Fackelmann, Sunshine, and the beach — "The last rotating sight was the…"
The last rotating sight was the chinks coming back through the door, holding big shiny squares of the room. As the floor wafted up and C’s grip finally gave, the last thing Gately saw was an Oriental bearing down with the held square and he looked into the square and saw clearly a reflection of his own big square pale head with its eyes closing as the floor finally pounced.
Context
The final shot delivered by mirror, exactly as the plan's one-liner has it: the mirrors enter as "big shiny squares of the room" — portable framed images, each one carrying a composed shot of the scene — and the last thing Gately sees before the flashback dumps him onto the beach is himself, "his own big square pale head with its eyes closing," framed in the held square. The Sunshine has already turned the room's light lethal-cinematic ("The air in the room got overclear, a glycerine shine, colors brightening terribly. If colors themselves could catch fire" — pp. 980-981; "The passing window exploded with light"). Why the mirrors were fetched the raw never says — the obvious inference is that they're for Fackelmann's sewn-open eyes, a forced self-viewing to die on, but the text shows them only bearing down on Gately (inference flagged as such). What the raw does support is stark enough: the book's climactic optics are a mirror aimed at a man's face, the same instrument the A.F.R. stretches across highways (163, n.110) here handheld and indoors, and the theme's last image before the freezing sand is a reflection with its eyes closing.