Perspective Is a Tool for Us to Use as We Choose 

When I arrive at my meditation park today, it feels much smaller than usual. I can’t really explain it, but it just feels as if someone has shot it with a shrinking ray, as if everything is closer together, as if even the sky is lower and the lake shallower and each and every blade of grass and tree is 20 percent less tall and wide than before. I ascribe this to some constraint in my own thinking. It’s as if I’m not the monk I have become, but am instead burdened by something from the past, something near and dear and important to me, yet something keeping me back and down, something that won’t let me grow. I shuffle around, confused by the feeling. As I settle down, my meditation feels different. Unusual. There is a presence around me, something insubstantial as filaments of spirit from a dream-spider’s spinneret, yet somehow familiar.

“Dad?” I say.

“Dear Boy,” he answers, as he often did when he was alive.

“How did you find this place?”

“I was thinking of you and your turtles. The intersection seems to have some special power.”

I’m surprised. In all the years I kept turtles as a child, he never paid them a moment’s mind. My second thought is to wonder where he is.

“Are you in heaven?”

“Don’t ask,” he says.

“Are you in hell?”

“How could you suggest such a thing?”

“Where, then?”

“It’s not what you think. Everything’s different.”

He seems strongly disinclined to elaborate, so I move on. “I’m learning from the turtles,” I say, sounding and feeling like a little boy again. “A particular one in Japan told me that the world is full of gods and demons, spirits and ghosts.”

“Wise animal.”

“Are you one? A ghost, I mean.”

“What do you think?”

“You’re dead. I guess that means you’re something like that.”

“Well then.”

“You always told me to be and do the highest, best I could. For me, that means discovering all I can about what lies below and beyond and above the waking, solid world. I want to be wise, Dad. I don’t want to waste my time on a lot of the nonsense I see others do.”

“Perfect,” my father says. “Keep doing that.”

I cry as he disappears. A moment later, I land hard on the sandy ground of a tropical island paradise, a coral atoll of breathtaking beauty with mushroom-like structures rising from the sea and low foliage and perfectly clear water. I collect myself, bend to shed my shoes, and begin walking the beach. After a minute or two, I spy a male giant tortoise lumbering my way.

“Welcome to Aldabra, Monk,” says the immortal tortoise.

“We’re in the Seychelles, then.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“It’s beautiful here.”

“We do love our mangrove mudflats, our seagrass beds, our sunsets, our lack of predators, our solitude.”

“Not as many tourists here as I’ve seen gawking at your giant cousins on the Galapagos.”

“Galapagos are individualists,” the giant tortoise sniffs. “As such, we disdain them. Couldn’t decide on a shape. Got old Darwin in a tizzy. He should have come to the Indian Ocean instead if he was looking for real turtles.”

“He did,” I say. “Although, if I remember it right, he didn’t go much farther north than the middle of Madagascar, Mauritius, and Rodrigues Islands. Not so far north as this, so he never saw your kind of giant tortoise.”

“Had he reached Aldabra, he would have understood more about altruism and community, concepts he wrote about, but so far as We are concerned, did not deeply understand.”

“He regarded altruism as a nearly fatal challenge to his theory of natural selection,” I say, sitting down in the sand and letting the giant shell beside me offer some refuge from the blazing sun.

“Just so,” the giant replies, his voice melodious, soothing, almost hypnotic. “And yet the irony there is that it is so adaptive, even ants practice it.”

“Yet insect societies have castes—workers and warrior and royalty and such.”

“And such indeed. Aldabras are a more egalitarian crew. Of course, it is easier to be so than it is on the aforementioned barren, volcanic wasteland.”

“I’ve been to the Galapagos,” I say. “I’ve seen scores of tortoises sharing mud baths there…”

“And have you seen the mating rituals of those cultureless beasts, monk?”

“I have,” I allow. “They’re a bit loud, I grant you, with all that bellowing and grunting, but I don’t see the Galapagos as barren.”

“They’re trendy. He who falls prey to trends is a sucker.”

“If I’m a sucker for anything, it’s turtles.”

“We are all plagued by squatters in our minds. It can be difficult not to trip over them.”

An electric-blue coconut crab approaches my bare toes, which protrude from my black leggings. I know this is the largest land crab in the world, and I wonder what magic there is in these islands, something in the soil, perhaps, which gives birth to an abundance of size in many things. His claws would shame a pair of Vice Grips. I strategically withdraw my feet as he waves them, his stalked eyes drilling me for depriving him of a tasty meal.

“Give him a coconut,” the giant suggests. “If you don’t, he’ll dog your steps until the end of your days.”

I spy a coconut palm and shake it. Nothing falls. Shimmying up the tree in robes seems unwise.

“One of those will do,” the tortoise says, pointing his nose.

I see the coconut and collect it. The crab trundles toward me, blue claws snapping. A female Aldabra giant tortoise emerges from the bush and prostrates herself before the big male.

“My King,” she murmurs.

“Wait,” I say, picking up the fruit. “You’re king of the Aldabra tortoises?”

“And of the green turtles and the hawksbills that nest here as well as the rest of the island. The rest of the archipelago, too, with all its rare species, including the Inaccessible Island rail, the smallest flightless bird left in a world decimated by your kind.”

“I had no idea.”

“That does not say much for your observational skills, Monk. Have all turtles you encountered referred to themselves in plural? Should We construe that my natural grandeur, speech, stature, and bearing do not impress you? Should We feel insulted?”

“I guess I should have noticed the difference,” I say. “I mean, you’re already immortal, so why would you care about being a king?”

“What a strange question. We step into the shoes of these lessons just the way you will step back into yours when you’re finished walking on the beach.”

“You mean you circle, immaterially, until the right moment to incorporate?”

“Something like that,” he smiles.

I think of my father. I struggle to understand the nuances and complexities of the life and times of the spirit-writer, of the job I have to do and all the different ways in which my literary material comes to me. I conclude that it is my job to discern as much as I can so as to understand the lesson, but not to judge.

“Great,” I say. “Got it.”

“Now that you do, you may address us as Sire, or Your Majesty.”

“Very good, Sire.”

“Tell me, Monk—can you reconcile your Daoist beliefs with the fact that everything in our lives, whether we are entranced or assuming the extreme risk of eating stonefish meat at the sushi bar, is just a fancy videogame with no reality or substance?”

“I’m not sure I can believe that,” I say weakly.

“The many worlds hypothesis demands this conclusion,” His Majesty replies. “The odds are simply stacked against us living in the One True World when that world is in the company of an overwhelming number of simulacra. We wouldst like to imagine that so sublimely intricate a creation is admired and treasured by sentient beings across the galaxies. Often, at night in the cloudless skies above my islands, We observe the twinkling of stars and imagine they are the appreciative eyes of such gamers.”

I toss the coconut at the crab. It rolls to a stop and he is upon it at once, embracing it like a lover, prying into the husk for the reward of the sweet white meat. Frigate birds, the gliding geniuses of the bird world, wheel overhead looking for other birds to harass out of a meal. A snow-white fairy tern, elegant and beautiful in the extreme, goose-steps past, rummaging through the coconut fronds. A bright-red Madagascar fody the size of a finch flits through the mangrove branches, lands briefly upon the shell of the Aldabra king, and promptly disappears. A lesser noddy stares at me sagaciously from a branch nearby, while a whimbrel plays a game of chicken with the surf.

“A nice image,” I admit, “but still difficult for me to believe.”

“You feeling that way is a feature of the program. I’m here to help you see past it.”

I know I collapse a little bit at that. It’s such a bitter pill to swallow.

The king opens his maw, showing its pink interior, then closes it again with a snap. I notice the fine serrations on his beak, the better to sever Opuntia cactus, which I have read are the favored food of this species. I can tell he sees my discomfort and wants to change the subject.

“Once, in the Pleistocene, there was a giant crocodile here. He feasted upon my forebears,” he tells me.

“You realize that when you talk about Aldabra Island through the span of geologic time, you are both crediting the designers of this game with a truly long-term vision and the players with incredible staying power.”

His Immortal Majesty places one forelimb after the other upon a fallen coconut trunk, raising himself so that he towers over me, though, in truth, I am still seated in the sand. “You conflate our sense of time with those of the makers,” he says. “Do you not see the failure in logic there, the assumption that our own perception of time is anything other than a feature of the game, a quality built into us in the same way as our very form? Who is to say that what passes here as ten millennia is, by the lights of the makers and in the framework of the game, anything more than the blink of an alien eye, and an aeon but an hour?”

“I suppose that’s possible,” I answer, slowly realizing why this great fellow has been crowned sovereign of the archipelago.

“The creators of the game could, of course, be long gone. They could be the ancestors of the current players. If so, we should admire their ancestral handiwork, bow to them as superior to us in the way that we are to ants, and be grateful we have a chance for this experience.”

“In China, there is a bit more appreciation for ancestors than there is in the West,” I say. “Even so, if what you say is true, I bow.”

“Or it could be our own descendants who have conjured us—that they are the makers.”

“I suppose it makes sense that some mixture of curiosity and respect about their own past might lead our descendants to bring us to life in this way.”

“Even what we call the laws of physics, the rules of nature, might be no more than the sophisticated code used by our distant offspring in writing this program,” His Immortal Majesty offers, spying a flat leaf of his favorite cactus and biting off a chunk the size of my head.

“All this is at least a reason to live an interesting life,” I say. “I mean, if we’re regular and boring, we’re likely to end up as computer wallpaper or pawns who are sacrificed early to some higher strategy. If we keep doing weird stuff, writing boundary-pushing books, for example, or ruling over an archipelago, then we are less likely to be the character deleted by meeting some grisly end.”

“Like the tortoises of the Galapagos,” His Majesty says triumphantly enough; it is clear he is proud of his own logic. “Did not the grand majority of those boring, conforming, self-congratulatory beasts suffer ignominious ends, living food stashed into the hulls of the maritime vessels that bore whalers to their cruel sport? Did not the various races on the various islands of that inferior archipelago not largely die out while those under my purview have thrived?”

“The geography is different,” I say. “I mean, more people visit those islands, not that I wish to take anything from the magnificent job you’ve done as sovereign ruler, keeping destructive humans at bay. The Galapagos do, after all, sit right in the middle of whale waters and not so very far off the coast of South America…”

“We are closer to Africa than those pretenders are to their continent.”

“Yet those waters were closer for European whalers. There was no Suez Canal back then, so they would have had to sail clear down the west coast of Africa and around the horn and up…”

“This, too, has been programmed,” says the king. “Though the Seychelles are becoming more and more crowded with tourists by the day.”

“If I understand your lesson correctly, then to play by the rules is the best we can do, actually the only thing we can do. If that’s the case, then why bring up the subject at all? Why even have the lesson?”

The king swallows, issues a belch, breaks wind, and passes enough chalky urine to fill a large salad bowl. “Perhaps the other immortals have judged you harshly. In truth, you are not the very stupidest monk. The answer, of course, is that knowing we’re in a game gives you perspective. You can still enjoy it as the greatest possible game you could ever possibly play, but the downsides to it have less bite when you know it’s not as real as it seems to be.”

I think about this for a while. “It seems cynical to me,” I say. “Like spinning a vinyl record in a vertical plane, like a bicycle wheel, when there is no needle there and no music to come out.”

“Up to you,” says the immortal king. “Perspective is always a tool for you to use as you see fit.”

Disquieted by the whole conversation, I try one more argument.

“I’ve heard scientists say that the complexity of a simulation like the one you propose increases exponentially as we add in variables. The degree of complexity in our world would be impossible to manufacture artificially, even with an unimaginably powerful machine.”

“What is impossible?” His Highness counters. “Perhaps we are designed not to be able to imagine such a machine. What’s more, why should the laws of physics inside the game be the same as those outside it?”

I collapse on the sand, outplayed. “Your Majesty, I have to admit I have never met an immortal turtle like you.”

“Such are the rules of the game, Monk,” he says, doing that always-awkward turtle approximation of a smile. “In this simulation, there is only room for one king.”

I stare out at the beautiful flat sea. I imagine Arab and Austronesian traders landing upon these delicate, graceful shores centuries ago after carefully negotiating the surrounding reefs. I imagine them first laying eyes on these beautiful, black, stalwart, and insightful giants. I wonder if any of them knew the king when they saw him, even though he might have been but a tyke at the time.

A tyke against whom all arguments are futile.

The island fades as my gaze goes glassy. I hope to sense my father again during my return trip and tell him what I have learned.

Sadly, he is nowhere to be found, and I am back at my park, where everything has now regained its normal size.