Challenger Deep: Chapters 1–32

There are two things you know. One: You were there. Two: You couldn’t have been there. Holding these two incompatible truths together takes skill at juggling.

“There’s no telling how far down it goes,” the captain says, the left side of his mustache twitching like the tail of a rat. “Fall into that unknowable abyss, and you’ll be counting the days before you reach bottom.”

“But the trench has been measured,” I dare to point out. “People have been down there before. I happen to know that it’s 6.8 miles deep.”

When he laughs, the wrinkles stretch tight, and you can see the muscles and sinews of his neck.

They are Halloween pirates, like the captain, with fake blackened teeth, trick-or-treating on hell’s doorstep. I’d laugh at them if I didn’t believe with all my heart that they’d gouge my eyes out with their plastic hooks.

“Shore to boat, boat to goat. That’s the answer, I’m saying. The goat. It eats everything, digesting the world, making it a part of its own DNA, and spewing it out, claiming its territory. Territory, heredity, heresy, hearsay—hear what I say. The sign of the goat holds the answer to our destination. It all has a purpose. Seek the goat.”

I’m that coin on its way down, screaming in the neck of the funnel, with nothing but my own kinetic energy and centrifugal force keeping me from dropping into darkness.

The sea stretches in all directions. Before us, behind us, to starboard, to port, and down, down, down.

Our ship is a galleon, weathered from a million voyages going back to ages even darker than this.

“She’s the finest vessel of her kind,” the captain once told me. “Put your faith in her and she won’t steer you wrong.”
Which is good, because there’s never anyone at the tiller.

She pours some coffee from a full carafe, but instead of offering me some, she reaches right through my navel and retrieves the milk from somewhere behind me in the refrigerator.

Between the slats of wood that make up the hull and decks of the ship is foul-smelling black pitch to keep the water out.

Nowhere is that smell more pungent than down below. It’s sharp and organic, as if whatever life-forms that were distilled by time into the tar haven’t entirely finished decomposing.

That summery smell of beach that brings you to the most serene place in your soul is nothing more than a gentle wafting of marine putrefaction.

I know it was entirely in my imagination, but there was this cruel and malevolent look in her eyes that I will never forget.

Then she tentatively puts her ear to the wall, I suppose figuring it would be easier to hear them that way than by standing in the middle of a silent room.

I open my eyes, almost surprised to find myself in my living room, and it occurs to me that there is a perfect plumb line from my home to somewhere in China, and I wonder if pushing my thoughts down that line the way I just did could be a dangerous thing.

“Would you prefer to be ballast then?”
That had shut me up. I’d seen the "ballast." Sailors crammed into the cargo hold like sardines, in order to lower the ship’s center of gravity. If there’s no task for you on this ship, you become ballast.

“But we will know as we near the trench, because there will be signs and dark portents.”
I won’t dare ask the captain what those dark portents might be.

Carlyle keeps his expression solemn as he splashes soapy water on the deck.

The tar between the planks seems to retreat from his deluge.

The rope lattice of the ratlines narrows as I near the crow’s nest, making the climb feel increasingly treacherous.

I look around at the dozen or so people enjoying themselves in vaguely psychedelic stupors.

I look around at the dozen or so people enjoying themselves in vaguely psychedelic stupors.

“Listen,” Shelby says, “we don’t live this stuff, it’s just a hobby. We indulge a few days a month. I, for one, do not feel socially stifled by this.”
“Yeah,” says Max. “That’s because you’ve got plenty of other things to stifle you.”

Then the doodles grew into sketches, the sketches grew into pieces, and the pieces are now “works.” Or “oeuvres,” if you’re really pretentious, like some of the kids in my art class who wear berets, like somehow their brains are so creative, they need a covering more unique than anyone else’s.

My own “oeuvres” are mostly comic book art. Manga and stuff, but not always.

The captain’s “ready room” is aft, at the very back of the ship.

Please rate the following statements from one to five using the scale below:
1 strongly agree 2 totally agree 3 agree emphatically
4 in absolute agreement 5 how did you know?

Still, it’s pretty impressive, this circular glass crown atop a sleek concrete spire.

In front of us someone all trussed up in a harness and blue jumpsuit leaps into the void, and disappears down the side of the tower never to be seen again.

He preens on the railing, raising his beak majestically, fluffing his feathers.

These images have to mean something, don’t they? Why else would they be so intense? Why would that silent voice inside be so adamant about getting them out?

The magenta pencil breaks. I toss it and pick up vermilion.

Some people need a clique to make them feel safe. They have this little protective bubble of friends that they rarely venture away from.

While we crewmen do our business, pacing back and forth on deck with no seeming point to the endeavor, the captain stands above us at the helm.

Like a preacher, he pontificates his own peculiar brand of wisdom.

He looks at me as if the answer is obvious. “Compound eyes confound lies.”

I begin drawing what’s in my head, as if maybe by drawing it, it will exorcise the super bugs from my brain.

If pennies become worthless, does that devalue our thoughts to less than nothing? It makes me sad to think about it; billions of copper bits spinning down the yellow funnel into oblivion. I wonder where they’ll go.