Nothing Lasts Forever. Robert Steiner
a pit in a plum so that she feels herself dying from inside out, outraged by the agony of not being able to pull death out of her the way she or her lover can pull ejaculate out of her in the aftermath of their behavior. Walking through the darkness of one room after another, touching keys of the piano as he glances at marked scores, he measures the life she’s created since there’s no time for her to create more of it, only time to understand how the impossible became possible until it became inevitable. It’s impossible that others are dying while she’s dying, but if others are, then what are their lovers doing that he isn’t? In a bathrobe on the balcony he ignites the flame of his lighter before watching sunrise annihilate the horizon.
I should have done this years ago, she remarks regarding day after night nude in a bed in the middle of a room. Nude and hairless from scalp to ankle she announces that she’s surviving another night, but she dreads the dawn in front of her in case it’s going to be her last. Sun is ominous, after which moon, as both remind her of her catastrophe day and night over and over, day out day in. She relinquishes the distinction between sun and moon once that between death and life is as negligible as it is incomprehensible, though her death becomes more comprehensible than her life. But for her lover, the nearer she is to death the more incomprehensible the world that’s going to outlive her, the one in which he’s already been condemned to live without her, and he looks to her like a condemned man as surely as she’s a condemned woman when he looks at her. She can see in his eyes that he’s looking at a condemned woman when he looks at her and then averts his eyes because he can’t continue to behold the dying woman he loves. For you dying is going to be endless, she tells him cleaning his ear with her tongue, as endless as living without me. He kisses her neck because the more he can’t bear to imagine her dead the more he imagines her dead. While she’s cleaning his other ear he wants to know what the chairs and the bed and the piano, let alone a sky and an ocean, are doing here and what are they supposed to do without her and what is he supposed to do with them without her? The end of her world corrupts everybody’s world for him so that when he complains of it she kisses him as if for the first time or for the last time because he’s admitting that the world is going to go on after the woman he loves dies, that after she dies there will be a world outside the apartment, below the balcony, on the beach across the street. When he can no longer hold the thought of the world he plumps her nipples with his lips, though her breasts are nothing now but blue-veined skin. Sunlight gives her belly the glow of wet peach while under the moon her throat and pelvis and buttocks are cool marble to touch. When she arches the small of her back, trying to bleed into his body or to escape the madness of his ardor, the image informs the dreams of her that he’ll undergo night after night after she dies, dreams that drive him to an insomnia of despair to save him from the nightmare of his ardor. He sees nothing of her in the darkness of the bedroom at night and so knows his lover by her smell, then by the taste of her, until he realizes that he’s remembering her taste and smell at the instant of waking from a dream and that the dream has been a dream of her after death, though she still lies beside him breathing, but darker than the night beside him and as invisible to him as death. He touches her to prove that she exists, wondering if he’s going to touch her after she doesn’t and how he’s going to touch her and for how long? Nude day and night silent and still or playing piano or holding him to her, she’s the absolute object of his desire, exuding the mystery of dying and the authority of death that no one who isn’t dying or dead can possess. Her hairless scalp exhibits her authority, the scalp that’s been concealed all her life by auburn hair bleached in summer sun, and her ravaged body bears witness to the mystery she’s become until the transparency of her condition makes her irresistible whether he’s in his armchair with a whiskey and a smoke or nude in bed disturbing her space or her silence, disturbing her transparent authority. When she wakes she trembles between who she’s been since birth and who she’s going to be the day she dies as if day after day her unconscious has been preparing her consciousness for death, a trembling that comes as close to expressing what it is to be dying as she can share without speaking and as close to sharing her estrangement from the world inside the mystery of dying. Trembling in the arms of the man she loves, she shares her terror unashamedly, exhibiting her suffering as she exhibits her nudity until he’s as exhausted by his desire for her to live as by the ordeal of watching her die. Since he isn’t dying he’s living more intensely than ever before, consumed by the idea of death. When not treating the dying woman he loves, he thinks of nothing but death, daydreaming her death and asleep at night his nightmares are landscapes of death—hers, his own, everyone he knows, everyone he doesn’t know. Each day witnesses the erosion of her person, and so each day he dreads the shattering and the scattering of pieces of her and the dissolution into sand of those pieces that he’s going to see night and day for years and years. He knows as she knows that he’ll live this experience of loving her and losing her for years and years, but he doesn’t and she doesn’t know that he’s going to live it for decades and decades because his life will fail over and over day after day once she isn’t in it. Inhaling whiskey from the glass of it in his hand, he confesses that eventually he’ll be free of the world by losing everything around him that matters, whatever is going to matter after she dies. Her illness afflicts him when he shaves at the mirror each morning or each night or in the afternoon, if he shaves two or three times in the day or two or three times at night. When he shaves he addresses lather in the mirror, pointing his razor at the cigarette fixed to the lather’s teeth and then speaks to the smoke rising into the eyes his eyes reflect, wondering how the reflection can bear the pain the smoke causes until it closes one of its eyes. He informs the unidentifiable reflection with the cigarette and the suffering eye that if it drinks enough whiskey it doesn’t mind stepping on a cockroach with a bare foot. Afterward sipping whiskey while sunlight shakes the ocean, he overhears the woman he loves in the bed in the bedroom saying, I’m here, I’m still here, here I am. At night when he smokes on the balcony, sipping whiskey across from hotels and apartments where no one is dead or dying because no one else can be doing what she’s doing while she’s doing it and where traffic below him howls like wolves against the laughter, conversation, and music, he thinks, she’s here, then, she’s still here, then, she’s going to stay here, even when he knows she’s not. To soothe her pain he applies lotion to her back and buttocks so that she can fall asleep even though she doesn’t want to miss anything and so doesn’t fall asleep. Looking at each other under lamplight hours inside the dangerous dark’s insomnia, she lies on her hip, hands flattened between a cheek and a pillow, while he sits knee over knee in the armchair with his arm resting on the rest for his arm though by dawn he’ll sit with a leg over the armrest when it’s become a legrest too. They don’t blink as they watch each other since lately she blinks the way she breathes, barely breathing and barely blinking out of respect for the breath she’s losing, then out of respect for blindness at the instant of her death. Because she’s lying on the hip nearest her heart, he watches the hollow under her ribcage empty and fill as if she’s concealing emptiness under the skin, as if there’s nothing left to protect her under her skin against the death inside her, the pit in the plum. They listen to each other breathe, looking at each other do it because neither can stop thinking, not about the nightmares they’re missing in their insomnia, not about dying and death, which create the nightmares, not about being apart forever without having an idea of what that means since they have no idea of forever. Together they can’t stop thinking of another sunrise that carries death or doesn’t one more day or not. Your eyes are going to bleed, she says more than once any given night, watching him watch her inside their insomnia that begins to seem the insomnia of young lovers who don’t sleep because they can’t bear the separation from each other. He’s witless with terror, but can’t open his mouth in front of anyone anywhere in case he won’t close it ever again even though he couldn’t uncover words to speak the unspeakable. They imagine a future in which she doesn’t die and they live to discuss her nudity and their obsessions when they believed she was going to die. He asks her if she’ll remain nude in bed and perpetually provocative once she learns that she’s going to live. He asks if she’s going to love him in spite of living or if his presence will remind her of thinking she was going to die. Will their obsessions appear to her disgusting because she’s going to outlive them? Would she want him dead instead of her because he knows of her depravities when she thought she was going to die? Could she become a religious fanatic? Will survival shame her until she reviles him for doing to her body what