Challenger Deep Read Free Page B

pockets of gas bubble and brew from earth’s intestinal distress as it tries to digest its long and often sad history of life. Theplace where all God’s creatures are eventually distilled through the rock into black gunk that we then suck out of the ground and burn in our cars, turning those once living things into greenhouse gases, which I guess is better than spending eternity as sludge.
    Deeper still, I can feel the cold of the earth replaced by heat until there are caverns of red-hot, then white-hot magma, swirling under unthinkable pressure. The outer core, then the inner core, to the very center of gravity, and then gravity reverses. The heat and pressure begin to decrease. Molten rock turns solid again. I push through the granite, the sludge, the bones, the dirt, the worms, and the termites, until I’m bursting through into some rice paddy in China, proving that there’s no such thing as down, because eventually down is up.
    I open my eyes, almost surprised to find myself in my living room, and it occurs to me that there is a perfect plumb line from my home to somewhere in China, and I wonder if pushing my thoughts down that line the way I just did could be a dangerous thing. Could my thoughts be magnified in the heat and pressure of the earth and come out the other side as an earthquake?
    And I know it’s just a tweaky stray thought, yet the next morning, and the morning after that, and every morning from that moment forward, I check the news in secret terror to see if there was an earthquake in China.

14. Can’t Get There from Here
    Although I have been told by various frightened crewmen not to venture into the unknown corners of the ship, I can’t help myself. Something compels me to seek out things that are better left alone. And how can one be on a great galleon and not check it out?
    Rather than heading on deck for roll call one morning, I get up early enough to explore. I begin to make my way down the long, dimly lit corridor of the crew deck. I take my parchment pad, and draw quick impressions.
    “Excuse me,” I say to a crew member I haven’t seen before, lurking in the shadows of her cabin. She has wide eyes, runny mascara, and wears a pearl choker that looks like it might actually be choking her. “Where does this hallway go?”
    She looks at me with suspicion. “It doesn’t go anywhere, it stays right here.” Then she ducks back in and slams her door. I hold her image in my mind, and on my pad I sketch her face as it looked when she retreated into shadows.
    I continue to walk, keeping track of my distance down the unending hallway by counting the ladders. One, two, three. I get to the tenth ladder, but the corridor just continues ahead of me. Finally I give up and climb ladder ten, only to find myself coming out onto the deck through the midship hatch, and I realize that every one of those ladders, regardless of where it is on the crew deck, exits up through that same hatch. I’ve walked that corridor for twenty minutes, yet have gotten nowhere.
    Sitting on the railing above me is the parrot, as if he’s been waiting there just to mock me.
    “You can’t get there from here,” he says. “Don’t you know? Don’t you know?”

15. No Passage of Space
    My job on the ship is as a “stabilizer.” I can’t recall when I was assigned this task, but I do remember the captain explaining it to me.
    “You shall sense as the ship heels side to side on the sea, and position yourself opposite of the roll, starboard to port, port to starboard,” the captain had said.
    In other words, just like a vast majority of the crewmen, my job is to run side to side across the deck and back again to counteract the rolling motion of the sea. It’s completely pointless.
    “How could our weight possibly make a difference on a ship this size?” I once asked him.
    He glared at me with his bloodshot eye. “Would you prefer to be ballast then?”
    That had shut me up. I’d seen the “ballast.” Sailors