Platonic Fruit

One lazy weekend morning I came into the kitchen and found my roommate sitting at the counter. He was resting his cheek against his fist and was staring at this watermelon with a forlorn expression.

With a yawn and a stretch I made my way over to our refrigerator, grabbed my jug of OJ, took a swig, and sat down next to him. His face was as pitiful as ever. And since I’m a good friend—and the whole thing was starting to get awkward—I asked him, “You, uh, okay?”

“I just found out this watermelon isn’t actually a watermelon,” he replied in a monotone voice.

“Really, what is it?” I asked, intrigued.

“It’s a fake watermelon.”

“Wha-what? Really?”

At this point I was genuinely confounded. I examined the melon intently now, analyzing the fractal green stripes on its surface with narrowed eyes as I started to scratch my head. I could have sworn I saw him bring the thing home in a plastic shopping bag. Wasn’t it from Kroger or something? I darted my eyes around the room until I found the bag it came in. There it was crumpled along the wall amidst some empty beer bottles. Walmart. Right. Yeah. He got it at Walmart. I know that’s fake shit central, but fake fruit? I darted my eyes back to the melon. It looked so… real…

“So… what’s it made of?” I asked, still a tad astonished.

“A complex set of chemical compounds of some sort.”

“Oh wow. So someone made it in a lab or something?”

“Effectively, yeah.”

“So how did you find out? Does it taste terrible?”

“No, it tastes exactly like a watermelon.”

“Really? Well, is it bad for you?”

“Well, nutritionally it’s identical to a watermelon. I’m not really worried about my health or anything and it looks the same and tastes the same and all. It’s not any of that, it’s just… it’s the idea, y’know?”

“Sure. I mean, just the thought of people in lab coats cooking up something in a lab putting God knows what into it.”

“Yeah, exactly. Although there’s no real lab coats and all, and the people didn’t really control what went into it directly.”

“Wow, that sounds even worse! How do you know it’s even safe to eat?”

“Well, there’s a lot of testing involved, regulatory agencies, and people have more or less been eating these things for thousands of years, and while there’s different varieties—”

“Wait, hold on… thousands of years?”

“Well, yeah. Like I said, I’m not really worried about any deleterious effects. It’s just—”

“But I thought you said they made this thing in a lab?”

“Well, I said effectively, yeah. I mean agriculture is an ongoing experiment, and farms are essentially the earliest organic laboratories and all.”

“Okay, so I’m confused. You said this was a fake watermelon.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“How?”

“Well, here…”

With that he dumped the sizable melon into my scrambling hands.

“Oof!” I exclaimed with the unexpected weight.

“Feels pretty solid, eh?”

“Well, yeah… It feels like a watermelon.” At this point it should probably go without saying that I was incredibly incredulous, but I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. I’ve never known my friend to be exactly dishonest, but he can be a tad… eccentric.

“Well, that’s just the thing. It’s really not.”

“How do you mean?”

“That whole weight you’re feeling is just an affect created by a series of electromagnetic fields interacting with each other and the gravitational field of the Earth.”

At this point my credulity was being stretched beyond belief, but I like to think of myself as an open-minded gent and I’m willing to listen to all kinds of batshit crazy things that come out of the head of my roommate or anyone else—if only for the entertainment factor alone. And so I replied with the most suitable words I could think of for the occasion: “Go on…”

“This melon is actually mostly comprised of empty space. The only reason it feels solid at all is because of these energy fields repelling against each other at particular proximities. The only reason it looks the color it does is because of particular chemical properties that cause it to reflect certain wavelengths of light. The only reason it tastes the way it does is because these fields send signals to your brain when they interact with your tongue.”

“Wait—this melon is sending signals to my brain?”

“Well, not directly. And it’s not as though there’s some kind of intent exactly. Well… unless consciousness is actually innate to matter or defines matter fundamentally on a subatomic level or something and ‘intent’ as an aspect of consciousness—”

“Okay, okay, okay, but wait…”

And at that last word, my nutty friend did exactly that. Silence sat between us. His eyes shifted back and forth in dull expectation while my own peered off into the distance. After a moment, it clicked.

“Are you just describing… everything?” I asked with furrowed brow, annoyed at the thought.

“That’s the thing dude…” he said with wide, almost pleading, eyes, “…I don’t know if anything is really real…”

My eyes crossed a little before I rolled them around. And with a sigh I stood back up.

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere, obviously. Space is just a function of time, which itself only really exists in our minds. At the speed of light, everything is flat and there’s nowhere to go and nothing happens.”

I walked to the fridge and out of the corner of my eye, I could see his eyes widen and his jaw go slack. With a small chuckle to myself I put the OJ back, grabbed myself a carton of cottage cheese and made my way back to my room.

In the other room, the melon dropped to the floor, but there was no one around to hear it, so it didn’t make a sound. And that was convenient, since I was busy watching these really engaging patterns of light at the time.