Challenger Deep Read online

  But I know things will calm down if I’m not in the middle of it. Whatever they’re planning to do won’t happen if I leave. I can save everyone if I leave.

  The bell rings. I bolt from class. I don’t even know what class it was. The teacher was speaking Cirque-ish today. Today, sounds and voices are muffled by a liquid fear so overwhelming I could drown in its waters and no one would ever know, sinking down to the depths of some bottomless trench.

  My feet want to take me to my next class by force of habit, but there’s a force more powerful compelling my feet now right out the front entrance of the school, my thoughts racing ahead of me like a man on fire.

  “Hey!” yells a teacher, but it’s an incompetent, impotent protest. I’m out of there, and no one can stop me.

  I race across the street. Horns blare. They won’t hit me. I bend the cars around my body with my mind. See how the tires squeal? That’s me doing that.

  There’s a strip mall catty-corner to the school. Restaurants, pet shop, doughnut place. I am free, but I am not. Because I can feel the acid cloud following me. Something bad. Something bad. Not at school—no, what was I thinking? It was never at school. It was at home! That’s where it’s going to happen. To my mother, or my father, or my sister. A fire will trap them. A sniper will shoot them. A car will lose control and ram into our living room, only it won’t be an accident. Or maybe it will. I can’t be sure, all I can be sure of is that it’s going to happen.

  I have to warn them before it’s too late, but when I take out my cell phone, the battery is dead. They drained my battery! They don’t want me warning my family!

  I race this way and that, not sure what to do, until I find myself on the corner begging everyone who passes to borrow their cell phone. The looks they give me—dead-eyed gazes—chill me. They ignore me, or hurry past, because maybe they can see the steel spike of terror piercing my skull, driving all the way down into my soul.

  60. The Things They Say

  My panic has subsided. The unbearable sense that something awful is about to happen has settled, although it hasn’t entirely gone away. My parents don’t know I left school early. The school did send out a robocall about “Kah-den Boosh” missing one or more classes, because the automated voice can’t pronounce my name. I deleted it from voice mail.

  I lie on my bed, trying to make sense out of chaos, examining the mystery ashtray that holds the remains of my life.

  It’s not like I can control these feelings. It’s not like I mean to think these thoughts. They’re just there, like ugly, unwanted birthday gifts that you can’t give back.

  There are thoughts in my head, but they don’t really feel like mine. They’re almost like voices. They tell me things. Today, as I gaze out of my bedroom window, the thought-voices tell me that the people in a passing car want to hurt me. That the neighbor testing his sprinker line isn’t really looking for a leak. The hissing sprinklers are actually snakes in disguise, and he’s training them to eat all the neighborhood pets—which makes some twisted sense, because I’ve heard him complaining about barking dogs. The thought-voices are entertaining, too, because I never know what they are going to say. Sometimes they make me laugh and people wonder what I’m laughing at, but I don’t want to tell them.

  The thought-voices tell me I should do things. “Go rip out the neighbor’s sprinkler heads. Kill the snakes.” But I won’t listen to them. I won’t destroy someone else’s property. I know they’re not really snakes. “You see that plumber who lives down the street,” the thought-voices tell me. “He’s really a terrorist making pipe bombs. Go get in his truck and drive away. Drive it off a cliff.” But I won’t do that either. The thought-voices can say a lot of things but they can’t make me do anything I don’t really want to do. Still, that doesn’t stop them from tormenting me by forcing me to think about doing those terrible things.

  “Caden, you’re still awake?”

  I look up to see my mom at the door of my room. It’s dark outside. When did that happen? “What time is it?”

  “Almost midnight. What are you still doing up?”

  “Just thinking about stuff.”

  “You’ve been doing that a lot lately.”

  I shrug. “A lot of things to think about.”

  She turns off the light. “Get some sleep. Whatever’s on your mind, it’ll look clearer in the morning.”

  “Yes. Clearer in the morning,” I say, even though I know it will be just as cloudy.

  Then she hesitates at the threshold. I wonder if she’ll leave if I pretend I’m asleep, but she doesn’t.

  “Your father and I think that maybe it would be a good idea for you to talk to someone.”

  “I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

  “I know. That’s part of the problem. Maybe it will be easier to talk to someone different, though. Not me or your father. Someone new.”

  “A shrink?”

  “A therapist.”

  I don’t look at her. I don’t want to have this conversation. “Yeah, sure, whatever.”

  61. Check Brain

  Automobile engines aren’t all that complicated. They look that way when you don’t know much about them—all of those tubes and wires and valves—but mostly the combustion engine hasn’t changed that much since it was invented.

  My father’s issues with cars don’t end with plunging rearview mirrors. He basically knows next to nothing about cars. He’s all about math and numbers; cars are just not his thing. Give him a calculator and he can change the world, but whenever the car breaks down, and the mechanic asks him what’s wrong, his response is usually, “It broke.”

  The automotive industry loves people like my father, because it means they can make lots of money from repairs that the car may or may not need. It annoys my father no end, but he rationalizes it by saying, “We live in a service economy. We all have to feed it somehow.”

  It’s not like the car manufacturers are much help. I mean, with modern technology, you’d think our cars could diagnose themselves, but no, all there is on the dashboard is this moronic “check engine” light that comes on whenever there’s anything wrong—which proves that automobiles are more organic than we think. They’re obviously modeled on the human brain.

  There are many ways in which the “check brain” light illuminates, but here’s the screwed-up part: the driver can’t see it. It’s like the light is positioned in the backseat cup holder, beneath an empty can of soda that’s been there for a month. No one sees it but the passengers—and only if they’re really looking for it, or when the light gets so bright and so hot that it melts the can, and sets the whole car on fire.

  62. More Alive Than You Think

  “There is much to teach you,” the captain says, strolling the copperized deck, his hands clasped behind his back. The crisp woolen uniform he now wears is beginning to look almost as natural on him as his pirate outfit had. He even carries himself differently now. More regally. Clothes make the man.

  As he does his rounds, he makes sure everyone is occupied with their particular trivial pursuits. Today my assignment is to be his shadow. Watch and learn.

  “Journeys of discovery require more than just a working maritime knowledge,” the captain lectures. “They require intuition. Impulsiveness. Leaps of folly as often as leaps of faith. Do you catch my drift?”

  “Yes, sir,” I tell him.

  “Wrong answer,” he snaps. “Best not to catch a drift. It could lead to influenza.” Then he jumps on the weblike rope ladder on the mainmast. “Come join me on the ratlines.” He climbs upward, with me right behind.

  “Are we going to the crow’s nest?” I ask.

  “Absolutely not,” he tells me, insulted by the suggestion. “Only to the sails.” We climb high enough to reach the mainsail. “I’ll show you a secret,” he says. Then he pulls out a knife from his coat and slashes the sail—a gash a full foot wide. Wind pushes through the tear, making it spread like an opening eye.

  “What was that
for?”

  “Observe,” the captain says.

  I watch the damaged sail . . . and witness it slowly repair itself. The sail heals like a membrane, until all that remains is a faint scar where the tear had been, a slightly deeper beige than the rest of the canvas sail.

  “This ship is more alive than you think, boy. She feels pain. She can be hurt but can also heal.”

  As I cling to the rope ladder, a chill goes through me that has nothing to do with the blustering wind. “Is it Calliope’s pain?” I ask.

  The captain turns his eye to me. “I don’t know. How is it that you know her name?”

  I realize my mistake—but maybe it’s the kind of folly of which the captain approves. “Crewmen talk,” I say. Which is true, so it’s not like I’m really lying. Still, the captain seems suspicious.

  “Whether or not she feels the ship’s pain is important to know. ’Tis a question for which I would welcome an answer.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I tell him. I wonder whether he’s just given me permission to speak to her, or if he’s trying to trap me for having done so.

  63. People I Don’t Know in Places I Can’t See

  “I feel everything,” Calliope tells me as I rest in her metallic arms one night, suspended above an easy sea. “I feel not only the sails, but the hull. Not only the ship, but the sea. Not only the sea, but the sky. And not only the sky, but the stars. I feel everything.”

  “How can that be?”

  “I don’t expect you to understand.”

  And yet I do. “I have connections, too,” I tell her. “Sometimes I feel inside the people around me. I believe I know what they’re thinking—or if not what, then at least how they’re thinking. There are times that I’m certain I’m tied to people on the other side of the world. People I’ve never met. The things I do affect them. I move left, they move right. I climb up, and they fall from a building. I know it’s all true, but I can never prove what happens to people I don’t know in places I can’t see.”

  “And how does this make you feel?”

  “Wonderful and terrible at the same time.”

  She tilts her neck to look into my eyes, instead of looking forward at the sea. It’s a harder move than folding her arms to hold me. I hear the straining squeal of bending copper. “We are not all that different, then,” she says.

  And I know for the first time that I’ve truly pierced her loneliness. And she has pierced mine.

  64. If Snails Could Talk

  The doctor has a PhD in psychology from American University, which, to me, sounds a little too generic to be real. A framed diploma hangs proudly in the waiting room above a potted ficus with leaves a little too green to be real as well.

  “I want you to feel you can talk to me about anything,” the talk-doctor says, speaking with a calmness to his voice, and a deliberately slow cadence—like a snail might, if snails could talk. “Anything you say or do in here is kept in strict confidence, unless you want me to share it.”

  It sounds like he’s reading me my anti-Miranda rights.

  “Yeah. Confidence. I get it.”

  I get it, but I don’t believe it for an instant. How do you trust a therapist when even the plant in his waiting room is a lie?

  That’s where my parents are now. They’re in the waiting room leafing through copies of Psychology Today and FamilyFun, and talking about me. They were here in the room with the talk-doctor and me for the first few minutes. I thought they would launch at him a laundry list of all the things that have been going on, but they seemed uncomfortable when they tried to talk about me to a stranger.

  “Caden’s behavior has been”—my father had struggled for the words—“out of the ordinary.”

  Both he and Mom seemed relieved when the doctor asked them to leave the room.

  “So,” says the talk-doctor now that we’re alone. “Out of the ordinary. Let’s start there.”

  I know I have to hold it together in here. I feel as if my entire life depends on my holding it together. This man doesn’t know me. He can’t see into me. All he gets is what I give him.

  “Listen,” I say, “my parents mean well, and I know they think they’re helping me, but this is their problem, not mine. They’re totally stressed and overprotective. I mean, you saw them, right? They’re so nervous, they make me nervous.”

  “Yes, I can see that you’re anxious.”

  I try to stop talking with my hands, and to keep my heels consistently on the floor. I’m only partially successful.

  “Tell me,” he says, “have you been having trouble sleeping?”

  “No,” I respond. It’s true. I haven’t had trouble sleeping, I just haven’t felt like sleeping. At all.

  “And how are things at school?”

  “School is school.”

  He’s quiet for a painfully long stretch. I can’t stand it. I start fidgeting with things within fidgeting distance. I reach for a small cactus on the table beside me to see if it’s fake, too, but it’s real, and I prick my finger. He hands me a tissue.

  “Why don’t we do some relaxation exercises?” the talk-doctor suggests, although I know it’s only phrased like a suggestion. “Lean back, and close your eyes.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll wait until you’re ready.”

  Reluctantly I lean back and force my eyelids to close.

  “Tell me, Caden, what do you see when you close your eyes?”

  My eyelids snap open again. “What kind of dumb-ass question is that?”

  “It’s just a question.”

  “What am I supposed to see?”

  “Nothing specific.”

  “Well, that’s what I see. Nothing specific.” I’m standing now. I don’t remember standing. I can’t recall when I began to pace the room.

  The session drags on for a torturous eternity that is just another twenty minutes. We never do get through the relaxation exercises. I never answer his question. I never close my eyes for fear of having to tell him—to tell myself—what’s there. Instead we play chess, although I don’t have the patience to consider my moves, so I intentionally make bad ones to end the game quickly.

  When it’s time to leave, he tells my parents we should schedule weekly sessions, and that maybe, just maybe, they should consider having me also see someone with a license to write prescriptions. I knew he was a fake.

  65. The Darkness Beyond

  What do I see when I close my eyes? Sometimes there is a darkness there that goes beyond anything I can describe. Sometimes it is glorious, and sometimes it is terrifying, and I rarely know what it’s going to be. When it’s glorious, I want to live in that place, where the stars are just marking a vast unreachable shell, like they used to believe in days of old. The inside surface of a giant eyelid—and when I peel back the lid, there’s a darkness that truly goes on forever—but it’s not darkness at all. It’s just that our eyes have no way to see that kind of light. If we could, it would blind us, so that eyelid, it protects us. Instead we see stars—the only hint of the light we can never reach.

  And yet I go there.

  I push past the stars into that dark light, and you can’t imagine how it feels. Velvet and licorice caressing every sense; it melts into a liquid you plunge through; it evaporates into air that you breathe. And you soar! You don’t need wings because it supports you of its own accord—of its own will resonating with yours—and you feel not only that you can do anything but that you are anything. Everything. You move through everything, and your heartbeat becomes a pulse of all things alive, all at once, and the silence between each beat is the stillness of things that exist, but do not live. The stone. The sand. The rain, and you realize that it is all necessary. The silence must exist for there to be a beat. And you are both those things: the presence and the absence. And that knowledge is so magnificent you can’t hold it in, and it drives you to share it—but you don’t have words to describe it, and without the words, without a way to share the feeling, it breaks
you, because your mind just isn’t large enough to hold what you’ve tried to fit into it . . .

  . . . but it’s not always like that.

  Sometimes the darkness beyond is not glorious at all, it truly is an absolute absence of light. A clawing, needy tar that pulls you down. You drown but you don’t. It turns you to lead so you sink faster in its viscous embrace. It robs you of hope and even the memory of hope. It makes you think you’ve always felt like this, and there’s no place to go but down, where it slowly, ravenously digests your will, distilling it into the ebony crude of nightmares.

  And you know the darkness beyond despair, just as intimately as you know the soaring heights. Because in this and all universes, there is balance. You can’t have the one without facing the other. And sometimes you think you can take it because the joy is worth the despair, and sometimes you know you can’t take it and how did you ever think you could? And there is the dance; strength and weakness, confidence and desolation.

  What do I see when I close my eyes? I see beyond darkness, and it is immeasurably grand both above me and below.

  66. Your Terrifying Awesomeness