Nothing Lasts Forever. Robert Steiner
a number of whiskeys. He smelled the chair, then felt it for ejaculate or the illusion of it, then sat on it, which he had never done before, poised above the keyboard as if waiting to play, and if he could have he’d have played it to remind himself that millions of people would continue to play piano despite the death of the woman he loved. Elsewhere he found a sliver of feces but swallowed it before thinking—he should have kept it instead. As for the woman he loved, her corpse wasn’t in disgrace even when he thought of it as a corpse for the first time, when the pronoun “it” replaced the pronoun “her,” then replaced “she,” until “it” was the only other pronoun in the apartment beside all those attached to him, or once the it of her corpse became more the it of chairs and tables and balconies and whiskey bottles. He dressed the corpse to look as if nothing had happened to the woman he loved until it resembled her so closely that a mourner couldn’t have told them apart. What pervaded the room, once he telephoned a sister, was the odor of disbelief, the odor described as one of dying or even death or of a corpse becoming a cadaver. Who arrived was a small paternal figure, an uncle in a pair of white shorts and a necktie and a safari hat as stiff as a sidewalk. Soon the apartment welcomed friends and family, even tenants of the building who used to avoid his eyes until they avoided his sunglasses, which he only wore because the friends and family and tenants avoided his eyes. He knew what they thought of him because he knew they knew what he thought of them and what they thought of the woman he loved because of him. Suddenly, therefore, the death belonged to others, and so it wasn’t the death he could bear that she knew he could bear, but one among many deaths in the lives of other people he didn’t know or couldn’t bear because he did know, and so in the deaths of other people whom still other people had known, until the bedroom was an ocean of remembered dead bodies more like the woman he loved than not. Even though she had died, her death no longer belonged to him or him to it. Before he could do or say anything, her death had become part of a greater reality and so less a part of his life, less life itself than an occurrence in life, not anybody’s death, but more like anybody’s than it was the death he anticipated while she was alive. Once she was dead he had to consort with others even if he had no concern for the outcome. What if after I’m dead, she had said, women have to be dying for you to get erect? He didn’t desert her corpse because he resented reality, though it unnerved him to observe reality’s idea of space and time so quickly restored before his eyes, the values restored of a reality he’d known and despised before she began dying. He had seen these values of time and space helpless in the face of human misery and understood them to be attributes that dramatized the vacuum in which life existed before the vacuum of death replaced it by the vacuum separating the corpse of the woman he loved in the bedroom from her mourners who filled the piano room and the kitchen and who used the bathroom one after another. Survivors crowded the balcony, two occupying the chaises noteworthy for their erotic theatre, a hefty thigh mercifully sliding across a blade of formidable ejaculate that had dried in the sun. He left when someone set a glass of whiskey on the piano, eyeing that someone with contempt, then with suspicion, until he bedded his sunglasses in his hair and waited for the mourner to remove the glass. He couldn’t nod his head in the direction of everyone, so he decided to leave, backing out of the apartment as others backed away from him, a few indicating his existence with a finger poised to shoot and ready to reload. He recognized someone, but couldn’t have cared less, possibly her mother whose umbilicus he’d seen the blackening nut of in the navel of the woman he loved after she died. Had he committed suicide immediately after her death, he would have witnessed none of it and wouldn’t have missed a thing.
He recognized nothing, not even nature, not its sky or its ocean, not its sun or its fowl. He might as well have seen nothing before in his life, bewildered under the curse of a sun along the threat of an ocean even though neither had ever existed before that instant. He expected an attack inside his body because he heard the word attack inside his ear and so wondered whether it was going to emanate from the heart or from the brain, but when nothing happened instead, he returned to the hotel, where he watched a whore douche and investigate one of her nostrils. When he closed his door he pressed his body into it as quickly as possible, then waited for the emptiness everywhere to settle, waiting with a whiskey on his chest and his eyes closed to meet an image of her corpse at the moment of death when he’d promised her to penetrate it with a finger. Only he knew the corpse for the body it had been even when it began emitting gases. If he concealed marks the woman and he imparted to her flesh, he did so because she was in no condition to speak for herself. In the end her death arrived when a crowd gathered, and what took place afterward meant nothing. Standing over her corpse for the last time, he belonged in the world because he wasn’t dead, and yet he had fallen in love to give up the world, and now the world served no purpose but the occasion for her death and his despair because of it. This was the source of his anonymity, and there could be no one else’s like it. He left the apartment as soon as it reminded him of everything he’d left behind to live in it, even to live in it as he nurtured the woman he loved to her death. The sun struck him like an accident of birth with either too much or too little meaning to abide. While she was dying he remained self-conscious that he wasn’t, but once she lay dead he was conscious that now he was free to live or die every day, which made him feel as if he could live forever. As soon as he woke in the hotel the day was over, as if it was always four in the afternoon, either too late or too early to do anything. Each morning he woke talking to a nameless someone, believing he overheard someone else doing the talking and within an hour, after coffee and a smoke and a shave, he’d wonder why and how he could have fallen for the idea that death meant something when he’d never believed that life meant something, or if life meant anything it could only be unearthed in nightmares or during insomnia. Mourning went on and on until everything he knew about everything disappeared, and solitude liberated him from plenitude. He’d never considered himself an object of scrutiny and didn’t intend to until the woman he loved died, until he departed her deathbed on the heels of her friends and family urging him to do so. He’d never scrutinized himself because he never thought of himself as a self until he was looked at by others as something other than he believed he was, until mourners observed him as someone the woman he loved had had to accept for who he was, one of the reasons he’d fallen in love with her. After her death he was nothing other than self, then self-conscious self, then wherever he walked or sat or stood he was a self sitting, standing, or walking in or out of the sun or moon during day or during night before the ocean and under the sky and on the earth. He walked, talked to himself, in his insomnia drank and smoked night and day until clouds of tobacco reinvented the room, and because it was the rainy season the smell of tobacco and whiskey concealed the odor of semen and when not semen the odor of disinfectant that saved the hotel from becoming uninhabitable. When not these phenomena, he experienced exhaustion in the face of nothing. He rode the ferry across the bay, then made certain that his wife’s car was nowhere to be seen. The path to the door of the house swarmed with hornets eight feet in the air, a black balloon he skirted by hiking through the privet and crushing his wife’s flower bed. A neighbor repairing chicken wire on top of the low wall separating his property from theirs studied him as if he were a felon. To irritate him further he remarked the aesthesis of the wire and the broken glass surrounding it. At the door he trembled to unleash whatever waited behind it and once inside immediately approached a window to assure himself that every inside had an outside, each trap a means of escape. From a front window watching the street, then a rear window overseeing the garden, he acknowledged an external world by pressing the glass until the moisture of his fingers appeared before they disappeared. Room after room appeared lifeless as clothes scattered when he entered, drawers mindlessly leaning in his direction, a wet towel noticing his arrival from the back of a chair, but still no taps dripped when he sought them out. He searched then for cobwebs in high places, pinched dust between his fingers in low ones, and scoured for vermin that for months had invaded to save themselves from the drought of the century. With a caravan of ants from kitchen to porch to garden, the house seemed happy, but for the mice, without anyone in it. Buckets of incendiary wine that he had left in one corner or another hadn’t been replaced for weeks, and so in each hundreds of dead flying creatures bobbed belly up, leaving no stench until he tossed the contents onto a mountain of compost at the bottom of the garden. While he had lived in this house he often interrogated himself in a voice other than his own, often surprised by the replies he gave to questions he asked, noting often that he ought to have thought of something more completely before he said anything