Nothing Lasts Forever. Robert Steiner

lovers who aren’t dying. I forbid you to use my death as an excuse, she says, but says nothing else and nothing more. She wants a whiskey with him because she’s going to bake on the balcony without her mushroom hat. She wants a tan without lines, a deep tan with no remorse, and so she’s inviting tropical sunshine to suck the life out of her. The woman he loves says that by now she must have become a rumor in the neighborhood, that the silence around her means people are whispering—no visits, no phone calls, no letters, no postcards. She remembers how she used to think and behave when someone was dying and now can’t believe that that’s how people she’s known for years and years are behaving and thinking because of her. It’s why I only allow you into my bedroom, she says, let alone into my cavities. He discovers one short colorless pubic hair while exploring her seam with his tongue, so he plucks it between his teeth, then shows it to her on the tip of his finger. The tip of one of her fingers accepts it from the tip of his and together they observe it as if it’s an archaeological find. To speak of her death or of her dying to anyone while she’s alive would be treason, so he speaks to no one about anything, and to do that he sees no one because her dying and death are the only themes of his nights and days since they’re the only themes of hers. Once she dies, the violent body will repose, the final monstrous transformation of dying into death. It will be her body, yet different, and different not only because it’s a corpse, but also because it’s going to resemble her and still be inexplicable, unknowable and unspeakable and still recognizable as the woman he loves. Disorder to fragments to ash, she reflects, squeezing his penis in her fist. If one day he speaks of her dying and death, he’ll have the last word regarding her life, her flesh, their love, disorder, fragments, and ash. Every act in the apartment thwarts death, but alludes to death, and then thoughts and acts precipitate death whatever happens wherever in the apartment they are and whenever they’re there. Birds, clouds, dragons, sunsets, tides—all embody death when she observes them until she believes that she’s been bending toward an early end from its beginning at her birth. Everything occurs for her at the threshold of death while for him nothing occurs but witnessing her at the threshold. She prepares to be an object like all other objects in the world and then nothing other than an object in the memory of the man who loves her. She’s going to die once, but in his mind she’s dying all day, all night, day after night and night after day, nude and sunlit and moonlit, lit by fever and skin tan and ardor. She slithers on her belly before arching her spine to negotiate steps to the balcony, then nestles against the chair at the piano where eventually she plays with her back to him, revealing wounded flesh from her buttocks to the wide wings of her scapulas. When they crawl together in the grit and dust of the cold floor, he’s aware of sinking as if the floor’s giving way and then that she’s sinking, and he imagines the earth’s horizon after she dies. Because she’s sinking she’s fondling him and then he’s sinking with her in silence, unaware of anything but sensations inside and outside. They’re nothing but what they make of each other so that by the time they reach the balcony they’re inundated with sweat and saliva and an absolute need that they share more than the dread and terror they share day after day. The instant she dies: death, the apartment, himself, his reflection. An instant later she’s going to have been dead for an instant and immediately begins being dead forever until he won’t be able to think of her as ever having intended to remain alive. When they see themselves together in the ornate body mirror in the bedroom he sees them lubricious in love, but when he sees himself alone shaving or rinsing soap from his face she might as well be dead. Faced with nothing but death, sleep is out of the question since it imagines her survival night after night, shocking her morning after morning with the mortality on its way or inside her, a pit in a plum. They prefer the relentless irrevocable insomnia that keeps her alive the way it keeps suicides alive because as long as there’s thinking, even dark mean thinking, everything is still possible and nothing is not. If she’s going to invite sleep, she might as well bite cyanide or inhale an oven. They stand in front of the mirror that’s hundreds of years old, that’s watched dozens of owners die, enjoying the immortality reflections evoke, each lover irresistible to the other’s image. Their reflections appear to them portraits or photographs expressing a suspicion of lurid tragedy as if the dreamer of their dreams has emerged in daylight to pose with them for a camera or a painter. She watches him insert a finger into her image and admits that, until now, life has never humiliated her and so all that’s left but humiliation is watching what he’s doing now and watching what he’ll do later. The more she tries to prepare for nonexistence the less she’s prepared for the last experience of her life, for the last day of it, the last hour of the last day of the last experience. Watching his reflection penetrate hers several feet away, she exists because her image exists and then sees how her passion appears until she’s blinded by the onset of her climax, but then so is her reflection. She watches her reflection swoon, blinded by its climax until she can’t watch anymore because of her own. I don’t trust death, she suggests at high noon, nude but for sunglasses on the chaise on the balcony. Not the way I trust ejaculation. Anything can happen in death, adding to her fear the fear of outliving it, whatever and however and wherever outliving death means, making the most of her terror that death is something to survive, that dying teaches how to live formless and speechless, hopelessly unfeeling forever, here but not, now but not, just not nowhere forever. She hasn’t lived expecting to die the way her lover has, one of the reasons he’s the man she’s going to die in front of. Her translucent skin represents dying as the presentiment of the reflection death will make of her as if she could awaken after death inside the mirror without a human original on the other side looking back. If he thought he could view her reflection after her death he might not despair, but the idea makes him want to disappear inside her body in case from there he could save her from death or from inside the mirror save her reflection after her death. After her death he can never know others as he’s known her, then never know others in order to know himself since he knows himself because of her. Living with her absence for the rest of his life, he’s going to disappear inside a desire for what doesn’t exist. She continues dying, slithering across the floor to do it, eventually evacuating her bladder or bowels wherever whenever and then ejaculating before ejaculating again whenever wherever with him or without him, then ejaculating him until there’s no ejaculate left inside anyone inside the apartment where she’s dying. If she’s not thinking about dying day and night, she’s talking of it night and day, interrupting her thought with her talk while the man she loves drinks whiskey, smokes, and imagines the end of the world that only they survive. He would destroy the world to save the life of the woman he loves. She slithers to the piano to play until her head aches because she’s playing or because of the chords of the composition she’s playing, but one after another, composers vanish from her repertoire because her fingers can’t play them or she can’t remember them. The man she loves observes her lift the knobs of her hips with the knobs of her wrists as she ascends her piano chair even though dying has made her weightless until each orifice from mouth and nostrils to vagina and anus have grown immense by contrast the way her eyes and ears are immense, so that as she ascends to the horizon of the keyboard her body is nothing but dark entrances and exits, wide and swollen tunnels to her organs and viscera. He memorizes them—ways into her, ways out—not once thinking that if in he’d want out. Being other than myself, she defines death as while she thinks and talks about it, playing music that evokes it or its melancholy. She advises from the piano that soon she’s going to masturbate to interrupt her thoughts of death unless her thoughts of death are inspiring her to masturbate the way they inspire her to masturbate her lover. No matter what she does, she’s convinced that she’s doing it for the last time and so he studies her in case he can discern an instant or an expression or a posture in which her sense of an ending overcomes the ecstasy intended to expunge it, whether at the piano or evacuating her bowels or splayed across the wide bed in the middle of the room. He has expected day and night, sometimes hour after hour, that the hour or day or night might be her last, and now that she expects it too, he admits to himself that he’s expected it from the moment he arrived at her apartment, when she unwound the blue dragon scarf from her head and undraped the blue dragon kimono. He has to remember that his fate isn’t hers, and so he can’t know when the world of the living is going to fall away from her forever or that when she observes the sky she doesn’t watch it rise out of sight since time has turned into forever, never and forever while the sky is always only a sky menacing him with her death, though he has no reason to believe that