The Hike

by Drew Magary

Thanks for everything, Pennsylvania, but fuck you eternally.

There were iron ladder rungs pounded into the side of the mountain that made for “easy” climbing. It was not easy. Little Ben screamed the whole way up, his mother silently fuming. For his part, Ben’s father expressed no concern about the situation at all. The old man could distort reality so easily. He could say that things were going very well and that everyone was having fun, even when the precise opposite was true.

there.” Ben sank back down.

When you’re happy, you don’t question how that came to be.”

“How can you know we won’t be on this path forever?” “Does it matter? How long would you walk to see them again?” “Forever.” “Exactly. There’s no other way.”

have to have faith in it, even though I am now very much its prisoner, Ben. I have doubts every second but all I can do is move forward. And now you have to believe in the path, even more than you did before.” “What if I just run back to that house and hug our son and let death come? Why wouldn’t I do that?” “Because it’s not real, and you know it. When I get to the end of this thing—and I will get to the end of it—I will see Peter again. Flora, Rudy, Peter, Teresa: I’ll see them all. And it’ll be real. I won’t have to go looking over my shoulder, waiting for the hammer to fall. That will be my eternal salvation, and yours.”

adjusted. You can adjust to anything if you’re willing to live on.

You aren’t going to get this letter, but I’m going to write this to you anyway for the sake of my own sanity because something awful has happened. Just know that I love you. This terrible thing that’s keeping us apart may keep us apart for a very long time. I know that you know, deep in your heart, it’s not something I chose. I haven’t fled. I haven’t lost my mind. The path I stumbled onto accidentally is now holding me hostage in a faraway land. But I would never be away from you if I could help it. Never. Not for a day. Not for an hour. I will come back. Stay where you are and hold on, because I will come back. I love you.

Tony said his dad was in the Middle East, inventing a new kind of Coke can that had a special insert that would turn the Coke ice cold the second you opened it. No refrigeration necessary. Ben thought that would be awesome.

There was no guarantee he would, at the end of this, revert back to his normal size, his normal proportions, his normal self. Maybe there was a wheel of fate with a cutout of his stupid head pasted to the center, with all his possible new body types crudely marked all around it, and someone Up There was spinning it at random intervals just for the pleasure of watching Ben grapple with becoming a giant, a crab, a centaur, a dishwasher, a loaf of bread. Nothing about this land was permanent, not even him.

could forge memories like this now. He could put himself back in his house and daydream about Teresa and the children and make those daydreams feel like real remnants of his past. This kind of daydream was the precise opposite of life before the path, when he would sit at home with the kids losing their minds and imagine fly-fishing alone in some fucking river somewhere. All the fantasizing was reversed now. The most mundane things seemed so remote and foreign.

was at that age where he used work as an excuse to put off other pressing matters, like personal finances and filling out life insurance forms. He preferred making the small amount of money he made to figuring out how to take care of that money.

You drew those. You probably don’t remember that, do you? Depression has a way of vaporizing big parts of your memory. Important parts.

“Honestly, it’s probably not that different from the world you know. Some people are happy. Some people are angry. There are wars. I don’t know if time makes much of a difference. The world changes, but people act the way people always do.”

“No, I mean this. I do not want this friendship to linger. I do not want it to wither and die. It will end here, as strong as it’s ever been. And this is a good thing. I don’t want to be around long enough to disappoint you.”

There was nothing to confront here at this beach: no monsters, no past, no future. Everyone left him alone, the ultimate desire of any middle-aged man. The safety of it all wooed him. Coddled him.

real. I didn’t go through all this just for that to be the ending, just for everything to be so black and meaningless. Why would anyone show him that? What did he need to see of the absolute end of humanity that he couldn’t already guess on his own? Fuck that. There

There comes a point in life when you’ve seen so much that hardly anything surprises you or bothers you, and that’s a shitty moment. Wisdom is so terribly overrated.

But just remember that everything bad can be made good if you know how to use it.”

“It’s very dangerous!” “I DON’T FUCKING CARE.” “Through the café car,” the old man wheezed. “There’s a ladder you can climb to get into the cab.” “Who’s driving it?” “I told you: No one is. It drives itself.” “Not anymore, it doesn’t.” “The Producer won’t let you. . . .” “I am the Producer.” The clerk smiled at him. “Now you’re catching on.”

New colors. Colors beyond anything that he had seen before.

“Why are you selling me on this so hard? What’s in it for you?” “I told you: I’m a consultant. This is what I do. I consult.”

“Who’s to say you haven’t been on the path this whole time, Ben? Huh? Don’t you find it remarkable that you were born into such a wondrous time in history? The most advanced technological civilization in the history of the universe. The richest country in that civilization. The most advanced species on that lucky little planet of yours. You could have been a microbe, Ben: a tiny, insignificant, single-cell animal that lives for a day and no longer. Or you could have been a crab, hmm? But no: You were a person, with a cute wife and three lovely kids. Born a man, and a white man at that. Never killed off randomly. Never homeless. Never raped. Doesn’t that strike you as unfathomably lucky?”

Everyone needs to have something inside them that no one else can have.