It was amazing how much the Younger Ben annoyed Crab. He was an embarrassing yearbook photo come to life. Crab wanted to poke him in the eye. He had learned so much about maritime exploration from Cisco, and yet he could barely apply any of that knowledge to his travels with his past self, because the thirty-eight-year-old Ben was such a comical dolt: gunning the hovercraft before unmooring it, trying to unmoor it without cutting the engine, going to fucking sleep and leaving a tiny crab in the cockpit to keep them on course. (Try as Crab might, he eventually had to wake up the Younger Ben because he couldn’t turn the steering wheel enough to keep them from veering off the path.)
Everything that Crab said to Ben was a word-for-word recital of everything Crab had said to him years ago. It was as if he were reading off a script he had memorized: every warning, every insult, every clue he gave to the Younger, oblivious Ben. Every time he tried to think of something new and different to say, he found himself saying Crab’s exact words anyway. It was automatic. They were the correct words. And fucking with Younger Ben was half the fun. When they came to Fermona’s mountain, Crab magically stuck to the side of it, and so he had a marvelous time skittering up the peak while the Younger Ben clung desperately to his ice axes. He could laugh at him because he knew how things would turn out.
Soon they reached Fermona’s cave, and the Older Ben discovered a new appreciation for all the things Crab had done for him when he was trapped in the hole. Crab left Ben alone in that hole for a full week, but only because he was scavenging Fermona’s pile for hours at a time as the giant slept, looking for the seed bag despite his limited eyesight.
“Where is it?” he whispered to himself, scouring through the pile one agonizing piece at a time, the cans of food as massive as boulders to him. One time the giant stirred, and Crab settled down and became part of the enormous pile, impossible to detect. The giant went back to snoring loudly, and Crab resumed his tedious work. Once he unearthed the seed bag, he dragged it over to a corner of Fermona’s chamber and buried it out of sight, where he could easily get to it during the surprise dwarf fight. He had to retrace the layout of the cave virtually from memory because his eyes were getting so bad. He explored the other dungeon cells as well, each one housing a naked prisoner who was hairless and deranged, babbling nonsense.
“Hey, you!” Crab whispered to one of them. “Do you need help?”
“Gdsfkjhsadasdlkfasdfdsjlk!”
They were barely human. He couldn’t bear to look at them for very long.
The day of the fight, the Younger Ben commanded him, “Go into that pile and find me a weapon.” But the Older Ben had already found something. He had it in place and ready to deploy, like a good soldier. When he saw the Younger Ben fight the dogface and win, he beamed like a proud older brother.
The hardest part of mentoring his younger self—aside from letting the hovercraft smash into that iceberg because the path led directly into it—came after they defeated Fermona and were walking along the open prairie, when they saw the mirage of Ben’s old house. With his lousy crab vision, he could barely make out the blurry sight of little Peter out on the stoop in his jammies, smiling broadly. From that unreachable distance, he may as well have been looking at a small pet rock. But Crab knew what he was looking at.
That’s your home, but it’s not really your home anymore.
Don’t say that.
You know it’s true. It’s your former home now. The path is home.
Shut up.
He watched the Younger Ben howl in grief and envied him for being so determined, so frenzied in his mission to get back home. He wasn’t like that anymore. 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.
They came to the split in the road and now it was time for Crab to find out what was down the left-hand side of that path. He waved a pincer at the younger, more annoying version of himself, just as Crab had to him all those years ago.
“Do you want to take anything?” the Younger Ben asked him.
“I don’t need anything,” the Older Ben said. “One day, you won’t need anything either.”
Right on cue, he abandoned his younger self in search of the end, passing through the invisible barrier to the path without hindrance. He had served his time. He should have been close to the end by now. That’s what would have been fair.
He should have known better.