Challenger Deep

by Neal Shusterman

154. Challenger Deep

  I am falling into the eye of a whirlpool almost seven miles deep. I spread my arms like a skydiver, giving myself over to it. The ocean swirls around me, the spiraling force of the water keeping a vertical tunnel of air open like a wormhole.

  Through the raging walls of the whirlpool, I can see the Abyssal Serpent spiraling down with me, matching the pace of my descent, the same way it matched the pace of the ship. I wait for it to leap through the water to devour me, but still it does not. With the sun and sky just a pinprick far above, the light around takes on a dimming azure shade. Will the blue fade to black, leaving me in total darkness?

  It should take three and a half minutes to fall to the bottom of the trench, but I fall much longer than that. The minutes stretch until they feel like hours. There’s no way to measure how long I fall, but for the popping of my ears as the air pressure increases. The weight of how many atmospheres is above me now? No barometer in the world could measure it.

  “Those who speak of having seen the bottom lie,” the captain had said. Now I know he spoke the truth.

  Then below me I see a precarious sight, and I know I must be nearing the bottom. The jagged remains of shipwrecks poke through the walls of the whirlpool. I hit the tip of a mast and it breaks. I tumble through the tattered remains of an ancient sail, and then another and another, each one straining to catch me but failing, until at last I plunge into the silty gray ooze that lines the bottom of the world. Gray, not black. This is where the black pitch goes to die.

  I ache, but I am not broken. The sails couldn’t catch me but they did slow me down. I stand up, forcing my wobbly knees to hold my weight.

  I have done it! I am here!

  The whirlpool still rages, but here within its eye is a wet moonscape fifty yards across. And to my astonishment I see that this moonscape is punctuated by pile after pile of gold and jewels. All treasure seeks the world’s lowest point. Here lie the riches of Challenger Deep!

  Breathless and stunned, I wander the trove, struggling to walk within the muck that fills the space between treasure piles.

  At a jangle of coins, I turn to see another creature with me. A small one. It clumsily tries to make its way over a pile. It’s about the size of a small dog, but walks on two legs. Its flesh is a sickly shade of pink. It has awkward arms but no hands. I do not recognize it until I hear it say, “Just rewards, just rewards. Nothing just about them.”

  It’s the parrot, or at least his ghost, or maybe his undead remains; I can’t be sure. Without feathers, he looks malnourished and slight, like those little meatless game hens you get at the supermarket. His bullet wound oozes, but not with blood. It takes me a moment to recognize it as orange Jell-O. The kind with the little pineapple chunks in it.

  I make my way over to him, ready to gloat. The captain was right; he was wrong. I chose wisely. Now I get to rub it in. Yet he looks at me mournfully with his unpatched eye as if I’m the one to pity.

  “Saw this coming,” he says. “We can lead a horse to water—we can even make him drink. But to keep drinking, well, that’s up to the horse, the horse, of course, of course.”

  He pecks for a moment at the scarecrow’s pole that rises in the center of the whirlpool eye, dislodging a tiny phosphorescent sea slug and devouring it. The tiny slugs I now see are everywhere, giving everything an eerie glow. Their light dances on the jewels and piles of gold, making the treasure that much more enticing.

  “I took on the trench and conquered Challenger Deep,” I tell him. “So you can go back to bird hell, or wherever it is you came from.”

  “Yes, you have achieved the bottom,” he says. “But the bottom gets deeper with each trip; you know that, don’t you?”

  I feel queasy inside. A concussion from the fall, perhaps?

  “Take your treasure, then,” he says. “Take it, take it. I’m sure it will follow you wherever you want to go.”

  I reach out to the pile in front of me and pull out a single doubloon. It feels lighter than I expected. Far too insubstantial for a piece of gold. That queasy feeling begins to stray from my gut. Now I feel it stretching out to my fingertips that hold the coin. Something is about to dawn on me. I don’t want it to. I want to remain blissfully ignorant, but I can’t. I turn the doubloon over in my fingers. Then I reach for its edge with my other hand, grab it with my thumbnail, and peel back a gold foil cover, to reveal a dark-brown interior.

  “It’s chocolate . . .”

  The parrot gives me his perpetual grin. “A lifetime supply.”

  And when I look around me—really look around me, I can see that the jewels are all attached to little plastic settings. They’re not jewels at all. They’re Ring Pops. I can see them already beginning to dissolve in the muck.

  “April fool,” says the parrot. “And May, and June, and July.”

  The sick feeling has taken hold of my spine now. It rises vertebra by vertebra up my neck. I feel my cheeks and ears flush with it. I try to forge a mental wall to keep it from entering my brain, but I know the wall will not hold.

  “Take a closer look at that doubloon,” the parrot says. “Dare you, dare you!”

  I look at the foil of the chocolate coin again, and then I see it. The face on the coin is the captain’s but not the way I know it. This face is far more horrible. Far more real. I hear the parrot squawking, but he’s getting farther and farther away. I’m falling again. Even though I’m already at the bottom of the world, I’m falling.

  Doubloon to festoon. Festoon to festival. Festival to vegetable. And vegetable to—

  155. Vestibule

  The vestibule of a crumbling building.

  We’re on vacation in New York. I am ten. There was a street festival snarling traffic, so we took the subway again. My parents and my sister and I have, once more, come up from under the city in the wrong place. A bad place. A place I know we probably should not be.

  Our hotel is in Queens. This is not Queens. It may be the Bronx. That’s what Mom thinks. I don’t say so, but I secretly think that maybe we’re in a borough that doesn’t exist on any map. I am jittery, and a little sick to my stomach. We were just in Times Square, and visited the massive Hershey’s store there, where we got far too many edible souvenirs. Both Mackenzie and I have been gorging ourselves during our subterranean journey of mystery.

  Mom and Dad argue. Dad insists the subway is still the best way to get us where we need to go. Mom insists we hail a taxi.

  I look around. We are on a corner near a grocery, but its doors and windows are shuttered with graffiti-covered steel. At the curb are overstuffed cardboard vegetable crates waiting for a trash pickup that may be days away. Cabbage and potatoes and carrots and broccoli. The stench of rotten produce is so strong it doesn’t help my Hershified stomach.

  That’s when I turn and see a man sitting in the arched entrance to the old building next door. The vestibule. It’s a word Dad taught me when we passed through Grand Central Station. “When a building is so grand,” Dad had told me, “its entry needs its own special name.” I said the word over and over because I liked the way it felt on my tongue.

  This vestibule is an archway that leads into a dark building that has every indication of being abandoned. The man’s clothes are tattered and so dirty there’s no telling what color they were originally. His heavy beard is tangled. The man sits where the full sunlight hits him harshly. A foot more and he could be away from it, in the shade, but he seems to avoid the shade like it’s toxic. But he does have something to shield him from the sun.

  He has a Cap’n Crunch box on his head.

  Mackenzie laughs when she sees him. “Do you think it’s full, or did he eat it all before he put it on?”

  But I don’t find it funny. I’m not sure what I find it, but I don’t find it funny.

  I look to see that Dad has caved, and is by the curb trying to hail a taxi, while Mom instructs him that he needs to be more aggressive about it.

  I am terrified of the man in the doorway w
ith the cereal box on his head, yet there is something so compelling about him that I feel I must have a closer look.

  I’m a few feet away from him when he sees me. He squints one eye in the sun, then I realize he’s not squinting. One of his eyes is bruised and swollen shut. I wonder how it happened. I wonder if maybe somebody who didn’t like him camping in the vestibule beat him up. He looks at me with his one seeing eye, as wary of me as I am of him. His eye is bright and alert. More than alert, it seems to peer deeper than eyes usually do. I know that means he’s “off.” Maybe worse than “off.” But I can’t help but also notice that the color of his eye isn’t all that different from my own.

  “Is it true, then?” he asks.

  “Is what true?” My voice is shaky and weak.

  “The birds,” he says. “They don’t have heartbeats. The rats neither. You know that, doncha?”

  And when I don’t answer he holds up his hand.

  “Spare something?”

  I reach into my pocket to pull something out. All I have are chocolate coins from the Hershey’s store, a little soft from being in my pocket. I put the whole handful into his palm.

  He looks at them and begins laughing.

  Just then my arm is almost wrenched out of its socket by my mother.

  “Caden! What are you doing?”

  I stammer for a moment, for I have no real explanation.

  “Leave the boy alone!” the Cap’n says. “He’s a good boy, ain’cha, son?”

  Mom pulls me behind her, then regards the man festooned in the cereal box uneasily. And then my mom—who insists bums on the street just use money to get drunk, who believes giving handouts to beggars allows them to stay beggars, who will only donate to charity by credit card—pulls out her purse, and hands him a dollar. Clearly something about this particular man has motivated her to open her purse, just as it had motivated me.

  Dad, who has finally snagged a taxi, calls from the curb, a bit mystified by his family’s sudden attention to a homeless man.

  “Good yer takin’ a taxi, ’stead a’ the subway,” the Cap’n says to us, but it’s me he’s looking at with his one good eye. “Subway’s bad this time a day,” he says. “It’s forever down there.”

  156. No Miracles Here

  Vestibule, vegetable, festival, festoon, doubloon.

  I’m holding the doubloon so tightly it begins to melt in my fingers.

  “The answer was right there in your pocket,” the parrot says. “Funny how that works.”

  Then he looks past me, and I follow his gaze. The space around us is rapidly shrinking. Piles of false riches are swept up in the raging waters. The whirlpool is collapsing.

  The parrot whistles. “Such a thing, such a thing. Epiphanies are never convenient, and often arrive too late.” He doesn’t seem so much pleased with himself as simply resigned.

  “Wait! You’ve got to help me!”

  He shrugs. “I have. I am. I will. But there are no miracles here. Just momentum. We can only hope it’s upward.”

  He turns and hops from one pile of false gold to another, then right into the swirling wall of water and disappears, leaving me alone at the bottom of the world.

  As the space around me diminishes, the piles of “treasure” are ripped away, becoming debris spinning in the contracting circle of water. There’s no one to call out to, no one to help me. The only presence I can feel beyond my own is that of the serpent, its anticipation building to a fever pitch. The waters will close in around me, it will finally have me, and no one, not even the damnable captain, will ever find me again.

  I cling on to the scarecrow’s pole in the center of the tightening circle. I try to climb it, but it’s covered in slippery algae. I can’t even get a grip on it.

  If I brought myself to this place, then there must be a way to bring myself out, but how? What am I missing?

  The only answer I get comes from the serpent. It speaks to me. Not in words, for it knows no language. It speaks to me in feelings, and it projects into me hopelessness of such immense weight, it could crush the very spirit of God.

  Your fate is inescapable, that feeling says. You were doomed from the moment you chose to make this dive. I will open my jaws and take you—but I will not consume you. No, that would be too easy. I will chew you like a piece of gum, until anything resembling Caden Bosch is gone, and you are nothing but black pitch between my teeth. And there you will remain, trapped in the maw of madness for all eternity.

  It would be so easy to give in. Seven miles of ocean about to come down on my head and a doomsday demon just a few feet away: Why not just leap into its mouth right now? At least David had a slingshot to battle Goliath. What have I got?

  What have I got?

  In those final moments, as the eye of the vortex contracts toward me on all sides, the parrot’s words come back to me. “The answer was right there in your pocket.”

  I look at the doubloon still gripped in my right hand. I had thought he meant the chocolate coins in my memory—but the parrot wasn’t in that memory. He knows many things, but that’s something he couldn’t know!

  I shove my other hand into my pocket. At first I think there’s nothing there—but then I do find something. It’s oddly shaped, and I can’t quite figure out what it is until I pull it out.

  It’s a blue puzzle piece.

  A piece the exact shade of blue as the tiny spot of sky miles and miles above my head.

  And suddenly I can feel the serpent cringe.

  Because all that remains to complete the sky is this one single piece . . .

  . . . and the sky wants its completion even more than the serpent wants me.

  I look to my right hand that holds the coin, and my left hand that holds the promise of sky. I know I have been a victim of many things beyond my control—but in this moment, in this place, here is something I have the power to choose. There are no miracles here, the parrot had said—but neither is there hopelessness, no matter what the serpent wants me to believe. Nothing is inevitable.

  With the whirlpool barely a yard wide and closing, I drop the doubloon, close my fingers around the puzzle piece, and thrust my fist upward, offering completion to the distant sky.

  And suddenly I’m rising.

  As if a hand has grabbed my wrist, I am slingshotting upward as the whirlpool collapses around me.

  Churning white water surges at my feet. I feel the furious wail of the serpent. I sense the burning of its fiery eye. It snaps at my heels but is always an inch away.

  I feel like my arm will be torn loose. I can feel the acceleration in every joint of my body, so much faster than when I had fallen. Faster than the paltry pull of gravity. Faster than the serpent, still trying to flood my mind with its requiem of hopelessness.

  The blue circle of sky above me grows and grows until I shoot past the scarecrow and away from the deep.

  I see nothing but blue as I soar upward into the embrace of sky.

  157. Kind of Like Religion

  There are many things I don’t understand, but here’s one thing that I know: There is no such thing as a “correct” diagnosis. There are only symptoms and catchphrases for various collections of symptoms.

  Schizophrenia, schizoaffective, bipolar I, bipolar II, major depression, psychotic depression, obsessive/compulsive, and on and on. The labels mean nothing, because no two cases are ever exactly alike. Everyone presents differently, and responds to meds differently, and no prognosis can truly be predicted.

  We are, however, creatures of containment. We want all things in life packed into boxes that we can label. But just because we have the ability to label it, doesn’t mean we really know what’s in the box.

  It’s kind of like religion. It gives us comfort to believe we have defined something that is, by its very nature, indefinable. As to whether or not we’ve gotten it right, well, it’s all a matter of faith.

  158. Morons in High Places

  My trip to the sky takes me many places I can’t remem
ber, across many days that I can’t count, before I arrive back where I started. A fluorescently lit white room, encased in invisible Jell-O. I can feel my body trembling, but I’m not cold. I know it’s the meds—whatever I’m on, or whatever I’m coming off of.

  A pastel persona peers down at me. She asks me a question in Cirque-ish, and I respond in Klingon. I close my eyes for a moment, night turns to day, and suddenly it’s Dr. Poirot in front of me instead of the pastel. I’m not shaking anymore, and he’s actually speaking English, although his voice isn’t quite synced to his lips.

  “Do you know where you are?” he asks.

  Yes, I want to say, the White Plastic Kitchen—but I know that’s not the answer he wants to hear. More importantly, it’s not the answer I want to believe.

  “Seaview Memorial Hospital,” I tell him. “Juvenile Psychiatric Unit.” Hearing the words come out of my mouth brings me one step closer to trusting that they’re true.

  “You’ve had a bit of a setback,” Poirot says.

  “No duh.”

  “Yes, but you’re on the other side of it now. I’m pleased to say that for the past few days I’ve seen nothing but upward momentum. Your awareness of your surroundings is a good sign, a very good sign.”

  He shines a penlight in each of my eyes and checks my chart. I expect him to leave, or perhaps transform into one of the nurses again, but instead he pulls up a chair and sits down.

  “Your blood work showed a sudden drop in your medication levels about a week ago. Any idea why that might be?”

  I consider serving him up a nice big platter of dumb, but what’s the use? “Yeah,” I tell him, without mincing words, “I was cheeking my meds.”

  And then he gets a little smug, and says something I’m not expecting at all.

  “Good.”

  I look at him for a moment, trying to determine whether he actually said that, or if I just heard it in my head.

  “How is that good?” I ask.