Nothing Lasts Forever. Robert Steiner

to throw what he said at his face. Why say anything except what she wants to hear since it’s also what he wants to say and all that he wants to say, but when he tells her everything he thinks she wants to hear she replies that he could only say those things with his hands around her throat. Whenever she vomits he assumes the end has begun, but he assumes it too if she wets the bed in her sleep, assumes it even more if she wets the bed awake, and then he suddenly thinks of things he should have been saying that he hasn’t, things he might have said if she weren’t dying with his hands around her throat. Anytime anything emerges from an orifice without warning, he assumes death isn’t lurking around a corner or on the other side of a door but has walked into the room with conviction, and so he cleans her immediately because he doesn’t want her believing the same thing, though they both know she’s a bomb with a timer. He places large towels around every orifice so that if she vomits or defecates or urinates he can remove the evidence without disturbing her sleep, without adding shame to her death or burying her in self-consciousness the way he’s buried in it because he’s the only human being in the apartment who isn’t dying. Once he wipes her after an accident, after her pre-conscious fails to waken her, she wakes later as if from a bad dream though sometimes remembers it as a good one. Thoughts and words disappear whenever he thinks she’s about to die, but no sooner does he feel speechless than he has nothing on his mind to say anyhow and so his silence doesn’t matter. After so much talk and so many exercises in desire, at the end there’s only going to be silence and stillness, the arrival in the bedroom after her death of a room full of nothing and an exercise in living with nothing. He spoons broth between her lips, then watches bewildered as she makes her way to the floor, nearly falling from the bed to do it before announcing that she’s decided to crawl everywhere she wants to go, crawling first to the balcony, then to the bathtub, where with his care she showers after crawling onto the bowl, and then she crawls to her piano and onto the piano chair so that she can play nude and emaciate something he knows he should know but doesn’t, then doesn’t need to know because she knows even though once she dies no one will know what it was she played at the end. She begins crawling incessantly whether at midnight or during afternoon sun or at the edge of the cocktail hour, when she crawls to the balustrade of the balcony to expose her nudity to the traffic below. She enjoys crawling since it offers the world newly to her eyes—new horizon, a new earth beneath—and then she’s certain he can’t resist the sight of her body slithering across the floor lathered in oil and gathering dust. Whenever she’s able to stand on the balcony by herself, looking below at the world she’s going to lose sooner rather than later, he observes her from inside the apartment as she slips from sunlight to shadow and back again, moving inside dappled light, he tells her afterward. He observes deep hollows that once were dimples, thighs that have withered until he can see the ocean between them, and tiny fists that dying has made of every vertebra under the skin of her back. Because she’s dying she’s indifferent to the eyes of others while she looks at the street below unless she imagines others enjoying her nudity and then enjoying her ejaculations that soak the mattress of the chaise. Imagining that, she enthuses. Soon she sits in the chaise in the sunlight waiting for her mushroom hat and to hear the tolling of ice cubes in her lover’s first, second or third whiskey of the day. The lovers behave like anyone else, if not everyone, drinking and talking, remarking of the sky its sun, of the ocean its fish and the fowl that devour them, then of bathers and tourists going and coming until she’s suddenly overcome with fatigue or onrushing fate or an urge to ejaculate and so he carries her inside like in the movies, she remarks. She stops talking because she’s thinking, then of her thinking she says that she’s grateful she won’t have to watch his destruction since there’s never going to be anyone like her in his life because there hasn’t been before and he’s lived long enough that if there were another like her they’d have already met and then she’d be dying alone and unloved, with no one’s hands around her throat and no one to humiliate herself in front of.

      The longer the woman he loves lies or crawls nude, dying and touched only by the man she loves, the less she regards human time and space. He can move her nudity anywhere anytime and from there, and then he can move her nude to or from the piano and from or to the bathroom day or night, moving her to watch her gain a tan, play piano, bathe, encourage her to evacuate her bowels, or steady her below the horizon of the bowl as she vomits. She remains the same dying woman he loves in one place or another at any time or any other, as emaciated, erotic, and restless here or there as now and then. Under these dire circumstances he’s convinced he knows her body better than he knows his own because hers is dying and his isn’t. The deeper their intimacy, the more his memories of her will be memories of dying and its repetitions, memories of who she was while she was dying, memories of who he became while she was dying—she died and he became who he will have been since. Dying identifies the essence of their love, and since their love identifies the essential experience of his life, his despair will be as indifferent to time and to space as is her dying. One day they have nothing more to say concerning life before she began to die, nothing more to recognize after recognizing that nothing they knew before she began dying has been anything other than possible lives each of them might have lived, but didn’t. Now that she’s dying they don’t question the content of their lives or reflect on who they are or what they were or who they’d be if she weren’t dying. After she dies she won’t be anyone anymore and he won’t be anyone to anyone else. They experience everything they’ll ever know of each other, being everything they’ll ever be to each other, being everything they’ll ever be to anyone, being everything he’ll ever be to anyone else. It’s inhumane to be human—discuss, says the woman he loves during lightning, thunder, and curtains of rain that infuse insomniacs with perilous thought and depraved acts. While he can still adore the woman he loves nude, gleaming and skeletal day after day, night after night, his memory will reflect the afterglow of his adoration, translating his obsession with her body into a lifetime of despair after she’s dead. He can’t know in what context he’s going to remember her decades later because something always comes after something else and then the next thing arrives again and again until memory despairs of telling the truth because it despairs of having witnessed it. When he remembers he’ll remember what he needs to remember unless in despair he also remembers what he needs to forget. From the moment he touches her nudity, loving her can only ruin him, as from the moment she admits him to the apartment in her undone dragon kimono her existence invites despair as far as his eyes will ever see. Each time he sees the glowing nudity of the dying woman he loves, everything he’s going to do after her death his future is going to undo. He drinks whiskey day and night because the burden of watching her die is unbearable, but since it’s unbearable he’s never drunk, viewing her performance of dying as a virtue he lacks. As horrible as her dreams of death have been, she’s suddenly begun dreaming of life so that once she wakes she believes for several seconds that dying has only been a nightmare. Once she remembers who she is and where and why because she sees the man she loves, she’s dizzy and vomitous, her heart aching until it closes like a fist. Once it’s over, she says, find out what’s different inside, extending her finger to his nose to remind him of her smell while she isn’t dead. Overlooking the beach, he says that tomorrow or the next day something monstrous is going to rise from the ocean floor, bite off their heads, and disappear under the waves. She walks to him with the confidence of the woman she was before starting to die, with the grace of the artist entering a stage in search of a piano, but now nude and hairless under her mushroom hat and behind sunglasses the size and color of oranges. He sees her enter a stage nude and hairless, sporting sunglasses and a mushroom hat, then she plays hairless and nude for thousands in an audience. When he recites the scene to her, she urges him not to forget it, and he doesn’t so that decades later he’ll remember it in order to recite it. She straddles him, confessing that it’s impossible not to think of a future because human beings spend their lives thinking of one, if not several, thinking more of the future than of the present, but since she’s dying she has to crush thoughts of a happy life with him under her heel by crushing thoughts of even an unhappy life with him. I can’t find a way to think of myself, she admits. Lying in his arms as he lies in hers, she wonders if it’s still a scalp he’s massaging when there isn’t hair on it. Later she walks toward him as steadily as she did before she began to die, each bare foot crossing in front of the other, her hips in symmetry, her back upright, her arms swinging into darkness out of light so that the shadow of her body approaches