Challenger Deep

by Neal Shusterman

  He turns his chair away from me but doesn’t get up to leave, which means he’s just posturing now. He wants to see where this is going.

  “Shakespeare wrote tragedies and comedies, so which do you feel like you’re in when he talks to you?” Actually the bard also wrote love sonnets, but if Shakespeare’s reciting sonnets to him, that’s a whole other issue.

  “I . . . don’t know,” says Raoul.

  “If it’s a tragedy,” I tell him, “remind Shakespeare that he’s got a comic side, too. Challenge him to make you laugh.”

  “Go away!” he says, and when I don’t leave, he joins the dog watchers—but I can tell he’s really not watching, he’s thinking about what I said—which is all I wanted.

  I’m no Poirot, and I’m not even a Carlyle; I don’t know if I’ve given him good advice or not, but it seems to me that these worlds we touch upon can get so dark, anything we can do to lighten them must be a good thing, right?

  124. Hating the Messenger

  I’ve been desensitized to the horrors of group therapy. The graphic details, the tearful confessions, the furious rants. They’re all so much background noise. Carlyle is a good facilitator. He tries to be a fly on the wall, and lets us talk among ourselves, giving advice and guiding us only when he needs to.

  Alexa does the same thing almost every day. The second she gets the floor, it’s like a filibuster—especially when there’s someone new in the group. She keeps reliving the horrors inflicted on her by her stepbrother, and how it felt to cut her own throat—she just uses different words, and different lead-ins, to trick us into thinking she’s taking us somewhere new.

  Is it insensitive for me to want her to stop? Is it cruel for me to want to scream at her to shut the hell up after the millionth time I’ve heard the story? I realize I’m feeling a little clearer than usual today. A little more verbal. I can put thoughts together. It may not last, but I’m determined to use it while I’ve got it.

  In today’s retelling, she’s standing in front of the mirror, looking deep into her own eyes, and deciding there’s nothing in them worth saving, but before she raises the Swiss Army Knife to her throat, I shout out—

  “Excuse me, but I’ve already seen this movie.”

  All eyes turn to me.

  “Spoiler alert,” I continue. “The girl tries to kill herself, but she lives, and her scumbag stepbrother takes off and disappears from everyone’s lives. It was a real tearjerker the first few times, but now it’s old—even for cable.”

  “Caden,” says Carlyle carefully, like he’s trying to figure out whether to cut the yellow or the blue wire on a bomb. “You’re being a little harsh, man.”

  “No, I’m being honest,” I tell him. “Aren’t we supposed to be honest here?” Then I look back toward Alexa, who stares at me, maybe terrified of what’s coming next. “Every time you relive it, it’s like he’s doing it to you again and again,” I tell her. “But it’s not even him anymore—it’s you. Now you’re the one making yourself his victim.”

  “Oh, so I should just forget it?” Tears well in her eyes, but I have no sympathy today.

  “No, don’t ever forget it,” I tell her. “But you have to process it and move on. Live your life, otherwise he took your future away from you, too.”

  “You’re just mean!” she shouts at me. “I hate you!” Then she buries her face in her hands and sobs.

  “Uh . . . I think Caden’s right,” says Raoul apprehensively. Hal nods his approval, Skye looks off to her left like she couldn’t care less, and the others just watch Carlyle, either too afraid or too medicated to have an opinion.

  Carlyle, still fretting over which wire to cut, cautiously says, “Well, Alexa has a right to feel what she feels . . .”

  “Thank you,” Alexa says.

  “. . . but maybe Caden does have a larger point that we all should consider.” Then he asks what “moving on” means to each of us, and calm conversation continues. Even though I meant what I said, I’m also relieved he found the right wire to cut.

  After the session is over, Carlyle calls me aside. I know what this is about. He’s going to lecture me about how I behaved in group today. Maybe he’ll even threaten to tell Poirot about it.

  So I’m shocked when he says, “That was actually very insightful of you back there.” Then, seeing my surprise, he says, “Hey, credit where credit is due. It might not have been the best way to say it, but Alexa needed to hear it, whether she knew it or not.”

  “Yeah, and now she hates me.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” Carlyle says. “When the truth hurts, we always hate the messenger.”

  Then he asks me if I’m aware of my diagnosis—because the doctors always leave it to parents to tell us. My parents have floated a few mental-illness buzzwords, but only in the vaguest way.

  “Nobody tells me anything,” I finally admit. “At least not officially to my face.”

  “Yeah, it’s like that at first. Mainly because diagnoses change, but also because the words themselves carry so much baggage. Know what I mean?”

  I know exactly what he means. I had overheard Poirot talking to my parents. He was using words like psychosis and schizophrenic. Words that people feel they have to whisper, or not repeat at all. The Mental-Illness-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.

  “I’ve heard my parents say ‘bipolar,’ but I think that’s just because it sounds like a nicer word.”

  He nods in understanding. “Sucks, doesn’t it?”

  I laugh at that. It’s actually nice to have it stated so clearly. “No, it’s a walk in the park,” I tell him. “When the park is Yellowstone, and Old Faithful is blowing boiling steam up your ass.”

  Now it’s his turn to laugh. “Your meds are working if you’ve got a sense of humor again.”

  “It’s a fluke,” I tell him.

  He grins. “As time goes on, you’ll find more and more flukes.”

  “That’s a whole lot of whales,” I say.

  “Not necessarily,” he answers. “Dolphins have flukes, too.”

  And that sends me right to the wall in Mackenzie’s room. I begin to wonder if that wall has been painted over to erase any hint of my illness from her room. After all, those samurai dolphins could be seen as psychotic.

  125. Promenade

  I sit in the Vista Lounge drawing while Callie looks out the window. This is how our free time goes, what little of it there is. My stomach is acting up today. Gas, or indigestion, or something. Being here with Callie makes my discomfort seem unimportant. The big picture window loses heat to the overcast day, making the lounge chilly, but I can’t keep Callie warm during the day, when eyes are everywhere. I imagine she comes to my room every night to borrow my warmth—but I think that happened only once. Still, this is one time I’m happy to believe my imagination.

  Bland Muzak plays in the Vista Lounge through speakers that are built into the ceiling, so we couldn’t grab them and rip them out if we tried. Muted brass instruments drone on like Charlie Brown’s parents. Bwah-wa-wah, Bwah-mwah-wa-wah. Even the tunes here are medicated.

  Callie glances at my sketch pad. “You draw differently than you did before you got sick, don’t you?”

  I’m surprised that she would know that, but maybe I shouldn’t be. I feel like we’ve known each other much longer than we actually have.

  “I don’t ‘draw’ anymore,” I tell her. “Lately I just push stuff out of my head.”

  She grins. “I hope you have something left inside when you’re done.”

  “Yeah, me, too.”

  Then she grabs my arm gently. “I want to walk,” she says. “Will you walk with me?”

  This is a new request from her. Once she’s fixed in front of the Vista Lounge window, she rarely leaves until someone makes her leave.

  “Are you sure?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she says. Then again, “Yes, I am,” as if she needs to say it twice to convince herself.

  We go out into the hallway and walk—an old-fashioned
promenade, arm in arm, in defiance of the no-physical-contact rule. No one stops us.

  The ward is designed as an oval. “Like a big fat zero,” Hal once pointed out, finding great significance to that. Here, you can walk the hall without pacing, because once you start walking, you never reach the end. Today I measure laps by how many times I pass the nurses’ station, but quickly lose count.

  “Don’t you want to go back to the window?” I ask Callie. Not because I want to, but because she should want to.

  “No,” she says. “There’s nothing more to see today.”

  “But . . .”

  She turns to me, waiting for me to continue. I wish I could, but I have no idea what my “but” was about. So I walk her to her room.

  “You should finish your drawing,” she says. “I want to see it when it’s done.”

  Since I was just sketching Muzak impressions, I’m less interested in the finished product than she is.

  “Sure,” I tell her. “I’ll show it to you.” Our conversations never feel this awkward. Even when we say nothing, it’s less awkward than this. My stomach rumbles and begins to ache. It seems to echo the discomfort in the air between us. Finally she tells me what’s on her mind.

  “I’m worried,” she says. “I’m worried that we won’t set each other free.”

  I’m not sure I catch her meaning, but I’m unsettled, even so. “That’s not up to us. It’s Poirot who decides that.”

  She shakes her head. “Poirot just signs the papers.”

  We stand at the door to her room. Angry Arms of Death passes by, giving us an I’ve-got-my-eyes-on-you sort of look before moving on.

  “We’ll leave here,” she tells me, “but we won’t leave together. One of us will be left behind.”

  And although I don’t want to think about that, I know it’s true. A harsh reality amidst the harsh unreality.

  “We have to promise to free each other when the time comes,” she says. “I promise. . . . Can you?”

  “Yes,” I tell her, “I promise, too.” But I know it’s easier said than done. And I think, if thoughts are worth a penny, how much less promises must be worth. Especially the ones you’re likely to break.

  126. A Fine Kind of Pain

  My gut is the sea, roiling and stirring with deep dark acidity and malevolent intent. The discomfort within has evolved into sheer misery. Just as my stomach rumbles with gaseous unpleasantness, so does the ocean beneath the hull of our ship.

  “The Abyssal Serpent is stalking us,” the navigator tells me. “Just as some people feel rain as the tightness of their joints, you feel that nasty-ass creature coursing through your bowels.” Then he goes to one of his maps of a nonexistent world, and picks up a pencil he’s not supposed to have in our cabin. “Tell me where you feel it and I’ll plot a course for us that will confound its pursuit.”

  I point to the places within where I feel my gut gurgling and aching, growling and straining. He translates my angry intestines, and with steely concentration draws a tangled knot of lines on his map—a path crossing itself over and over in every direction but straight. Then he runs the modified map up to the captain.

  “It’s a fine kind of pain,” the captain reassures me, when he comes to check on my condition. “Go with your gut and it’ll never steer you wrong.”

  127. Have You Considered That Maybe It Was Intentional?

  The nurse says it’s not food poisoning, since no one else got sick but me. I suspect that I got it from the eggplant parmesan my mom brought for me. She sneaked it in because we’re not supposed to get food from the outside. I hid it in my closet, and forgot about it, but then found it and ate it the following day. Best argument ever for refrigeration. I’m too embarrassed about it to tell anyone that my writhing tortured gut is my own stupid fault—although Hal knows, because he saw me hide the plate. I know he won’t tell, though. He doesn’t tell the pastels or the doctors or Carlyle anything anymore. I can barely move from the pain, except to thrash back and forth on my bed. The pastels give me medicine that does absolutely nothing. It’s like trying to put out a forest fire with a water gun.

  I moan loudly, and Hal looks up from his crazy-ass atlas long enough to say, “Have you considered that maybe it was intentional? Maybe your parents poisoned you.”

  “Wow, thanks, Hal, that’s just what I need to hear.”

  The fact is, I already thought of that, but hearing him say it out loud makes the concern that much more real, and it ticks me off. Like I’m not already paranoid enough.

  He shrugs. “Just trying to give you perspective, perplexive, perspiration, expiration. If you expire, I’ll give you a twenty-one gun salute, but your next of kin will have to provide the twenty-one guns.”

  128. Intestinal Time-share

  I’m shackled to the table in the White Plastic Kitchen again. I’m lucid enough to know it’s a dream. Lucid enough to know that my stomach is giving me no relief, even in my sleep.

  The monsters with masks that look like my parents are there, and now a creature with Mackenzie’s face is there, too. The mask looks like a cross between my sister and Edvard Munch’s The Scream; blond hair and a terrified yowling mouth—although from behind the mask I can hear laughter.

  The three of them press their pointed Vulcanoid ears to my bloated belly, and my belly speaks to them in guttural evil growls like Satan himself has purchased a time-share in my intestinal tract. They listen, nod, answer questions in the same guttural language.

  “We understand,” they say. “We will do what must be done.”

  Then, the foul thing inhabiting my stomach begins to dig its way out.

  129. Against Us

  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 t
hat 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.

  130. Stay Broken

  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.”