Nothing Lasts Forever. Robert Steiner

in whiskey. Like you. She’s more dead than alive since she’s been dying for too long, and he no longer wants to witness it because he can’t face his reflection without shame, ashamed of his shame because he could face her death better if he were drunk, but because she’s dying he remains as sober as a corpse. Not only is her body dying, the woman he loves is dying inside of it, giving her existence to the emptiness she’s becoming. She examines the consequences to her body not only of dying, but of their passion over and over, sharing with him what she sees or remembering from her reflection in the mirror one moment of pleasure or pain or pain and pleasure one after the other. Because of her fierce nudity, the sun, the ocean, the blue high absence into which they gaze is flush with nothing and with nothing’s power over everything. Because the woman he loves is here and not here at the same time, now and not now in the same place, the sky can’t appear more abandoned, the ocean more vacant, both full of nothing’s infinite possibilities before she becomes fragments of tooth and bone in a can of ashes. All things perceptible change except for the dying that doesn’t want to change the more she wants it to end even though it is, in timeless measure, going to end in order to change the world her lover inherits from her. All things change except her dying, but all changes repeat imagining, desiring, and fearing the instant of her death, repeat that as long as she’s dying she hasn’t died, then once she dies she becomes dead and then dead forever, and so they remain conscious of the idea of her death until they identify it with a can of ashes and teeth and the shavings of her skeletal bark. Without being dead her estrangement from the world brings the lovers together as minds dying and not dying, then as the dying mind and the living one, irreducible lovers who learn to look at each other as living and dying, to him an unbearable eloquence as poignant as her hairless marked nudity in the moonlight. With the obsession of a paranoid for his paranoia he’s convinced that she can’t comprehend her interior life anymore than he can because she considers herself already among the dead when she considers herself anything at all. She’s among the dead because he’s going to remain among the living. In silence and stillness she stares at him because he’s going to go on living, to her as unfathomable as her death is to him. She’s not only coming to nothing, she has to continue as nothing as if nothing could be called her destiny, her destiny to become an image in her lover’s memory. Holding her as if he’s already holding the corpse, her image in his arms has begun to outlive her, the origin of the memory that outlives the dead even before they’re dead and buried or burned. If living had a purpose, she tells him, I’d know it by now. While they sip whiskey and smoke she confesses that she loves him because he’s irreparably damaged and therefore can endure anything. Afterward she lies on the chaise silent and distracted, preferring his irresistible curse to hers since he’s going to despair all day every day unless it’s night and his insomnia endures the curse of his despair. Between the curses of despair and insomnia, suicide is out of the question, possibly death too or possibly dying before being dead, possibly his curse in despair and insomnia will be to think and dream until he falls to his knees the way he falls to his lover’s knees in search of her redemptive flesh. Neither lover assumes it’s their last conversation because it occurs like any other—death displaced by annunciations of love and mindless pleasure. Then they hear sullen noises inside the radio, from music to suffering refugees and then, too, more smokes and more whiskey that displace death and love until he displaces everything everywhere by lacing his fingers in tea tree oil and approaching her exposed body. He touches it to keep it living and touches it because it’s going to die. My body is ruined, she says, announcing that she’s had her last climax, remarking that now she knows why she’s always hated the word “climax.” She’s embarrassed and then ashamed that at the last minute she wants more out of death than nothing, that she wants nothing to be more than nothing or nothing to be the nothing the man she loves conveys by living his life the way he lives it. She admits betraying herself at the last minute, losing courage and will and knowledge to her fear of death. Baffled by the tawdry fear of leaving the world, she wants the man she loves to bear witness to the malevolent helplessness of her dying. Now her nudity means nothing, but without the possibilities nothing had come to mean, though thirty years later her nudity is going to consume her lover’s solitude and despair and insomnia until his past is his reality, and so her nudity of thirty years before becomes absolute nudity as it becomes absolutely everything to him. He’s consumed by the thought of her because he didn’t die when she died. From the apartment to his hotel not a soul knows that the woman he loves is dying. Walking until he wanders, finding a beach sunbathers bathe on, then an ocean waiting to drown someone, he views white sails on sail boats from one end of the bay to the other, then lantana and bostryx that crest the beach, and at the horizon a cruise ship bearing down on everyone in its way. On the beach everyone beautiful has no idea that the woman he loves lies dying because they’d be ashamed to be beautiful bathing under the sun on a beach watching an ocean busy being beautiful. Between cabbage palms and witchweed he sees a striped legless slither out of the afternoon heat. Until he does it he doesn’t know he’s prowling the beach, not strolling it, doesn’t realize that he’s searching for something in the dizzying tropical sunshine. As soon as he finds other people’s nudity, he turns away repulsed, and once he surprises a gathering of young lovers, he surprises another and then another. When he observes the tight hem of a bathing suit pinch the thighs of a pubescent girl full of nothing but future, he uncovers a world of women who aren’t dying, none of whom he loves, but if not why not, why not them instead of the dying woman he does? Breathless when he reaches the hotel he hears his footfalls like a jealous man with a gun. Tenants in the hotel are on edge when he walks by, including whores going to work the streets or coming back after doing so, even coming back with clients to their rooms, who also seem on edge when he walks by. Silent Mi Dom, the madam, brushes his wet arm with the skin of hers. When she does he feels like removing his sunglasses, but who knows where that could lead and so he doesn’t. The instant he closes the door to his room he leans the weight of his back against it as if a mob might be on its way. He finds the desk where it belongs, the fan fanning a breeze it invents for the occasion, his beaten suitcase cowering in a corner, beaten but unbowed. He decides that once the woman he loves dies, he’s going to live in this room for the rest of his life. From brass bed to desk to balcony, from chairs and tables of bamboo and straw, from his crushed raffia hat hooked behind the door to the linen cream trousers bent by a hanger in the wardrobe, this room suits him as a place in which to lose himself forever. Above a creamy white sink he rinses sweat from his face and neck and shoulders over and over until he prefers to shower and shave and so shaves and showers within earshot of a radio forty years old, of mahogany and ivory knobs. He overhears speeches from Jakarta and Hanoi while he lathers left and right and over and under until his expression buries itself in a mountain of soft soap. Before he lights up he knocks back a half glass of whiskey, then matches the smoke in the middle of his face so that behind his sunglasses he can’t see who’s looking back at him since it’s the mourner naked and unrecognizable, the tenant needing to lose himself forever among refugees and teenaged streetwalkers. Because hotels are for strangers who live among strangers, unless he’s with the woman he loves, he searches for anything that reminds him of himself, but locating nothing he wears sunglasses outside and inside even after nipping a chunk of chin into the sink as if other people could recognize from his eyes that nothing reminds him of himself, then as if his reflection reflects it when he can’t look himself in the naked eye. He pours another whiskey and sets it on his stomach on the bed because he’s about to close his eyes, about to vanish behind their lids for hours without seeing the world around him, as if by doing that the world ceases to exist. For hours in the dark of his hotel room he overhears traffic and big voices laughing at nothing laughable, then a living trumpet down the street interrupting any sound that isn’t it, the invincible world more alive than ever assuming insidious relationships among sights and sounds and human beings outside and below his window. He intends to overlook the disturbances beneath him because they have nothing to do with his life, his life nothing to do with the world the way death has nothing to do with life, the way his lover’s death has nothing to do with his life, and so he hears his face crack the floor unless the floor cracks his face first. He doesn’t remember doing it, so he doesn’t know which hit which when, even though his memory of it wakes him before his memory sends him back into sleep comforted by the absence of memory and knowledge. As for the blood in his mouth, he doesn’t taste it until he sees it reflected in the bathroom mirror hours later, then sees above his eye a cut, then a