Challenger Deep: Chapters 99–129

“The flies are awful secret police that tear us as if we were carrion,” Hal tells her.

He drew lines between all the places he’d lived. He found the patterns very arresting.

The thing that infuriates me most about her, though, is that she has the gall to make me appreciate my own parents more.

He doesn’t say it to me anymore because Mom told him it was trite.

On the other hand, there was this bizarre cult that committed mass suicide wearing brand-new Nikes as their own warped homage to “Just do it.”

“What they do here has no bearing on the price of tea in China,” he finally says.

Her hands are cold. She says she has poor circulation in her extremities.

She turns to me, forsaking her view for a moment.

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.

“We store the forward mooring ropes there,” he tells me.

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.

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.

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.

In a few minutes my paper reflects a jagged inner landscape of sharp edges and deep crevasses. No sense of gravity or perspective. Abstract angular angst.

In a few minutes my paper reflects a jagged inner landscape of sharp edges and deep crevasses. No sense of gravity or perspective. Abstract angular angst.

It distracts me and I forget not just the gist of the conversation, but its entire direction as well.

He considers this very seriously, then he grabs his little pad and scribbles out a new prescription for me. “I’d like to add Risperdal to your medication regimen,” he says.

My gnarled purple legs are rootlike, sparking with intelligence, or maybe it’s just a series of short circuits.

I had an “adverse reaction” to the Risperdal.

Neither Poirot nor the pastels would tell me exactly what that meant. Carlyle was more forthcoming.

“Zis is accomplished by creating a vacuum within ze cranium,” the ship’s doctor explains. “Zen ze errant brain is introduced to ze left nostril, at vich time it is zucked in to fill ze void. All zimple physics.”

“That,” he says, “was the Abyssal Serpent—a very formidable adversary. Once it sets its eye on you, it will track you until you, or it, are no more. It will never let you be.”

Rule one: disparaging remarks are punishable by early dismissal. Unless of course early dismissal is what you were aiming for. Then it’s not a punishment at all, but a pleasant perk of rudeness.

If I had been born a Native American in another time, I might have been lauded as a medicine man.

My voices would have been seen as the voices of ancestors imparting wisdom.

Living in the twenty-first century gives a person a much better prognosis for treatment, but sometimes I wish I’d lived in an age before technology.

For instance, Raoul’s much ado about nothing comes by way of his father, a failed Shakespearean actor who gave up the dream and started a theater camp for underprivileged children.

“Shakespeare wrote tragedies and comedies, so which do you feel like you’re in when he talks to you?” Actually the bard also wrote love sonnets, but if Shakespeare’s reciting sonnets to him, that’s a whole other issue.

I’ve been desensitized to the horrors of group therapy. The graphic details, the tearful confessions, the furious rants. They’re all so much background noise.

The second she gets the floor, it’s like a filibuster—especially when there’s someone new in the group. She keeps reliving the horrors inflicted on her by her stepbrother, and how it felt to cut her own throat—she just uses different words, and different lead-ins, to trick us into thinking she’s taking us somewhere new.

“Uh...I think Caden’s right,” says Raoul apprehensively.

He was using words like psychosis and schizophrenic. Words that people feel they have to whisper, or not repeat at all. The Mental-Illness-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.

“I’ve heard my parents say ‘bipolar,’ but I think that’s just because it sounds like a nicer word.”

“Your meds are working if you’ve got a sense of humor again.”
“It’s a fluke,” I tell him.
He grins. “As time goes on, you’ll find more and more flukes.”
“That’s a whole lot of whales,” I say.
“Not necessarily,” he answers. “Dolphins have flukes, too.”

We go out into the hallway and walk—an old-fashioned promenade, arm in arm, in defiance of the no-physical-contact rule.

I’m too embarrassed about it to tell anyone that my writhing tortured gut is my own stupid fault—although Hal knows, because he saw me hide the plate.

I’m shackled to the table in the White Plastic Kitchen again. I’m lucid enough to know it’s a dream. Lucid enough to know that my stomach is giving me no relief, even in my sleep.

The three of them press their pointed Vulcanoid ears to my bloated belly, and my belly speaks to them in guttural evil growls like Satan himself has purchased a time-share in my intestinal tract.

“Someone got tired of hearing you moan about your gut, so they cleaned it out by exposing your innards to the sea, and dragging you over the barnacle-covered keel of the ship, then back up the other side. Whatever was causing your distress has surely been scraped off.”

A blue sky can be orange, up can masquerade as down, and someone is always trying to poison the meal.