Nothing Lasts Forever. Robert Steiner

been thinking. Will what happens next create what will happen after? she’s been thinking. What happens when what happens next comes to an end? Now she knows. Because something always happens next, she’s still alive and so sensation envelops them day and night instead of the chaos of dying and the idea of death. Her life has been coming to an end all the time she’s been doing other things, expecting to do other things for years and years without having to die. Bathing under her mushroom hat while he’s burdened by a whiskey that separates him from a virulent sun, she says that at just this instant she heard the words “my demise” in her mind, having never before thought the word “demise” in regard to what’s happening to her, nor has she had other synonyms for death surface, but now, because of “demise,” they will. Has the word “demise” occurred to you, she asks the man she loves, as in the thought that I’m meeting my demise at the hands of my lover? Sparrows interrupt, swooping as they bank against a wall of sky that holds them hostage inside the heat of the day. The man she loves who loves her back more each day in case each is the last knocks back what’s left of his whiskey before rising to speculate on another. Interrogating the apartment, he views a bottle hiding inside a mirror’s interpretation of the bathroom, so he sees if the mirror has gotten the bathroom right when he turns right before left before turning a circle. He explains to his reflection that he can’t bring her death to its knees, uplifting a full glass since everyone in the room concurs. He walks his whiskey back to the nude woman, concluding that her nudity has driven him mad and then that her dying nudity has driven him to value madness. His madness clarifies for her the humiliation, embarrassment, abjection, and incompetence of dying. Her heart sinks because he implies committing suicide after the thrall of ravaging her dead body, a ravaging that gives her something to look forward to. She wants him to want her after her death. How can he commit suicide if willing to wipe fecal residue from between her buttocks? How can he commit suicide when then he kisses the space between the clean buttocks and kisses the clean buttocks themselves inch after inch before discovering a wen the size of a nickel in the crease of a cheek? Each day he tends the wen, squeezing it of infection before disinfecting it, and after it’s healed days and days later he forgets it until he decides decades later that he’s going to violate the privacy of the woman he loved by revealing it to an unsuspecting indifferent world. No one commits suicide just because mirrors tell the truth, she tells him. Everything private reeks of his memory of her dying because his memory unearths everything that no one should know after she’s dead. Not able to endure life, but after death a likeness of it, she says to him concerning the contempt in his idea of suicide, a studied phrase that announces the beginning of the end of her tragedy, to her an infolding tragedy from now on, no longer a tragedy that’s been unfolding between them. He can’t abandon her anymore after death than he could abandon her now, even if rooms are filling with shadows and smells that feel and appear as if there are ghosts walking the apartment, but ghosts are only the presentiments of memory until sunlight on the balcony where she lies nude isn’t like sunlight anymore and then her nudity isn’t like nudity anymore. Despite their conspiracy to stop death at the door, at shutters and at windows, arrest even its reflection inside mirrors and on the surfaces of furniture, including the surface of the glossy black piano, including the surfaces of whiskey glasses he offers up to the sun or to the moon, dying remains the burden of life all day every day. There’s nothing else and nothing more. No matter how much pain or pleasure she undertakes to escape or memorialize the arrogance of death, she’s not of this life anymore, and because of it he’s not who he’s been until now. The woman he loves closes in on death as it closes in on her when every day repeats an altered world in an altered apartment, an apartment and a world altered by the daily repetition of the monstrosity of dying and the madness that accompanies it. He admires her dying as he admires her nudity from across the room or across from him on the balcony or slithering on the floor or outstretched on her bed as if she wants to conceive a child with him. Then he admires her in his arms and admires her when she takes him in her arms until as deeply as he loves her and covets every orifice and covets her viscera he doesn’t understand her anymore. Then he admires the pitiless misunderstanding she evokes nude and dying in front of him all day and night every night after every day, admiring her impersonation of the woman he loves, her impersonation of being in love and passionate the way only a living being with a future can be those things. When he collapses at her feet and surrounds her legs with his arms, everything possible becomes forever impossible, and together they conclude that everything for them has always been impossible, never more than when together they believed everything possible. Dying and enraptured, she’s never not dying, and because he can’t bring death to its knees, he’s never not on his knees in front of her. For decades in his despair and solitude she’s going to do nothing inside his memory and dreams but continue to die enraptured and yet estranged by rapture. While she’s dying she’s not of this world anymore, and after she’s dead he’s going to carry her unimaginable death wherever he goes, and he’s going to go everywhere, living from a suitcase one long day before one long night. On his knees at her feet he surrounds her legs with his arms, burying his face where she separates the folds of her skin—how each imagines remembering the other after the end of time. Burying his face in her body, he falls after never having thought of falling before, but suddenly he falls because everything is always going to be impossible once she’s dead. Once he’s suffused by the impossibility of life after she dies, time stops, space narrows, narrowing even his vision and his breathing, and so he buries his face against her to inhale the smell of her dying flesh because it isn’t yet dead flesh, because buried inside the smell of her thighs and the odor from her seam he feels that she isn’t dead, that the time of her dying has ceased and that space is the space of her living body. The madness ensuing from the experience of her dying becomes the madness that she isn’t dying so long as his face buries inside her. No experiences anymore during the vigil of the catastrophe because everything everywhere derives from death. There’s only the ensuing madness that she cannot die with his face buried inside her. He watches from the horizon of his whiskey and the smoke clouding it once she’s no longer present as the woman he loves, but as an indecipherable presence that invites madness, an absolute he doesn’t comprehend but for sounds the piano produces under her fingers, fingers that seem to remember being human and when they do she’s nearly human in every respect. When he looks at her nude and suffering at the piano night and day he observes nothing other than suffering and nudity and music, observes what remains of an artist dying in Capricorn. She could walk down the street or along the beach without anyone knowing that she’s losing her life, but everyone who sees her couldn’t fail to notice if she’d lost an arm or a leg or both legs or both arms or all four limbs. Her person vanishes unremarked in the world despite the sun on the balcony, and on the balcony while the sun undergoes twilight, the universe looks as if something important could still occur, the moon possibly. The lovers sense the sense of her ending that they could almost point to on the horizon or high in the menacing sky at the rising of the moon. The man she loves looks up from his whiskey and smoke to watch her depart—her gaunt face, her swollen labia, her shrunken breasts, and the rest of her anatomy and the rest of the adjectives that accompany it all go somewhere else, somewhere he can’t fathom because he’s not dying. He stands apart from her sharing her awareness that she no longer inhabits a reality the rest of the world does whether they know it or not, understand it or not, like it or not. The rest of the world awaits its fate, but hers has arrived and so the worst is over. The horizon slices daylight in half until he can see death in everything of the moment—sunset, sunset’s ocean, nudity, nudity’s meaning, until he’s punished for not being blind. When coming to an end comes to an end, only the dead exit, and the woman he loves has begun to look dead.

      On the balcony the idea that anything can happen at any time becomes the idea that everything that can happen happens, but not all at once. Time repeats dying until dying is timeless the way nudity is space instead of time, the way passion, sunrise, sunset repeat until dying is death with a heartbeat—a stateless timeless nonexistence. A bus accident would have avoided this, she says. Studying blood in her urine as it sinks to the bottom of the bowl that he holds under her, she and her lover lace fingers with all the strength she can impose on him without crushing his hand or spilling the urine with the blood running through it. They wallow in whiskey while she invades his lap and abducts his smoke on the balcony. I should have been drinking since I was born, she decides, like you. Instead she’s left with putting her faith