The narrator faced his dying mother at ten, and watched a man’s gruesome execution through a bathroom stall at twenty. This man knew when he would die as he said, “’But you’re not going to kill me…’” (36). “The explanation was uttered at four m

inutes and five seconds past nine in the evening, and his throat was slit at four minutes eight seconds past nine, he knew the time of his death precisely three seconds beforehand.” This use of time and numbers and calculations shows the man’s inordinate infatuation with death and his attempts materialize it into something that he can more easily perceive, something carried out at a scheduled time— like “the precise moment I brush my teeth” (37). Though he needed precision to pin-point death, his obsession is soon dissipated in the rapture of young love. “When you’re full of life, you only have time to love and be alive. […] ‘What’s an old man? You think you know?’ Of course she didn’t know either. And since neither she nor I could, at the time, imagine an old man, we started laughing and then we made love like crazy” (36). In his youth, death seems far, if not fictional—all he has is his whole life ahead of him. The narrator has a purpose at this point, and this is why he doesn’t need to generate his obsession. When he loses his purpose, being his prospective life, he gives himself a new purpose, his prospective death.

At fifty, he begins to wonder again, about that ticking clock, and his scheduled time. When he is on his first plane trip in his seventies, he believes it’s his lucky day when it seems that the plane will soon crash. He sits in peace as the whole world around him panics—all the passengers fear death as it stares them in the eye, yet he rejoices for the very same reason. When devoid of its nebulous shield, death is his not much of a foe.

In his deathbed, he ponders this while observ

Some topics in this essay:
Save Me”, , reader question, Virgilio Pinera’s, magical realism, causes reader question, causes reader, precise moment, past event, purpose prospective, past nine, jugular vein, bathroom stall,