Challenger Deep

The Captain tells Caden that the trench goes down forever. Caden argues that scientists measured the depth at 6.8 miles. The Captain laughs, and Caden worries that he is missing “something important and deceptively obvious that I’ll only understand when it’s too late to matter” (3). 

Caden dreams that he is lying in a white kitchen. He can’t move. People he knows and loves, including his parents, surround him, but in the dreams they are impersonations of people: “monsters in disguise” (4). At the end of the dream, they tear him to pieces. 

Caden is on a ship but cannot remember when he arrived. He believes he is 15 years old. He does not know many of the other crewmen. They don’t speak to him except to tell him not to touch their possessions or to get out of the way. When he tries to help them with projects, they push him away. The Captain watches them, as does the Parrot on his shoulder. The Parrot has an eye patch and wears a security badge. One of the other children tells Caden not to tell the Parrot anything because “that’s how they get you” (6).

No existing language accurately describes Caden’s emotions. A kid he calls “the Navigator” tells him to write directions on his parchment pad because “your visions show us the way” (7). The Navigator, Caden’s roommate, replaced his prior roommate who disappeared without an explanation. The Navigator is always writing complicated mathematical formulas, navigational charts, and strings of words. Caden believes that the Navigator is a genius, and the Navigator believes that Caden is “the doorway to the salvation of the world” (8). 

Caden stands in the doorway of Mackenzie’s bedroom as their father tucks her in. She is almost 11 years old. He hears his mother talking on the phone to his grandmother downstairs. Then Caden tells his father that he thinks a boy at school wants to kill him. 

Caden describes a bucket at the mall where people donate money to a children’s charity by putting a coin in a slot. The coin rolls around the edges of the bucket, going faster as the funnel narrows and the coin nears the opening at the bottom. Caden compares himself to that coin, “screaming in the neck of the funnel, with nothing but my own kinetic energy and centrifugal force keeping me from dropping into darkness” (10). 

Caden’s father asks about the boy he thinks is trying to kill him and is surprised when Caden says the boy hasn’t actually threatened him. Caden says that he doesn’t know the boy; he only passes him in the hall sometimes, but he believes that the boy is a threat to him. To make the conversation end, Caden says that he must be stressed out and goes downstairs. 

Caden remembers asking the Captain what the name of their ship was. The Captain said “to name her is to sink her. That which we name takes greater weight than the sea it displaces. Ask any shipwreck” (13). A sign above the main hatch of the ship reads: “You are not the first and you will not be the last” (13). The Parrot asks Caden if the sign ever speaks to him, and he says no. 

Caden visits what he calls the White Plastic Kitchen every night. Tonight, he hides inside a refrigerator. Someone opens the door and reaches through Caden’s body to get the milk behind him. Her hand passes through him.

Caden describes the layout of the ship. It includes decks that are impossibly larger than they appear from the outside and a hallway that seems to have no ending. Below decks is a pungent smell that Caden finds overwhelming, but the Captain enjoys it, saying that, “nothing awful is without its beautiful side” (15). 

Caden remembers that he used to play a game called Psycho Shopping Spree with his friends. They would focus on a shopper at a mall and imagine that the shopper was buying items to murder their victims with. One day, they followed an old woman and watched her buy a butcher knife. Caden made eye contact with her and noticed a “cruel and malevolent look in her eyes” (16). He says that now he sees her eyes everywhere. 

Caden stands in his living room and tells Mackenzie that he is listening for termites. She worries about a possible infestation, and Caden tells her that he doesn’t hear anything. He thinks about the termites to distract himself from what is happening at school. He imagines the ground beneath the house and wonders if it goes down deep enough to bury ancient, hidden civilizations. He imagines that his thoughts push into the earth and wonders if he could cause an earthquake in China. 

Caden explores the ship, even though he has instructions not to. He asks a female crew member where a hallway goes, and she tells him that it stays where it is. Caden walks down the hallway, counting the ladders that line its sides. When he takes a ladder back up to the deck, he realizes that all ladders exit at the same place above deck.

Caden’s job on the ship is to counterbalance the weight of the ship when it leans too much to one side. Crew members who do not have a task are used as ballast, shoved into the lower decks to lower the ship’s center of gravity. The Captain tells him that he will soon assign an important mission to Caden, and to expect dark omens as they near the trench. 

When he is not working on the ship, Caden spends time with a young man named Carlyle, the ship’s swabby, or cleaner. Caden sees him swatting at rats with his mop, but Carlyle tells him that they are not rats. Caden asks him how the Captain lost his eye. Carlyle says that the Parrot lost his eye first, after selling it to a witch in exchange for a potion that would make him an eagle, but the witch tricked him, and the potion didn’t work. Carlyle says that the Parrot then clawed the Captain’s eye out in a rage, not wanting to be the only one missing an eye. 

Caden climbs the nets up into the crow’s nest. When he reaches the narrow bucket on top of the mast and climbs in, he finds the inside far bigger than the outside. He sees a live band playing music in a chamber where people sip martinis. A hostess seats him. A pale man nearby asks Caden if he is a jumper, but Caden tells him that he is just trying to clear his head. A man gets to his feet and jumps over the edge, killing himself. The pale man says, “Jumpers do what jumpers do. It’s our job to applaud their pluck and celebrate their lives” (26). 

At school, Caden tries to convince himself that no one there wants to hurt him. His mother suggests that meditation will help him. He remembers his surprise in art class when he learned how hard it was to make a pot on a pottery wheel. Each time he tried, the clay warped into a shape his teacher called a mystery ashtray. Caden feels like his life is destined to become a mystery ashtray. 

On Fridays, Caden meets with his friends Max and Shelby to work on a computer game of their own design. Caden is the artist. Max knows the most about code, and Shelby writes stories for the characters. Caden likes drawing because he says, “when I see a blank page, I can’t leave it like that. Blank pages scream at me to be filled with crap from my brain” (29). Caden shows Shelby a sketch of a character named Xargon. She accuses him of sloppy work and of not taking the project seriously. Caden believes that the quality of his artwork is dropping, and he doesn’t know why. 

The Captain summons Caden to a meeting, but when Caden arrives, only the Parrot is there. The Parrot says that he is actually the one who called the meeting and gives Caden a questionnaire to fill out. When Caden finishes, the Parrot asks for information he can use against the rest of the crew. Caden refuses, and the Parrot ends the meeting. 

The questionnaire asks Caden to give an answer between one and five for each of the statements. The options are: 1, strongly agree; 2, totally agree; 3, agree emphatically; 4, in absolute agreement; 5, how did you know? The questionnaire comprises statements like, “I smell dead people” and “I am God, and God does not fill out questionnaires” (34). 

Caden’s family goes to Las Vegas for two days while exterminators treat their house for termites. In the hotel, Caden feels nervous but does not know why. His father encourages him to keep working on his social anxiety. His parents lose money gambling and argue about who is to blame for their bad luck. Caden and Mackenzie walk the Vegas strip while their parents go to a spa treatment. Caden accepts cards from street workers who advertise dancing girls and escorts. He decides that one of the workers plans to burn down their hotel. To escape from the man, Caden and Mackenzie go into Caesar’s Palace. They see a replica of Michelangelo’s statue David. Caden thinks that David looks sad and worried, and he wonders if David is like him: He sees monsters but doesn’t have enough slingshots to fight them all.  

Caden’s parents are drunk that evening. They take Caden and Mackenzie to the Stratosphere Tower, a Vegas attraction including a ride that drops 108 stories in 8.5 seconds at near free fall. Caden’s father pressures him into boarding. As workers attach Caden’s cable, he somehow knows that they are only pretending to secure him. He believes his father, the workers, and people watching from an adjacent tower restaurant all want to see him die. He thinks, “The pain of knowing is killing me more than killing me would kill me, so I jump just to end it” (40). Caden is surprised that he survives, but even on the ground, he feels as if he is standing on a ledge. 

Caden wakes from a nightmare and finds himself on the ship. The Navigator notices him and asks if he was in the White Plastic Kitchen. The Navigator then gives Caden a map and tells him it will be the only way he can find his way out of the kitchen. 

The Parrot demands that Caden draw a portrait of the Parrot. Instead, Caden draws a piece of excrement and shows it to the Parrot. The Parrot laughs, which leads Caden to draw another, accurate portrait of him. The Captain tells Caden that he does not have permission to be talented, but he will consider letting Caden keep the talent to draw. 

The next morning, in the crow’s nest, the bartender makes a special cocktail for Caden. He says that the cocktail contains garbage, spice, beetles, and the cartilage from a cow. The Parrot arrives and tells Caden to drink the cocktail, which tastes bitter but not unpleasant. He says that Caden has to visit the crow’s nest twice a day from now on.

Caden remembers a family trip to New York. He did not like using the subway or seeing the crowds of people on the trains. He spent the week studying New Yorkers; surprisingly, they rarely made eye contact and seemed alone, even among so many people. He says, “I marveled that people could live so close—that you could literally be surrounded by people who were only inches away—and yet be completely isolated. I found it hard to imagine. It’s not hard for me to imagine anymore” (47). 

After returning from Las Vegas to a termite-free house, Caden feels uneasy and restless. He alternates between pacing and drawing. His drawings are formless, and he feels as if something inside of him is trying to escape onto the paper. At one point Mackenzie is near him, eating peanut butter with a spoon. Caden digs his thumb into her spoon and draws a smudge of peanut butter across the page with his thumb. He sees that his mother is watching and worrying. 

Caden sits with his friends at lunch but feels as if he cannot enter their conversation. He sees himself as someone in a clique with only one member. His friend Taylor asks him where he is. Caden responds with a joke and then pretends to laugh with the others. 

Caden paces on the deck of the ship with the other crewmen. The Navigator sits on a barrel filled with rotten food. Flies circle it as the Navigator makes new navigational charts based on the orbits of the flies. The Parrot lands on Caden’s shoulder, looking into his ear, and says his brain is still there. Caden assumes that the Parrot is talking about his brain. The captain announces that there is nothing to fear except fear itself—and man-eating monsters.