No one moves. No one but the parrot, who grooms himself. I can’t help but sense he’s proud of me for what I’ve said. It annoys me that I care.
Whatever patience the captain had is now gone. He looks like a volcano about to blow. “As usual, Seaman Bosch, your insolence can only be surmounted by your ignorance!”
And then the navigator comes to my rescue.
“Insolence, ignorance, ignoble, Chernobyl. Don’t go nuclear, sir—the crew can’t survive the radiation.”
The captain considers this, then chooses to vent the pressure of his fury by safely releasing it in another gale-force sigh. “Opinions are like sandstorms, Seaman Bosch,” he says. “They have no place at sea.” Then he tweaks my nose like he might a naughty child, and dismisses us.
As soon as we’ve left the map room and are out on deck, the navigator scolds me. “When will you learn? You walk in step with the captain, or you walk the plank—which, being copper, will not give you the proper bounce for a graceful dive.”
It occurs to me that, while I’ve seen crow’s nest jumpers, I’ve never seen the ship’s plank. But now as I look out across the open deck, there it is, poking rudely off the side of the ship like a middle finger. It doesn’t surprise me that it appeared at its mention. I’ve learned not to be surprised by anything here.
Before we go below, the girl with blue hair turns to me. Each time I talk back to the captain, I seem to earn a little more respect from her. “I’ll bet our captain has a pretty bad beast, too,” she says. “Do you think we’ll ever run into it?”
I look up to see the parrot swooping from the map room to a high perch on the foremast.
“I think we already have,” I tell her.
82. Deep in the Throat of Doom
In the middle of the night, I am abducted by crewmen I don’t know and taken to clean the cannon. Punishment, no doubt, for talking back to the captain. I try to fight, but my limbs have turned to rubber just as completely as the ship has turned to copper. My arms and legs bend and stretch in strange directions, and give me no support when I try to stand, no assistance when I try to fight. My arms flap like noodles at my abductors.
Down a dark hatch we go where the massive cannon awaits. “Everyone must clean the cannon at least once each voyage,” I am told. “You’ll do it whether you like it or not.”
The place is dark and dismal with a stench of grease and gunpowder. Cannonballs are stacked in pyramids, and there in the middle sits the cannon, impossibly heavy—the copper planks beneath it buckle from its weight. Its dark mouth is even more intimidating than the captain’s eye.
“Isn’t she a beauty?” says the master-at-arms—that grizzled, muscular career seaman, covered in leering skeletal tattoos.
Beside the cannon is a bucket of polish and a rag. I dip the rag in the polish with my rubbery arms, and begin to slather it on the barrel of the great gun, but the master-at-arms laughs. “Not like that, you fool.” Then he grabs me with his powerful arms and lifts me off the ground. “It’s not the outside that needs cleaning.”
I hear more laughter, and for a moment think that there are others hiding in the room—but the laughter is from the skull faces of his tattoos. Dozens of voices cackle at me. “Push him in!” they yell. “Shove him in!” “Cram him in!”
“No! Stop!” But my pleas are useless. I am pushed headfirst into the mouth of the cannon, sliding down its cold, rough throat. Tight. Claustrophobic. I can barely breathe. I try to squirm, but the master-at-arms yells at me:
“Don’t move! The slightest motion can set it off!”
“How can I clean it if I can’t move?”
“That’s your problem.” He and his ink laugh long and loud—then there’s silence . . . and then he begins pounding on the barrel of the cannon with an iron pole. In a constant rhythm so loud it resonates in my skull.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Hold still, please!” the skull tattoos yell. “Or you’ll have to do this again.”
After what feels like forever, the rhythm of the banging changes.
B-B-B-Boom! B-B-B-Boom B-B-B-Boom!
The endless percussive symphony makes my brain want to slide out through my ears and run away—and I realize that must be how it happens! That’s what chases the brains out of sailors’ heads! But I don’t want to be another mindless sailor. I don’t want Carlyle mopping my renegade brain into the sea.
Clang-Clang Bang! Clang-Clang Bang! Clang-Clang Bang!
The pattern of the pounding cycles through twice more, louder each time, until the world is all noise and my teeth are rattling in my head, and I know that no one is going to stop this. I am alone in the barrel of the gun and no one can save me.
83. Clockwork Robots
Your parents come once a day during visiting hour, like a pair of clockwork robots. You convene in the rec room, and each day you beg and bargain with them to take you away.
“There are crazy people here!” you tell them in a hushed voice so the ones you’re speaking about can’t hear. “I’m not one of them! I don’t belong here!”
And although they don’t speak the words, their answer is in their eyes. Yes you are, and yes you do. You hate them for it.
“It’s only for a little while,” your mother tells you. “Until you’re feeling better.”
“If you didn’t come here,” your father insists, “you would just have gotten worse. We know it’s hard, but we know you’re brave.”
You don’t feel brave, and you don’t trust them enough to take their word for it.
“There’s some good news,” they tell you. “Your MRI came back clean. It means you don’t have a brain tumor, or anything like that.”
Until they mentioned it, it had never occurred to you that you might have had one. And now that it’s been mentioned, you don’t believe the results.
“It wasn’t so bad, was it? The MRI?”
“It was loud,” you tell them. Just thinking about it makes your teeth start to rattle again.
Your parents come and go, come and go. It’s the only way you can measure the days. And they talk about you when they think you’re not listening—as if somehow it’s your sense of hearing that’s been affected, not your mind. But you can still hear them across the room.
“There’s something in his eyes now,” they say. “I don’t know how to describe it. I can’t look at them.” And that almost makes you laugh, because they don’t see what you see when you look in their eyes. In everyone’s eyes. You see truths no one else can see. Conspiracies and connections as twisted and sticky as a black widow’s web. You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees a bottomless pit in yours.
84. Lost Landscape
You can’t get in your own head sometimes. You can pace around it, you can bang it against walls, but you can’t get inside.
“That’s not a bad thing,” Dr. Poirot tells you. “Because right now the things inside aren’t doing you much good, are they?”
“Not doing me much good,” you repeat. Or is it him repeating you? You’re never really sure, since cause and effect have become as shifty as time itself.
Dr. Poirot has a glass eye. You only know because your roommate told you, but now that you look, you can see that it is slightly smaller and doesn’t track as well as the other. Dr. Poirot wears bright Hawaiian shirts. He says it’s to make his patients feel more comfortable. Dr. Poirot prounounces his name Pwah-ROW. “Like Agatha Christie’s detective,” he told you. “You’re probably too young to know the character. Times change, times change.”
Dr. Poirot has a cheat sheet that tells him everything about you. Even things you don’t know yourself. How can you even begin to trust such a person?
“Forget the troubles of the outside world. Your job now is to rest,” he says as he flips the pages of your life.
“My job is to rest,” you echo, and are mad at yourself for being unable to offer anything but an echo. You don’t know whether or not it’s the meds making you do thi
s, or your misfiring brain.
“Your mind is in a cast now,” he says. “Think of it that way. It was broken and now it’s in a cast.”
You ask if you can have things from home, but don’t know what to ask for. You have your own clothes to wear, but no belts or jewelry. Books are allowed, but no sharp pencils or ballpoint pens either. Nothing that can be used as a weapon against others, or against yourself. They do allow writing instruments in the rec room, but they are under constant guard by the pastels.
Later that morning, your breakfast, along with your morning meds, comes up in an epic projectile puke in the rec room. You had no internal warning, and it spews out all over the puzzle table like white-water foam.
The girl who seems to spend her life at that puzzle table throws a fit.
“You did that on purpose!” the perpetual puzzler yells. “I know you did!” She has blue hair with blond roots. The roots, you suspect, are accurate measures of how long she’s been here. When you puke on her puzzle, she launches herself at you—pushes you hard against the wall, and you’re too drugged up to fight back. You have a bad bruise on your arm now, but the pain of that is also numbed, like every other part of your nervous system.
A pastel persona is quick to restrain the perpetual puzzler before she can claw your eyes out, and another one escorts you away. There are always pastel personas around, quick to respond if someone gets out of line, and if it gets really bad, there’s security dressed in black, but you don’t think they carry weapons, because weapons are too easy for a desperate person to grab.
You hear the puzzler crying as you leave. You want to cry, too, for her lost landscape, but instead it comes out as a laugh, which makes you feel even worse, and so you laugh even louder.
85. All Meat Must Be Tenderized
You are in the White Plastic Kitchen again. There are shapes around you that sometimes make sense and sometimes don’t. Monsters of malicious intent wear ever-changing masks. Voices join in a babbling chorus, and you can’t tell what direction they come from, or what dimension—one of the standard three, or one that’s only accessible through the part of your head that hurts all the time.
Tonight you sweat. The kitchen is too hot. And it only makes your head hurt worse.
“I have a brain tumor,” you tell a disembodied mask with a clipboard hovering beside it.
“No you don’t,” it says.
“It’s inoperable,” you insist. You can’t tell if the mask is male or female. You think that’s intentional.
“Both your MRI and CAT scan showed nothing out of the ordinary,” it says, looking at the clipboard—and you don’t argue, because you don’t want to be shoved back into the cannon.
The mask grows hands—or maybe it had hands all along that were just invisible until now. You feel pressure on your upper arm, and when you look, your whole arm is wedged into the crook of a guillotine.
“Hold still, I’m just checking your vitals,” the he-she mask says.
The guillotine slices down. You watch your arm flop on the ground like a trout in a boat. You groan, and the mask says, “Too small. Throw it back, yes?” And it tosses the arm out an open window that wasn’t there a moment ago. Yet when you look, your arm is still attached to your body.
“Systolic’s still high. We’ll up your Clonidine,” it says. “And if that doesn’t work, we’ll just pop your head like a balloon.”
Some of these things are actually spoken. Some aren’t. Yet you hear them all the same, and you can’t tell which words are out loud, and which are sent to you telepathically.
“Let’s have a look at that bruise. Is it tender?” He-she looks at the purple bit of flesh given to you by the blue-haired puzzle-girl.
“Hmm—nice and tender,” he-she says or doesn’t say. “Good! All our beef should cut like butter.” Then you’re left to slowly broil in your own juices.
86. Therapy Rodeo
You don’t know what this stuff is they feed the kids within these painfully bare institutional walls. Chicken, maybe? Beef stew? The only thing you can clearly identify is Jell-O. There’s lots of it. Little bits of peaches or pineapple are mired within it, suspended in red jiggling transparency. You can relate to their plight. Especially when the meds kick in. There are times when the world is gelatinous around you, and it takes such a gathering of willpower just to move the slightest bit, it hardly seems worth the effort.
You exist from meal to meal, in spite of the fact that food means nothing anymore, because you have neither a feeling of hunger nor a sense of taste. It’s a side effect of your magical medical cocktail.
“Only temporary,” Dr. Poirot says. “Only temporary.”
Which doesn’t really mean much to you, because time no longer moves forward. It doesn’t move sideways anymore either. Now it just spins in place like a little kid making himself dizzy.
You learn to measure time by therapy sessions.
Three times a day, for an hour at a time, they corral you into a circle and force you to listen to things that are so awful you can’t purge them from your mind. A girl describes, in graphic detail, how she was repeatedly raped by her stepbrother, before trying to slit her own throat. A boy explains step-by-step what it’s like to shoot up with heroin, and sell yourself on the streets to earn money for more. The demons these kids ride are awful, and you want to turn away, run away, cover your ears, but you’re forced to listen because it’s “therapeutic.” You wonder what freaking moron decided it was a good idea to torture screwed-up kids by making them listen to one another’s living nightmares.
You tell your parents about it, and to your surprise, they are as furious as you.
“My son’s fifteen!” your father says to the head pastel. “You’re exposing him to horrors no kid should be exposed to—much less one who’s sick—and you call that therapy?”
Way to go, Dad. It’s the first sign that maybe he’s not an impostor after all.
Your parents’ complaints bring about results. A new “facilitator” takes over the therapy group to help rein things in, and keep the therapy rodeo from being overly traumatic to impressionable young minds. “I’m not here to brainwash you,” he tells us. “I’m just here to help you speak your mind.”
His name is Carlyle.
87. All That We’ve Worked For
“The dreams you’re having trouble me,” the captain says. “They reek of malevolence and subversive intent.”
We sit in his study, just the two of us. He smokes a smoldering pipe stuffed with seaweed skimmed from the ocean. The parrot’s perch is empty.
“But dreams give you insight,” I point out.
The captain leans closer, the acrid smoke of his pipe stinging my eyes. “Not these dreams.”
I keep expecting the parrot to voice an opinion, forgetting that he’s not in the room. I’ve become so used to the captain and the parrot as a team, it makes me uneasy.
“The masked demons you speak of in your dreams of the white kitchen threaten to undo all that we’ve worked for,” the captain says, “and our journey will be for naught.”
I wonder if the parrot has suffered the same fate as his father, and has had an unwanted visit to the galley, which is nowhere near as sterile and bright as my dream-kitchen. Has he had an appointment with the chopping block? I’ve often thought I’d like the parrot gone, yet the thought of his absence brings me foreboding.
The captain could not have done away with him, because the captain and I are in cahoots. As long as I am a key part of both the captain’s and the parrot’s schemes, then both are safe if I make no move one way or the other. There are times I want them both to survive. There are times I want them both dead. But I live in fear of only one of them remaining.
“Listen to me well,” the captain instructs. “You must not go to the white kitchen. Keep your eyes closed to the brightness of its light. Resist that place with every fiber of your being. Everything depends on you staying here with us. With me.”
88. Toxic Tide
You don’t so much sleep as borrow eight hours from death. When the meds peak, and you can’t get in your head, you can’t dream either. Maybe in the earliest hours of the morning, just before waking up, you’ll slide into your own unconscious mind, but you’ll wake all too soon.
You come to know the pattern of your particular chemical bombardment. The numbness, the lack of focus, the artificial sense of peace when the meds first hit your system. The growing paranoia and anxiety as they wane. The worse you feel, the more you can get into the treacherous waters of your own thoughts. The greater the threat from inside, the more you long for those waters, as if you’ve grown accustomed to the terrible tentacles that seek to draw you into their crushing embrace.
Sometimes you can see why you need the cocktail. Other times you can’t believe you even thought that. And so it goes, waxing and waning like a tide, both toxic and healing at the same time.
When the tide is high, you believe in the walls of this place. When the tide is low, you start to believe other things.
“Once your brain chemistry begins to settle,” Dr. Poirot says, “what’s real and what’s not real will become increasingly clear.”
You’re not entirely convinced that’s a good thing.
89. Streets Green with Blood
“He looks at maps all day long,” Carlyle, the therapy guy, tells you. “We call him the navigator.”
The kid sitting at the table in the corner of the rec room pores wide-eyed over a map of Europe. You can’t help but be curious.
“Why do you have it upside down?” you ask him.
He doesn’t look up from his map. “Gotta break up the known patterns to see what’s really there.” It sort of makes sense. You’ve been there, so you know what he means.
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