Challenger Deep

by Neal Shusterman

  With a green marker he draws purposeful lines between cities as if he knows exactly what he’s doing. The map is a wild web of green. “Solve the pattern, and it solves everything,” he says, and it gives you a chill, because it reminds you so much of yourself. You sit down across from him. He’s older than you. Seventeen, maybe. He has a faint goatee trying hard to express itself, but it’s six months short of becoming a reality.

  Finally he looks up at you with the same intensity with which he scoured the map. “Name’s Hal,” he says, putting up his hand to shake, but taking it down before you can shake it.

  “Short for Haldol?”

  “Cute. Short for Harold, but that’s a parental designation. I am no more Harold than I am Seth, the Egyptian god of chaos. Although Seth is my middle name.”

  He jiggles his marker in his fingers and mumbles words that rhyme with “middle,” and somehow that leads him to bring his pen down on Vienna.

  “Mozart!” he says. “The violin was his instrument of choice. Here is where he died in poverty.” He holds the pen on the point of the city. Green ink bleeds into the suburbs. “This is where it will start,” he says. “I thought I had it yesterday, but I was wrong. This time I’m right.”

  “What will start?” you ask.

  “Does it matter?” Then he mumbles, “Matter, flatter, fatter, hatter. Mad Hatter!”

  He leaps up from the chair and asks the nearest pastel persona if they can put on Alice in Wonderland—the creepy one with Johnny Depp—because there’s something important about it, and he must view it immediately.

  “We don’t have that one,” the pastel tells him. “How about the Disney cartoon version?”

  Hal waves his hand in disgust. “Why is everyone here so useless?” he says, then looks at you. “Present company excepted.”

  It makes you feel good to be, for once, excluded from the ranks of the useless.

  90. Atlas Drugged

  They make Hal your roommate. Your old roommate, whose name and face you’ve already forgotten, was discharged that morning. Hal is moved in before the bed is cold.

  “You seem to get along,” a pastel persona tells you. “Hal hasn’t been able to share a room with anyone, but you he likes. Go figure.”

  You’re not sure whether that’s a compliment or an insult.

  Hal arrives with an overstuffed portfolio of maps torn from atlases and pilfered from AAA.

  “My mother brings new ones sometimes,” he tells me. “Every addition is a step in the right direction.”

  He has written mysterious things on the lines that he draws between cities. And he orates random thoughts of profundity with such authority that you want to write them down and hang them on the wall, but they only allow writing instruments in the rec room.

  “Man is often lost in a technological, physiological, astrological lack of logical existence that can best be described as a whole lot of nothing lightly dashed with an obvious hint of Scotch,” Hal says. You wish you could remember it so you could recite it to your parents, and show them that you, too, are profound—but these days things just don’t go in one ear and out the other, they actually teleport, avoiding the space between.

  Hal speaks of mathematics, Euclidean perfection, and the golden mean. You tell him about the invisible lines of meaning you feel stretching and winding through and around the people in your life. He gets all excited, which excites you, too.

  “You get it!” he says. “You see the big picture.” And although your big picture isn’t the same as his, they seem to layer neatly over each other, like parts of a musical score, incomprehensible to someone who can’t read music until all the instruments begin to play.

  “Your artwork is a map,” he tells you. “Lines and curves that contain continents of meaning, points of commerce and culture. Trade and travel routes in every curve.” He traces his finger along the lines of your latest piece, which is taped up on the wall.

  “What we perceive as art, the universe perceives as directions,” he proclaims. Directions to where, however, neither of you is sure.

  91. Not in the Olympics at All

  You empty your lunch plate mindlessly. When you stare at the empty plate, for just a few moments you’re in the Olympics. You’re the discus thrower. You spin round and round, fighting the chemical-induced thickness of the air, and hurl the plate, certain you’re about to win a gold medal. It hits the wall but doesn’t shatter because it’s plastic. Then you realize you’re not in the Olympics at all. How disappointing. The pastels are there on either side of you in an instant, certain that you’ve just had a violent outburst, and want to prevent another one.

  “You can’t break down the walls that way,” Hal calmly tells you from another table in the dining room. “You can’t break the windows either. I’ve tried. Tried, fried, lied, and untied. They won’t even let us have shoelaces. Shoelaces! It’s because they know how much I hate freaking slippers.”

  92. The Greater Unknown

  Ever since I came out of the cannon mostly intact, the other sailors look at me in awe.

  “He’s a special one,” the captain says.

  “That he is, that he is,” says the parrot.

  The two of them playact with each other, pretending to be cordial, but only so it will make the final betrayal even sweeter. Even though I trust neither of them, I know that eventually I’ll have to choose a side.

  “Be my second eye,” the captain says, “and you shall have riches and grand adventures beyond imagining.”

  “Be my second eye,” says the parrot, “and I will offer you something the captain never will. A way off this ship.”

  I can’t decide which offer is the better one, because I don’t know which is the more frightening unknown: the captain’s adventures, or life ashore.

  I try to pose the quandary to Carlyle but, not knowing where his true loyalty lies, I must couch my question so it doesn’t give him reason for suspicion.

  “If two equally dangerous creatures attack our ship simultaneously from opposite sides,” I ask him, “how do we decide which one to take down, since we only have one cannon?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Carlyle says. “Lucky for me I don’t make the decisions around here.”

  “But if you did . . .”

  He stops mopping for a moment and considers it. “If I did, things would be a whole lot better,” he says. Then he adds, “Or a whole lot worse.”

  It maddens me that Carlyle refuses to commit to any sort of opinion. Even about himself.

  “If it’s vision and wisdom you want, then you know who you should ask,” he says. Then he looks toward the bow, letting his gaze complete the thought.

  93. No Other Way

  Calliope has no answer for my quandary about the two beasts.

  “I deal in futures, not hypotheticals,” she tells me, almost insulted that I asked. “You’re on your own with this one.”

  I almost tell her the truth of the matter, but then realize that she’s right. Even if I tell her the real beasts are the captain and the bird, her answer will be the same. Only I can decide. It can be no other way.

  The storm still postures on the horizon, but we get no closer, and the captain becomes increasingly frustrated.

  “The ocean current is like a treadmill beneath our keel,” the captain tells me. “It pushes us back at the same rate the wind pushes us forward. We sail at a fine clip, yet go nowhere.”

  “We need a stronger wind,” I tell him.

  “Or a lighter ship,” he suggests, burning me an evil eye. He still holds me responsible for the transmutation of our ship into copper. Then he softens, and grabs my shoulder. “But sturdier than wood we now are—and the pale green of things is a better camouflage against the sky and sea. It protects us from the loathsome, scanning eyes of the beasts.”

  94. Critical Mass

  Today you are in a hospital. Or at least this morning. This hour. This minute. Where you’ll be three minutes from now is anyone’s guess. You’ve be
gun to notice, though, that, bit by bit the sense of being outside of yourself has diminished with each passing day. A critical mass is reached, and now your soul collapses in upon itself. You’re back inside the vessel of your body.

  Just one. Just you. Just an individual.

  Me.

  I don’t quite know when it happens. It’s like the movement of an hour hand, too slow for the naked eye to see, but look away for a moment, and the hand has magically leaped from one number to the next.

  I am here in the White Plastic Kitchen, but it’s not as white as I remembered, and the table I lie upon has mellowed into a bed. My body feels like rubber and my brain like chewing gum. The light above me hurts my eyes. What is it that everyone needs to see so desperately that they need so much light? And why do I still feel as if I’m about to be eaten?

  No one comes, and nothing happens forever and forever. Then I realize there’s a light switch across the room. I can turn it off. I can, but I can’t because I’m the pineapple chunk in the Jell-O. Nothing can motivate me out of this bed but an urgent need to go to the bathroom. Since I’m not feeling that right now, I can’t move. Apparently neither can Hal. I can’t tell if he’s asleep or just trapped in the same Jell-O mold across the room. I doze and I wake, unable to really tell the difference. Then the ground begins to roll beneath me, and I relax, knowing it won’t be long until I’m back on the sea, where I make sense, even if nothing else does.

  95. Windmills of My Mind

  How do you explain being there and being here at the same time?

  It’s sort of like those moments when you’re thinking about something big that burned itself a powerful memory. Maybe it’s the time you scored the winning goal in the play-offs. Or maybe it’s the time you got hit by a car on your bike. Good or bad, you’re bound to relive it in your head now and then—and sometimes after you’ve gone there, it’s a shock to come back. You have to remind yourself that you’re not there anymore.

  Now imagine being like that all the time—never knowing for sure when you’re going to be here, or there, or somewhere in between. The only thing you have for measuring what’s real is your mind . . . so what happens when your mind becomes a pathological liar?

  There are the voices, and visual hallucinations when it’s really bad—but “being there” isn’t about voices or seeing things. It’s about believing things. Seeing one reality, and believing it’s something else entirely.

  Don Quixote—the famous literary madman—fought windmills. People think he saw giants when he looked at them, but those of us who’ve been there know the truth. He saw windmills, just like everyone else—but he believed they were giants. The scariest thing of all is never knowing what you’re suddenly going to believe.

  96. Divine Dealer

  My friend Shelby comes to visit with my parents. She slowly moves toward me through the Jell-O. It’s amazing she can move through it at all.

  “I visited you before—do you remember? Do you know who I am?”

  I want to be angry at the question, but I can’t feel anger. I can’t feel anything. “No, and yes,” I tell her. “No I don’t remember, but yes I know who you are.”

  “You were pretty out of it the last time.”

  “I’m not now?”

  “Everything’s relative.”

  I sit there saying nothing. I think it’s awkward for her. I don’t feel that. I feel patient. I can wait forever.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Okay.”

  “I’m sorry for thinking that you . . . you know.”

  “Thinking that I . . . ?”

  “That you were using.”

  “Oh. That.” I pull back pieces of the last conversation we had in school. It feels like several lifetimes ago. “I was using,” I tell her. “And God was my drug dealer.”

  She doesn’t get it.

  “Tripping on my own brain chemicals. The dope I was doing was already inside.”

  She nods in a sort-of understanding way, and changes the subject. I’m cool with that. “So Max and I are still working on the game.”

  “That’s good.”

  “When you get out we’ll show you what we’ve got.”

  “That’s good.”

  She has tears in her eyes now. “Stay strong, Caden.”

  “Okay, Shelby. I’ll stay strong.”

  I think my parents join us for a game of Apples to Apples, but I don’t think the game goes well.

  97. Can I Trust You?

  The girl stands silhouetted against a huge picture window that stretches floor to ceiling, corner to corner, in a room the hospital has labeled the “Vista Lounge.” It’s designed to give the patients a sense of freedom and open air in the midst of claustrophobic sterility. It doesn’t work.

  The girl is almost always there. She stands like a monolith looking out of the giant window. A dark silhouette against the bright outside world, staring forever forward.

  I’m almost afraid to go up to her. The first few times I saw her, I kept my distance—but right now, that feeling of being a chunk of pineapple congealed in Jell-O isn’t as strong as other times. I’m here—not Elsewhere—and I resolve to take advantage of that fact. It requires a tremendous effort of will for me to stride forward and move toward her. In a few moments, I’m close enough for her to see me out of the corner of her eye.

  She makes no move, gives no acknowledgment that I’m there. I can’t quite tell her ethnicity. The girl has silky brown hair and rich skin the color of polished oak. I’ve never seen anyone stand so rigidly for so long. I wonder if it’s her medication, or if this is the way she is. I find it fascinating.

  “What’s out there?” I dare to ask.

  “Everything that’s not in here,” she says coldly, with the hint of an accent. The accent is enough to tell me that she’s from India, or maybe Pakistan.

  The view from the window is of a series of rolling hills, and a row of hillside homes that light up at night like a string of Christmas lights. Beyond the hills is the sea.

  “I saw a hawk dive down and fly off with a baby bunny,” she tells me.

  “Well,” I say, “that’s something you don’t see every day.”

  “I could feel it die,” she says, and she touches her body in a place that her liver might be. “I felt it here”—and then she reaches up and touches the side of her neck—“and here.”

  Silence for a moment, and then she says, “Dr. Poirot tells me these things aren’t real. And that when I’m better, I’ll know that. Do you believe him? Because I don’t.”

  I don’t answer her because I’m not sure if I can trust anything the parrot says.

  “The hawk was my hope, and the rabbit was my soul.”

  “That’s very poetic.”

  Finally she turns to look at me. Her dark eyes burn with fury. “It wasn’t meant to be poetic, it was meant to be true. You work for Poirot, don’t you? He sent you. You’re one of his eyes.”

  “Poirot can take a flying leap,” I say. “I’m here because . . .” I can’t bring myself to finish the thought, so she finishes it for me.

  “Because you have to be. Like me.”

  “Yeah. Exactly.” We’ve finally reached an understanding. It’s not exactly comfortable but at least it’s a step down from awkward.

  “The others talk about me, don’t they?” she asks, turning her gaze back out toward the horizon. “I know they do. They say terrible things behind my back. All of them.”

  I shrug. Mostly the kids here don’t seem to notice anything unless it intrudes on their idea of personal space. Of course, for some of them, personal space can stretch the distance between the earth and the moon.

  “I’ve never heard them say anything,” I tell her.

  “But if you do, will you tell me? Can I trust you?”

  “I can’t trust me,” I tell her.

  That makes her smile. “Admitting you can’t trust yourself makes you all the more trustworthy.” She turns to me again. Her eyes stu
dy my face, moving up and down, then side to side like she’s checking the distance between my ears. “I’m Callie,” she says.

  “Caden.”

  And I stay with her, looking out of the window, waiting for hawks to kill rabbits.

  98. Decomposed Potential

  I used to be afraid of dying. Now I’m afraid of not living. There’s a difference. We go through life planning for a future, but sometimes that future never comes. I’m talking about personal futures. Mine, to be specific.

  There are times I can imagine people who know me looking back ten years from now, and saying things like “He had such potential,” and “What a waste.”

  I think of all the things I want to do and want to be. Groundbreaking artist. Business entrepreneur. Celebrated game designer. “Ah, he had such potential,” the ghosts of the future lament in mournful voices, shaking their heads.

  The fear of not living is a deep, abiding dread of watching your own potential decompose into irredeemable disappointment when “should be” gets crushed by what is. Sometimes I think it would be easier to die than to face that, because “what could have been” is much more highly regarded than “what should have been.” Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug.

  99. Running on Saturn’s Rings

  There’s a motivational poster in Poirot’s office. It’s an Olympic runner bursting through the tape at the end of a race. The caption reads, “You may not be the first, you may not be the last, but you will cross the finish line.” It makes me think of the track team I didn’t actually become a part of. His poster is a lie. You can’t cross the finish line if you drop out before the first track meet.

  “Does it speak to you?” asks Poirot when he catches me staring at it.