Authors: Neal Shusterman
Challenger Deep (19 page)
“What they do here has no bearing on the price of tea in China,” he finally says. “Or for that matter, the price of china in Turkey.”
“Or,” I add, “the price of turkey in Denmark.”
He looks up at me sharply, and wags a finger. “Don’t bring Denmark into the equation, unless you’re ready to deal with the consequences.”
And since I’m not, I suggest no further nations.
Callie and I are not in the same therapy group. I ask to be switched into hers, but I don’t think such requests are honored.
“I’m sure it’s the same as your group,” Callie tells me at breakfast one day, “except that no one in my group is a first-timer. We’re probably all a little less naive. We were arrogant enough to think we were done with this place. Now we’re more humble. Or more pissed off. Or both.”
“Hal’s in my group, and he’s not a first-timer,” I point out.
“Well, he may have been in and out,” Callie says, “but I think his first time never really ended.”
I join her in front of the picture window of the Vista Lounge whenever I can. Whenever my feet allow me to stay in one place.
Today, while she stands valiantly observing the world, I draw the random things that come to mind. They’ve bent the rules, allowing me to have markers outside of the rec room. I think that’s a sign that I’m making progress. No pencils, though. Felt-tip markers are less likely to cause injury, either intentional or accidental.
Sometimes Callie and I talk, sometimes not. Sometimes I hold her hand—which, strictly speaking, we’re not supposed to do. No physical contact allowed. Human interaction here must come verbally or not at all.
“It’s good when you do that,” she tells me as I take her hand one day. “It keeps me from falling off.”
Falling off what, I don’t know. I don’t ask. I figure she’ll tell me if she wants to.
Her hands are cold. She says she has poor circulation in her extremities. “It’s genetic,” she tells me. “My mother is the same. She can chill a beverage just by bringing it to you.”
I don’t mind the chill of her hand. Usually I’m too warm. Besides, her hand warms quickly when I hold it. It’s good to know I can have that effect on her.
“This is my third time here,” she confides in me. “My third episode.”
“Episode.”
“That’s what they call it.”
“More like a miniseries.”
She smiles at that, but doesn’t laugh. Callie never laughs, but the sincerity of her smile makes up for it.
“They tell me that when I’m ready to stop looking out of this window, I might be ready to go home.”
“Are you getting close?” I ask, selfishly wanting her to say no.
She doesn’t answer. Instead she says, “More than anything I want to be out of here . . . but sometimes home is harder than here. It’s like jumping into a cold ocean on a hot summer day. You want to do it more than anything, but you don’t want to feel the shock of the cold water.”
“I actually like that feeling,” I tell her.
She turns to me, grins, and squeezes my hand. “You’re just weird.” Then she returns her gaze to the view, which doesn’t change today. Not as much as a single hawk in the sky in search of a rabbit.
“At home they expect you to be fixed,” she says. “They say they understand, but the only people who really understand are the ones who’ve been to That Place, too. It’s like a man telling a woman he knows what it feels like to give birth.” She turns to me, forsaking her view for a moment. “You will never know that, so don’t pretend you do.”
“I don’t. I mean I won’t. But I do kind of know how it feels to be you.”
“I believe that. But you won’t be with me at home. Just my parents and my sisters. They all think medicine should be magic, and they become mad at me when it’s not.”
“I’m sorry.”
“But if I endure it,” she says, “eventually I will settle in. I will find myself as I was before. We do, you know. Find ourselves. Although it’s a little harder each time. Days pass. Weeks. Then we squeeze ourselves back into the skin of who we were before all this. We put the pieces back together and get on with things.”
That makes me think about Skye, the puzzler, and the jigsaw piece she gave me. I keep it in my pocket as a reminder, although I can’t recall what it’s supposed to remind me of.
The navigator might be brilliant, but I don’t dare ask him about the forecastle, and how to get in, because he’s also curious. He’ll want
to know why I’m asking. I haven’t told him about the time I spend with Calliope, because I know he can’t keep a secret. He will blurt it out in so many rhymes and alliterations, everyone will know. Besides, the navigator has been moodier than usual. He’s begun to close me out the way he closes out others. Something about me being suspicious and pernicious.
Instead, I seek out Carlyle at midnight, and ask him. I find him mopping aft, back toward the mizzenmast, clearing the deck of grime and the occasional brain.
“The fo’c’sle?” he asks, pronouncing
forecastle
in the proper seaman’s way. “What do you want with the fo’c’sle?”
“I just want to know what’s down there.”
He shrugs. “We store the forward mooring ropes there,” he tells me. “Although it’s been so long since we’ve seen port, I wouldn’t be surprised if the ropes have evolved into higher forms of life.”
“If I wanted to get in there, where would I find the key?”
“Why would you want to?”
“I have my reasons.”
He sighs and looks around to make sure we’re unobserved. He respects my privacy on the matter, and doesn’t ask my reasons again. “There’s only one key to the padlock, and the captain has it.”
“Where does he keep it?”
“You’re not going to like it,” Carlyle warns me.
“Tell me anyway.”
For a moment Carlyle ponders the gray suds in his bucket, then finally says, “It’s behind the peach pit, in the socket of his dead eye.”
No matter how rational the world seems to be, you never really know what crazy crap is around the bend. I saw this in the news once: some socialite in a Manhattan high-rise takes an elevator from the penthouse to the basement garage, dropping down sixty-seven floors—sixty-eight if you count the mezzanine—to get her Mercedes and go to a gallery on Madison Avenue, or whatever it is that Manhattan socialites do with their time.
What she doesn’t know is that a water main burst just a few minutes ago next to her building. So the elevator reaches the basement, and as the doors begin to open, the elevator is flooded by freezing water. What is she going to do? There isn’t even a worst-case scenario for this, because it’s beyond anyone’s imagination.
In five seconds the water’s at her waist, then at her neck, and then she drowns, never knowing what the hell happened, or how such a horrific thing is even possible. I mean, think about it: drowning in an elevator in a skyscraper. That’s wrong on sixty-seven different levels, not counting the mezzanine.
The weird thing is, hearing stories like this makes me feel a kind of kinship with the Almighty, because it proves that even God has psychotic episodes.
I go to the crow’s nest to ponder the obstacles and consequences to getting this particular boss key. The way I see it, it’s an impossible task. I sit at the bar, sipping my cocktail and sharing my dilemma with the bartender, because bartenders are known to give good advice, and I know that the crow’s nest personnel have neither love for, nor loyalty to, the captain. I’ve met several bartenders here. They work varied shifts, because the crow’s nest operates twenty-four hours a day. Today’s bartender is a slender woman with eyes a little too small for her face. She compensates with mascara and turquoise eye shadow, so that her eyes look a bit like two peacock feathers.
“Best to forget it,” the bartender advises. “I mean literally. The less you remember it, the less important it will seem, and the less important it seems, the less anxious you’ll be.”
“I don’t want to be less anxious,” I tell her. “At least not until I get that key.”
She sighs. “Sorry, I wish I could help you.”
She appears a bit miffed that I’m not taking her advice. Or maybe she’s miffed that I’m hanging out at the bar. The crow’s nest folk don’t seem to like when I hang around too much. Like any other service establishment, they want to move the customers in and out as quickly as they can. I prefer to take my time.
On the barstool next to me is the master-at-arms. He has no
cocktail, he’s just chatting up the bartender. She doesn’t seem to mind
him
being there. The leering tattoos on his arms regard me with emotions that range from curiosity to disdain, then the skull with a penchant for show tunes launches into a rousing “Hello, Dolly!,” which happens to be the name of the bartender. It makes all the other skulls complain.
“How can you stand it when your ink acts up?” I ask him.
For a moment he looks at me like I’m from Mars, then he says rather slowly, “I just . . . don’t . . . pay attention.”
I suppose “not paying attention” takes a great deal of discipline. I know when my voices get out of hand, it’s like being in the middle of the New York Stock Exchange. At least he can muffle his with long sleeves and layers.
“Have you ever seen the captain up here?” I say, but the master-at-arms seems to be ignoring me now, so I direct the question to the skull with a rose in its mouth, figuring it might be the mellowest one. “Does the captain ever come to the crow’s nest?”
“Never,” says the tattoo through clenched teeth. “He’d prefer that no one did. The captain doesn’t like anyone messing with sailors’ minds but him.”
“Then how come he doesn’t just shut the place down? I mean, he’s the captain, he can do anything he wants on his ship, right?”
“Ha!” says the dice-eyed skull. “Shows how much
you
know.”
“There are some things that not even the captain can control,” says the skull with the rose.
“What kinds of things?”
And the theatrical skull sings, “
Storm fronts that linger upon the horizon; white plastic places where every thought dies in; swabbies and cocktails and parrots’ bright wings; these are a few of his least-favorite things.
”
The other skulls all groan, and I smile. If the captain isn’t all-powerful, perhaps getting that key isn’t as impossible as I thought.
110. Garden of Unearthly Delights
Hal and I sit in the rec room. He’s absorbed in his maps and I’m absorbed in my drawings, trying to be here and not somewhere else.
“I wrote myself a chaos language,” Hal tells me. “Full of symbols and signals and sigils and cymbals. But due to its chaotic nature, I can’t remember it.”
“Were the cymbals to wake you up when you got too boring?” I ask him.
He points a finger at me. “Watch yourself, or I will mark you in your sleep with a sigil of hair loss, and you will turn into your father.”
Sigils, as I recall from some dark comic book series, are symbols of medieval magic from back in the day when so few people were literate that literacy itself was seen as borderline magical. A man who could read was considered a genius. A man who
could read without moving his lips was proclaimed either divine or demonic, depending on the agenda of whoever was doing the proclaiming.
Today Hal is doing all the proclaiming, which is how it usually goes.
“Symbols have power!” he announces. “You see a cross, it makes you feel something. You see a swastika, it makes you feel something else. Yet the swastika is also an Indian symbol meaning ‘It is good,’ showing that symbols can be mortally corrupted. That’s why I make up my own. They are meaningful to me, and that’s all that matters.”
He draws a spiral punctured by a sine wave. He draws two question marks at odd angles bisecting each other. He’s right—they are powerful. He’s
made
them powerful.
“What do they mean?” I ask.
“I told you, I forgot the language.” Then he looks over at my sketch pad, noticing that I have copied his symbols and am adding on to them, turning them into figures that battle one another. I have corrupted his symbols. I wonder what he will do.
“Your last name is Bosch,” he says. “Are you related?”
I assume he’s asking if I’m related to Hieronymus Bosch—an artist who painted some pretty bizarre things that scared the crap out of me when I was little, and still dance around my head on bad days.
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
He nods, at home with uncertainty, and says, “Don’t put me in
your Garden of Earthly Delights, and I won’t write death-symbols on your forehead.”
Thus, Hal and I reach a mutual understanding.
I open my eyes in the middle of the night, and feel the familiar numbness of semiconsciousness combined with medication. My head is a fogged-in airport. All thoughts are grounded. Still, I can sense that I’m being watched. I force myself through my pharmacological haze and roll over to find someone standing beside my bed. In the dim light coming from the hallway, I can see green pajamas covered in cartoon sea horses. I hear a clicking sound, and it’s a few moments before I realize that the sound is the chattering of teeth.
“I’m cold,” Callie says. “And you’re always so warm.”
She makes no move, she just chatters. I look across the room to see Hal snoring away. Callie’s waiting for an invitation. I throw back my covers. It’s invitation enough, and she climbs in.
She
is
cold. Not just her hands and feet, but her whole body. I pull the covers over both of us and she turns her back to me, making it easier to hold her and share my body warmth. We lie close like a pair of spoons. I can feel the ridges of her spine against my chest. I can feel her heart beating so much more rapidly than mine. Our bodies form a symbol, I think, as powerful as one of Hal’s—and it occurs to me that the most meaningful symbols of all must be
based on all the different ways two people can embrace.
“Don’t get any ideas,” she says.
