The narrator, a 15-year-old boy named Caden Bosch, cannot sleep while his sister and parents sleep in rooms nearby. He feels trapped in the present moment, and if his concentration lapses, he will begin to imagine things “beyond that moment” (2), which he cannot afford to do. He says that a figure he calls the Captain waits beyond the present moment, and that the Captain is always waiting for him. The Captain was at the beginning of his journey, and he believes he will be there at the end. 

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.