Challenger Deep

After Caden gets out of the cannon intact, the other sailors treat Caden with respect. The Captain promises Caden adventures and riches if he will serve as his second eye. The Parrot promises that if Caden will spy for him instead, he will help him find a way off the ship. Caden does not know how to decide which of these two dangerous beasts to attack. Carlyle says that Caden knows whom to ask for help. 

Calliope cannot answer Caden’s question about the two beasts and does not know how they should proceed. The Captain tells Caden that the ship has stopped progressing. He blames Caden for the ship’s heaviness and slowness, now that it has changed from wood to copper. 

Caden is in the White Plastic Kitchen, which is not as white as it was on previous visits. He notices that he is lying on a bed, not on a table like usual. He sees a light switch on the wall but cannot move to turn it to the off position. He dozes and drifts in and out of consciousness. 

Caden tries to explain “being there and being here at the same time” (162). He compares it to having a memory of something significant while doing something insignificant, and then experiencing the shock of coming back to reality as the memory vanishes. He believes that he feels that way all the time. He remembers the story of Don Quixote fighting the windmills because he believed they were giants, and says that the scariest thing is not knowing what he might believe next. 

Shelby visits along with Caden’s parents. She says she has come before, but Caden hasn’t recognized her until now. She apologizes for assuming that he was using drugs as an explanation for his behavior. She and Max are still working on the game, which she promises to show Caden after he returns home. 

Caden sees the silhouette of a girl standing before a picture window that extends from floor to ceiling in a room the called the Vista Lounge. She is almost always there, and Caden has never spoken to her before today. He asks her what is outside the window, and she responds that she is looking at everything that is not in the hospital. At the window, she once saw a hawk take a baby rabbit and fly off with it, and she felt the rabbit die. Dr. Poirot then told her that it wasn’t real. Caden doesn’t answer because he isn’t sure whether he trusts the Parrot.

She introduces herself as Callie, and she asks Caden to tell her if the other patients say anything about her.

Caden says he used to be afraid of dying, but now he worries that he won’t get to experience a future. 

Dr. Poirot tells Caden that his parents will be allowed to bring him some art supplies. Caden looks at a poster behind Dr. Poirot. It shows an Olympic runner breaking the tape at the end of a race. Caden is on so many drugs that he can’t imagine crossing a finish line. 

Calliope tells Caden that she has been concentrating on her legs, even though she doesn’t have any. She asks him not to tell the Captain. She believes that her legs and feet are embedded behind her, in the ship, and asks Caden to get inside the ship and confirm her theory. 

The girl with blue hair tells Caden that Callie sits in front of the window because she needs to: “She thinks the outside world goes away when she’s not looking” (171). The girl touches her nose twice, over and over. When Caden asks her why she does it, she says that it feels like she’s falling if she doesn’t. As he leaves, she presses a puzzle piece into his hand: It’s a blue piece of sky. Skye is the girl’s name. Then she says that Callie likes him, and that he shouldn’t mess it up by being a creep. 

Hal’s mother visits often. Caden thinks she is beautiful; she moves as if she has a protective barrier around her that the hospital and its patients cannot corrupt. Hal tells Caden that she was deemed an unfit mother in his youth, and that his grandparents raised him. When they died, he went into foster care. The first map he defaced was a map on which he drew lines connecting all the places he had lived while in the foster system. The sound of her fingernails drumming on the table agitates Caden, and he resents “that she has the gall to make me appreciate my own parents more” (174). 

Caden begins telling himself, “This, too, shall pass” (174). He used to find the phrase annoying when his father said it but now finds it comforting. Caden believes that any slogan can be twisted around itself until it is in the shape of a noose.

Caden searches for the ship’s forecastle, where he believes he will find Calliope’s legs. The Parrot interrupts him and tells him that he needs to focus on their plan against the Captain. 

Dr. Poirot tells Caden that each person has a construct through which they view the world. Caden’s construct is out of alignment. Caden believes that Poirot wants to help him, but he is also worried that he will believe something different five minutes later. Back in his room, Hal is untalkative; his antidepressant dosage has risen, and it makes him antisocial while he adjusts.

Caden draws random things with the markers that the staff permitted his parents to bring. He asks to join Calliope’s therapy group, but is not allowed to because he is a first-time visitor to the hospital. She calls her current visit the third episode of her mental health miniseries. She says that when she can stop looking at the window, it will be near the time when she is safe enough to go home. Being at the hospital is easier for her than being at home; at home, her parents expect her to act as if her mind works normally. 

At midnight, Caden asks Carlyle where the forecastle is. Carlyle says that the Captain has the only key. He keeps it behind the peach pit that is in the socket of his missing eye. 

Caden remembers reading a story about a Manhattan socialite. She took the elevator of her high-rise down to the basement garage. A water main burst next door, and when she opened the elevator door, water flooded in and drowned her. Stories like this make Caden “feel a kind of kinship with the Almighty, because it proves that even God has psychotic episodes” (183). 

Caden asks the bartender in the crow’s nest how to get the key, but she advises him to forget it. The master-at-arms sits next to Caden. The skulls tattooed on his arms begin singing. The master-at-arms says that when the tattoos are loud, he just stops paying attention to them. He says that the Captain never comes to the crow’s nest because there are things that even he can’t control. 

Hal invents what he calls a chaos language made of signs and symbols. He makes his own symbols because he can give them his own meanings. They have not been corrupted like the signs of the cross and swastika. He promises that he will not write a death symbol on Caden’s forehead. 

Callie comes to Caden’s room and climbs into bed with him because she is cold. In the morning, he sees that she left her slipper when she went back to her room. He plans to put it back on her foot at breakfast. 

Carlyle gives the therapy group paper and markers. Today they are going to draw how they are feeling. Caden draws a “jagged inner landscape of sharp edges and deep crevasses” (191). Skye asks him to draw how she is feeling. He draws a cross between a manta ray and an amoeba. She says it is exactly how she feels. Then Bones asks him to draw for him. Caden draws a porcupine. By the time group ends, Caden has drawn for everyone except Hal, who concentrates on another map. 

Caden compares himself to Van Gogh, Michelangelo, and a homeless man who painted abstract masterpieces. Each of these people were obsessed with their art and paid a price for it. Caden does not feel like he knows who he is.

Dr. Poirot adds a pill called Risperdal to Caden’s medications, saying that it will help him be “here with us more of the time” (194). 

Caden imagines three witches in a dungeon, stirring a cauldron, making medications. 

On the ship, Caden’s brain escapes through his nostrils and runs to the upper deck. He slides under the Captain’s door, hoping for a chance to get the key. The Captain sees him but does not recognize that the brain belongs to Caden. He shouts for help and Carlyle comes in, scooting Caden along with a mop. Sailors throw Caden into the sea. A scaled beast slides against him in the water. The Parrot reaches him and pulls him into the sky, where it reminds him that he has to help him with the Captain. He drops Caden, who lands below in a huge cocktail glass. 

Caden had an adverse reaction to the Risperdal but does not remember it, except for the experience on the ship. Carlyle has to remind him to swallow his food after he chews it. 

The ship’s doctor puts Caden’s brain back into his head. The Captain tells him that he has to trust him, not the Parrot, and not the bartenders. He says that the monster Caden touched in the sea was the Abyssal Serpent: “Once it sets its eye on you, it will track you until you, or it, are no more” (203). 

Caden’s anxiety rises and he cannot stop pacing. 

Hal’s mother visits. She is engaged and tells Hal that she will be moving to Seattle. Hals says that his maps indicate that he will not be going to Seattle with her.