Nothing Lasts Forever. Robert Steiner

Soon he’s going to find blood on the floor where he fell, which he wipes with the bottom of his bare foot. He thinks he’s like any other bleeding insomniac, but he expects to hear violence through the wall that separates his room from a roomful of whores, and then he’s grateful that he slept a dreamless sleep if apparently at cost to the expression on his face. If every night he underwent dreamless sleep instead of insomnia or dreams he would pay the toll his face has paid since he goes nowhere and sees no one anyhow who isn’t at death’s door or remorselessly corrupt. He brushes shattered glass and whiskey with another bare foot, the same foot he uses to crush cockroaches, and so before he pours another whiskey into another glass, he examines the sole of each foot for blood, glass, the husk of a roach, its innards. Though only the right side swells and bruises, his face heats up with whiskey and despondency, allies for decades. Now he has to endure himself as if he were enduring other people the way other people endure each other by learning to endure themselves too. He empties himself of ideas, wearing cream linen trousers and a vivid silk shirt when he buys whiskey and smokes because no matter what he finds at the apartment he’s going to need them. He’s imagined her death so often that he no longer imagines her corpse, but the disturbing quiet of the apartment that will pronounce the death of the woman he loves, a quiet that is going to tell him how she’s going to look once he walks from the doorway to the bed in the middle of the bedroom. In the kitchen while he tilts the bottle and bends into a dark whiskey, nobody needs to tell him that love is a slaughterhouse or that his memories are going to crawl through boneyards and crematoria in search of something when there’s nothing but nothing unless bone and ash and teeth are something. The woman he loves reminds him of death even when he arrives at her piano because suddenly he only knows her as little as he knows himself and there’s no time to know more of her though there’s too much time to know himself. He can’t bear the end of her life because he won’t know her anymore and must know himself better and better year after year in spite of knowing therefore despair and one drama after another regarding suicide or one of its legions. He leans into his whiskey because he’s been watching women walk one leg in front of another from place to place oblivious to the death down the street, and he’s said nothing about it to anyone he saw, nothing about losing the woman he loves to any other two-legged woman he might love or could have loved or should have. Forgetting everything but a suitcase, he’d moved to a hotel beside the bay where if a telephone rang the ring didn’t belong and a knock at the door meant trouble if not more trouble, whereloss embedded in love the way her piano’s roof concealed the deadly wires that made music. After she dies he’s going to see her nude and macerated everywhere and see himself reflected in everything everywhere, but he isn’t going to see himself as others see him or as she sees him after she’s dead. This is how it is when he enters the bedroom where the woman he loves lies tan, nude, still, her body cool to touch just as she preferred to be discovered when she sent him away. Death took the place of dying as soon as he closed his eyes at her bedside as he knew it would the moment he entered her apartment for the first time in order to see her macerated and nude day after day until she died, the thing she had just done while he was out. Once she died there was nothing more to say about dying, and in an instant he stopped thinking of anything to say because for weeks and weeks he hadn’t thought of anything but dying. Now it was as if weeks of dying had amounted to hallucinations, her end more disappearance than death, her death an unnatural event so long as his eyes remained closed. As soon as she wasn’t dying, dying became hallucinatory gestures that had ensued from hallucinatory thinking and the acts thereof. As soon as she wasn’t dying he no longer had to interpret anything of her body or mind, and so their intimacy mystified him because of the violence done to it as soon as she was dead. If he opened his eyes he would discover no reflection from her eyes, no light of recognition out of irises swollen and black. She had concluded the strangest instant of every human history because love, fear, sadness, failure, reason and the loss of it, and every other feature of human existence came to an end in an instant, an instant of which she experienced nothing. She died not knowing that she died even if she knew she was about to die the instant before, and because he wasn’t in the room he knew nothing. Waiting for weeks and weeks for her to die, when she died, neither of them knew anything of it, assuming that there was something to know, but without being there how could he conclude there was nothing or something at the instant of her death? Everyone dies without telling anyone because they don’t know that they’re going to die until they’re dead, and so they know even less than the witnesses to it, who behold death as the most devout act of intimacy of one human being for another even if there’s nothing to witness. If human endeavor achieved miracles over thousands of years of human history, the dying couldn’t care less, preferring that thousands of years of human history vanish on the spot if they could continue dying another day, then another hour, then last but not nothing another instant. People who are dying don’t need to know one more thing about the world of people who aren’t dying since they’ve spent their lives learning the world, but at the end it hasn’t spared them one measure of agony. All that the woman and her lover did with each other, as much as they loved and adored each other, didn’t spare her one measure of agony, him one of despair. He had expected to touch the woman he loved at the instant of her death, not knowing the instant of it, but expecting to touch her constantly at the end to be certain he experienced it whenever the instant occurred. Once he opened his eyes he began to watch her nudity for signs of life, observing her resemblance to the body of the woman he loved since he wasn’t in the room when she died, assuming she died. The longer he watched the more convinced he was that she had moved imperceptibly or had moved while he blinked or that she was about to move, in each instance certain that her body could give evidence that it hadn’t died and that it hadn’t already become the corpse of the woman he loved instead of the body of her. If it had become a corpse, he couldn’t have studied it inch by inch, scouring it first with his eyes, then with his fingertips, finally with both hands in the same motions he used to massage it or to give it pleasure or pain by rolling skin into bone or separating one fold from another or filling one orifice after another with something or some other. She must have moved or must be about to move because she had to move to prove to him that she hadn’t died while he was absent though not absent from his room at the whorehouse or absent from his reflection in his bathroom mirror at the whorehouse. He remarked to the woman he loved that he needed a whiskey, which came as no surprise to either of them, then he told her that since he needed a whiskey he’d need another one, and so he was going to retrieve the bottle from the kitchen and once he did that he’d need smokes too. He warned her that he was a man on a mission and left, talking to her in his absence loudly enough to be heard, but not too loud so as to alarm the sleeping patient or to wake the dead, eventually bringing a deep glass of whiskey to life before leaning into one of its brothers and returning. While whiskey and smokes watched him, he looked at her closely, relieved that he hadn’t missed a thing. His observations might have been endless and he might have studied her body for days, straightening a leg or uncrossing an arm or touching her fingers one after another, but he couldn’t understand why he would do it, though before her death he couldn’t imagine doing anything else because while he could imagine her dead, he couldn’t imagine her no longer present in the room with her body. As for the apartment, he regretted the piano and the mirror, having assumed that when she died they would disappear with her. Chairs full of mourning sat everywhere where once they were inhabited by terror and dread. Where were dread and terror now? Where was her agony? The bed possessed more personality than he remembered now that she was dead in it, though tables nearby less, and from then on everything everywhere inside and outside existed as before and after, ennobled by her death or estranged beyond recognition because of it. He had never asked the origins of two finely woven rugs or a drawing on a wall, and now that she was dead his ignorance perturbed him. He had neglected a music box because of his phobia regarding them, his fear that like all small machines they think. Above her body the wide wooden fan fanned as if nothing had happened to the room or its inhabitants, going on because going on over and over was the sum and purpose of its existence since like all small machines it could think its way through even the worst to befall a human being below it. Since his interest in everything everywhere in the room was as endless as his interest in the body of the woman he loved, he had to end it, but he could only justify an end when the room and then the apartment and then the view from the balcony all ceased to be familiar. She couldn’t have returned to this place then, and he couldn’t therefore wait to exit it. Once she no longer resided in it, the