Recognition

Recognition

Is he who I think he is, or is this recognition simply an illusion? Does he live in Philadelphia? I think he did at some point. Or does? But why would he be in this sauna? At this time? Surely he works during this hour, doesn’t he? Did we ever have a conversation about saunas and our preferences about using saunas? At one point at least, if I remember correctly. If he is who I think he is, which I don’t know if he is, would he recognize me as who I am?

The shape of the face is similar, there’s no doubt about that. No, don’t stare for too long: quick glances, quick glances. Focus your eyes on the hourglass and its steady sand stream and observe peripherally. The orange sand huddled in the upper hemisphere of the glass slowly descends grain by grain, into the bottom half through gravity’s welcome grace. There is no electric time here, only sand time. I wonder why that is? What prevents a clock in this hot space? It has to be the heat reshaping the way we regard time, it has to be. 

To reiterate, his face has a face shape that matches the face shape of Michael. His eyes have an element of Michael-ness about them as well. The nose, the mouth, the ears: all similar enough. But exact?  Everything about him could be Michael, but there is also the equal possibility to suggest that he is not Michael.

When was the last time I saw him? Real-Michael that is. It must have been in college; those last weeks were a blur though, transcending osmosis-like from one life stage to the next. No, we weren’t close. Maybe I could have been closer to him. Maybe he could have been closer to me. But we were in the same social group, weren’t we? We shared intimate moments. At least a handful, if I can recollect accurately. There was a time when the two of us could recognize one another without hesitation or suspicion. It was immediate, unwavering. We knew more about each other than purely surface level. We had discussed things. A whole menagerie of things. What exactly did we talk about… 

He lifted; I knew that. Real Michael, but also this potential Michael. He cared about his body to the point where he made lifting an element of who he was and his daily routine. It was a part of his identity at one point. Physical wellbeing. Had he wanted to be a physical therapist or something in that world of health and bodies. We had lifted together at the university gym. More than once! This informs the thoughts that this could be Michael: this sauna, the one we are in right now, in a part of the gym, Blade Fitness, which we, or I, or, rather, Maybe Michael or not-Michael belongs to. So, it is not impossible to conclude that Michael or Not-Michael had lifted earlier and came into the sauna after his lift. This suggests it might be Michael after all.

The sweat is starting to form above my brow, and I see sweat on Michael/Not-Michael’s body as well. My heart is beating. Saunas are the next best thing after cardio for the heart, or so I’ve been told. We are both wearing towels around our waists and are shirtless. If we were wearing clothes then perhaps I would more readily be able to identify if this is Michael or Not because clothes often have some signifying features of one’s past or present position in life, don’t they? Perhaps a t-shirt with Mason University stamped on his chest would readily allow me to identify this person as the person that I know. Or knew. But we are raw humans right now. Stripped to the basics. The room is just sweat, wood, and hot air. True elemental forces. We as its meaty tenants. And sweat is the most human of those forces, we as some of the only animals capable of the sweat function. To sweat is to be human and to be human is to sweat. That is why I enjoy the sauna, to affirm my unique personhood as a being that sweats. But this lack of recognition is subtly disrupting the comfort I typically find because isn’t the ability to recognize a human function? Pigeons all look the same, but people, people are unique, not pigeon-like at all. That’s what I believe. And with no other identifying features other than face and flesh, it’s impossible to know who this person sitting across from me is. 

Focus now. What do you remember about him? I think I saw online that he lives in the area. But does he live close enough to come to this particular gym? I observed passively a couple of months ago photographs of him getting married; his wife also went to our college, but I remember a few things now except for some small cursory conversations. I wonder if at that moment in time, in that frat house when I once witnessed them, if they knew they would end up getting married at a point in the future. And I mean they looked beautiful, in the electronic photographs on the internet, their faces wrinkled with smiles, glowing with that natural matrimonial aura mixed with the unwavering skill of a professional photographer. He posted them online, Michael that is, and us being friends online, because we once were friends offline (in fact, there was a time when we were friends online and offline simultaneously) and I observed them, and “liked” the image, and I was happy for them. I recognized Michael as Michael in those images because it was Michael who posted them. But would I wonder the same thing had it not been his post? Would I wonder if it was he, in fact, in that wedding photo had I seen it in a magazine or on the television screen?  Would the image pass by my consciousness as a stock photo of slightly familiar strangers had I not known their precise origin? Isn’t it such a strange phenomenon that people in such images presumably have their own complex social worlds, and they are complete biological entities outside of the second captured? I think about this often.

But there’s no wedding ring on his finger right now. One point for Not-Michael. But maybe people don’t wear their wedding rings in the sauna? There is no one else in this sauna, so I can’t look at other men’s hands to witness this as a truth. I have never married yet and therefore do not wear a wedding ring, so I don’t know if it is customary to remove the wedding ring a priori to entering the sauna. I imagine that the metal would get hot due to the temperature conditions within the sauna. Further, the sweat, I presume, would form around the wedding ring and make it exceptionally uncomfortable and dangerously slippery. But all that being said…would I really remove my wedding ring and put it in a gym locker before my time in the sauna? I would fear it getting lost, and a male locker room in central Philadelphia would surely be the worst location to misplace a wedding ring, an artifact so crucial to one’s relational identity. So, no, the playing field is equal; I’m faced to confront the fact that the only way to determine if I recognize this person or not is purely by his facial details.

The largest conundrum here is that if this is Michael, then it doesn’t look fully like Michael. Or, rather, it does look like Michael but just a changed version of Michael, a Michael that has been aged or disassembled. They look similar enough to be the same, but is the similarity a coincidence or physical change? His face is puffier, his eyes less youthful. He had been toying with the idea of going bald all throughout college, and this Maybe Michael is bald. But a lot of men are bald, by choice or not. Michael was bald in his wedding photos. Bald with a beard, just like this man, who might be the person who I am thinking he might be. This Michael is also bigger than the Michael I remember. The Michael I knew, which could maybe be this person, began skinny but progressively became more muscular and toned throughout our time in college, due to his commitment to the gym and how it became a part of his identity.  However, this Maybe-Michael is definitely fatter than the Michael I last saw, maybe five years ago. Maybe marriage, and no longer being in the pursuit of a lover made him deprioritize the physical appeal of his body. Or perhaps due to his job, which may or may not be a physical therapist, and other demands of his life, he hadn’t been able to exercise as much. Maybe he had taken to drinking due to the amount of strain in his life, and this accounts for the puffiness of his face. I can’t tell if Michael is happy or unhappy; there are no details to confirm his state of mind in the sauna as his face is in a neutral state. And I recognize that I might just be projecting my own feelings and ideas onto this body. So this doesn’t narrow it down.

There’s also the possibility that he modified his face somehow, be it through botox or other forms of plastic surgery so that he could alter his face to better fit the ideal version of how he wants to appear. But is Botox sauna safe? Are the neurotoxins in the injection able to withstand temperatures of 170 degrees Fahrenheit? And if this is the case, is the face of Maybe-Michael the ideal version of who he wants to be, the proportions shifted accurately by a doctor to match the dream project of his selfhood?

In the deepest recesses of my mind, I am processing: every memory I have of Michael, internally analyzing each facial contour to see how well they match with the visage I have before me. The contours of the cheeks, the lips, the nose, and all the features are organically organized around and inside his skull. It could be him. But it could also not be him. He is the idea of Michael, and there is a chance that this version of Michael will replace the memory version that I have of Michael in my mind. Does he notice me staring at him? I think he’s doing a good job of not seeming suspicious, not seeming overtly curious about this person sitting across from him in the sauna. But maybe I’m not. Maybe he is wondering these similar thoughts about me.

And that’s the biggest mystery of all of this. I take a sip of my water, pondering. If this is, in fact, Michael, then why has he not recognized me? When I walked into this sauna seven and a half minutes ago according to the sand in the hourglass, he did not look at me at all. In fact, he barely acknowledged my existence at the moment of my entrance. Michael/Not-Michael’s whole demeanor is closed; he does not want to interact with me it seems. But that’s the thing about strangers; in my experience, strangers rarely want to interact with one another. And the way I see it, there’s no reason that he would need to interact with me if he is, in fact, not Michael.

However, if he is Michael, then that’s a different story. My body is at the point in the sauna where sweat, the fluid that makes us the most human, is actively dripping down my body, forming a liquid coating around my skin. Yes, if it is Michael, then there’s a bigger issue here. If it is Michael, and he realized it was me who came into this sauna, then why didn’t he say anything to me? Surely it’s the person who is in the sauna already to talk to the person that they know. Is there a reason why he doesn’t want to talk to me? Did I ever do something to offend him? I can’t think of anything. Except, maybe, in one of those cursory conversations five years ago that I had with his now-wife, I said something that could be perhaps misconstrued (incorrectly, of course) as flirty, and maybe, in the intimate times they shared together in their bed, or maybe even on their honeymoon to be more percise, she said, “you know Michael, your friend said something rather suggestive to me, five years ago, at that party,” and since then he’s been holding a bulging grudge against me, frustrated that I offended his wife so deeply that she brought me up on their honeymoon, and then when he saw me walk into the sauna, now 8 minutes ago, his blood boiled to the point that his internal temperature was so high that it didn’t even matter that he was in the sauna, and this whole period of time he has been trying to stay calm so that he doesn’t come at me in a jealous rage, some retribution for the heavy offense that I presumably suggested towards his wife (which wasn’t really anything, truly). That could be it. But it could also not be it. 

Suddenly, another thought crossed my mind, and I almost let out an audible gasp in horror. What if, in fact, he did not recognize me? What if my face was the mystery; what if I was the one whose face had changed so much to the point where I only look like a version of me but not the actual me, and this whole time the two of us had been unsure if we were one another, a limbo of uncertainty of whether or not the two people in this sauna really are who they think they are.

Surely he’s seen me. After all, I have been posting images of myself online, and us being online friends activates the social contract, a mutual obligation to observe images of one another, passively but consciously. And hadn’t he, Michael, not not-Michael, seen those photos? I am almost certain he liked them. If that’s the case wouldn’t he recognize me? Or have I changed too? I’ve gained weight myself, and I have been drinking. I too have gone bald and decided to shave my head. I have a beard. But I think I’m still recognizably me, am I not?

In terror, I considered something else at that moment. What if, like those images that Michael posted of his wedding, the only reason I recognize who I am is because it is the me who is looking; I am observing the person in the mirror, and only with the knowledge of who I am, I am able to recognize myself. What if the me I think I am is not at all connected to what I actually look like; I only recognize myself because I am the person acknowledging the reflected self in the mirror. After all, there is that concept which I read about or heard somewhere that says that the version of you, the one you see in the mirror is not how others see you because your brain switches things around.

And what if it’s my brain that is the problem in recognizing this person? That too is a possibility…what if there is an innate inability for me, as a fundamentally me issue, to recognize people I once knew. I’ve read about things like this, where one’s brain chemistry might be distorted over the course of a natural life. It’s become a pattern; I feel like I recognize strangers as people I know but fail to recognize the people I know, mistaking them for strangers. What if my brain is broken, and I fail to process things in the normal way, unable to distinguish facial features from one another, required to use only context, such as a college T-shirt or tattoos, to distinguish person from person?

At this point, the sauna heat is nearly oppressive, and I’m chugging my water desperately. I wipe my forehead with the towel and look over once again at Michael/Not-Michael and realize that I don’t even know if the face that I am seeing now is the one that I observed 10 minutes ago. Had the face shifted at all? No, that’s impossible. But what if my perception of the face has shifted? Do faces constantly shift in microscopic ways each moment, the skin loosening and tightening to better fit environmental conditions, similar to how leaves of a plant shift slightly to catch more sunlight? His face is now both more Michael-like and less Michael-like than before. Maybe visual features are only an illusion and the real center of a person is within the personality - and all this physiognomy is entirely disconnected with the ability to distinguish people.  

Are all faces like this one? Do all faces shift in subtle ways as your own relationship to the face changes? Are all faces constantly melting, shifting, and reforming? I think about the face of my girlfriend, the one who I plan to marry and post images of us on the internet; at one point she was just a stranger I had not recognized, but then I connected to her, and we went on dates, and we moved in, and I began to understand her face in a much more recognizable way, it was familiar to me. But was my familiarity to the face only due to her ability to recognize me? What if the familiarity of the face is only familiar when recognition is involved? What if, one day, I come home, and I see her, my then future wife, look at me and there is no indication in her eyes, her lips, or her general demeanor that indicates that she recognizes me as me at all? My face, distorted far away from the version of me she has come to know.  When that happens…will her face no longer be the face that I have known? If this person, this mass of sweaty flesh, looked my way, and indicated the biological nodes “I know you” then maybe I wouldn’t be sitting here, slithering in a coating of my viscous sweat, feeling the DUN-DUN, DUN-DUN of my heart, beating with cardiovascular vigor in these sauna conditions, and I would realize that this person was in fact Michael and not a stranger and we would be here in this sauna talking about all the times we lifted together, all those memories of college. We would talk about where we lived, and the clothes we wear, and talk about our life partners and how we love them. I can ask about his wedding, and he can ask me about my partner, and how we plan to get married and take beautiful images to which we post on the internet, and those electric versions of our faces will be shared and seen throughout all the people I know and once knew, and we would say “what a crazy coincidence this is, being here in the same sauna at the same time, what a small world”. I take the final sip from my plastic water bottle. 

I could just say…are you Michael? I could ask. But then, what if it wasn’t him? Would I have to explain that they look like each other, and I couldn’t tell? But if it is Michael, then would he be offended that I didn’t recognize him, immediately? I would be upset if he didn’t recognize me. Would we feel like we had drifted too far away from who we once were, at a point in our lives where we can’t even recognize our once close acquaintances when we are intimately stuck in a room together in our most human physical states? Wouldn’t that just be so profoundly sad and so disturbingly unhuman, so contrary to the sweaty personhood we are experiencing now?

I open my dry mouth to say something, but almost at the same moment as my lips part, Michael/Not-Michael gets up from his seated position and exits the sauna, and all future vocalizations become mute. His egress leaves me alone with the heat and wood and the sweat. The hourglass is still, all the orange sand complacently settled in the bottom half of the glassy vessel.