Challenger Deep

The Captain now wears a woolen uniform more modern than his former pirate outfit. One day, while observing Caden, he slashes one of the sails with a knife. As Caden watches, the sail repairs itself. The Captain says that the ship is alive, and that it can both hurt and heal. Caden asks if the pain belongs to Calliope. The Captain wants to know how Caden knows her name and says that it would be a good thing to know whether she feels the ship’s pain or not. 

Calliope tells Caden that she feels not only the ship’s pain but also everything. Caden believes that he understands and tells her, “Sometimes I feel inside of people around me. I believe I know what they are thinking—or if not what, then at least how they’re thinking” (109). He feels terrible that his life affects the lives of people he doesn’t know and whom he will never meet. Calliope tells him that they are very similar. 

Caden visits a therapist while his parents wait in the waiting room. They have told the doctor that Caden’s recent behavior is out of the ordinary. Caden tells the doctor that his parents have the problem, not him. As they discuss Caden’s anxiety and sleepless nights, the therapist tries to lead Caden through a breathing exercise to relax him, starting with the question of what Caden sees when he closes his eyes. Caden refuses to close his eyes. The therapist recommends that Caden’s parents take him to someone who can prescribe medication. 

Caden tries to describe what he calls the darkness behind his closed eyes. Sometimes it is terrifying, and sometimes it is beautiful. Sometimes he wonders if he has pushed beyond the stars. 

Caden feels that he is halfway between two places. He cannot tell what is part of him and what is not. He hears his mother calling him for dinner for the third time. At dinner, he doesn’t eat because he does not see the point in feeding an empty shell. He tells himself that the reason people don’t connect with him anymore is because they are frightened by his awesomeness, but he is even more frightened than they are. 

Caden attends a mission meeting with the blue-haired girl, the Lore-Master, the Navigator, the girl with the pearl choker, and Bone Boy. The Lore-Master tells the Captain that he can’t decipher the runes in a book he is studying. The Captain punishes him by making him clean the cannon. 

Caden believes he can see the connections between everything and everyone. He also feels that he has a duty to share what he knows. He sees a woman outside a supermarket and says, “There’s a worm in your heart, but you can cast it out” (119). She hurries away, frightened, but he feels that he has done something good.

Caden notices that his feet are bare and bleeding. He doesn’t remember taking off his shoes. He walks into a travel agency next to the supermarket and tells the people inside that the worm is trying to kill him. The manager throws him out and he cries outside, feeling like Jonah being digested inside the whale. 

The Captains tells Caden that they are going to test his diving bell today, even as Caden protests; they need a bathyscaphe, not a diving bell. The crewmen throw the diving bell overboard. It snaps the rope and sinks. The Captain says that the test succeeded because it proves the quickest way to the bottom of the trench. The Parrot lands on Caden’s shoulder and tells him that they need to talk. 

Caden’s father tries to stop him from going for another barefoot walk. Then he tries to go with him, but Caden runs past him into the street. When Caden looks back a few blocks later, his father is following him in his car, slowly. He reminds Caden of a silver shark. 

The Parrot tells Caden that he is concerned about the Captain; he thinks he has bad plans for Caden. The Parrot claims to have been Caden’s greatest advocate when he has spoken with the Captain alone. He says that if the Captain betrays the ship, they will need to kill him. 

Caden hasn’t slept for at least two days. His parents alternate sitting with him on his bed in shifts. A voice tells him that they aren’t really his parents. He wants to explain the voices to his mother, but he doesn’t want her to know that he hears them. 

The Captain calls Caden to his office. He says that he worries that the Parrot is plotting against him, and that when the time comes, he may need Caden’s help to kill it. 

Caden remembers that when he used to look at paper money, he thought that George Washington was glaring at him. Until recently, it never stopped him from using money. He worries that no matter how many clues he gathers, he will not be able to stop what is happening to him. 

Caden’s father has been crying. He tells Caden that they are going on a trip. They get in the car, but Mackenzie is not there. He believes that his parents are trying to protect her from him. Caden throws a tantrum in the back, screaming and rocking the car and cursing his parents, but the locks are childproof, and he can’t get out of the car. They take him to Seaview Memorial Hospital. He sees a fish tank and notices that a small boy inside it, pounding on the glass for someone to let him out. He sees a ship inside the tank and cannot tell whether he is inside the glass or outside of it. 

Caden plots against the Parrot with the Captain, and against the Captain with the Parrot. He knows that the eventual conflict between them will annihilate him. 

When Caden realizes that his parents plan to leave him at the hospital, he begins to scream and fight against the orderlies, who then restrain him. He screams that the workers are killing him as his parents turn and leave. Three men wrestle him into a room and one of them injects him with a sedative. This is Caden’s first visit to the White Plastic Kitchen. 

Caden dreams that he is lying on a beach somewhere where no one speaks English. His parents are nearby, holding hands while Mackenzie plays in the surf. Caden knows he is dreaming, and so he curses the perfect beach and the drink he holds in his hand. 

Caden tries to describe the experience of consciousness while under the influence of psychoactive medications. He compares it to the faceless figure that falls from the sky at the beginning of the TV program The Twilight Zone.

Caden is unsure of whether he is on the ship or in the hospital bed. He knows that people come and ask him questions, but he cannot tell who they are or remember them for long. He feels like a snail without a shell that he can hide inside, a mere slug for others to observe. 

The Captain tells the crew a story about when Captain Ahab from Moby Dick met Captain Nemo from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He says that the white whale did not sink Ahab’s ship. Instead, it sunk after a collision with Captain Nemo’s submarine, The Nautilus, which was fleeing from giant squids. The two men became friends, but the whale and the squid became bitter enemies, doomed to fight each other forever. The Captain says the moral of the story is that “we must not free ourselves from our beasts. We must abandon all else in this world but our beasts” (141). Caden tells the Captain that he is wrong but avoids punishment. 

In the middle of the night, crewmen abduct Caden and take him to clean the cannon. They shove Caden into the cannon’s barrel and tell him that if he moves the cannon will explode. Then they bang on the outside with an iron pole. Caden knows that no one can save him. 

Caden’s parents visit for an hour each day. They tell him that his MRI shows that he doesn’t have a tumor. He tells them that the MRI was loud. 

A man named Dr. Poirot visits with Caden. He wears bright Hawaiian shirts, and the other patients tell Caden that he has a glass eye. Dr. Poirot tells Caden that his job is to rest for now and to think of his mind as being in a cast, like a broken bone. Later that day, Caden unexpectedly vomits on a puzzle that a girl with blue hair is working on. She pushes him against the wall, but he is too drugged to fight back. 

In the White Plastic Kitchen, Caden tells a disembodied mask that he has a brain tumor. The mask tells him that his scans are negative and asks about the bruise on his arm, which he sustained in the fight with the blue-haired girl. 

Caden has no appetite and feels that his existence is now measured from meal to meal. Then he learns to measure time by his three daily therapy sessions. In his group, a girl describes how her uncle used to rape her so often that she tried to kill herself by slitting her throat. A boy describes prostituting himself on the street for heroin money. Caden’s parents complain when he tells them about the stories he is hearing; his father does not believe that listening to the nightmarish experiences of other kids is therapeutic. The leader of the therapy group is then replaced by a man named Carlyle. 

The Captain tells Caden that the masked demons in White Plastic Kitchen may undo all of the work they’ve been trying to accomplish together. He says that Caden has to resist going there at all costs. 

Dr. Poirot tells Caden that once the medications settle into his brain, he will have a better sense of what is real and what is not.  

Carlyle points out a kid to Caden. The kid is always looking at maps, so they call him the Navigator. The Navigator is drawing green lines over a map of Europe “to see what’s really there” (155). He introduces himself to Caden as Hal. 

Hal becomes Caden’s roommate. An orderly tells Caden that he is the first person Hal has gotten along with well enough to share a room. When Caden tries to describe the connections he sees in everything, Hal understands, even though he says they are approaching a similar problem in different ways. He says, “What we perceive as art, the universe perceives as directions” (157).