erect, she’s moist, moist and erect and depraved not because of the imagery they invent and the behavior the imagery invites, but because they conceive a future in which she survives and he escapes despair and together they live to relive and remember their intimacy and the madness that’s created it inside the imminence of her death. After defecating she inclines her back so that her lover can clean her, neither of them knowing if it’s the last time she’s going to bend or walk or sit or stand in her lifetime and so when she fastens her hands to her ankles he knows what she expects and does it in case this too he’s doing for the last time. Afflicted with existence and the dread of nonexistence she measures her days and nights mourning the loss of her, exhorting her lover to explore what losing her is going to mean when she no longer splays or bends or purchases her ankles with her hands. She grieves first one day and night, then the next night and the next day all day every day or all night every night, and when not grieving she desires, sometimes too ill to do anything but desire desire. She considers every open door or shutter or window the threshold of death toward which her lover is forcing her the way a kidnap victim is forced into the dark silent trunk of a stolen vehicle, but when he closes them one after another, the window and door and shutter, she accuses him of driving her insane by succumbing to her fear. Every instant of their days and nights opens onto nightmares or daydreams of death or a dream of eternity, revealing a truth of her suffering that becomes untruth an instant later. Until she dies he isn’t free to empty himself of everything in the world, and so he imagines eternity as he views a blinding ocean surface or struggles on a beach against a bed of needle-grass or Pisonia thorns, and prowling streets he’s shocked that crowds of bathers in bikinis aren’t tearing out their hair. As soon as he returns to the apartment he describes to the woman he loves the salacious beauty of her flesh and skeleton as she wrestles his inescapable seduction, her obtrusive hipbones, in particular, something to behold in the palms of his hands. Why are we only mindless now that I’m dying? If she were told that she was cured, she says, she might not be able to survive the news because then she’d anguish waiting to go through it all again. Each daylight reveals the reality of her unreality until sunrise and sunset contrive to kill her, and yet if the man she loves attempts to conceal dawn or twilight she accuses him of reminding her that she’s dying.
It doesn’t make it easier if you pretend the world isn’t wonderful, she tells him. It’s one of those sunrises when they cry before sex and then wait hours for her to evacuate her bowels before having sex again because her bowels have emptied. She studies her body in a mirror sloped against a wall, admiring how her skin welts the color of rubies and raisins while her lover licks her wounds inside the reflection. Twisting a fistful of his hair to avenge herself because she’s sacrificing her life to the world that he’s inheriting from her, she views him on his knees where her flesh buries his face and adores his humiliation because she’s going to die in front of him. Before and after they touch or talk of touching she talks of infinity as if it’s a consequence of her ejaculations as much as it is of her death.
You drink, but aren’t drunk, she remarks enjoying the stupor of his sobriety when she speaks because it tells her that he’ll never love anyone enough to massage and bathe and wipe and bind and torture outside and inside, never love another woman to death.
My sweet butcher, she calls him while he’s standing at the foot of the bed, weeping with a whiskey in one hand and a smoke in the other because she’s dying and he isn’t, and she wonders how soon he’ll get drunk on her death.
Stick a finger up me, she says and he does. Later he retrieves a hand mirror, a compact, and a bullet of lipstick
in case today’s the day, she says, then after humanizing what she calls the ragged skin of her face, she hands him the mirror so that she can analyze her labia.
Lipstick the things, she insists after viewing them. Whiskey, smokes, the balcony during a muggy dawn, the blind whisper of incoming tide—the lovers face a world not yet visible unless fog is a future, and so they imagine that they’re going to live forever. She swallows an ounce of his drink, usurps a smoke, and wishes she had something to leave him beside bad dreams, but wants him to know, in case she dies before sunrise, how much she enjoys his expression as he masturbates against her body to say nothing of his expression as he masturbates her. He succumbs to a delirium greater than when he was falling in love with her and never stops wanting her because she never stops wanting him to want her. Since her flesh is vanishing before his eyes he always wants to caress it, and when he isn’t caressing it he misses caressing it and wants to possess what’s left of it forever, though it isn’t the same flesh he fell in love with, but dying flesh soon to be beyond desire and beyond desiring. When he touches it he imagines his touch will keep it alive or disbelieves that he could desire dying flesh, but after satisfying their desires over and over he knows that he can’t keep it alive by desiring or caressing it and so he’s holding in his arms what’s soon to be lifeless, then cadaverous, then rotting and buried or burned. If he didn’t love her as much as he does by now, dying would have made her completely unlovable to everyone she’s known.
They couldn’t wait to be rid of me, she speculates,
and I’d rather die than know them another minute. The lovers address death lucidly with disinterest whenever she feels more intelligent than desperate because addressing it keeps it at bay in their minds as if death were a piece of music waiting to be scored for her to play in order to feel it or to make others feel it.
You need a drink, she says after evacuating her bowels into the bedpan.
How are my stools? she asks while he walks them away. Her body is steamier than the earth as he poses it on the chaise in the agony of high blue noon.
When I was still alive, she says,
good behavior wore me out until all I wanted to do was sleep so that I could be bad in my dreams. I never need to go shopping again, she realizes, or make plans for the weekend, and I don’t have to rehearse, and I don’t have to vomit before I perform. The more the world isn’t hers the more she remembers it as overwhelming and tedious and burdensome, though it was none of them when she lived as if she would live forever. Dressing for death, she considers her nudity as whenever he lays hands on her with tea tree oil. He massages her throat and shoulders as she wonders if an eternity of nothing makes sense or are nothing and eternity apples and oranges though both are fruit? Expecting to die any minute every day all day makes her lunatic and so he massages her sternum and ribs and belly, careful to avoid the navel that reminds her she has a mother, even more now since the knot at the end of the rope has swelled as if it could burst her skin. He moves her flesh over her bones, making it crawl or stretch or collapsing it or punishing it for waiting to feel nothing. As if death has already arrived, everything she thinks and does is in a sentence containing the word death or one of its legions. For him death doesn’t arrive because it isn’t his and so everything he thinks and does is in a sentence containing the word despair and all of its legions all the time, everywhere. She’s dying, but then she’ll be dead, and he’s going to suffer despair until he dies too, knowing for decades what to expect from dying though nothing so much as an end to despair. No matter how long they wait under sun or moon, drinking and smoking and urinating and massaging her thighs, nothing in the room changes because the only change is going to be her death and the despair that replaces his dread.
The fleshy underside of my thigh, she informs him,
you pay so much attention to it that you’re going to blubber into your drink after I’m dead. Think of my thigh and then unzip yourself. Now take down your trousers and lean over, I need to stop thinking. He watches the mist of a gray beach in the foreground of a gray ocean while the woman he loves investigates him, thinking that even the mist and the color gray are nothing like they were before she began dying. He wants nothing for the rest of his life but a finger inside her all day and night every night and every day. She places his hand without the drink in it around her throat and tells him to squeeze, then to squeeze harder, then to squeeze until he thinks she’s never looked more desirable. Silent while he ejaculates inside her he thinks that this is the last time he’ll ejaculate inside her, but whenever he ejaculates inside her or outside her he assumes it’s the last time, then decides that as long as he believes it’s the last time it can’t be or won’t be if only because he’s believed it. He doesn’t live like anyone she’s known, she reminds him, and once she dies he’ll live even less like anyone she’s known. She took him as her lover because he didn’t remind her of anyone, but she didn’t know she would be dying sooner rather than later. When he kisses her forehead he sees dark half moons holding up her eyes and so he kisses their darkness, then kisses her lips because he knows she’s seen the dark half moons too. He hasn’t said to her all that he wants to say because much of what he wants to say he wants
