Nothing Lasts Forever. Robert Steiner

misquoted. At the finish he often concluded by reminding himself to remember the way he had said something in order to repeat it to his wife during their next altercation. He often felt that he had clarified himself to himself if not yet to others and therefore that he had dealt a theme a deadly blow, a discovery he couldn’t wait to share during the next altercation. Other than the memory of hearing the sound of his voice day after day from one room to the next while he lived in this house, he roamed now from room to room enduring the memory that he had spent years in this house enduring. Losing everything by which he knew himself, he would have liked to ask his wife if she agreed that they were broken spirits who for a time had convinced themselves that because of love they weren’t or that because of love there was more than solitude and defeat to life, knowing full well that there wasn’t. He’d asked his wife something similar when he told her that he’d fallen in love, which struck her as impossible because by then she perceived him as unlovable, and then when he told his lover his wife’s opinion, his lover had explained to him that that was why he had a lover. He knew that he couldn’t again refer to the house in anything but past tense, then he knew that he couldn’t refer to the woman he loved in anything but past tense, then that he referred to his wife in past tense the moment he’d fallen in love because his wife had found him unlovable. One day he spoke to the woman he loved, bathed her, massaged, excoriated her flesh, and penetrated her, and always spoke in present tense because she was always present, but then on another day he could do none of the things he had done because she was always forever the past, relegated therefore to past tenses, and would be a part of his past until he died and everyone he knew spoke of him in past tenses if they didn’t already. Enervated, he poured a tumbler of neat whiskey and held it against a colorful cloudburst over the garden, where to no one’s surprise the glass reflected a cloudburst. He hadn’t finished polishing his shoes for the funeral and was so anxious thinking of the house while in the house that he poured a second whiskey, holding it again to the sky to reiterate that there could be no surprises when it came to glasses of whiskey. He left a note under the bottle before gathering his suit, a white shirt, a necktie, and the polished shoes, remembering because of the note that he had never talked so much in his life as he did while living in that house. Once he exited it, the house was that house in his mind because it receded as if walking away from him rather than he from it, though while inside it, it had remained this house because it strangled him by the neck of his existence even while he was polishing a shoe in order to see his face between the tip and the throat one last time. No matter how much everything meant to everybody while it was happening, nothing’s happening anymore, so there’s nothing to understand. Yours, the husband. Now you must imagine a blue moon, white stars, the smell of hyacinth from one end of the beach to the other. For the first time since the woman he loved had died, he heard ocean in the dark, then for the first time felt it under his feet, the first of many firsts of its kind even if every first was going to feel like the last of something if not the last of everything. Awaiting her funeral, a self within him undid the self with which he seemed to have been familiar, his damaged unconscious undoing his conscious, a damaged conscious undoing his unconscious, both belonging to him if they belonged to anyone. Awaiting her funeral redeemed the intimacy between the lovers until it became an intimacy as mad as the idea of eternity and as mad as the idea of intimacy since he couldn’t abide the presence of anything outside himself, whomever that self was or was becoming or was unbecoming, and he couldn’t know which because the woman who accepted him for whomever he was had died. He had despaired of asking the woman he loved who or what it was she thought he was in case she couldn’t have been further from the truth and so would have loved someone other than him without knowing it until she knew it and ceased loving him. Whomever he was as the result of her death, despair liberated from dread as surely as it did from death and dying and the rest of the world. He remained speechless, too full of speech in his despair to have said something to someone if he could have opened his mouth. Instead he felt the presence of the dead woman he loved beside him day and night, then sat up in bed more than once because the room filled with fog, and only then could he hear her voice struggling to speak the way he struggled to speak to no one in the room every day. They remained speechless together in his hallucination, speechless and unable to touch in an intimacy derived from the self undoing his self the way death undid hers, an intimacy out of the madness they shared—his the madness of loss and despair, hers the madness of assuming she could speak to him and lie beside him after she was dead, his other madness that he too believed she could do those things. Dreams devoured him too, but enough of the sublime. He had borne witness to her madness, then carried her madness out of the room after she was dead because it didn’t belong to the mourners who had arrived after there was no purpose to it. As it was, he didn’t know the instant of her death and finally said so to no one in his room and then to his reflection from which he received no expression of empathy. She died in an instant, but which one, he asked the room, expecting an answer even if it came from the hallucinatory voice of the dead woman he loved. What precisely was he doing at the instant of her death? What precisely was he thinking? Her death occupied the universe and so the universe changed. As soon as she died, he said on the balcony of his room, looking for signs of her death up and down the streets, then for signs of her resurrection, she died again and again. He spoke to a reflection in the bathroom mirror so that it appeared to him he was speaking to someone other than himself, saying to it that the woman he loved had embraced his insomnia because she feared she would die if she slept or would dream of dying if she slept or dream that she wasn’t dying before she had to wake to the knowledge that she was, but now that she was dead he embraced insomnia, afraid that in his sleep she would invade his dreams filled with her death or of her living before dying, and yet in insomnia she lay beside him nude, macerated and speaking to him of the rest of his life before his death, of being saved in his dreams or by his insomnia at the arrival of the dead woman he loved. When he didn’t experience visions of the dead woman he loved, he overheard young and tiny whores giggling or weeping or being whipped by a belt at the ankles next door—playing in the dark of life, without happiness, among imaginary playmates, and he wasn’t sure how his life was different, though it was. During the lower half of his third whiskey, overseeing sunset from his balcony, he sat astonished at the fearlessness with which he greeted each day since the death of the woman he loved. If he strolled a beach of bathers, it may as well have been deserted, likewise streets where distance from one to another stretched immeasurably under his shoes. If the dying of the woman he loved devastated every day and every inch of space they occupied together, after her death he saw to it that neither time nor space could devastate him again. He couldn’t arrive late at any time, and he could never be in the wrong place anywhere. Ashamed to imagine of her death that she deserted him as if she’d abandoned him the way he’d abandoned his wife for her, he thought nothing about his love for her anymore than he thought about drinking whiskey or addressing the reflection in the mirror while he shaved or didn’t shave addressing the reflection or awaiting the macerated nude arrival of the dead woman he loved. She had withdrawn from him at the edge of her imminent death, love withdrawn at the edge of her nonexistence, so that he witnessed nothing of love between them except their thoughts of lost love or of losing love crossing the room or crossing the street or the beach or the expanse of the ocean before returning to them stricken with clarity that love could not survive death untrammeled or uneaten. A day came when a stranger found his face in the mirror and from that hour he was never entirely alone since there was always another being hearing or dissenting or bearing witness, even only another incarnation of himself the way the hallucinatory dead woman he loved incarnated again and again. He looked from his balcony to the future, watching the present come to an end so that the future arrived, but when the time came he only caught a glimpse of it leaving. For a time he had no palpable sense of her death and was so apart from the interior drama of grief and futility that her death he experienced as a disappearance that could be replaced by her appearance nude and macerated beside him in bed. He couldn’t address her, couldn’t say “you” to her, but alone in his hotel room he referred to the woman he loved as she or as her, but always in past tenses. He wasn’t beside her except in madness, and in despair he was apart from her, not there but here, not then but now, and so her death couldn’t illuminate anything except the time and the space in which his madness and despair because of it would occur. Her death left him mute, not only silent because he lost speech—he lost his voice. If he coughed or cleared his throat of a husk or vomited from too much whiskey or from too