In the Final Stage of Life
From “Keeping Time,” by F.H. Batacan:
In the mirror above the capacious sink, he sees a stranger.
…
Now, at forty-seven, he is the man he has always wanted to be: muscled and trim, save for a little residual fat around the belly and love handles, and under the arms. With his looming physical presence, intelligent eyes, and silver hair, he looks distinguished, attractive, if a bit icy. If his wife were here, if they had just met, she would be all over him; he is now the exact type she would have found irresistable. She has been dead several years now, though, one of the first to go.
He studies his image.
He might as well remember himself like this. It will not last long.
Maria Batacan uses the opening paragraphs of her delightfully arrested “Keeping Time” to show her protagonist in a state of postponement.
He lives in a world of human overreach where a global failure of policy and engineering will cascade to poison all water. He will never arrive at age fifty-seven, and neither will anyone else see the year in which his birthday would have occurred.
Anyone living in that time would be rightfully frightened, confused, angry, resentful…. Pick your emotion. Yet Batacan doesn’t show you those feelings here, and she doesn’t much dwell on them within the broader story. Instead, she moves past the flurry of human emotional capability and also past a typical presentation of what remains.
She leaves you with a collection of what’s left — something that resembles “acceptance” as the last stage in the grief cycle — and delivers the view of time before death through objects and tense.
Objects
Batacan has the mirror takes the lead in introducing Mike. It presents each part of his timeline.
It shows his now (strange; new; superficial) and captures his recall of what was (alone and abandoned; overweight but familar). It even attempts to figure his expectation of what will be (empty; forever on hold).
Ultimately, I think, the mirror reflects the shallowness of living with no prospects beyond how far he could reach with his gaze. Mike sees himself as a physical being and only as such. His fat and muscle and hair would have wasted away regardless of the date of humanity’s end, but, without any possibility to create a legacy that extends into a future generation, have no opportunity to combine into something greater and transcend his individual mortality.
Narcissism arises from the mirror and becomes its own object and story-telling device. More quickly than the light reflected from the glass, Mike becomes this singular focus on self.
Could he have been reflected as anything else? Grotesquely, the narrator’s note that “he might as well remember himself like this” feels less like a comment on physical beauty than about the futility of thinking that anything else is possible.
Tense
Less overt, Batacan also uses writing in present tense to highlight the moment.
He sees a stranger.
He studies his image.
I love how simple these phrases are and how assuredly they match reader to story.
The narrator; Mike; the reader; and each narrative object. They exist in the sentence you’re reading in the time that you’re reading it.
You see a stranger. You study his image.
Through that joint nature, you live as Mike lives, and as much as it should make you shake, you become what Mike becomes. You get the privilege and horror of approaching the end of all things, and of becoming Narcissus as a matter of course.
Crawling out of that pit, therefore, becomes a struggle more encompassing than a story told in past tense about this exact predicament could generate.