Once I told Darryl, a pompous Queens University student about the old man in the barn, my favourite story about the nature of reality. Darryl already knew how reality worked, so he was the perfect victim.
I told him of swinging in the barn, dangling from a rope affixed to the peak of the roof, and trying to grapple with and land on a narrow beam. Alone in the barn on one of those occasions, I turned with the twisting rope to see an old man watching me, smiling pleasantly and smoking a pipe. The hair rose on the back of my neck, unhelpfully, and when I reached the other side, I clung to the wall, placed my feet on the beam and slowly turned. He was gone. In his place, there was now an old coat thrown carelessly over a ladder.
When I told Darryl, I was unwisely trapped in a car with him, and he began to apply his stultified Queens intellect to the matter. “Of course,” he began, “what you really saw was –” and he gave a standard explanation that would immediately occur to someone tied to their cultural understandings of the world.
I told him what I had seen: an old man and a coat. The old man was of shorter duration, but was that useful criteria for truth and permanence? Reality? If someone is gone, did they exist?
