“Defiant” & Length of Time
Image from Brevity
Story: “Defiant”
Kate Hopper’s “Defiant,” an essay published at Brevity, yearns for the extension of time, for those terminal, never-to-be-known-again final moments to be made a heart’s beat longer.
Your pulse beats, defiant, in the tender crook between thumb and forefinger. My gaze shifts between it and your face, your cheekbones prominent, your neck slack. The cardiologist tells you, “Your heart is very sick. You should start to have conversations about the end of life.” And I can feel you shrinking next to me.
When you leave the exam room to use the bathroom, I ask this doctor, because I need to know, how long he thinks you have. “Six months, maybe,” he says, his dark eyes somber.
“Defiant” is a brief nonfiction essay where Kate (the narrator) speaks to her father, It’s an emotional retelling that spans the time between when her father is given a terminal diagnosis of six months to live and her final moment with her father, the distance connected by justified frustration, unconsidered facts, and the time manipulation allowed by by storytelling. These time manipulations, accomplished through shifts in tense, move us at light speed towards the end of her father’s life before once again returning to the moment in the car ride from the doctor’s office when her father is still alive, his heart beating, “defiant, in the crook between [his] thumb and forefinger.” In fact, that phrase, “defiant, in the crook between your thumb and forefinger,” appears twice: once in the story’s first sentence, and again later, in the second-to-last sentence. This repeated sentence tethers us and brings us back to the present that she wants to focus on, when her father was still alive, and it also brings to the fore what’s most important: the time she had with her father, and his defiant heart.
What’s more interesting about the story’s structure is how it is composed of 35 sentences that break down into five compact and meaningful groups of seven. The first seven, from the beginning’s “Your pulse beats…” to “…his dark eyes somber.”, establish an unstoppable moment which propels us towards the final seven. Those final seven begin with “Time will become elastic…” and end, beautifully, with “He doesn’t know your heart.” And it’s in that last seven where the story’s manipulation of time and form are revealed, and Hopper’s yearning for more time is laid bare, this final group of seven holding within it the longest sentence of the story, a 75 word wish for more time. The sentence admits the six-month diagnosis was right “almost to the day,” and it counts the “three minutes and fourteen seconds” of the Neil Diamond song that’s playing while she holds her father’s hand as she’s “watching watching watching” her father’s pulse, “watching” repeated to stretch the time further than it should be allowed.
Neither of us knows that in six months, almost to the day, I will be holding your hand, Rachel on the other side of you, and that three minutes and fourteen seconds into “Holly Holy,” which will be piped through the speaker on the windowsill—Neil Diamond singing “And the seed, let it be full with tomorrow, Holly holy…” the pulse in your neck, which I will have been watching watching watching, will go quiet.
These groups of seven sentences not only neatly divide the story into meaningful blocks, one of which is the entirety of what the doctor doesn’t know about her father and his life, but this form manipulation also embodies Hopper’s desire for more time with their father. “Six months, maybe,” the doctor tells her in the beginning, then the story takes that six and stretches it, makes it feel like more, working hard to swell these moments between diagnosis and death into larger, grander beats. There isn’t anything she can do to save her father from his inevitable end, but she spend more time telling the story and in doing so keep him alive until that last sentence’s period arrives, standing firm against time. Defiant.
Cocktail: Length of Time
Because what does that doctor, who met you in the hospital last winter, know about you and your heart? Yes, there is the echocardiogram and the spools of data from your pacemaker, his years of experience. But he doesn’t know the way your heart has expanded with each grandchild. … He doesn’t know how your beloved tangerine tree came to be—a lunchtime seed spit into a poinsettia by a colleague all those years ago.
“Defiant’s” heart has a bold beat throughout, and a clear yearning for something good to last for as long as it can. This week’s cocktail, Length of Time, is a long drink with a strong heart built with cask strength whiskey, specifically bourbon, though any cask strength spirit would do. Cask, or barrel, strength spirits have bold flavor because they’re still undiluted, and unblended, after being pulled from their barrels. This flavor, in shorter drinks, is almost too much, the spirit defiantly dominating the entire cocktail. Not to mention the high proof punching you in the mouth.
In a long drink, or a cocktail built with the addition of soda or tonic water, the proof is mitigated and the flavor stretched, making the whole cocktail an enjoyable, and delicious, drink that can be enjoyed for a good while. Length of Time not only uses a strong spirit but also orange liqueur, to call back to the tangerine tree, and a touch of Benedictine for depth. Lemon juice lifts it all while tonic water lengthens the cocktail, creating a round, flavorful drink you can enjoy for a length of time.
Length of Time
1.5oz Cask Strength Bourbon
0.5oz Orange Liqueur
0.5oz Lemon Juice
0.25oz Benedictine|
Optional: 0.5oz Simple Syrup (if you like sweeter drinks)
5oz Tonic Water*
Add the first four ingredients to a shaker and shake with ice. Strain into a tall glass and add ice.
Add the tonic water and with a bar spoon, gently lift and mix the spirit at the bottom to incorporate. Add a straw.
It’s this length of time that’s yours to have, and enjoy, for as long as you can.