! Do you want us to lose a mast?”
The storm has been looming for more than a week—plenty of time to prepare the ship for this onslaught, but the captain chose to do nothing, sticking to a unique philosophy.