Nothing Lasts Forever. Robert Steiner
die the next. Nude day after day she confounds death even if at times he fears that the acts they commit because she’s nude and lascivious are going to kill her. Watching her sleep, he often fears she’s already dead. Sipping whiskey and smoking in a bedside armchair with a book broken-backed across his knee, he fears that sleep prepares her for death At the inconceivable instant of her death there will be nothing left but to examine her corpse inch over inch in an unfathomable anatomy lesson because of a momentary event that will haunt the rest of his life. Dead she’s going to be breathless and sleepless and present in the room, absent to him and to the world, but more physically imposing than when she was alive. While she sleeps he wants her to sleep, but he wants to see her eyes, wants to see her eyes seeing his as they watch her and then wants to watch her wake to prove that she hasn’t died in her sleep. Once she dies he’s going to look away until he can’t resist her nude corpse because he’s memorized her flesh by smell and touch and taste and so he’s going to take the inside and the outside of it with him from the apartment when finally he leaves her corpse behind and quietly closes the door. Everything they do with each other as with everything they say or don’t say they say or do or don’t do in the chaos of dying and the context of death. After she dies when he drinks whiskey or shaves or reads or has sexual relations he’s going to do it in despair because as she was dying everything he did he did to possess her dying body absolutely. When he’s alone he obsesses about his life after her death, but when he’s with her he obsesses about her death because she’s always dying in front of him. Not a day or night comes before going that she isn’t dying in front of him. No matter what they say or do or overhear from the street or from inside the radio, eventually his thoughts turn to the day the woman he loves is going to die and then to the day after she dies when she’s already been dead for a day and then when she’s going to be dead for a week. While he coaxes an excretion from her rectum with an oiled finger she tells him he’s going to be shocked that the world doesn’t end when she does, going to be shocked when he forgets her face unless he’s holding a photograph of it and then he’ll be shocked that loving her has made other people’s lives incomprehensible. It’s possible, she tells him, inhaling the finger he’s removed from her anus, that my death will make you odious. He adores not only her flesh, but also everything he’s never seen of her—bone, muscle, sinew, viscera. He wants to memorize the hollows and curves of her body outside and inside just as he’s memorizing the smell of her on his finger. She urges him to drink a whiskey and sip a smoke before doing what he’s going to do to her, so he steps to the balcony overlooking a world that doesn’t remind him of death though suddenly no matter what he sees or imagines he infers loss and despair from it. She enjoys confessing her desires, savoring words he’s never heard in her voice because she’s never spoken them, and so he shares his darkest desires with her until she considers herself a madwoman in the dream of a madman. Even dying won’t spare her the impulses of the man she loves and the woman she’s become. Death encourages them because no matter what they do he’ll be the only witness left alive and so she wants him to memorize the consequences of what he’s doing while he’s doing it. No matter what they do they look into each other’s eyes in order to conceal nothing since concealing nothing has become the only reality they have the time to invent. She tells him he’s got the rest of his life to ask questions and the rest of what should have been hers to answer them. They begin to experience sunlight and moonlight differently from when she believed that death wasn’t around the corner though around the corner every day and every night she was defying death like everyone else, including the man she loves. When he thinks in front of a mirror, then in front of it talks about his thinking, reminding the reflection that it’s not going to disappear when the woman he loves dies, the mirror wonders at his expression after he survives her, asks what face he’ll possess the first time he observes it after her death, when he and his reflection are left alone with each other for the rest of his life. Inside the radio there’s a violin and a cello awaiting a piano while in the bedroom the dying woman undergoes sensations that remind her skin of the cello, of the violin, of the suspense of the piano. You went crazy in my nightmare, she tells him after waking from one, so you must be even crazier in your own. When he feels for fever and there isn’t one, she takes the hand from her forehead and uses it to massage her belly because dying has reduced her to pain, darkness, madness, music. Watching the ceiling fan, she’s sickened by pain and then by pleasure and then sickened because they come to an end, reminding her of death until the man she loves overwhelms her fear by reminding her of life. He retrieves towels bathed in vinegar to ease the aftermath of their behavior. If death is in this room, she asks, where’s eternity? She craves daylight because she’s going to see something instead of thinking about what she won’t be seeing ever again as soon as she dies. In daylight the world’s a visible landscape of loss, but night dramatizes the terror that absolutely nothing is on its way and then absolutely nothing arrives later if not sooner, in her case sooner. Night evokes a future of nothing until every night breeds the dread of nothing and so the desire for everything. Their hands massage her belly and thighs while they wait for her headache and its nausea to pass in the aftermath of their behavior. The closer she is to death, the closer they are to each other because they won’t have to remain close forever. She assures herself that he can withstand her death even though it doesn’t console her that despair is going to be what consoles him. In its darkest heart her death obliterates the need for him to love her the way she’d expect to be loved if she were going to live another fifty years. He’s the ideal lover because he aspires to nothing outside his imagination, an imagination that desires the woman he loves and so desires to gratify her since in his despair after she’s dead he’ll do nothing but suffer his absent desire and lost gratification until he desires nothing and nothing gratifies him until only nothing gratifies him. While they make love she hoods her eyelids so that her eyes get used to seeing nothing because they’ll see nothing forever, however long that turns out to be. Then after ejaculating she stops breathing as if ejaculating takes her breath away, but instead she’s getting ready to cease breathing for as long as it takes to never breathe again, to be breathless forever. While he holds a whiskey and a smoke he thinks he’s watching her sleep even though she doesn’t move a muscle and doesn’t breathe because she wants to imagine how being a corpse would feel if it could be felt and then wants to imagine how she’ll look to her lover once she becomes it. Eyes closed, motionless, breathless, she rehearses what it’s going to be like to be her corpse, inventing for her lover what he’s going to witness an instant after she dies. Breathless, blind, and still as a rock she imitates death like a child in bed at night, but the child does it because death is inconceivable even if it happens. The dying woman he loves is imitating childhood as if a mind full of it might save her. He whispers her name not once, but three times, each more urgently than the time before until she coughs to prove that she’s alive. Overhearing ice cubes bump in his whiskey, she opens her eyes, surveys the ceiling, its fan, the fan’s revolutions before announcing that she wants him to violate her corpse before dressing it and turning it over to her family. She invites him to give thought to how he wants to ravage it as soon as she’s dead. He leans into her pelvis and ribcage to kiss them, then he kisses her thighs and then her swollen labia. When he retreats to the armchair to sip whiskey and smoke in the direction of her dying wish, she confesses that the image of him invading her eternal unconsciousness makes her swoon. He can’t take his eyes from her and then can’t remove his hands because his is the last human touch of what has become her catastrophic beauty. She needs her passion to last until the instant before her death and then she needs it to go on and on inside the man she loves afterward. He interrupts smoking and drinking to moisten her scalp and face with a cool wet cloth, then cools her entire body because he feels the heat of it in his hand from her skull to her seam. She isn’t who she’s been, but she’s all that she’s ever going to be and who she’s become is the woman he’ll always remember desiring and so he wants her to live forever. Were she not dying, her nature might remain buried in the wreckage of life lived one minute after the next as it will be lived by everyone not dying when she does, as her lover’s life will be lived because he’s going to survive her. As soon as she realizes he’s beside her in the blackest moments of night she remarks that like the struggle for love the struggle to live ends in bed. Before dawn she not only looks like someone who’s dying, but like someone who’s always been dying because she looks like someone who knows that she’s dying. His reflection in the mirror could go on forever being that of a lover