Nothing Lasts Forever. Robert Steiner
reiterates that the next occasion or the next minute or the next bowl of soup or the next sentence or the next kiss might be her last. When her conviction leads to nothing it leads to everything immediately afterward, and it’s then that she’s afraid to do anything, including think, other than lie on the floor or lie in bed or lie on the chaise staring silently at the man who loves her, who’s going to remember her until remembering her comprises the madness of his despair decades later. She tells him that she can conceive of eternity as long as there’s nothing to it all the time and it lacks the curse of memory, lacks the curse of witnessing his future without her. Who would believe that I loved you? Who would believe that I accepted you for who you are? Who would believe that you loved me every moment I was dying? The lovers occupy a world abandoned by everyone who’s going to go on living, and since they understand the venality of going on living, they wait for death to emerge in the apartment, not arrive from somewhere else, but abandon its hiding place where it’s witnessed everything they believed nobody witnessed. Among last moments last words and last thoughts until she’s taking her last breath, death emerging from somewhere in the room so that she isn’t only dying, she’s at the end of dying, and then she’s dead and there isn’t any more dying to do until he’s doing it alone decades later, remembering that she was able to do it. Death, the apartment, you, she tells him at the poignant finale to masturbating under the sun as if she’s been masturbating with the sky in mind, masturbating so that the sky, the sun, the ocean could watch her do it. The lovers foresee the end and the way of the end without needing to share sentences or glances about it. In the chaos of dying, formless days and nights disintegrate the world she no longer understands or desires. Her suffering is endless, its contradictions insoluble, the barbaric truth that only death resolves, dying an outrage that playing piano forever or ejaculating forever could not assuage.
Spontaneity at last! she cries, forcing the nude man she loves to his elbows and knees so that he resembles a large hairy dog. After she dies he’ll be the arbiter of her past, and of his present memory the expert. Anointing herself with tea tree oil, she approaches the large dog from behind and inserts her hand inside it slowly and carefully, but with determination, then follows the hand with her wrist and her wrist with half her forearm until there’s nowhere to go and little arm left to go there. Her death is going to empty him and exaggerate the burdens of time and space, slowing time to a crawl, diminishing space to a suitcase. He’ll live out of a suitcase while he walks life as if he’s walking underwater, and once the woman he loves exists only in his memory, she’ll exist underwater with him, but more mercifully than she does while dying, and her lover more mercifully than while he’s a dog on a floor, her despoiled lover in agony. Once she’s arrived at a curve in the road of his rectum she adjusts her hand, turning with the clock before turning against it and so discovering a terse meaty walnut under her thumb. His unreliable memory will impose decades of silence immediately after her death even though now and here on the marble floor neither of them would believe that he would only exhibit his memory of her dying and death after expunging everything that could be called his life, even though neither of them now and here would believe it on the marble floor where they are dizzy and trembling and overcome by the intimacy of her arm invading him. She’s never loved him as much as she does this instant, prolonging the instant by massaging his rectum with her fingers, the same strong fingers she uses at the piano or against one of his erections until together they envision a lifetime of her arm inside of him as easily as they envision her playing piano for another fifty years. Only when he pleads with her not to recall her arm does she begin to recover it, pausing to admire the glistening forearm, the wrist and the small hard hand with each knuckle raw and red extracted cautiously so as not turn his anus inside out. If she weren’t dying she wouldn’t have done it and so after doing it, it reminds her of death even as it reminds her that they know no limit to each other’s minds or bodies. Before she did it, she didn’t intend it, but she didn’t have a doubt in her mind that she desired to do it, and while she did it she enjoyed it, and then once she withdrew her arm and wrist and hand there wasn’t a doubt that she should have done it. While they watch his penis ejaculate a puddle between his thighs she licks her hand, the fingers attached to them, the space between the fingers. Their intimacy effaces everyone they’ve ever known, and so they fall into each other as she’s falling into death and he’s falling into the image of her death before falling into the despair of an unreliable memory the instant she dies. They cling to each other on the floor because no matter what they do, the catastrophe never stops arriving. Unable to cease thinking of her condition, she’s admitting that death is on its way more fiercely than ever—her hand inside her lover further proof that there’s no going back. They don’t speak of death often anymore because the miasma of it is all around them whether in bed, on the balcony, at the piano, over the bowl in the bathroom. A smell surrounds them even in the bathtub where she soaks and he sponges her, an odor of dying that permeates dreams so that her unconscious faces death along with her conscious, the dreamer with the dream, the pianist the masturbator, until it’s obvious that her death is going to leave images of her person strewn everywhere because she’s been busy being human. My death is going to be a massacre, she says curled into her lover’s lap. Aware that all the voices and images and music and memories of her lifetime are going to succumb at the same instant in the same place, she’s inconsolable at the debasement death defines. Death penetrates every space all day and night wherever she’s looking for anything but death, then it penetrates every moment that she’s looking at anything anytime she’s looking even when there’s only death to stare at. She wants to know firmly what the man she loves intends to do to her corpse, wants to contemplate before she’s dead what’s going to happen to it after she’s dead since she’s going to miss whatever it is when the time comes. What are the chances of an erection? she asks the inert organ with her lips grazing the sleepy collar of it. No more pussyfooting, she says as he pours a first whiskey of the morning. I’ve given you everything you could ever want, she says while he’s urgently pouring a second whiskey of the morning. The ravager of her corpse he considers an anonymous intruder, but that’s because she isn’t yet a corpse and so he thinks of the violation as a nonevent by a nonbeing of another nonbeing, but this too is because she isn’t yet the corpse he’s expected to violate. He places her on her back across his thighs while sitting at the edge of the armchair so that she can watch while he manipulates her, her legs dangling over his knees, her head cradled against his arm. He watches blood fill her cheeks and scalp as soon as he touches her. There’s no hurry, they’ve got all day and nowhere to be, no sleep to achieve, nothing to discuss since they’ve stopped discussing life as well as death, stopped discussing her flesh or his flesh. He takes his time and she takes hers, watching his eyes until she closes hers knowing he’ll watch her locked lids where the lashes have vanished and above them where her eyebrows have vanished and above them the hair she’s possessed since she was a child with a lifetime of long hair ahead of her—it, too, vanished. He continues taking his time because they have nothing but time, incessant time if not an infinity of it, if an infinity of it exists, whatever infinity actually is going to be once she’s a part of it. She hums softly whatever she would be playing at the piano were she playing it instead of being massaged and manipulated and penetrated, humming more to herself than to him while his fingers suggest one thing or imply another from which she infers something else. Responding with a primordial sound that interrupts her melody, she hints at another idea he identifies, and then something new occurs to her body as if by magic, followed by something else not new but out of order and therefore made new as if by magic. When she stops humming she’s concentrating on stripping herself of thought until she’s oblivious to anything other than becoming nothing but sensation, not knowing who it is she’s biting on the arm so that her lover, too, is oblivious and without thought. Blood rushes to her neck and face and scalp like the blood of someone who isn’t about to die because no one arched across her lover’s thighs and so curled as a half moon in her lover’s arms is about to die, no one whose veins and arteries are pounding from scalp to seam is about to die. Sharing the aroma of his fingers, they look into each other’s eyes as if it’s the first time or the last time they’re looking into each other’s eyes. Like that, she whispers, after it’s over just like that. They immerse into sensation and despair because she drapes her nudity across his knees over and over day after day, rehearsing the instant after her death since she’ll miss it, but convinced that it’s going to happen