It was a windless night on the bay.
He sat in a folding chair, fishing rod in one hand, bottle of whiskey in the other, staring into the full moon’s rippling reflection.
He wondered what the moon actually was. It clearly wasn’t what he’d been taught in school. Could it be true, as he’d heard from several sources, that it was an artificial construction? Some kind of device designed to trap souls in this realm? But that would likely make it physical, and it didn’t feel physical. Nor did he feel trapped. The moon felt like a light source. Whatever it was, it was conscious. And it appeared to him to be some kind of real-time reflective map as well.
He’d watched it through his telescope many times and studied the darker patches. Shapes that looked eerily like the continents he knew. Then again, all he really “knew” of the continents came from maps, maps that everyone trusted, maps made by men who’d also never seen the world as a whole with their eyes, but only drawn it based on highly speculative inferences. Maybe the shapes of the dark patches of the moon were the actual shapes of the continents. And what of the additional patches that didn’t mirror any mapped continents? Could those be unknown…or hidden land masses?
His thoughts vanished altogether when he felt a subtle pull on his line. He gently placed the bottle on the concrete dock, rose to a crouched pose as he reeled down, then swung his whole body backward to set the hook. The drag screamed in bursts as he felt the line rise and shake. A moment after the tarpon’s splash shattered the moon’s reflection into a million pieces, the sound reached his ears. The line went slack. The tarpon had won, as usual.
He sat back down with a sigh, reeling in his empty hook with shaky hands. “That was a monster,” he whispered to himself. He pulled another mangrove snapper carcass from the cooler and cast it out as far as he could, disrupting the moon’s reflection again just after it had reassembled itself. He took another swig.
“Moon,” he said aloud. “What are you?”
“I am what you believe me to be,” it said to him without words.
“No. I mean objectively. What are you?”
“I am all of the things you think I could be, and also none. Like everything else in your reality, your conception of me is what I am to you. What I am to you is what I am. What I am to anyone else does not matter at all to you.”
He didn’t like the answer, though he felt the truth in it. He wanted to know. He wanted to know everything.
“If you knew everything, what would be the point of a human life?” the moon asked. “What if who you really are outside of your current reality actually does know everything, and it’s so incredibly boring and unexciting that you constantly create lives and experiences to entertain yourself?”
He pondered the question over the next hour as he finished the bottle. Within his human life, he realized, everything he loved most, he did purely for excitement or entertainment, including tarpon-fueled adrenaline rushes. Why would it be any different outside of this life?
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