Fiction is an excellent medium to explore ideas. And so, I bring you Castaway, a short story:

There is one thing I know for certain, and that is that I am not Raymond Burke. I am not forty-three years old. I do not have a son named Merck, who recently dropped out of art school to become a drug peddler. I am not married to my college sweetheart.

As for the other details of my life, those are anybody’s guess. I have no idea of my actual name, the names of my children (or whether I even have any) or my spouse(s) (or whether I even have any). The story of my life, my real life, as near as I can tell, began about two hours ago on a lonely beach in a woefully uninhabited area. An hour before that, I was Raymond Burke, husband of Shannon Burke, father of Merck Burke.

This is what happened: I was driving down the highway, when my car broke down. I pulled over to the shoulder, and after I realized that nobody was going to stop and help me, I attempted to cross the road. I saw the car coming, only briefly, before it hit me.

I thought I was dead. I kept expecting to feel that final blackness close in, that eternal fading to nothing. But, instead, I woke up on this beach, surrounded by the remnants of what appears to be the small plane I was flying. No other survivors. No drivers license in my pocket. No memories of ever flying a plane, no memories of a crash. Just the memories of the Burke life, the life that didn’t happen.

How did this happen? How did I hallucinate forty-three years that didn’t happen? Is this kind of confabulation even possible?

What if I’m not really on the beach? What if the Burke-life was the real one, and I’m in a hallucination now? How can I tell what is real? How can I possibly know?

Why can I hear the beeping of a heart monitor? Why can I hear doctors yelling about hit-and-runs? Why can I see sterile fluorescent hospital lighting rushing by overhead?

Why can I still hear the waves? Why can I still feel the sand?

…