The Hike (22 page)

But somewhere along the ride, while praying for it to end without killing him, Ben began to lean into the curves. The track would twist and he would angle his body, like a motorcycle racer speeding around a turn. When the time came to go upside down, he reared way back and pretended to push an afterburner button, like a jet pilot evading incoming fire. He stopped crying. He was focused. He was driving. When the ride came to a stop, his tears were gone. He dashed out the exit and circled back to get in line again.

He rode the coaster ten more times that day. In the car ride back, before his old man got pegged for yet another DUI and the cops had to drive Ben the rest of the way home, he burped and told the boy:

“I'm sorry I made you cry, kid. I'm fucked up.”

“I know you've been drinking, Dad.”

“No, I mean I'm
fucked up.
But I got my reasons. I know I never did anything good for you, Ben. But just remember that everything bad can be made good if you know how to use it.”

 • • • 

He woke up. Something had turned inside him. All those years of resignation and hardening and evolved indifference—they fell off him. There was that urgency again. That frenzy.

He stood up on the porch of the caboose, looking at the growing line of track behind the barreling train. He had no control over the path. It had dictated everything to him. But that was over now.
Drive the thing.
Yes, he would drive it. He would drive it right back to Teresa. He would come for her.
I put the path here. This is where I wanted it to go.

The clerk, who had walked to the caboose all the way from the café car, tapped Ben on the shoulder.

“You need to come inside before dark,” the clerk said.

Ben turned and smashed the clerk's face in. Then he pounced on the old man and began choking him, bashing his head with the butt of his gun.

“Stop!” the clerk cried. “You need to come inside.”

“How do I get into the locomotive?” Ben demanded to know.

“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.”

Ben let the old man go and marched through four of the passenger cars before encountering a dogface in the first-class cabin.

“I've been waiting for this since . . .”

“Fuck you.” Ben punched the dogface square on the chin and knocked him into the seats.

He ran to the café car, slid the front door open and stood on the coupler attaching the locomotive to the rest of the train. It was topping off at 200 miles an hour now, the outside air a vicious beast roaring between the locomotive and the café car. On the back of the locomotive was a ladder reaching up to the roof. Ben grabbed the rungs and pulled himself up, adrenalized like a boy thirty years younger. On top of the locomotive, he saw the track bending to the right along the great salt flat, heading into a darkened mountain range.

There was a tunnel at the base of the mountains. At this speed, it wouldn't take long for the locomotive to go sailing into it, sweeping Ben off the top of the train. No matter to him. He was a bull now. In the darkening sky, he saw a red triangle forming up high between two luminous moons that were now hanging up and to the left of the mountain tunnel. The triangle looked as if it had been drawn by lasers. He crouched down and slid along the top of the locomotive as the wind did everything it could to peel him off. But Ben had hands again. It felt good to have hands. Hands were useful.

The tunnel grew closer and the great triangle in the sky widened as Ben made it to the front of the raging locomotive and found a ladder running down the side to the door of the cab. Just as he climbed down and looked through the window to see an empty engineer's seat, a great black Smoke with white fire eyes flew beside Ben and gave him a silent, angry stare.

Ben didn't hesitate. He furrowed his brow, leaned into the Smoke's body, and began inhaling deeply, sucking the ghost up like a bong hit. He could see the Smoke panic, its eyes growing wild with fright. Ben didn't stop. He sucked every last bit of ash out of the sky, including the Smoke's pathetic, glowing eyes. Then, he turned to the window and spat the Smoke back out of his mouth as hot fire, using the flame to melt down the glass and form an opening. The wind cooled the melted glass in place right away, and Ben slipped into the engineer's seat and saw the red triangle still expanding up in the jumbled night sky.

The train was half a mile from the tunnel, but Ben had no interest in entering a mountain ever again. He strapped himself into the seat and grabbed the black throttle, jerking it backward. The train shrieked as a holiday's worth of sparks lit up under the wheels. The locomotive tipped to the left, balancing along one rail. Ben pressed the
SAND
button, dousing the rails in hot friction, and then rammed the throttle forward again.

He leaned in and to the left. The train began to lift off the ground. Ben could feel it separating from the rails and veering away from the mountain, the other cars trailing behind the locomotive as the train began to take flight. It was speeding upward, into the red triangle in the sky. Through the windshield, Ben could see the sides of the triangle expanding and pulsing. Two parallel lines of glowing purple swans flew in front of the train and formed a path directly into it.

But then the train began to slow down. After taking off from the ground like a rocket, gravity suddenly came back into play and Ben could feel the locomotive losing its buoyancy, poised to fall rapidly back down to the ground. There was a fire extinguisher in the cab next to the engineer's seat. He unbuckled his seat belt and grabbed the extinguisher, bashing it into the windshield and clearing every last shard of glass. Just as the train was about to fall, Ben walked to the back of the cab and ran toward the open windshield, leaping out headfirst, diving toward the swans.

He blasted into the air as the locomotive went limp and the train plunged back down to the salt flat, splitting open on impact and forming a long line of fire in the salt that looked like a freshly opened tectonic plate. Ben didn't look down. He was flying now, in complete control, leaning into the atmosphere and picking up speed—a living comet. The moons, bright and silver above him, converged on the triangle, closing in and spinning like buffers at a car wash. He shot into the red triangle as the moons kissed and now Ben was out of the stratosphere and in the open black of space, surpassing the speed of light, moving so fast that he left his own body in the dust. His hands in front of him turned to white lightning as the swirling nebular clouds billowed up and fell behind him. The deep space was transforming before his eyes now, compacting into a single flashing tube that was changing color so quickly that he couldn't keep up with what he was seeing.
New
colors. Colors beyond anything that he had seen before.

His lightning hands merged with the white at the end of the tube and now he was moving so fast that every atom in his body sloughed off and reduced him to a single, precious particle, moving faster than anything has ever moved, compacting and picking up heat until every quark within it was ready to break apart and blow out into its own universe. He had become a photon. He
was
light. He took a deep breath (was it a breath?) and the white became everything.

A moment later, he was sitting in a white room with no doors or windows. Two parallel black lines stretched out from his chair, turned left, and ran into the bare wall. Sitting at a white desk across from him was Mrs. Blackwell. She seemed surprised to see him.

H
e was human again. Landbound. Affected by gravity. No gun. But he wasn't forty-eight anymore. No, now he was ten years younger, or at least looked it. His hands were pristine: no scar on his palm from the knife fight with the giant cricket. His body was healthy and vigorous. He probed his mouth with his tongue; the tooth Cisco had pulled out was rooted back in place. Anchored. All of that extra mileage, gone.
He felt something in his pocket. He reached into his black mesh shorts and found a hotel room key. The inn. Room 19.

“You're here earlier than I expected,” Mrs. Blackwell said to Ben.

“I'm a late bloomer. But once I bloom, I bloom fast.”

“Well, wait right there and we'll be with you shortly.”

“Where am I?”

“The Executive Producer's office.”

“
I
am the Producer.”

“You are, but this is the
Executive
Producer's office, and he's a very busy man. So he'll see you in just a moment.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No, I won't wait.”

She sat back in her chair. “All right. You can see him, if you can find him.”

There was nothing else in the room except for a black Sharpie sitting on top of the white desk. No door. No stairs. No way out. Ben got up and walked over to the bare wall. It was clean, with no cracks or hidden levers. He got down on his hands and knees and looked under the desk.

“He's not there,” she said.

“I can see that.”

He got back up. It took a moment, but then he saw the Sharpie and knew what he had to do. He swiped it off the desk and walked back to the wall. He hadn't forgotten all that drawing he had taught himself in the desert. Perspective. Contours. He drew a frame, then two hinges, and then a thin black void inside the frame. Then he made the door, rectangular and thick, with four brickmold panels and a black handle. For an added flourish, he wrote “PUSH” across the top of the handle. Then he looked back at Mrs. Blackwell and threw the Sharpie onto her desk. It rolled right off.

“Good-bye, Mrs. Blackwell.”

“Good luck, Ben.”

He pushed the door open and found himself in a wood-lined office, with tasteful paintings hanging from the walls and two shiny leather chairs facing each other in front of a large, hand-carved oaken desk. On top of the desk there was a silver letter opener and a bottle of—what else?—fine champagne. Behind the desk were two more doors. The globe of an unknown planet—all misshapen continents and strange oceans—sat spinning off to the side. One of the leather chairs was empty. In the other chair sat an elderly man, perhaps in his seventies, wearing a white linen suit and white slippers with no socks. He was frighteningly tan all over. Even his lips were tan. From his neck
hung a thick gold chain with no pendant. His face was stretched back, like he'd had work done on more than one occasion. His hair was perfect silver and he was rocking sunglasses indoors. He stood up and opened his arms wide when Ben came into the office.

“Ben, baby! You made it. I'm so proud of you.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“I'm Bobby. I'm the Executive Producer. Love your work. Have a seat.”

“I'm not gonna have a seat. I'm gonna fucking kill you.”

The Executive Producer grinned. “Ben, I'm sorry, but that's not going to happen. See, I'm the one obstacle you
don't
get by. Now sit down, and I'll tell you everything. You must have questions.”

“When do I go home?”

“I think we should talk a bit before circling back to that.” He sat back down and gestured for Ben to do likewise. “Come on. Relax. Would you like anything to drink? Eat? Caviar? Champagne? I
do
love champagne.”

“No.”

“You're very focused. It shows up in your work.”

“Where am I?”

“My office, of course.”

“Are you God?”

“No, but that would be a better title for it. No one ever knows what a producer does. It's a shame, really.”

“Why did you do this to me?”

“Oh, it wasn't me. I'm a consultant, Ben. A fixer. The path
chose
you, don't you know that by now? Since the beginning of time, the path has been here, ready to claim worthy subjects. Once it chose you, I consulted. I
studied
. I learned about your hopes and fears and dreams, and all of that informed the path as it shaped itself just for you. Your hike was on
the longer end. We had another fellow go for a full million years. Helluva sight. I've never seen such perseverance. Anyway, I help sculpt the path, like a landscaper. And your subconscious generously helps to fill in the gaps. Hence the dog theme for you. It's like a birthday party.”

“Voris?”

“From your journals. Great character. Says so much with those eyes of his.”

“Fermona?”

“Standard path obstacle. Good chemistry between you two.”

“Cisco?”

“Ah, Cisco. No, Cisco was a man, like you. Little overlap there. Again,
great
chemistry.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why?”

“Why does the path pick people?”

“We're past
why
here, Ben. This is just how it is.”

“How do I get home?”

“Ah. Now, this is where it gets interesting.”

“I have to kill you, don't I?”

“No. Like I said, baby, you don't get to kill me. You and I, we hang. We just hang. No rancor.” He reached behind his chair and poured himself a glass of champagne. “You can go home simply by walking out the door.”

“Which one?”

“Either one. You go through the door on the left, and you return to your life as it was the day you ventured onto the path. Everything the same. That familiar, boring world that you know and occasionally love.”

“What about the other door?”

“Oh, that?” the Executive Producer said with one eyebrow arched. “That's heaven. You walk through that door, and you get to be a Producer
eternally. You remain on the path, and you can make it go anywhere you like, one endless red carpet rolling out for you. You can make a billion dollars. You can invent the flying car. You and your wife can have sex five times a day.
Good
sex, too. Like you had at the villa. You have complete control to shape your life any way you like. There are no limits. And you can live forever, Ben. You and your kids. Your loyal, perfectly well-behaved children. Go nuts. You can fly to Mars and build a resort colony there. You know those wonderful dreams you had? Sexy Annie Derrickson? No dogs ripping your face in half? That's all waiting for you. One endless, fabulous fantasy. The life you deserve, Ben.”

Ben sat stone silent, processing the offer.

“You're full of shit. This is a trick.”

“Not a trick. My word is bond.”

“I know who you are,” Ben told him.

“Kid, I am so far beyond what you think I am, it would make you sick.”

“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.
”

“What door did Cisco take?”

“Oh, I'll never tell.”

Ben stood up. “I want what I had.”

“Why?” the Executive Producer asked. “Why would you want that? I'm green-lighting the ultimate prize for you. Monks sit in dark rooms their whole lives hoping for a chance to walk through
that
door. And not all of them get the chance, I promise you.”

“It's not real.”

“Oh, please. You know it's real. You saw it yourself, didn't you? You could see it, touch it, taste it. It was as real as anything else you've ever known.”

“It's not the same.” Ben was grasping now, desperate. “Not real.”

“Who said
your
life was real, Ben?”

“Don't say that.”

“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?”

“Given that you kept me prisoner for ten years and change, I don't feel lucky at all.”

“You should. Who's to say we didn't produce
you
? That
you
are the only man who has ever lived, ever? All the world's history—everyone you've ever met or heard of—all background for you, the greatest story ever told. Your parents weren't real.”

“Stop it.”

“Your wife and children were props.”

“STOP IT.”

“Who's to say this wasn't just one big test run for a model universe? Who's to say that you, lucky Ben, are not the
first
man . . . the prototype of humanity? And who's to say that the path isn't God Himself, welcoming you in His arms, asking you to build the universe with Him? You can't go back.”

“I will.”

“You know too much now. You now know that everything that once seemed so definitive to you, up until the day you set foot in
my
woods, is just a series of arbitrary limits. Gravity. The sunrise. Time itself. The rest of
the universe doesn't play by any of Earth's rules. Why should you? Why be bound by orbits or revolutions? That world you want back into is
ordinary,
kid. And dying. Remember the freighter? Remember that freighter you saw sailing through the end of humanity? That's not far away, baby. That's
close
. Your family might be on that boat, and that's if they're
lucky
.”

“I won't listen to you.”

“Oh, I'm about to make it even harder. Because, you see, if you choose the left-hand exit, you cannot ever, under any circumstances, tell anyone about your time on the path. Not even your wife. You'll be struck dead before the words reach your mouth from your brain. Same fate if you try to write it down, or use sign language, or tap out Morse code to tell the world your story. Your heart will explode that instant. And you won't end up back in this office. Do you understand? This is your only chance to walk through that other door, to be the master of the path and live forever in ecstasy. Maybe you should think before acting so certain, baby. Don't throw away the mother lode. This is your life and the afterlife merged together in one perfect, endless existence.”

Ben felt his knees buckle.

“Sit,” said the Executive Producer. “That's what the chair is for.”

But he didn't sit. He walked up to the door on the right—the door to heaven—and gripped the round, brushed satin knob, letting it slip around inside his palm. Then he turned to the Executive Producer.

“What happens if I leave them?” he asked.

“You still don't understand. You're
not
leaving them if you go through that door.”

“What happens to the world behind the door on the left if I don't go through it?”

“It doesn't exist. But what difference does it make? Everything is the same, but better.”

“Will I be dead?”

“There is no dead. Think bigger than just life and death.”

“It's not a trick.”

“Of course not.”

“Then it's a test.”

“No, it is not a test. It's as real and binding as life on Earth.”

But his life on Earth . . . that was
realer
, right? Ben backed away from the door and sat down, rubbing his temples and groaning loudly. The Executive Producer stood and poured him a glass of water, then gave him a kind pat on the back.

“It isn't easy,” he said. “I know. It's a lot to take in, baby. Fortunately, you're in the right spot. You're free to deliberate for as long as you like. I'll stay here forever with you, if that's how much time you need to decide.”

Ben buried his head in his hands. He had flown between two moons only to end up forced into this spot. Another goddamn puzzle to solve. The path had taken him and plunged him into this awful, horrible, fantastic world. And yet it had been protecting him the entire time, keeping him alive, wooing him with food and drink and things he had never seen before.
The path was good, wasn't it? If you just walk through that door back onto the path, you'll see them again and you'll live forever and it will be so terribly wonderful and easy . . .

And yet, “It doesn't exist.” That was what the Executive Producer told him would happen to the world he once knew. It would be gone forever: everything he'd ever seen, everyone he knew, everything that he had ever been through thanks to a scary world that was far beyond his control. All of it would disappear.

Ben glowered at the tan playboy across from him.
I could stab him. That letter opener on the old man's desk. That would do the trick. Just stab the fucker right in the eye.
Over on the wall, Ben noticed one of the paintings included a nighttime beach landscape, with a little blue crab propped up on the dunes and two full moons in the background.

Two moons. Two goddamn moons. Why are there always two moo
ns?

And then Ben had an idea: a marvelous, insane idea. Oh, what a brilliant idea he had. He stood back up.

“I want what I had,” he repeated to the Executive Producer.

“More faith in life than God Himself, huh?”

“Yeah. More faith in life than God Himself. But it's more than that. You said I can do whatever I want on the path, right?”