Challenger Deep

by Neal Shusterman

  115. Double, Double, Toil and Trouble, Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble

  About 99 percent of a pill is made up of other stuff that has nothing to do with the medication. They add extra ingredients for color, coating, and to make the pill stick together. Stuff like xanthan gum, which is made from bacteria; Carbopol, which is an acrylic polymer like house paint; and gelatin, which is made from cow cartilage.

  Somewhere deep in the secret recesses of Pfizer, or Glaxo-SmithKline, or one of the other big pharmaceutical companies, I imagine there’s a high-security dungeon where three hunchbacked witches stir a massive industrial cauldron of crap I don’t want to know about, but I must ingest on a daily basis.

  And the generic versions aren’t even brewed by real witches.

  116. Dirty Martini

  It finally happens.

  My brain escapes through my left nostril and goes feral.

  I’m out of my body, scurrying on the deck in the middle of the night. The ship is fogged in. There’s no hint of stars, or what lies before us—or maybe it’s just that my mind’s eye can’t see all that far. The other brains hiss when I get close. We are solitary creatures, I realize. Solitary and suspicious. This close to the deck, I can see the sticky black caulking spread between the copper planks. That black sludge seethes with intentions I’d rather not know about.

  My gnarled purple legs are rootlike, sparking with intelligence, or maybe it’s just a series of short circuits. Those twisted dendritic legs get stuck in the pitch, and the stuff begins to pull me down like I’m a dinosaur in tar. I know if I can’t get free I will be dragged into the narrow space between the copper planks, and crushed—digested by the pitch. It takes a huge amount of will, but finally I tear myself free.

  Where will I go?

  I cannot let Calliope see me like this. I’m horrible. So instead I head aft and make my way like a gecko up the bulkhead toward the captain’s ready room, squeezing myself as flat as I can to slip in under the door. If it’s true that I play a crucial part in this mission, then he will help me. He will find a way to fix this.

  The captain sits at his desk with a half-melted candle, studying one of my drawings for symbols and signs. When he looks up to see me, the glare of his eye is like a flamethrower.

  “Get that thing out of here!” he bellows.

  He doesn’t recognize me. Of course he doesn’t—to him I am just another piece of useless vermin infesting his ship. I try to explain, but I can’t. I have no mouth.

  I hear footsteps. A door creaks open, and hands, dozens of hands, hundreds of hands grab at me. I wriggle and squirm. I can’t let them get me! The hands grasp and claw, but I twist free from them and bolt out the door, tumbling down the stairs, into . . . wetness. The deck is wet with soapy water, and Carlyle pushes his mop toward me. The mop is huge! A wall of filthy brown snakes. His mop hits me and I slide through the slick flood, trying to grab on to something, but it’s no use. I see the drainage hole in front of me, and there’s nothing I can do. In a moment I’m in free fall. Then I’m in the cold sea, submerged beneath the waves.

  I hurt. I hurt everywhere—and I know I’m going to die this way. My body, on the ship, will go through the motions of living, but I will be gone.

  Then, in the midst of my panic, I feel something. Something huge. It moves beneath me. Hard scales brush past my raw nerve endings. It’s one of the creatures the captain speaks of. It’s here, and it’s real. I recoil in terror. In a moment it’s gone, diving deep . . . but only so it can gain momentum as it rises again—this time with its mouth open. I kick, I struggle, and finally I break the surface.

  I can see nothing. No ship. No sea. The fog is cotton-dense.

  I feel the rush of water as the creature rises toward me.

  Then, out of nowhere, the parrot swoops down, his wings wide, and he grabs me, his talons digging into the ridges and convolutions of my gray matter. He pulls me from the water, and we soar upward.

  “Unexpected, unexpected,” the parrot says, “but not irreversible.”

  We rise high above the ship, out of danger, and out of the dense fog bank. All I can see of the ship is the mainmast and the crow’s nest poking through the fog, but the sky above it is clear. The stars are as plentiful as the Milky Way seen from space. In an instant, I’ve gone from absolute terror to absolute wonder.

  “I can give you a gift of unlimited horizons,” the parrot squawks loudly, “but only if you do what must be done. The time has come. Do away with the captain, and all that you see from horizon to horizon will be yours.”

  I want to tell him about the creature beneath the waves, but I can’t communicate at all. I want to believe the parrot can read my mind, but he can’t.

  “All is well,” he says. Then he drops me.

  I plummet toward the fogged-in ship. The crow’s nest swells before me, envelops me, and I find myself splashing in bitter liquid. I am at the bottom of a huge cocktail glass, sitting there helplessly like an olive in a dirty martini.

  There are eyes all around. They study me with faces too distorted in the curved glass to recognize.

  “You know,” I hear the bartender say, “they put Einstein’s brain in a jar of formaldehyde. If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for you.”

  117. While You Were Out

  “It happens like that sometimes,” Carlyle says. He doesn’t have a mop, so that helps me to know where I am. The clock says it’s long after therapy group, but sometimes Carlyle hangs in the dining area, talking. Helping.

  “It happens like that,” I echo. I didn’t participate in group today. I had other concerns.

  “Everyone reacts differently to medication. That’s why Poirot keeps changing it up on you. He’s got to find the right cocktail.”

  “The right cocktail,” I say. I know I’m repeating him. I know it, but I can’t stop. My thoughts are rubber and anything that comes in bounces out again by way of my mouth.

  I had an “adverse reaction” to the Risperdal. Neither Poirot nor the pastels would tell me exactly what that meant. Carlyle was more forthcoming. “I’m not supposed to bother you with the details, but you deserve to know,” he told me. “You had a rapid heartbeat and tremors. You were pretty incoherent. I know it sounds awful, but it really wasn’t so bad.”

  I have no memory of these things. I was Elsewhere.

  Carlyle pushes a plate of food toward me, reminding me that I need to eat.

  I do, trying to focus on chewing and swallowing, but even when I attempt to concentrate, my mind drifts. I think about Calliope, whom I haven’t seen for days. I must get up to the bow. I think about the bartenders, and wonder what diabolical things they’ll be putting into my cocktail. Spleen of chameleon. Testicle of tarantula. Eventually I realize that I’m sitting there with a fork in the air, and food drooling out of the side of my mouth. I feel like I could have been like that for hours, but probably not, because Carlyle would let it go on only for a few seconds. He reminds me to chew and swallow. Then he reminds me to chew and swallow again. This has been a setback. We both know it.

  Carlyle takes the spoon out of my hand and sets it down. “Maybe you’ll eat more later,” he says, realizing this meal isn’t happening.

  “Maybe I’ll eat more later.” It is not lost on me that the fork has magically transformed into a spoon.

  118. Zimple Physics

  The ship heaves and drops, heaves and drops. A lantern hanging from the low ceiling of my cabin swings with the motion, and shadows reach and retreat, each time seeming to get a little bit closer.

  The captain personally supervises the return of my brain to my head. Getting toothpaste back into the tube doesn’t even begin to describe it.

  “Zis is accomplished by creating a vacuum within ze cranium,” the ship’s doctor explains. “Zen ze errant brain is introduced to ze left nostril, at vich time it is zucked in to fill ze void. All zimple physics.” The ship’s doctor, who I’ve never seen before, and never see again, looks and sounds suspicio
usly like Albert Einstein, whose brain, I’ve heard, is in a jar. When the operation is over, I still feel somewhat out-of-body. The captain looks at me and shakes his head in disappointment.

  “Lie down with dogs, get up with rabies,” he tells me unsympathetically. I don’t think that’s the actual expression, but I get the point. “If you choose to trust the bird and those blasted bartenders, then this is what you can expect. Put your faith in me, boy, not in their brain-sucking concoctions. I thought you’d know better by now!”

  The captain looms over me, seeming so much larger than life when I’m this incapacitated. He turns to go, and I don’t want him to. The navigator is nowhere in sight, and I don’t want to be left alone right now.

  “It swam past me . . . ,” I tell him.

  He slowly turns back to me, studying me. “What swam past you?”

  “Something huge. It had scales. They felt like steel. Then it dove deep, and launched itself toward the surface. I could feel its hunger. It wanted to devour me.” I don’t dare tell him that the parrot rescued me before it could.

  The captain sits on the edge of my cot. “That,” he says, “was the Abyssal Serpent—a very formidable adversary. Once it sets its eye on you, it will track you until you, or it, are no more. It will never let you be.”

  And although this is not the best of news, the captain smiles. “If the Abyssal Serpent sees you as worthy of its attention, that speaks very well of you. It means there’s much more to you than meets the eye.”

  I look away from him, rolling to face the wall, trying to escape the prospect of the serpent. “If it’s all the same to you,” I tell him, “there are certain eyes I’d rather not meet.”

  119. Little Chatterbox

  My anxiety level is spiking again, and I pace around the nurses’ station, making Dolly, the morning charge nurse, nervous.

  “Honey, don’t you have group now?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then isn’t there something you’d rather be doing?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She complains to the other nurse that we patients don’t have enough structured time, and in the end, she gets the orderly with the scary tattoos to escort me away.

  “Why don’t you watch some TV in the rec room?” he suggests. “A bunch of your friends are watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” he tells me. “The original one—not the creepy one with Johnny Depp.”

  I find myself instantly irked. “First of all, just because we’ve got Oompa-Loompas bouncing around our brains, that doesn’t make us all friends. And secondly, the original was called Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory—although technically not, because the book was first, and it was Charlie in the book—but that still doesn’t make you right.”

  He chuckles and that ticks me off even more. “Well, aren’t we the little chatterbox today?”

  What is he, a kindergarten teacher for the Hells Angels? “I hope all your skulls eat you in your sleep,” I tell him. He doesn’t laugh at that and I feel I can claim a minor victory.

  120. The Maps Say Otherwise

  Hal’s mother pays one of her surprise visits. I’m not in the rec room to see it. I can’t even sit long enough to draw—I’m pacing back and forth on deck to counteract the motion of the sea again. They’d give me an extra Ativan if I asked, but I don’t. The bartender is much too free with the cocktails, and the thought of climbing to the crow’s nest just makes me more anxious.

  When we’re both back in our room, Hal tells me of his current maternal adventure. She stayed longer than usual this time. She even played a game of checkers with him. This is what’s commonly referred to as “a red flag.”

  “So what’s wrong?” I ask him.

  “She’s moving to Seattle,” Hal tells me. “She’s very excited, and wanted me to know.”

  “Why Seattle?” I ask.

  “She’s in the process of collecting a new husband, and that’s where he lives.”

  I can’t quite tell how Hal feels about this. “So, that’s good, right? You’ll go there when you’re done here.”

  Hal stares at the ceiling, lying flat on his bed. “The maps say otherwise.”

  “She’s not taking you?”

  “I see no path to the Pacific Northwest.” A moment of silence, then he says, “Her fiancé finds me ‘off-putting.’”

  I’m about to point out that, as his mother, she can’t just leave him, but then I remember that he’s already been removed from her custody.

  He rolls to face the bulkhead. I feel the ship rise and fall, riding a slow, powerful swell.

  “It’s okay,” Hal tells me, “I’ve got better places to be.”

  121. Mentally We Roll Along

  The following morning’s group features a couple of new faces, and an absence of some old faces. Everyone has a different graduation day, and the population is constantly rolling. Sometimes there are warm good-byes, other times exits are stealthy. It all depends on what the individual wants.

  “They can beam people in and out of this place,” a kid named Raoul tells me. “I’ve seen it.” Rather than argue with Raoul’s construct of reality, I just tell him that I’m not allowed to talk to people with too many consecutive vowels in their name.

  Today in group, Skye, who is nearing the end of her puzzle, seems slightly less angry. “There’s a reason for all of this,” Skye tells the group, looking to Carlyle for validation. “My mother says God never gives us something we can’t handle.”

  To which Hal says, “Your mother’s an asshat.”

  “Hey!” barks Carlyle, and Hal is banished from the rest of the session. Rule one: disparaging remarks are punishable by early dismissal. Unless of course early dismissal is what you were aiming for. Then it’s not a punishment at all, but a pleasant perk of rudeness.

  “Caden,” Carlyle says, looking for a moderate among extremes, “what do you think about what Skye said?”

  “Who, me?”

  I think he might say something snarky like “No, the Caden hiding in the air vent,” but instead he says “Yes, you,” as if I wasn’t just trying to buy time, but actually thought he might be addressing air-vent-Caden. Carlyle can be disappointingly unbanterful.

  “I don’t think God gave us this any more than he gives little kids cancer, or makes poor people lottery winners,” I say. “If anything, he gives us courage to deal.”

  “What about the ones who can’t deal?” asks Raoul.

  “That’s easy,” I answer, with wide, soulful eyes and a totally straight face. “Those are the people who God really, really hates.”

  I’m hoping Carlyle expels me from the group, too, but no such luck.

  122. Historically Freaking

  If you think about it, the public perception of funky brain chemistry has been as varied and weird as the symptoms, historically speaking.

  If I had been born a Native American in another time, I might have been lauded as a medicine man. My voices would have been seen as the voices of ancestors imparting wisdom. I would have been treated with great mystical regard.

  If I had lived in biblical times, I might have been seen as a prophet, because, let’s face it, there are really only two possibilities: either prophets were actually hearing God speaking to them, or they were mentally ill. I’m sure if an actual prophet surfaced today, he or she would receive plenty of Haldol injections, until the sky opened up and the doctors were slapped silly by the Hand of God.

  In the Dark Ages my parents would have sent for an exorcist, because I was clearly possessed by evil spirits, or maybe even the Devil himself.

  And if I lived in Dickensian England, I would have been thrown into Bedlam, which is more than just a description of madness. It was an actual place—a “madhouse” where the insane were imprisoned in unthinkable conditions.

  Living in the twenty-first century gives a person a much better prognosis for treatment, but sometimes I wish I’d lived in an age before technology. I would much rather everyone th
ink I was a prophet than some poor sick kid.

  123. Bard and Dog

  Raoul, the new kid, has visitations from famous dead people. Most notably Shakespeare. Whether it’s his ghost, or the product of time travel, no one is quite sure.

  “So what does he say?” I ask him as we loiter around the nurses’ station. Raoul suddenly gets very guarded.

  “Leave me alone!” he says. “You’re gonna tell me it’s not real—but I got theories, okay? I got theories.”

  He storms away from me, probably thinking I’m going to make fun of him, but I’m not. I have developed a great respect for delusions and/or hallucinations—although I’m not sure which Raoul suffers from. Does he see the bard? Does he just hear him? Or does he think I’m Shakespeare when I talk to him?

  There was a time, before I wound up here, when I would have thought all this was funny. When I was a member of the world, and not a member of “the club.” The world just loves to laugh at the absurdity of insanity. I guess what makes it funny to people is that it’s a gross distortion of something very familiar. For instance, Raoul’s much ado about nothing comes by way of his father, a failed Shakespearean actor who gave up the dream and started a theater camp for underprivileged children.

  I feel bad that I was mean to him in group, so now I feel helpful in the worst way. And what could be worse than me trying to help? So I follow Raoul to the rec room where Skye works away on her puzzle, and a bunch of other kids watch a talking dog movie—as if any of us really needs to add talking dogs to our mental stew.

  Raoul plops himself down at a table and I sit across from him. “Is it a tragedy or a comedy?” I ask.