Nothing Lasts Forever. Robert Steiner

      Leaning on the piano, her kimono undone, she invites him to pour a drink and so he studies the glass for clouds. She plays, he finds a bedroom and beyond it a balcony watching an ocean, then a beach pocked like the moon, and afterward he sees the same sky he saw from the room with the whiskey and the piano she’s playing, the same high blue void he’s going to search for menace day after day until the end. From the balcony he finds sunbathers enduring futility. She gives him time, playing until she doesn’t want to play and doesn’t want to give him any more time. The woman waits for the end of one whiskey and the start of another before she undoes a scarf concealing her scalp the color of dry vermouth. Then she lets the kimono drop so that he sees her as she desires him to see her, an act of undraping the first among moments he considers absolute because she’s hairless and macerated. When they embrace he feels only tissue and bone, and when he caresses the veneer of skin across her head he feels her fate in veins pulsing along his fingers. He cradles her naked scalp until she’s lying across the bed, whispering in her afflicted voice to the ceiling. He undresses, but doesn’t recognize himself and he can’t identify the odor of his clothes on the armchair. While she talks he smells her body from bare scalp to smooth seam because everything is happening for the first time. Inviting street sounds that a minute before didn’t exist, the world intends another sunset, but taxi horns, brake cries, a stray bongo, even the breathing of the woman he loves he doesn’t recognize as sounds he’s heard before. A radio somewhere sounds like no other radio and then the face of the woman he loves doesn’t resemble hers until she wakes because he’s studying her and then she hugs his knee with her knee until they remember everything about each other. She’s as pale as the ocean and her eyes are darker and larger than any eyes he’s ever seen because they have no lashes and above the missing lashes they have no brows. No sooner is she awake than she’s asleep and while she sleeps he collects shadows in the room now that agony and terror are sitting on chairs all around it. Hours later night falls harder than a drunk from a bench. He kisses her skin whenever she moves and then he kisses her skin because she stops moving, watching her because death is watching her and in the darkness he senses death doing it. He watches her face and her body to make certain she hasn’t died and then he watches her because the death to come is going to be her death, not his, but he can’t comprehend that his body and face will continue to exist after hers have ceased. She’s going to disappear from the space beside him and then from the world, but he’s not going to disappear even though after she dies he’s going to want nothing else but to disappear once the world isn’t the world he’s known since knowing her. They don’t touch or speak because they’d speak about not seeing and not touching if they did, about silence, stillness and darkness, about her imminent death all night because everything is happening for the first time if not for the last time. He kisses her throat, her belly, her thigh at the first suspicion of another sunrise when they begin to touch and speak even if they speak of separating forever and so of losing each other forever, becoming nothing to each other. They reflect on nothing as the sun rises because nothing new rises for her to fear. They speak of separating forever while they’re touching, not suffused in conceiving what becoming nothing is going to mean as soon as she dies. They investigate the absence not only of each other, but of everybody and everything else and eventually of the loss of himself to himself because of her disappearance. Nothing’s going to last forever, she says watching him in an armchair sipping whiskey, smoking and listening to her afflicted voice address the ceiling, the ceiling’s revolving fan, the fan’s melody. They look, they listen, she speaks of death and dissolution, of her death and of his dissolution because of it. In daylight they don’t think about not seeing and not touching because a world touches and sees them whether they like it or not, so they wait breathlessly for daylight even though it can deliver catastrophe as convincingly as it delivers sea birds and fish and sun lovers to a reality on the other side of the shutters. In darkness with a bed in the middle the space between their bodies silences them because it’s an unbearable space evoking eternal separation and the nothing eternity and separation evoke no matter who lives or dies or when and where they do it. They close the space without touching until their sensation of each other terrifies them over and over. If silence didn’t silence them and darkness didn’t conceal their shadows they would touch and speak as if they could speak and touch forever. Every day that he wakes he wakes obsessed with her mortality, then tries to console himself by considering his own. Because she loves him she isn’t consoled by the reality that one day he too is going to die, instructing him not to turn her death into his tragedy. They suffer the self-consciousness of being alive in different ways even though she confesses that being conscious has always taken a lot out of her. She doesn’t expect anything from death except nothing, but she’s going to miss how the world changes without her in it, she says, rummaging among her lover’s genitals on the bed in the middle of the room in the early morning light. The lovers will gradually obliterate the world as they know it, obliterating everyone they’ve ever known who isn’t them until they know only what they mean to each other and then only because she’s dying. Since her life is coming to an end she knows what he means to it, but he can’t know what she means to his because

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