Challenger Deep

by Neal Shusterman

  A nurse arrives in my room with our evening meds. First she tends to my roommate, and then to me. I look into my happy little paper cup. My current but ever-changing cocktail now provides me three meds in the evening. A green oblong pill, a blue-and-white capsule, and a yellow tablet that dissolves in your mouth like flavorless candy. I take them one at a time with a cup of water she gives me that’s slightly larger than the cup the pills are in. Then, knowing the drill, I open my mouth and pull my cheeks apart with my fingers like I’m making a face at her, to show her that the medicine has truly been swallowed.

  After she’s gone, I go to the bathroom and fish the blue and white capsule from way back in my mouth, which I hid like a squirrel, high in the gum line. She would never have found it without running her fingers through every inch of my mouth. If you’ve been caught cheeking your meds, they actually do that. But I’ve been a good boy. Until today.

  I know there’s nothing I can do about the dissolving tablet, but maybe, with practice, I can squirrel away both the capsule and the green pill. Whatever Hal was feeling when he did what he did, at least he was feeling. Right now, even despair would seem like a victory. So I drop the pill into the toilet and pee on it for good measure, then flush, happy to medicate whatever foul creatures live in the sewers.

  Then I go back to my bed, lie down, and wait for the world to end.

  149. Half-life

  I know more about psychoactive medication than is safe for any one human being to know. Kind of like the drug dealer who’s done everything, and can speak with authority on the various forms of high.

  Most antianxiety meds act quickly, do their business, and then are caught by the liver—the policemen of the body—which flushes them out in less than a day. Ativan can calm you down instantly if injected. In less than an hour if taken orally, but its effects wear off just a few hours later.

  On the other hand, Geodon, Risperdal, Seroquel, and all the other heavyweight antipsychotics have a much longer half-life, evading the liver for quite a while. What’s more, the “therapeutic effect,” as they call it, builds up over time. You gotta take the stuff for days, even weeks, before those meds start doing what they’re paid to do.

  Of course most of the side effects of those drugs are immediate, making you feel within an hour that you’re something other than human. When you suddenly stop taking them, if you don’t have seizures and die, those side effects go away within a day or two. It takes longer for the actual therapeutic effects to vanish, just as it took a longer time for them to begin.

  In other words, for a few golden days, you remember what it feels like to be normal, before you plunge headlong into the bottomless pit.

  150. Last Man Standing

  Morning mist burns away, leaving a myriad of cotton-white clouds from horizon to horizon. They move quickly across the sky, the day strobing between sunlight and shadow. Below that dramatic vista, the sea is as glass—a perfectly reflective surface, mirroring the sky. Clouds above, clouds below. There seems to be no difference between the heavens and the depths.

  Not even the relentless momentum of our ship—now carried by a steady wind—can stir these waters. It is as if we are skating upon the sea, rather than sailing through it. I know the Abyssal Serpent follows us somewhere beneath the glassy surface of the water, but like the ship, it travels in complete stealth, leaving no evidence of its passage.

  Neither Carlyle’s nor anyone else’s head rolls about the crow’s nest anymore. In fact, the place has entirely lost its magic. There is no bar, no chairs, no inebriated customers lost in neon cocktails. The crow’s nest is now on the inside exactly what it appears to be on the outside: a barrel, three feet wide, just large enough for a lookout to stand and scan the horizon.

  “Like any other appendage,” the captain tells me, “it has atrophied from lack of use.”

  Without the cocktail to dull me, there’s a clarity to my senses as sharp as a butcher’s blade. It cleaves through flesh and bone, revealing places within that were never meant to be exposed to the light of day. It purifies me, leaving me scoured both inside and out.

  It’s just me and the captain now. The rest of the crew is gone. Perhaps they abandoned us during the night. Or perhaps creatures of the deep dragged them overboard. Or perhaps they were pulled down between the copper plates and digested by the living pitch that holds the ship together. I don’t miss them. In a way it’s as if they were never really there to begin with.

  The captain stands behind me at the helm, and pontificates to his congregation of one.

  “There is hell in both the day and the night,” he says. “I have sat in the burning heat of day under a relentless sun, and under the stone gazes of a disinterested humanity.” He touches the copper railing, running a single finger across it as if checking for dust. “You long for the slightest copper, but resent it when it arrives. Do you follow?”

  “I do.”

  He slaps me hard across the back of my head. “Never follow! Always lead.”

  I rub my smarting scalp. “How, when there’s no one left?”

  The captain looks around, seeming to notice for the first time that there is no one else on board. “Point taken. In that case, you should revel that you are the last man standing.”

  “What are we looking for, sir?” I ask, peering out at the clouds both above and below the horizon. “How will we know when we arrive?”

  “We’ll know,” is all he says on the matter.

  I hold my position at the tiller. With no navigational charts, I turn the wheel on impulse and whim. The captain does not disapprove of any of my choices.

  Then something up ahead comes into view. It’s just a speck at first, but as we draw closer, it resolves into a post protruding from the water. I steer us toward it, and as we come closer still, I can see that it is more than a post. There is a crossbar, and a figure limply attached to it.

  A scarecrow.

  Its arms are stretched wide, its eyes are tilted toward the cloud-spotted sky in eternal supplication—and it occurs to me that all scarecrows look as if they’ve been crucified. Perhaps that’s what frightens the crows away.

  There are no crows to scare this far out to sea, however. No gulls or grackles, no birds at all, not even a parrot. Like so much else in the captain’s world, the scarecrow is dedicated to a pointless task.

  “The scarecrow is the final sign,” the captain tells me with a solemnity to his voice. A hint of fear in a man who shows no fear. “Directly beneath him is the deepest place in the world.”

  151. King of All Destinies

  As we near the scarecrow, the wind, which has been so steady that I had tuned it out, suddenly diminishes and disappears, leaving a silence so complete, I can hear my heart beating in the blood vessels of my ears. Above us, the sails lose their stiff convex tone, and sag limp and lifeless. We coast a bit more until the captain drops anchor, the chain rattling out until it pulls taut. The anchor’s depth is nothing compared to the depth of the trench beneath us, but the mystery of an anchor is that it never needs to touch bottom, or even come close, to keep the largest of ships in place.

  The scarecrow is still a hundred yards ahead, at about eleven o’clock to port. “This is as close as I dare get, boy,” the captain tells me. “The rest of this journey is yours and yours alone.”

  Yet there is still not a bathyscaphe or diving bell. Nothing to get me to the bottom.

  “But how . . .”

  The captain puts up his hand, knowing what I’m about to say. “You would not have made it this far, were you not meant for this,” he tells me. “A method will present itself.”

  I offer him a sly grin. “A method in the madness?”

  He does not smile back. Instead he chastises me. “The parrot spoke of madness, but for men like you and me, it is as science.”

  “Science, sir?”

  He nods. “Aye; the singular alchemy of transmuting that which mightn’t be, into that which is. ‘Madness,’ the parrot called it, but to
me, anything less is mediocrity.” Then he looks to me with a hint of desperation that he tries to hide. “I envy you,” the captain says. “All my life I’ve dreamed of the reward that lies in wait down there, out of my grasp until today. But you will call that treasure forth. You will fill our hold to the brim with booty beyond the imagining of the human soul.”

  I wonder how I could manage to bring such treasure up from the deep, but I know the answer will be the same as the nature of my descent. The method in the madness will make itself clear.

  And then the captain asks, “Do you believe me, Caden?”

  I can tell he’s not asking this idly, or even asking for my good. He needs me to believe it, as if his own life depends upon it. It is in this moment that I realize that everything has shifted. He is no longer leading me—I am leading him. Not just him, but everything else in this world of his. I can even feel the Abyssal Serpent anxiously awaiting my next move. It is a heady and frightening prospect to be the king of all destinies.

  “Do you believe me, Caden?” the captain asks again.

  “Yes, I believe.”

  “Do you forsake the parrot and all his lies?”

  “I do.”

  Finally he smiles. “Then it is time for you to be baptized by the deep.”

  152. Scarecrow

  I climb into the dinghy, a copper rowboat so small, it doesn’t seem to be able to hold its own weight above the waterline, much less mine. The captain lowers it, and as it touches the sea, it makes not so much as a ripple. I peer over the side to find nothing but my own reflection in the mirrored surface of the sea. I know that face is mine, and yet I don’t recognize myself.

  Each time I peer overboard, I half expect the Abyssal Serpent to launch itself out of the water, clamp onto my head, and take me down. What does the serpent wait for? I wonder.

  “Godspeed to your reward,” the captain says. I free the dinghy from the pulleys, and take to the sea alone.

  I row a steady pace toward the scarecrow, listening to the rhythmic squeak of the oar sockets that complain with each stroke. I face the ship as I row, for one must always row with one’s back to one’s destination. The ship seems to shrink quickly as I leave it. The green metallic vessel that felt so massive when I was on it appears little more than a toy boat now. I cannot see the captain.

  At last I come up alongside the scarecrow. I expected it to be on a floating buoy, but the pole is actually a wooden post that drops into the depths, presumably all the way to the bottom almost seven miles below. No tree has ever grown long enough to birth such a pole. It is encrusted with mussels and barnacles growing a foot above the waterline, coming almost close enough to touch the scarecrow’s work boots. His jeans and his plaid flannel shirt seem out of place in such a tropical environment, but what am I thinking? Everything about him is out of place here.

  He wears my father’s white straw fedora. His nose is the broken red heel of my mother’s shoe. His eyes are the large blue buttons on Mackenzie’s yellow fleece coat. If he were set free from his pole, I wonder, would he walk on water like Calliope did? Is there anything to his limbs besides fabric and stuffing? There is only one way to find out.

  “Can you speak,” I ask, “or are you just a scarecrow after all?” I wait, and when he doesn’t respond I begin to feel that maybe I’m on a fool’s errand. Perhaps I’m doomed to sit in this boat in the shadow of this splayed figure until nightfall and beyond. Then with a slight rasp of his canvas skin, he turns his head to me, and his blue button eyes rotate slightly, like binoculars seeking focus.

  “So you’re here,” the scarecrow says, as if he knows me and has been waiting for me to arrive. His voice is subdued, yet loud, made of many tones, like the voice of a whispering chorus.

  I tell my heart to cease its sudden pounding. “I’m here. Now what?”

  “You quest to achieve the bottom,” he says. “There are many ways to accomplish this. You could tie the ship’s anchor to your leg and let it take you down, perhaps.”

  “That would kill me,” I point out.

  The scarecrow shrugs as well as a scarecrow can. “Yes, but you would reach the bottom.”

  “I’d like to get there alive.”

  “Ah,” says the scarecrow. “That’s a different story.”

  And then he’s silent, looking out toward nowhere, as I had found him. The silence becomes uncomfortable. I wonder if he’s already lost interest and has dispensed with me—but then I realize he’s waiting for me to make a move, although I don’t know what move I should make. Since I know I must do something, I maneuver the dinghy as close to him as I’m able, and I tie its leading rope around the pole, mooring it there, making it clear that I’m not leaving. I can wait as long as he can. I observe a small crab rising out of his shirt pocket. It looks at me, then it crawls back in.

  The scarecrow turns his head slightly. The look on his canvas face is pensive. “Twister’s a comin’,” he says.

  I look to the sky. The puffy clouds still move at a steady pace, but there’s nothing to suggest a storm of any kind. “You sure about that?”

  “Very,” he says.

  And that’s when the sea that has been as still as glass begins to move.

  I spot a slight rippling to my right and I follow its path. Something has come to the surface. I see only glimpses of it. Sharp metallic scales. An undulating, vermiform body. I know this beast intimately. The Abyssal Serpent circles us, and I am terrified. As it increases its pace, the sea itself seems to resonate with its movement, beginning to revolve in a slow eddy, but quickly picking up speed. The waters begin to spin around the scarecrow’s pole, and the rope that holds the dinghy in place goes taut. Beneath the spinning waters I see the single glowing red eye of the dread serpent. It is as domineering as the eye of the captain. As invasive as the eye of the parrot. It is the culmination of every eye that has witnessed my life and passed judgment.

  “Twister’s a comin’,” the scarecrow says again. “Better take cover.”

  But there is no place to take cover and he knows it. The serpent circles faster. The spinning water dips in the center, revealing more layers of sea life clinging to the scarecrow’s pole, which has become its own vertical reef. And as the dinghy rocks in the growing current, I see the rope holding it to the pole begin to fray against a cluster of sharp mussel shells.

  I leap from the dinghy as it is torn away from the pole, and I cling to the scarecrow’s legs. The hapless rowboat circles the pole in the growing whirlpool and the pitch holding together its copper planks abandons it, spilling into the water like an oil slick. The dinghy falls to pieces. There are other things I see spinning in that water, too. I see bits of waterlogged parchment and bright feathers swirling with the malevolent black pitch. They stir round and round like the ingredients of a new cocktail.

  As I cling tightly to the scarecrow’s legs, I look down, and I am dizzied by vertigo. The whirlpool deepens at alarming speed, and the spiraling water pulls away from us, until I am looking down a funnel that has no visible bottom. The whirlpool roars in my ears like a freight train. The taste of salt spray nearly gags me.

  And the scarecrow says, “If you’re going, now’s the time.”

  Until that moment, all I could think about was holding on. “Wait, you mean—”

  “Unless you feel the anchor was a better idea after all.”

  The thought of dropping into the center of a whirlpool only makes me cling tighter and climb higher until I’m at his shoulders.

  If I commit to this dive, there’s no undoing it. There is no safety cable to slow my descent, no camera to document my fall. No one to catch me at the bottom and send me on my merry way. Yet I know I must do this. I must abandon myself to gravity. That’s why I’m here. So I fill my head with all the thoughts that have propelled me to this moment. I think of my parents and the horror of their helplessness. I think of the navigator, and his choice to be the sacrifice. I think of my sister, who understands that cardboard forts can become all to
o real, and I think of the captain, who has tormented me yet has trained me for this moment. I will be baptized by the deep. The parrot would call this the grandest of failures, I’m sure. Well, if this is the culmination of all failure, then I shall make a glorious success of it.

  “Mind the pole on the way down,” says the scarecrow. “Bye now.”

  I let go, and plunge into the funnel, finally ready to know the unknowable depths of Challenger Deep.

  153. The Overwhelming Never

  There are books I will never finish reading, games I will never finish playing, movies that I’ve started and will never see the end of. Ever.

  Sometimes there are moments when we objectively face the never, and it overwhelms us.

  I tried to defy the overwhelming never once, when I realized there are songs in my own music library that I will probably never hear again. I went to my computer and created a playlist with every single song. There were 3,628 songs that would take 223.6 hours to play. I kept at it for a few days before my interest waned.

  And so now I mourn. I mourn for the songs that will never reach my ears again. For the words and stories that lie on eternally unopened pages. And I mourn my fifteenth year. And how I will never, from now until the end of time, be able to complete it the way it should have been. Rewinding, and living it again, this time without the captain and the parrot and the pills and the shoelace-free bowels of the White Plastic Kitchen. The stars will go dark and the universe will end before I get this year back.

  That is the weight chained to my ankle, and it is far heavier than any anchor. That is the overwhelming never that I must face. And I still don’t know if I’ll disappear into it, or find a way to push beyond.