Challenger Deep

  My parents spend half a day gambling until they’ve decided they’ve lost enough money. Then they argue and blame each other.

  “You don’t know how to play blackjack!”

  “I told you, I prefer roulette!”

  Everyone needs someone to blame. Married couples blame each other. It’s easier that way. The whole thing is aggravated by the fact that Mom broke the left heel of her favorite red shoes, and had to limp back to the hotel, because walking barefoot on the streets of Las Vegas is not an option. Walking on coals would be less painful.

  While our parents console themselves with spa treatments, I go out with my sister and walk along the strip, watching the Bellagio fountain show. I’m kind of bothered to be with Mackenzie right now, because she happens to be sucking on her favorite candy—a blue Ring Pop. It makes her look much younger than almost-eleven, and makes me feel like I’m a babysitter. It’s also embarrassing to be around someone whose entire mouth has turned blue.

  As we walk, I collect business cards for escort services from sleazy guys handing them out to anyone who will take them. Not that I intend to call the numbers on the cards, but it’s something to collect. Like baseball cards. Except these have pictures of girls in underwear. Worth an entire major league team.

  I know that one of these buildings on the strip used to be the MGM Grand, which had a deadly fire a long time ago. It was such bad karma, the company sold it to some other hotel chain, and built a new hotel—a massive green Oz-like gambling cathedral. But the old hotel is now camouflaged by a different name. A lot of people died in that fire. One guy jumped out of a high window on a mattress to escape the flames. The mattress didn’t save him.

  Now I get to thinking about our hotel, and what would happen if it caught on fire. How would you get out of a flaming glass pyramid where the windows don’t open? My thoughts start spinning. What if one of these scummy guys on the street decides he’s tired of handing out dirty business cards, and decides that a little arson is in order. And when I look at one of them—really look at him, I see it in his face, and I know that he’s the one. I’ve gotten a powerful premonition, almost like a voice, telling me I can’t go back to our hotel. Because he’s watching me. Because maybe they all are. Maybe all those sleazy card-hander-outers are working together. And I can’t go back to our hotel, because if I do, it will be true. So I convince my sister, who’s whining that her feet hurt, to keep on walking, but I don’t tell her why. I suddenly feel like it’s all up to me to protect her from the creeps.

  “Let’s check out Caesars Palace,” I tell Mackenzie. “It’s supposed to be real cool.”

  As we walk in, I begin to feel a little safer. There are huge stone centurions with spears, wearing armor, guarding the entrance. I know they’re just for decoration, but they make me feel safe from all the scheming, scuzzy fire-starters.

  Inside, among the shops that push perfume, diamonds, leather, and mink, there’s an alcove where one more stone sculpture stands. It’s a perfect marble replica of Michelangelo’s David. Everything in Las Vegas is a perfect replica. The Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, half the city of Venice. The real world made fake for your amusement.

  “Ew, what’s with the naked guy?” Mackenzie asks.

  “Don’t be dumb, it’s David.”

  “Oh,” she says, and mercifully doesn’t ask “David who?” Instead, she asks, “What’s that in his hand?”

  “A slingshot.”

  “It doesn’t look like a slingshot.”

  “It’s a biblical slingshot,” I tell her. “The one he used to kill Goliath.”

  “Oh,” Mackenzie says. “Can we go now?”

  “In a second.” I can’t leave yet, because I’m struck by David’s stone eyes. His body seems relaxed, like the kingdom is already his, but the expression on his face . . . it’s full of worry, and concern he’s trying to hide. I begin to wonder if David was like me. Seeing monsters everywhere and realizing there aren’t enough slingshots in the world to get rid of them.

  23. Eight-Point-Five Seconds

  My parents are a little drunk on that first evening of our Las Vegas extravaganza.

  Their fight over who was responsible for the day’s gambling losses is over. They decide to rise above it all. Literally.

  See, every hotel in Las Vegas has a gimmick, and the biggest gimmick of all is the Stratosphere Tower, which claims to have 113 floors, although I think they’re measuring floors in Las-Vegas-inches, which stretch and contract to fit whatever lie you’re trying to sell. Still, it’s pretty impressive, this circular glass crown atop a sleek concrete spire. The elevator attendant claims they have the fastest elevators in Western civilization. Las Vegans and their elevators.

  The four-story circular crown has a revolving restaurant and a lounge with live music. People sit in red velvet chairs and drink neon-bright drinks that appear to be radioactive. The tower also has amusement park rides. One ride drops you 108 stories on a cable at near free fall without so much as a mattress to keep you company on your way down. A camera goes down with you, though, videotaping your simulated death, so you can take it home and relive those 8.5 seconds in the comfort of your living room.

  “Are you up for it?” my father asks. “There’s no line.”

  I think he’s kidding at first, but by the sparkle in his eye, I can tell that he’s not. My father rarely gets drunk, but when he does, he becomes the poster child for bad choices.

  “No thanks,” I tell him, and try to get away, but he grabs me, and says it’s a family event. He’s got discount coupons. Two for one. Four for two. Such a deal.

  “Loosen up, Caden,” he says. “Give yourself over to the universe.”

  My father did not live through the sixties, but alcohol turns him from a registered Republican to a hippie wandering Woodstock.

  “What are you afraid of?” he asks. “It’s perfectly safe.”

  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. People applaud, and my fingers begin to feel numb.

  “Anyone ever go splat?” some pale bozo with a neon drink asks the people running the ride, and then he laughs with his bozo friends. “I’d pay to see that!”

  “Either we go as a family, or none of us goes,” Dad says, which gets my sister working on me, complaining that I always ruin her life. My mother just giggles, because margaritas turn her into a twelve-year-old in a forty-year-old body.

  “C’mon, Caden,” Dad says. “Live in the moment, man. It’ll be something you’ll remember for the rest of your life.”

  Right. All 8.5 seconds of it.

  I stop protesting because it’s three against one. Then when I look in my father’s eyes, I see it. The same thing I saw in the card-carrying creep who I know wants to burn down our hotel. Who is my father, really? What if he’s part of some secret society? What if everything about my life has been a sham, like Venice-on-the-strip, and it’s all been about bringing me here, luring me to jump to my death? Who are these people? And although a part of me knows how ridiculous my thoughts sound, there’s another part of me that gives a foothold to my awful “What if?” It’s the same part of me that secretly checks under my bed and in closets after watching a scary movie.

  Before I know what’s happening, we’re dressed in the blue outfits, and for the first time it hits me why they’re called jumpsuits and we’re standing out on a gantry like a team of astronauts, and my sister goes first because she wants to prove she’s the bravest girl on planet earth, and then my mother’s hooked to the cable, and she jumps, her giggle turning into a plunging screech, and my father’s waiting behind me, making sure I go before him, because he knows I’ll take the elevator down if given the chance.

  “It’ll be fun, you’ll see.”

  But there’s no fun to be had, because that living cloud in the corner of my mind that looks under the bed is now a ground fog spreading over my brain like the angel of
death over the firstborn of Egypt.

  People watch with mild interest through the glass wall of the Stratosphere crown—well-dressed people eating escargot and drinking radiation as their restaurant slowly revolves—and I realize I’m part of the evening’s entertainment. Like at the circus, everyone secretly wants to see someone go splat.

  And my terror isn’t just butterflies. It isn’t just the adrenaline anticipation at the peak of a roller coaster’s first drop. I know for a fact—for a FACT—that they’re only pretending to attach my cable. That my life is about to end in a high velocity explosion of pain. The truth is in all of their eyes. The pain of knowing is killing me more than killing me would kill me, so I jump just to end it.

  Screaming, screaming, and screaming down the side of a tower and into a bottomless black pit so real, I will always, always believe it’s true—and yet 8.5 seconds later, I slow down, and am caught by a team at the base of the tower. I’m so surprised that I am still alive, I can’t stop shaking, and my one victory from this awful night is that my dad, who jumps after me, pukes on the way down—but not even that can take away the hellish black-hole feeling that I’m still standing on the ledge of something unthinkable.

  24. Don’t Think You Own It

  I awaken from a nightmare I can’t remember to the violent pitching of the ship. The lantern hanging from the low-slung ceiling of our cabin swings wildly, casting wavering shadows that rise and flow just as uneasily as the waves. The entire ship creaks in painful complaint, and the perspiring boards of the hull stretch and contract, straining against the miserable black tar that holds them together. The tar itself seems to moan with the effort.

  The navigator peers down from his bunk above mine, not seeming to care that the ship is about to be shredded into driftwood by the enraged sea.

  “Bad dream?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” I squeak.

  “Were you in the kitchen?”

  That catches me by surprise. I never told him about it. “You know about that place?”

  “We all go to the White Plastic Kitchen sometimes,” the navigator says. “Don’t think you own it, because you don’t.”

  I make my way to the bathroom, which is down the hallway. My feet feel like they’re chained to the ground. My arms feel as if they’re chained to the wall. That on top of the motion of the ship makes my bathroom journey a fifteen-minute ordeal.

  When I’m finally back in my bed the navigator drops down a torn piece of paper with lines and arrows curving this way and that.

  “Way out, stay out, stay home, way home,” he says. “Take that with you the next time you’re in the kitchen, is what I’m saying. It maps the way out.”

  “I can’t take a piece of paper into a dream,” I point out.

  “Well, then,” he says, insulted. “You’re screwed.”

  25. You Were Not Given Permission

  “Draw me,” the parrot says, eyeing my sketch pad. “Draw me.” I don’t dare refuse.

  “Strike a pose,” I tell him. He preens on the railing, raising his beak majestically, fluffing his feathers. I take my time. When I’m done, I present it to him. It’s a picture of a steaming turd.

  He looks at it for a few moments, then says, “It looks more like my brother. After he was eaten by a croc, of course.”

  That actually makes me smile. So I do a second sketch that does look like the parrot, eye patch and all.

  The captain, however, has been watching, and when the parrot flaps off very self-satisfied, he confiscates my pencil and pad. But at least he doesn’t have my drawing hand cut off. Rumor has it that the crewmen with peg legs got that way because they were caught playing soccer on deck.

  “You were not given permission to have talent,” the captain tells me. “It may offend the other crewmen who have none.”

  And although talent comes whether you ask permission or not, I bow my head and ask, “Please, sir . . . may I be allowed the talent to draw?”

  “I will consider it.” He looks at the portrait of the parrot, wrinkles his nose, and throws it overboard. Then he looks at the picture of the steaming turd and says, “A very good likeness.” Then he throws that one overboard, too.

  26. All Things Not Nice

  In the morning, the bartender calls me up to the crow’s nest to make me my cocktail. There are no jumpers today so the crowd is thin.

  “This cocktail shall be yours and yours alone.” He holds a long beat of eye contact with me, until I nod an acceptance. Satisfied, he grabs bottles and potions from the shelf, his hands moving so fast you’d think he had more than two. He shakes it all up in a rusty martini shaker.

  “What’s in it?” I ask.

  He looks at me like I’m an imbecile for asking. Or maybe an imbecile to think I’ll get an answer. “Garbage, and spice, and all things not nice,” he says.

  “Specifically?”

  “Cartilage of cow,” he tells me, “and spine of black beetle.”

  “Beetles have no spines,” I point out. “They’re invertebrates.”

  “Exactly. That’s why it’s so rare.”

  The parrot arrives, flapping up from far below, and sits on the cash register. Seeing the register reminds me that I can’t pay, and I tell the bartender so.

  “Not a problem,” the bartender says. “We’ll bill your insurance.”

  He pours the concoction into a crystal champagne flute and hands it to me. The brew bubbles red and yellow, but the two colors do not blend. My cocktail is a lava lamp.

  “Drink up, drink up,” says the parrot. He turns his head slightly and watches me with his good eye.

  I take a sip. It’s bitter but not entirely unpleasant. A faint flavor of banana and almond. “Bottoms up,” I say, then I down it in a single gulp, leaving the empty glass on the bar.

  The parrot bobs his head in deep satisfaction.

  “Excellent! You’ll visit the crow’s nest twice a day.”

  “What if I don’t want to visit the crow’s nest?” I ask him.

  He winks at me. “Then the crow’s nest will visit you.”

  27. Hand-Sanitized Masses

  Our family took a trip to New York a long time ago. Since all the convenient hotels were either booked or required multiple pounds of flesh in payment, we ended up off the beaten tourist path.

  Our hotel was somewhere in the left armpit of a fat guy in Queens. It was an area of Queens with the unfortunate name of “Flushing.” New York’s founding fathers, like most New Yorkers, had a keen sense of irony.

  Long story short, as a New Yorker might say, we had to take the subway everywhere, which was always an adventure. I believe one time we ended up in Staten Island, and there isn’t even a subway line that goes there. We kept running out of money on our MetroCards, which vomited digital cash every time you went through a turnstile, and Dad lamented the golden age of the brass subway token, when you could count your journeys in the palm of your hand.

  My mother was very clear about THE RULES OF THE SUBWAY, which involved lots of Purell, and never making eye contact with people.

  During that week I became a student of the crowd, studying the unwashed and un-hand-sanitized masses. In the streets, for instance, I discovered that New Yorkers never look up at the awe-inspiring buildings towering above them. They move fast and efficiently through dense mobs, as if they have a Teflon coat, very rarely bumping into one another. And in the subway, where everyone must stand still as the train rattles from station to station, not only don’t people make eye contact, but they exist in their own extremely tight universe, as if wearing an invisible space suit. It’s kind of like driving on the freeway, except that your personal space is only half an inch from your clothes, if that. I marveled that people could live so close—that you could literally be surround by thousands 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.

  28. Skippy Rainbow

  Our house is now termite-free, and the wonders o
f Sin City are memories best suppressed. But home feels no more comfortable. I have this urge to pace. Back and forth, back and forth. It’s pointless. When I’m not pacing, I’m drawing; when I’m not drawing, I’m thinking—which just leads me back to pacing and drawing again. Maybe I’m being affected by the pesticide residual.

  I sit at the dining room table. Before me is a spread of colored pencils, oil pastels, charcoal. Today I work in colored pencil, but I hold them so hard and press so powerfully, the pencils keep breaking. Not just the points, but the pencils themselves. I toss the ruined ones over my shoulder, not allowing for delays.

  “You’re like a mad scientist,” my mother observes.

  I hear her about ten seconds after she says it. It’s too late to respond, so I don’t. I’m too busy to respond anyway. There’s this thing in my head that I have to purge onto the page before it changes the shape of my brain. Before the colorful lines cut into it like a cheese wire. My drawings have lost all sense of form. They are scribbles and suggestions, random, and yet not. I wonder if others will see the things in them that I see. 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.

  “I don’t like it,” says Mackenzie, passing with a spoonful of peanut butter that she licks like a lollipop. “It’s creepy.”

  “I only draw what’s called for,” I tell her. Then I get a flash of impulsive inspiration; I reach over, dig my thumb into her spoon, and smudge an ocher arc across the page.

  “Mom!” yells Mackenzie. “Caden’s drawing with my peanut butter!”