Читать книгу Nothing Lasts Forever - Robert Steiner - Страница 6

INTO THE GREEN OCEAN DEEP

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 he isn’t dying and all he knows for certain is that he can’t explain a minute of living before he fell in love with her. Embracing him in the aura of death, her desire isn’t the desire she possessed before she began dying and the acts she desires aren’t the acts she’d desire if she were going to live and then because she isn’t going to go on living he desires every inch of her inside and out for as long as she exists. No one will ever know what we’re going to do, she insists, unless you display my body after I’m dead. Intending to remain nude and accessible until she dies, the lovers admire her nudity all day every day, but never more than when she’s glistening in tea tree oil under his fingers because they don’t believe that she could ejaculate one minute and die the next. Nude day after day she confounds death even if at times he fears that the acts they commit because she’s nude and lascivious are going to kill her. Watching her sleep, he often fears she’s already dead. Sipping whiskey and smoking in a bedside armchair with a book broken-backed across his knee, he fears that sleep prepares her for death At the inconceivable instant of her death there will be nothing left but to examine her corpse inch over inch in an unfathomable anatomy lesson because of a momentary event that will haunt the rest of his life. Dead she’s going to be breathless and sleepless and present in the room, absent to him and to the world, but more physically imposing than when she was alive. While she sleeps he wants her to sleep, but he wants to see her eyes, wants to see her eyes seeing his as they watch her and then wants to watch her wake to prove that she hasn’t died in her sleep. Once she dies he’s going to look away until he can’t resist her nude corpse because he’s memorized her flesh by smell and touch and taste and so he’s going to take the inside and the outside of it with him from the apartment when finally he leaves her corpse behind and quietly closes the door. Everything they do with each other as with everything they say or don’t say they say or do or don’t do in the chaos of dying and the context of death. After she dies when he drinks whiskey or shaves or reads or has sexual relations he’s going to do it in despair because as she was dying everything he did he did to possess her dying body absolutely. When he’s alone he obsesses about his life after her death, but when he’s with her he obsesses about her death because she’s always dying in front of him. Not a day or night comes before going that she isn’t dying in front of him. No matter what they say or do or overhear from the street or from inside the radio, eventually his thoughts turn to the day the woman he loves is going to die and then to the day after she dies when she’s already been dead for a day and then when she’s going to be dead for a week. While he coaxes an excretion from her rectum with an oiled finger she tells him he’s going to be shocked that the world doesn’t end when she does, going to be shocked when he forgets her face unless he’s holding a photograph of it and then he’ll be shocked that loving her has made other people’s lives incomprehensible. It’s possible, she tells him, inhaling the finger he’s removed from her anus, that my death will make you odious. He adores not only her flesh, but also everything he’s never seen of her—bone, muscle, sinew, viscera. He wants to memorize the hollows and curves of her body outside and inside just as he’s memorizing the smell of her on his finger. She urges him to drink a whiskey and sip a smoke before doing what he’s going to do to her, so he steps to the balcony overlooking a world that doesn’t remind him of death though suddenly no matter what he sees or imagines he infers loss and despair from it. She enjoys confessing her desires, savoring words he’s never heard in her voice because she’s never spoken them, and so he shares his darkest desires with her until she considers herself a madwoman in the dream of a madman. Even dying won’t spare her the impulses of the man she loves and the woman she’s become. Death encourages them because no matter what they do he’ll be the only witness left alive and so she wants him to memorize the consequences of what he’s doing while he’s doing it. No matter what they do they look into each other’s eyes in order to conceal nothing since concealing nothing has become the only reality they have the time to invent. She tells him he’s got the rest of his life to ask questions and the rest of what should have been hers to answer them. They begin to experience sunlight and moonlight differently from when she believed that death wasn’t around the corner though around the corner every day and every night she was defying death like everyone else, including the man she loves. When he thinks in front of a mirror, then in front of it talks about his thinking, reminding the reflection that it’s not going to disappear when the woman he loves dies, the mirror wonders at his expression after he survives her, asks what face he’ll possess the first time he observes it after her death, when he and his reflection are left alone with each other for the rest of his life. Inside the radio there’s a violin and a cello awaiting a piano while in the bedroom the dying woman undergoes sensations that remind her skin of the cello, of the violin, of the suspense of the piano. You went crazy in my nightmare, she tells him after waking from one, so you must be even crazier in your own. When he feels for fever and there isn’t one, she takes the hand from her forehead and uses it to massage her belly because dying has reduced her to pain, darkness, madness, music. Watching the ceiling fan, she’s sickened by pain and then by pleasure and then sickened because they come to an end, reminding her of death until the man she loves overwhelms her fear by reminding her of life. He retrieves towels bathed in vinegar to ease the aftermath of their behavior. If death is in this room, she asks, where’s eternity? She craves daylight because she’s going to see something instead of thinking about what she won’t be seeing ever again as soon as she dies. In daylight the world’s a visible landscape of loss, but night dramatizes the terror that absolutely nothing is on its way and then absolutely nothing arrives later if not sooner, in her case sooner. Night evokes a future of nothing until every night breeds the dread of nothing and so the desire for everything. Their hands massage her belly and thighs while they wait for her headache and its nausea to pass in the aftermath of their behavior. The closer she is to death, the closer they are to each other because they won’t have to remain close forever. She assures herself that he can withstand her death even though it doesn’t console her that despair is going to be what consoles him. In its darkest heart her death obliterates the need for him to love her the way she’d expect to be loved if she were going to live another fifty years. He’s the ideal lover because he aspires to nothing outside his imagination, an imagination that desires the woman he loves and so desires to gratify her since in his despair after she’s dead he’ll do nothing but suffer his absent desire and lost gratification until he desires nothing and nothing gratifies him until only nothing gratifies him. While they make love she hoods her eyelids so that her eyes get used to seeing nothing because they’ll see nothing forever, however long that turns out to be. Then after ejaculating she stops breathing as if ejaculating takes her breath away, but instead she’s getting ready to cease breathing for as long as it takes to never breathe again, to be breathless forever. While he holds a whiskey and a smoke he thinks he’s watching her sleep even though she doesn’t move a muscle and doesn’t breathe because she wants to imagine how being a corpse would feel if it could be felt and then wants to imagine how she’ll look to her lover once she becomes it. Eyes closed, motionless, breathless, she rehearses what it’s going to be like to be her corpse, inventing for her lover what he’s going to witness an instant after she dies. Breathless, blind, and still as a rock she imitates death like a child in bed at night, but the child does it because death is inconceivable even if it happens. The dying woman he loves is imitating childhood as if a mind full of it might save her. He whispers her name not once, but three times, each more urgently than the time before until she coughs to prove that she’s alive. Overhearing ice cubes bump in his whiskey, she opens her eyes, surveys the ceiling, its fan, the fan’s revolutions before announcing that she wants him to violate her corpse before dressing it and turning it over to her family. She invites him to give thought to how he wants to ravage it as soon as she’s dead. He leans into her pelvis and ribcage to kiss them, then he kisses her thighs and then her swollen labia. When he retreats to the armchair to sip whiskey and smoke in the direction of her dying wish, she confesses that the image of him invading her eternal unconsciousness makes her swoon. He can’t take his eyes from her and then can’t remove his hands because his is the last human touch of what has become her catastrophic beauty. She needs her passion to last until the instant before her death and then she needs it to go on and on inside the man she loves afterward. He interrupts smoking and drinking to moisten her scalp and face with a cool wet cloth, then cools her entire body because he feels the heat of it in his hand from her skull to her seam. She isn’t who she’s been, but she’s all that she’s ever going to be and who she’s become is the woman he’ll always remember desiring and so he wants her to live forever. Were she not dying, her nature might remain buried in the wreckage of life lived one minute after the next as it will be lived by everyone not dying when she does, as her lover’s life will be lived because he’s going to survive her. As soon as she realizes he’s beside her in the blackest moments of night she remarks that like the struggle for love the struggle to live ends in bed. Before dawn she not only looks like someone who’s dying, but like someone who’s always been dying because she looks like someone who knows that she’s dying. His reflection in the mirror could go on forever being that of a lover whose lover knows she’s dying because it expects nothing of anything, looks like nothing or anything. The woman he loves lies inside her death like 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 he’s doing? They talk for hours and hours night after night during their insomnia until they eroticize the world again and again—he’s 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 to say because she’s dying. If she weren’t dying he would have less to say and would be wary of saying it in case she lived another fifty years 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 him. She looks healthy and therefore cured, placing her open hand with its long fingers across his chest in a gesture of intimacy between lovers who aren’t dying. I forbid you to use my death as an excuse, she says, but says nothing else and nothing more. She wants a whiskey with him because she’s going to bake on the balcony without her mushroom hat. She wants a tan without lines, a deep tan with no remorse, and so she’s inviting tropical sunshine to suck the life out of her. The woman he loves says that by now she must have become a rumor in the neighborhood, that the silence around her means people are whispering—no visits, no phone calls, no letters, no postcards. She remembers how she used to think and behave when someone was dying and now can’t believe that that’s how people she’s known for years and years are behaving and thinking because of her. It’s why I only allow you into my bedroom, she says, let alone into my cavities. He discovers one short colorless pubic hair while exploring her seam with his tongue, so he plucks it between his teeth, then shows it to her on the tip of his finger. The tip of one of her fingers accepts it from the tip of his and together they observe it as if it’s an archaeological find. To speak of her death or of her dying to anyone while she’s alive would be treason, so he speaks to no one about anything, and to do that he sees no one because her dying and death are the only themes of his nights and days since they’re the only themes of hers. Once she dies, the violent body will repose, the final monstrous transformation of dying into death. It will be her body, yet different, and different not only because it’s a corpse, but also because it’s going to resemble her and still be inexplicable, unknowable and unspeakable and still recognizable as the woman he loves. Disorder to fragments to ash, she reflects, squeezing his penis in her fist. If one day he speaks of her dying and death, he’ll have the last word regarding her life, her flesh, their love, disorder, fragments, and ash. Every act in the apartment thwarts death, but alludes to death, and then thoughts and acts precipitate death whatever happens wherever in the apartment they are and whenever they’re there. Birds, clouds, dragons, sunsets, tides—all embody death when she observes them until she believes that she’s been bending toward an early end from its beginning at her birth. Everything occurs for her at the threshold of death while for him nothing occurs but witnessing her at the threshold. She prepares to be an object like all other objects in the world and then nothing other than an object in the memory of the man who loves her. She’s going to die once, but in his mind she’s dying all day, all night, day after night and night after day, nude and sunlit and moonlit, lit by fever and skin tan and ardor. She slithers on her belly before arching her spine to negotiate steps to the balcony, then nestles against the chair at the piano where eventually she plays with her back to him, revealing wounded flesh from her buttocks to the wide wings of her scapulas. When they crawl together in the grit and dust of the cold floor, he’s aware of sinking as if the floor’s giving way and then that she’s sinking, and he imagines the earth’s horizon after she dies. Because she’s sinking she’s fondling him and then he’s sinking with her in silence, unaware of anything but sensations inside and outside. They’re nothing but what they make of each other so that by the time they reach the balcony they’re inundated with sweat and saliva and an absolute need that they share more than the dread and terror they share day after day. The instant she dies: death, the apartment, himself, his reflection. An instant later she’s going to have been dead for an instant and immediately begins being dead forever until he won’t be able to think of her as ever having intended to remain alive. When they see themselves together in the ornate body mirror in the bedroom he sees them lubricious in love, but when he sees himself alone shaving or rinsing soap from his face she might as well be dead. Faced with nothing but death, sleep is out of the question since it imagines her survival night after night, shocking her morning after morning with the mortality on its way or inside her, a pit in a plum. They prefer the relentless irrevocable insomnia that keeps her alive the way it keeps suicides alive because as long as there’s thinking, even dark mean thinking, everything is still possible and nothing is not. If she’s going to invite sleep, she might as well bite cyanide or inhale an oven. They stand in front of the mirror that’s hundreds of years old, that’s watched dozens of owners die, enjoying the immortality reflections evoke, each lover irresistible to the other’s image. Their reflections appear to them portraits or photographs expressing a suspicion of lurid tragedy as if the dreamer of their dreams has emerged in daylight to pose with them for a camera or a painter. She watches him insert a finger into her image and admits that, until now, life has never humiliated her and so all that’s left but humiliation is watching what he’s doing now and watching what he’ll do later. The more she tries to prepare for nonexistence the less she’s prepared for the last experience of her life, for the last day of it, the last hour of the last day of the last experience. Watching his reflection penetrate hers several feet away, she exists because her image exists and then sees how her passion appears until she’s blinded by the onset of her climax, but then so is her reflection. She watches her reflection swoon, blinded by its climax until she can’t watch anymore because of her own. I don’t trust death, she suggests at high noon, nude but for sunglasses on the chaise on the balcony. Not the way I trust ejaculation. Anything can happen in death, adding to her fear the fear of outliving it, whatever and however and wherever outliving death means, making the most of her terror that death is something to survive, that dying teaches how to live formless and speechless, hopelessly unfeeling forever, here but not, now but not, just not nowhere forever. She hasn’t lived expecting to die the way her lover has, one of the reasons he’s the man she’s going to die in front of. Her translucent skin represents dying as the presentiment of the reflection death will make of her as if she could awaken after death inside the mirror without a human original on the other side looking back. If he thought he could view her reflection after her death he might not despair, but the idea makes him want to disappear inside her body in case from there he could save her from death or from inside the mirror save her reflection after her death. After her death he can never know others as he’s known her, then never know others in order to know himself since he knows himself because of her. Living with her absence for the rest of his life, he’s going to disappear inside a desire for what doesn’t exist. She continues dying, slithering across the floor to do it, eventually evacuating her bladder or bowels wherever whenever and then ejaculating before ejaculating again whenever wherever with him or without him, then ejaculating him until there’s no ejaculate left inside anyone inside the apartment where she’s dying. If she’s not thinking about dying day and night, she’s talking of it night and day, interrupting her thought with her talk while the man she loves drinks whiskey, smokes, and imagines the end of the world that only they survive. He would destroy the world to save the life of the woman he loves. She slithers to the piano to play until her head aches because she’s playing or because of the chords of the composition she’s playing, but one after another, composers vanish from her repertoire because her fingers can’t play them or she can’t remember them. The man she loves observes her lift the knobs of her hips with the knobs of her wrists as she ascends her piano chair even though dying has made her weightless until each orifice from mouth and nostrils to vagina and anus have grown immense by contrast the way her eyes and ears are immense, so that as she ascends to the horizon of the keyboard her body is nothing but dark entrances and exits, wide and swollen tunnels to her organs and viscera. He memorizes them—ways into her, ways out—not once thinking that if in he’d want out. Being other than myself, she defines death as while she thinks and talks about it, playing music that evokes it or its melancholy. She advises from the piano that soon she’s going to masturbate to interrupt her thoughts of death unless her thoughts of death are inspiring her to masturbate the way they inspire her to masturbate her lover. No matter what she does, she’s convinced that she’s doing it for the last time and so he studies her in case he can discern an instant or an expression or a posture in which her sense of an ending overcomes the ecstasy intended to expunge it, whether at the piano or evacuating her bowels or splayed across the wide bed in the middle of the room. He has expected day and night, sometimes hour after hour, that the hour or day or night might be her last, and now that she expects it too, he admits to himself that he’s expected it from the moment he arrived at her apartment, when she unwound the blue dragon scarf from her head and undraped the blue dragon kimono. He has to remember that his fate isn’t hers, and so he can’t know when the world of the living is going to fall away from her forever or that when she observes the sky she doesn’t watch it rise out of sight since time has turned into forever, never and forever while the sky is always only a sky menacing him with her death, though he has no reason to believe that her death resides in it. Once she’s convinced she’s doing everything for the last time when it isn’t the last time for anything, the reprieve 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 to her then as it happens now again and again since she’s found what she desires after death. What happens next? she’s been thinking. Will what happens next create what will happen after? she’s been thinking. What happens when what happens next comes to an end? Now she knows. Because something always happens next, she’s still alive and so sensation envelops them day and night instead of the chaos of dying and the idea of death. Her life has been coming to an end all the time she’s been doing other things, expecting to do other things for years and years without having to die. Bathing under her mushroom hat while he’s burdened by a whiskey that separates him from a virulent sun, she says that at just this instant she heard the words “my demise” in her mind, having never before thought the word “demise” in regard to what’s happening to her, nor has she had other synonyms for death surface, but now, because of “demise,” they will. Has the word “demise” occurred to you, she asks the man she loves, as in the thought that I’m meeting my demise at the hands of my lover? Sparrows interrupt, swooping as they bank against a wall of sky that holds them hostage inside the heat of the day. The man she loves who loves her back more each day in case each is the last knocks back what’s left of his whiskey before rising to speculate on another. Interrogating the apartment, he views a bottle hiding inside a mirror’s interpretation of the bathroom, so he sees if the mirror has gotten the bathroom right when he turns right before left before turning a circle. He explains to his reflection that he can’t bring her death to its knees, uplifting a full glass since everyone in the room concurs. He walks his whiskey back to the nude woman, concluding that her nudity has driven him mad and then that her dying nudity has driven him to value madness. His madness clarifies for her the humiliation, embarrassment, abjection, and incompetence of dying. Her heart sinks because he implies committing suicide after the thrall of ravaging her dead body, a ravaging that gives her something to look forward to. She wants him to want her after her death. How can he commit suicide if willing to wipe fecal residue from between her buttocks? How can he commit suicide when then he kisses the space between the clean buttocks and kisses the clean buttocks themselves inch after inch before discovering a wen the size of a nickel in the crease of a cheek? Each day he tends the wen, squeezing it of infection before disinfecting it, and after it’s healed days and days later he forgets it until he decides decades later that he’s going to violate the privacy of the woman he loved by revealing it to an unsuspecting indifferent world. No one commits suicide just because mirrors tell the truth, she tells him. Everything private reeks of his memory of her dying because his memory unearths everything that no one should know after she’s dead. Not able to endure life, but after death a likeness of it, she says to him concerning the contempt in his idea of suicide, a studied phrase that announces the beginning of the end of her tragedy, to her an infolding tragedy from now on, no longer a tragedy that’s been unfolding between them. He can’t abandon her anymore after death than he could abandon her now, even if rooms are filling with shadows and smells that feel and appear as if there are ghosts walking the apartment, but ghosts are only the presentiments of memory until sunlight on the balcony where she lies nude isn’t like sunlight anymore and then her nudity isn’t like nudity anymore. Despite their conspiracy to stop death at the door, at shutters and at windows, arrest even its reflection inside mirrors and on the surfaces of furniture, including the surface of the glossy black piano, including the surfaces of whiskey glasses he offers up to the sun or to the moon, dying remains the burden of life all day every day. There’s nothing else and nothing more. No matter how much pain or pleasure she undertakes to escape or memorialize the arrogance of death, she’s not of this life anymore, and because of it he’s not who he’s been until now. The woman he loves closes in on death as it closes in on her when every day repeats an altered world in an altered apartment, an apartment and a world altered by the daily repetition of the monstrosity of dying and the madness that accompanies it. He admires her dying as he admires her nudity from across the room or across from him on the balcony or slithering on the floor or outstretched on her bed as if she wants to conceive a child with him. Then he admires her in his arms and admires her when she takes him in her arms until as deeply as he loves her and covets every orifice and covets her viscera he doesn’t understand her anymore. Then he admires the pitiless misunderstanding she evokes nude and dying in front of him all day and night every night after every day, admiring her impersonation of the woman he loves, her impersonation of being in love and passionate the way only a living being with a future can be those things. When he collapses at her feet and surrounds her legs with his arms, everything possible becomes forever impossible, and together they conclude that everything for them has always been impossible, never more than when together they believed everything possible. Dying and enraptured, she’s never not dying, and because he can’t bring death to its knees, he’s never not on his knees in front of her. For decades in his despair and solitude she’s going to do nothing inside his memory and dreams but continue to die enraptured and yet estranged by rapture. While she’s dying she’s not of this world anymore, and after she’s dead he’s going to carry her unimaginable death wherever he goes, and he’s going to go everywhere, living from a suitcase one long day before one long night. On his knees at her feet he surrounds her legs with his arms, burying his face where she separates the folds of her skin—how each imagines remembering the other after the end of time. Burying his face in her body, he falls after never having thought of falling before, but suddenly he falls because everything is always going to be impossible once she’s dead. Once he’s suffused by the impossibility of life after she dies, time stops, space narrows, narrowing even his vision and his breathing, and so he buries his face against her to inhale the smell of her dying flesh because it isn’t yet dead flesh, because buried inside the smell of her thighs and the odor from her seam he feels that she isn’t dead, that the time of her dying has ceased and that space is the space of her living body. The madness ensuing from the experience of her dying becomes the madness that she isn’t dying so long as his face buries inside her. No experiences anymore during the vigil of the catastrophe because everything everywhere derives from death. There’s only the ensuing madness that she cannot die with his face buried inside her. He watches from the horizon of his whiskey and the smoke clouding it once she’s no longer present as the woman he loves, but as an indecipherable presence that invites madness, an absolute he doesn’t comprehend but for sounds the piano produces under her fingers, fingers that seem to remember being human and when they do she’s nearly human in every respect. When he looks at her nude and suffering at the piano night and day he observes nothing other than suffering and nudity and music, observes what remains of an artist dying in Capricorn. She could walk down the street or along the beach without anyone knowing that she’s losing her life, but everyone who sees her couldn’t fail to notice if she’d lost an arm or a leg or both legs or both arms or all four limbs. Her person vanishes unremarked in the world despite the sun on the balcony, and on the balcony while the sun undergoes twilight, the universe looks as if something important could still occur, the moon possibly. The lovers sense the sense of her ending that they could almost point to on the horizon or high in the menacing sky at the rising of the moon. The man she loves looks up from his whiskey and smoke to watch her depart—her gaunt face, her swollen labia, her shrunken breasts, and the rest of her anatomy and the rest of the adjectives that accompany it all go somewhere else, somewhere he can’t fathom because he’s not dying. He stands apart from her sharing her awareness that she no longer inhabits a reality the rest of the world does whether they know it or not, understand it or not, like it or not. The rest of the world awaits its fate, but hers has arrived and so the worst is over. The horizon slices daylight in half until he can see death in everything of the moment—sunset, sunset’s ocean, nudity, nudity’s meaning, until he’s punished for not being blind. When coming to an end comes to an end, only the dead exit, and the woman he loves has begun to look dead.

On the balcony the idea that anything can happen at any time becomes the idea that everything that can happen happens, but not all at once. Time repeats dying until dying is timeless the way nudity is space instead of time, the way passion, sunrise, sunset repeat until dying is death with a heartbeat—a stateless timeless nonexistence. A bus accident would have avoided this, she says. Studying blood in her urine as it sinks to the bottom of the bowl that he holds under her, she and her lover lace fingers with all the strength she can impose on him without crushing his hand or spilling the urine with the blood running through it. They wallow in whiskey while she invades his lap and abducts his smoke on the balcony. I should have been drinking since I was born, she decides, like you. Instead she’s left with putting her faith in death because she’s mortal and death is the only thing mortals can’t doubt unless they’ve put their faith in whiskey. Like you. She’s more dead than alive since she’s been dying for too long, and he no longer wants to witness it because he can’t face his reflection without shame, ashamed of his shame because he could face her death better if he were drunk, but because she’s dying he remains as sober as a corpse. Not only is her body dying, the woman he loves is dying inside of it, giving her existence to the emptiness she’s becoming. She examines the consequences to her body not only of dying, but of their passion over and over, sharing with him what she sees or remembering from her reflection in the mirror one moment of pleasure or pain or pain and pleasure one after the other. Because of her fierce nudity, the sun, the ocean, the blue high absence into which they gaze is flush with nothing and with nothing’s power over everything. Because the woman he loves is here and not here at the same time, now and not now in the same place, the sky can’t appear more abandoned, the ocean more vacant, both full of nothing’s infinite possibilities before she becomes fragments of tooth and bone in a can of ashes. All things perceptible change except for the dying that doesn’t want to change the more she wants it to end even though it is, in timeless measure, going to end in order to change the world her lover inherits from her. All things change except her dying, but all changes repeat imagining, desiring, and fearing the instant of her death, repeat that as long as she’s dying she hasn’t died, then once she dies she becomes dead and then dead forever, and so they remain conscious of the idea of her death until they identify it with a can of ashes and teeth and the shavings of her skeletal bark. Without being dead her estrangement from the world brings the lovers together as minds dying and not dying, then as the dying mind and the living one, irreducible lovers who learn to look at each other as living and dying, to him an unbearable eloquence as poignant as her hairless marked nudity in the moonlight. With the obsession of a paranoid for his paranoia he’s convinced that she can’t comprehend her interior life anymore than he can because she considers herself already among the dead when she considers herself anything at all. She’s among the dead because he’s going to remain among the living. In silence and stillness she stares at him because he’s going to go on living, to her as unfathomable as her death is to him. She’s not only coming to nothing, she has to continue as nothing as if nothing could be called her destiny, her destiny to become an image in her lover’s memory. Holding her as if he’s already holding the corpse, her image in his arms has begun to outlive her, the origin of the memory that outlives the dead even before they’re dead and buried or burned. If living had a purpose, she tells him, I’d know it by now. While they sip whiskey and smoke she confesses that she loves him because he’s irreparably damaged and therefore can endure anything. Afterward she lies on the chaise silent and distracted, preferring his irresistible curse to hers since he’s going to despair all day every day unless it’s night and his insomnia endures the curse of his despair. Between the curses of despair and insomnia, suicide is out of the question, possibly death too or possibly dying before being dead, possibly his curse in despair and insomnia will be to think and dream until he falls to his knees the way he falls to his lover’s knees in search of her redemptive flesh. Neither lover assumes it’s their last conversation because it occurs like any other—death displaced by annunciations of love and mindless pleasure. Then they hear sullen noises inside the radio, from music to suffering refugees and then, too, more smokes and more whiskey that displace death and love until he displaces everything everywhere by lacing his fingers in tea tree oil and approaching her exposed body. He touches it to keep it living and touches it because it’s going to die. My body is ruined, she says, announcing that she’s had her last climax, remarking that now she knows why she’s always hated the word “climax.” She’s embarrassed and then ashamed that at the last minute she wants more out of death than nothing, that she wants nothing to be more than nothing or nothing to be the nothing the man she loves conveys by living his life the way he lives it. She admits betraying herself at the last minute, losing courage and will and knowledge to her fear of death. Baffled by the tawdry fear of leaving the world, she wants the man she loves to bear witness to the malevolent helplessness of her dying. Now her nudity means nothing, but without the possibilities nothing had come to mean, though thirty years later her nudity is going to consume her lover’s solitude and despair and insomnia until his past is his reality, and so her nudity of thirty years before becomes absolute nudity as it becomes absolutely everything to him. He’s consumed by the thought of her because he didn’t die when she died. From the apartment to his hotel not a soul knows that the woman he loves is dying. Walking until he wanders, finding a beach sunbathers bathe on, then an ocean waiting to drown someone, he views white sails on sail boats from one end of the bay to the other, then lantana and bostryx that crest the beach, and at the horizon a cruise ship bearing down on everyone in its way. On the beach everyone beautiful has no idea that the woman he loves lies dying because they’d be ashamed to be beautiful bathing under the sun on a beach watching an ocean busy being beautiful. Between cabbage palms and witchweed he sees a striped legless slither out of the afternoon heat. Until he does it he doesn’t know he’s prowling the beach, not strolling it, doesn’t realize that he’s searching for something in the dizzying tropical sunshine. As soon as he finds other people’s nudity, he turns away repulsed, and once he surprises a gathering of young lovers, he surprises another and then another. When he observes the tight hem of a bathing suit pinch the thighs of a pubescent girl full of nothing but future, he uncovers a world of women who aren’t dying, none of whom he loves, but if not why not, why not them instead of the dying woman he does? Breathless when he reaches the hotel he hears his footfalls like a jealous man with a gun. Tenants in the hotel are on edge when he walks by, including whores going to work the streets or coming back after doing so, even coming back with clients to their rooms, who also seem on edge when he walks by. Silent Mi Dom, the madam, brushes his wet arm with the skin of hers. When she does he feels like removing his sunglasses, but who knows where that could lead and so he doesn’t. The instant he closes the door to his room he leans the weight of his back against it as if a mob might be on its way. He finds the desk where it belongs, the fan fanning a breeze it invents for the occasion, his beaten suitcase cowering in a corner, beaten but unbowed. He decides that once the woman he loves dies, he’s going to live in this room for the rest of his life. From brass bed to desk to balcony, from chairs and tables of bamboo and straw, from his crushed raffia hat hooked behind the door to the linen cream trousers bent by a hanger in the wardrobe, this room suits him as a place in which to lose himself forever. Above a creamy white sink he rinses sweat from his face and neck and shoulders over and over until he prefers to shower and shave and so shaves and showers within earshot of a radio forty years old, of mahogany and ivory knobs. He overhears speeches from Jakarta and Hanoi while he lathers left and right and over and under until his expression buries itself in a mountain of soft soap. Before he lights up he knocks back a half glass of whiskey, then matches the smoke in the middle of his face so that behind his sunglasses he can’t see who’s looking back at him since it’s the mourner naked and unrecognizable, the tenant needing to lose himself forever among refugees and teenaged streetwalkers. Because hotels are for strangers who live among strangers, unless he’s with the woman he loves, he searches for anything that reminds him of himself, but locating nothing he wears sunglasses outside and inside even after nipping a chunk of chin into the sink as if other people could recognize from his eyes that nothing reminds him of himself, then as if his reflection reflects it when he can’t look himself in the naked eye. He pours another whiskey and sets it on his stomach on the bed because he’s about to close his eyes, about to vanish behind their lids for hours without seeing the world around him, as if by doing that the world ceases to exist. For hours in the dark of his hotel room he overhears traffic and big voices laughing at nothing laughable, then a living trumpet down the street interrupting any sound that isn’t it, the invincible world more alive than ever assuming insidious relationships among sights and sounds and human beings outside and below his window. He intends to overlook the disturbances beneath him because they have nothing to do with his life, his life nothing to do with the world the way death has nothing to do with life, the way his lover’s death has nothing to do with his life, and so he hears his face crack the floor unless the floor cracks his face first. He doesn’t remember doing it, so he doesn’t know which hit which when, even though his memory of it wakes him before his memory sends him back into sleep comforted by the absence of memory and knowledge. As for the blood in his mouth, he doesn’t taste it until he sees it reflected in the bathroom mirror hours later, then sees above his eye a cut, then a cut above the lip too, and across his forehead and cheek prune blue flecks looking like a rash. Soon he’s going to find blood on the floor where he fell, which he wipes with the bottom of his bare foot. He thinks he’s like any other bleeding insomniac, but he expects to hear violence through the wall that separates his room from a roomful of whores, and then he’s grateful that he slept a dreamless sleep if apparently at cost to the expression on his face. If every night he underwent dreamless sleep instead of insomnia or dreams he would pay the toll his face has paid since he goes nowhere and sees no one anyhow who isn’t at death’s door or remorselessly corrupt. He brushes shattered glass and whiskey with another bare foot, the same foot he uses to crush cockroaches, and so before he pours another whiskey into another glass, he examines the sole of each foot for blood, glass, the husk of a roach, its innards. Though only the right side swells and bruises, his face heats up with whiskey and despondency, allies for decades. Now he has to endure himself as if he were enduring other people the way other people endure each other by learning to endure themselves too. He empties himself of ideas, wearing cream linen trousers and a vivid silk shirt when he buys whiskey and smokes because no matter what he finds at the apartment he’s going to need them. He’s imagined her death so often that he no longer imagines her corpse, but the disturbing quiet of the apartment that will pronounce the death of the woman he loves, a quiet that is going to tell him how she’s going to look once he walks from the doorway to the bed in the middle of the bedroom. In the kitchen while he tilts the bottle and bends into a dark whiskey, nobody needs to tell him that love is a slaughterhouse or that his memories are going to crawl through boneyards and crematoria in search of something when there’s nothing but nothing unless bone and ash and teeth are something. The woman he loves reminds him of death even when he arrives at her piano because suddenly he only knows her as little as he knows himself and there’s no time to know more of her though there’s too much time to know himself. He can’t bear the end of her life because he won’t know her anymore and must know himself better and better year after year in spite of knowing therefore despair and one drama after another regarding suicide or one of its legions. He leans into his whiskey because he’s been watching women walk one leg in front of another from place to place oblivious to the death down the street, and he’s said nothing about it to anyone he saw, nothing about losing the woman he loves to any other two-legged woman he might love or could have loved or should have. Forgetting everything but a suitcase, he’d moved to a hotel beside the bay where if a telephone rang the ring didn’t belong and a knock at the door meant trouble if not more trouble, whereloss embedded in love the way her piano’s roof concealed the deadly wires that made music. After she dies he’s going to see her nude and macerated everywhere and see himself reflected in everything everywhere, but he isn’t going to see himself as others see him or as she sees him after she’s dead. This is how it is when he enters the bedroom where the woman he loves lies tan, nude, still, her body cool to touch just as she preferred to be discovered when she sent him away. Death took the place of dying as soon as he closed his eyes at her bedside as he knew it would the moment he entered her apartment for the first time in order to see her macerated and nude day after day until she died, the thing she had just done while he was out. Once she died there was nothing more to say about dying, and in an instant he stopped thinking of anything to say because for weeks and weeks he hadn’t thought of anything but dying. Now it was as if weeks of dying had amounted to hallucinations, her end more disappearance than death, her death an unnatural event so long as his eyes remained closed. As soon as she wasn’t dying, dying became hallucinatory gestures that had ensued from hallucinatory thinking and the acts thereof. As soon as she wasn’t dying he no longer had to interpret anything of her body or mind, and so their intimacy mystified him because of the violence done to it as soon as she was dead. If he opened his eyes he would discover no reflection from her eyes, no light of recognition out of irises swollen and black. She had concluded the strangest instant of every human history because love, fear, sadness, failure, reason and the loss of it, and every other feature of human existence came to an end in an instant, an instant of which she experienced nothing. She died not knowing that she died even if she knew she was about to die the instant before, and because he wasn’t in the room he knew nothing. Waiting for weeks and weeks for her to die, when she died, neither of them knew anything of it, assuming that there was something to know, but without being there how could he conclude there was nothing or something at the instant of her death? Everyone dies without telling anyone because they don’t know that they’re going to die until they’re dead, and so they know even less than the witnesses to it, who behold death as the most devout act of intimacy of one human being for another even if there’s nothing to witness. If human endeavor achieved miracles over thousands of years of human history, the dying couldn’t care less, preferring that thousands of years of human history vanish on the spot if they could continue dying another day, then another hour, then last but not nothing another instant. People who are dying don’t need to know one more thing about the world of people who aren’t dying since they’ve spent their lives learning the world, but at the end it hasn’t spared them one measure of agony. All that the woman and her lover did with each other, as much as they loved and adored each other, didn’t spare her one measure of agony, him one of despair. He had expected to touch the woman he loved at the instant of her death, not knowing the instant of it, but expecting to touch her constantly at the end to be certain he experienced it whenever the instant occurred. Once he opened his eyes he began to watch her nudity for signs of life, observing her resemblance to the body of the woman he loved since he wasn’t in the room when she died, assuming she died. The longer he watched the more convinced he was that she had moved imperceptibly or had moved while he blinked or that she was about to move, in each instance certain that her body could give evidence that it hadn’t died and that it hadn’t already become the corpse of the woman he loved instead of the body of her. If it had become a corpse, he couldn’t have studied it inch by inch, scouring it first with his eyes, then with his fingertips, finally with both hands in the same motions he used to massage it or to give it pleasure or pain by rolling skin into bone or separating one fold from another or filling one orifice after another with something or some other. She must have moved or must be about to move because she had to move to prove to him that she hadn’t died while he was absent though not absent from his room at the whorehouse or absent from his reflection in his bathroom mirror at the whorehouse. He remarked to the woman he loved that he needed a whiskey, which came as no surprise to either of them, then he told her that since he needed a whiskey he’d need another one, and so he was going to retrieve the bottle from the kitchen and once he did that he’d need smokes too. He warned her that he was a man on a mission and left, talking to her in his absence loudly enough to be heard, but not too loud so as to alarm the sleeping patient or to wake the dead, eventually bringing a deep glass of whiskey to life before leaning into one of its brothers and returning. While whiskey and smokes watched him, he looked at her closely, relieved that he hadn’t missed a thing. His observations might have been endless and he might have studied her body for days, straightening a leg or uncrossing an arm or touching her fingers one after another, but he couldn’t understand why he would do it, though before her death he couldn’t imagine doing anything else because while he could imagine her dead, he couldn’t imagine her no longer present in the room with her body. As for the apartment, he regretted the piano and the mirror, having assumed that when she died they would disappear with her. Chairs full of mourning sat everywhere where once they were inhabited by terror and dread. Where were dread and terror now? Where was her agony? The bed possessed more personality than he remembered now that she was dead in it, though tables nearby less, and from then on everything everywhere inside and outside existed as before and after, ennobled by her death or estranged beyond recognition because of it. He had never asked the origins of two finely woven rugs or a drawing on a wall, and now that she was dead his ignorance perturbed him. He had neglected a music box because of his phobia regarding them, his fear that like all small machines they think. Above her body the wide wooden fan fanned as if nothing had happened to the room or its inhabitants, going on because going on over and over was the sum and purpose of its existence since like all small machines it could think its way through even the worst to befall a human being below it. Since his interest in everything everywhere in the room was as endless as his interest in the body of the woman he loved, he had to end it, but he could only justify an end when the room and then the apartment and then the view from the balcony all ceased to be familiar. She couldn’t have returned to this place then, and he couldn’t therefore wait to exit it. Once she no longer resided in it, the apartment meant nothing, though the abandoned piano perturbed him throughout a number of whiskeys. He smelled the chair, then felt it for ejaculate or the illusion of it, then sat on it, which he had never done before, poised above the keyboard as if waiting to play, and if he could have he’d have played it to remind himself that millions of people would continue to play piano despite the death of the woman he loved. Elsewhere he found a sliver of feces but swallowed it before thinking—he should have kept it instead. As for the woman he loved, her corpse wasn’t in disgrace even when he thought of it as a corpse for the first time, when the pronoun “it” replaced the pronoun “her,” then replaced “she,” until “it” was the only other pronoun in the apartment beside all those attached to him, or once the it of her corpse became more the it of chairs and tables and balconies and whiskey bottles. He dressed the corpse to look as if nothing had happened to the woman he loved until it resembled her so closely that a mourner couldn’t have told them apart. What pervaded the room, once he telephoned a sister, was the odor of disbelief, the odor described as one of dying or even death or of a corpse becoming a cadaver. Who arrived was a small paternal figure, an uncle in a pair of white shorts and a necktie and a safari hat as stiff as a sidewalk. Soon the apartment welcomed friends and family, even tenants of the building who used to avoid his eyes until they avoided his sunglasses, which he only wore because the friends and family and tenants avoided his eyes. He knew what they thought of him because he knew they knew what he thought of them and what they thought of the woman he loved because of him. Suddenly, therefore, the death belonged to others, and so it wasn’t the death he could bear that she knew he could bear, but one among many deaths in the lives of other people he didn’t know or couldn’t bear because he did know, and so in the deaths of other people whom still other people had known, until the bedroom was an ocean of remembered dead bodies more like the woman he loved than not. Even though she had died, her death no longer belonged to him or him to it. Before he could do or say anything, her death had become part of a greater reality and so less a part of his life, less life itself than an occurrence in life, not anybody’s death, but more like anybody’s than it was the death he anticipated while she was alive. Once she was dead he had to consort with others even if he had no concern for the outcome. What if after I’m dead, she had said, women have to be dying for you to get erect? He didn’t desert her corpse because he resented reality, though it unnerved him to observe reality’s idea of space and time so quickly restored before his eyes, the values restored of a reality he’d known and despised before she began dying. He had seen these values of time and space helpless in the face of human misery and understood them to be attributes that dramatized the vacuum in which life existed before the vacuum of death replaced it by the vacuum separating the corpse of the woman he loved in the bedroom from her mourners who filled the piano room and the kitchen and who used the bathroom one after another. Survivors crowded the balcony, two occupying the chaises noteworthy for their erotic theatre, a hefty thigh mercifully sliding across a blade of formidable ejaculate that had dried in the sun. He left when someone set a glass of whiskey on the piano, eyeing that someone with contempt, then with suspicion, until he bedded his sunglasses in his hair and waited for the mourner to remove the glass. He couldn’t nod his head in the direction of everyone, so he decided to leave, backing out of the apartment as others backed away from him, a few indicating his existence with a finger poised to shoot and ready to reload. He recognized someone, but couldn’t have cared less, possibly her mother whose umbilicus he’d seen the blackening nut of in the navel of the woman he loved after she died. Had he committed suicide immediately after her death, he would have witnessed none of it and wouldn’t have missed a thing.

He recognized nothing, not even nature, not its sky or its ocean, not its sun or its fowl. He might as well have seen nothing before in his life, bewildered under the curse of a sun along the threat of an ocean even though neither had ever existed before that instant. He expected an attack inside his body because he heard the word attack inside his ear and so wondered whether it was going to emanate from the heart or from the brain, but when nothing happened instead, he returned to the hotel, where he watched a whore douche and investigate one of her nostrils. When he closed his door he pressed his body into it as quickly as possible, then waited for the emptiness everywhere to settle, waiting with a whiskey on his chest and his eyes closed to meet an image of her corpse at the moment of death when he’d promised her to penetrate it with a finger. Only he knew the corpse for the body it had been even when it began emitting gases. If he concealed marks the woman and he imparted to her flesh, he did so because she was in no condition to speak for herself. In the end her death arrived when a crowd gathered, and what took place afterward meant nothing. Standing over her corpse for the last time, he belonged in the world because he wasn’t dead, and yet he had fallen in love to give up the world, and now the world served no purpose but the occasion for her death and his despair because of it. This was the source of his anonymity, and there could be no one else’s like it. He left the apartment as soon as it reminded him of everything he’d left behind to live in it, even to live in it as he nurtured the woman he loved to her death. The sun struck him like an accident of birth with either too much or too little meaning to abide. While she was dying he remained self-conscious that he wasn’t, but once she lay dead he was conscious that now he was free to live or die every day, which made him feel as if he could live forever. As soon as he woke in the hotel the day was over, as if it was always four in the afternoon, either too late or too early to do anything. Each morning he woke talking to a nameless someone, believing he overheard someone else doing the talking and within an hour, after coffee and a smoke and a shave, he’d wonder why and how he could have fallen for the idea that death meant something when he’d never believed that life meant something, or if life meant anything it could only be unearthed in nightmares or during insomnia. Mourning went on and on until everything he knew about everything disappeared, and solitude liberated him from plenitude. He’d never considered himself an object of scrutiny and didn’t intend to until the woman he loved died, until he departed her deathbed on the heels of her friends and family urging him to do so. He’d never scrutinized himself because he never thought of himself as a self until he was looked at by others as something other than he believed he was, until mourners observed him as someone the woman he loved had had to accept for who he was, one of the reasons he’d fallen in love with her. After her death he was nothing other than self, then self-conscious self, then wherever he walked or sat or stood he was a self sitting, standing, or walking in or out of the sun or moon during day or during night before the ocean and under the sky and on the earth. He walked, talked to himself, in his insomnia drank and smoked night and day until clouds of tobacco reinvented the room, and because it was the rainy season the smell of tobacco and whiskey concealed the odor of semen and when not semen the odor of disinfectant that saved the hotel from becoming uninhabitable. When not these phenomena, he experienced exhaustion in the face of nothing. He rode the ferry across the bay, then made certain that his wife’s car was nowhere to be seen. The path to the door of the house swarmed with hornets eight feet in the air, a black balloon he skirted by hiking through the privet and crushing his wife’s flower bed. A neighbor repairing chicken wire on top of the low wall separating his property from theirs studied him as if he were a felon. To irritate him further he remarked the aesthesis of the wire and the broken glass surrounding it. At the door he trembled to unleash whatever waited behind it and once inside immediately approached a window to assure himself that every inside had an outside, each trap a means of escape. From a front window watching the street, then a rear window overseeing the garden, he acknowledged an external world by pressing the glass until the moisture of his fingers appeared before they disappeared. Room after room appeared lifeless as clothes scattered when he entered, drawers mindlessly leaning in his direction, a wet towel noticing his arrival from the back of a chair, but still no taps dripped when he sought them out. He searched then for cobwebs in high places, pinched dust between his fingers in low ones, and scoured for vermin that for months had invaded to save themselves from the drought of the century. With a caravan of ants from kitchen to porch to garden, the house seemed happy, but for the mice, without anyone in it. Buckets of incendiary wine that he had left in one corner or another hadn’t been replaced for weeks, and so in each hundreds of dead flying creatures bobbed belly up, leaving no stench until he tossed the contents onto a mountain of compost at the bottom of the garden. While he had lived in this house he often interrogated himself in a voice other than his own, often surprised by the replies he gave to questions he asked, noting often that he ought to have thought of something more completely before he said anything about it, then too suggesting to an invisible other that he was being misquoted. At the finish he often concluded by reminding himself to remember the way he had said something in order to repeat it to his wife during their next altercation. He often felt that he had clarified himself to himself if not yet to others and therefore that he had dealt a theme a deadly blow, a discovery he couldn’t wait to share during the next altercation. Other than the memory of hearing the sound of his voice day after day from one room to the next while he lived in this house, he roamed now from room to room enduring the memory that he had spent years in this house enduring. Losing everything by which he knew himself, he would have liked to ask his wife if she agreed that they were broken spirits who for a time had convinced themselves that because of love they weren’t or that because of love there was more than solitude and defeat to life, knowing full well that there wasn’t. He’d asked his wife something similar when he told her that he’d fallen in love, which struck her as impossible because by then she perceived him as unlovable, and then when he told his lover his wife’s opinion, his lover had explained to him that that was why he had a lover. He knew that he couldn’t again refer to the house in anything but past tense, then he knew that he couldn’t refer to the woman he loved in anything but past tense, then that he referred to his wife in past tense the moment he’d fallen in love because his wife had found him unlovable. One day he spoke to the woman he loved, bathed her, massaged, excoriated her flesh, and penetrated her, and always spoke in present tense because she was always present, but then on another day he could do none of the things he had done because she was always forever the past, relegated therefore to past tenses, and would be a part of his past until he died and everyone he knew spoke of him in past tenses if they didn’t already. Enervated, he poured a tumbler of neat whiskey and held it against a colorful cloudburst over the garden, where to no one’s surprise the glass reflected a cloudburst. He hadn’t finished polishing his shoes for the funeral and was so anxious thinking of the house while in the house that he poured a second whiskey, holding it again to the sky to reiterate that there could be no surprises when it came to glasses of whiskey. He left a note under the bottle before gathering his suit, a white shirt, a necktie, and the polished shoes, remembering because of the note that he had never talked so much in his life as he did while living in that house. Once he exited it, the house was that house in his mind because it receded as if walking away from him rather than he from it, though while inside it, it had remained this house because it strangled him by the neck of his existence even while he was polishing a shoe in order to see his face between the tip and the throat one last time. No matter how much everything meant to everybody while it was happening, nothing’s happening anymore, so there’s nothing to understand. Yours, the husband. Now you must imagine a blue moon, white stars, the smell of hyacinth from one end of the beach to the other. For the first time since the woman he loved had died, he heard ocean in the dark, then for the first time felt it under his feet, the first of many firsts of its kind even if every first was going to feel like the last of something if not the last of everything. Awaiting her funeral, a self within him undid the self with which he seemed to have been familiar, his damaged unconscious undoing his conscious, a damaged conscious undoing his unconscious, both belonging to him if they belonged to anyone. Awaiting her funeral redeemed the intimacy between the lovers until it became an intimacy as mad as the idea of eternity and as mad as the idea of intimacy since he couldn’t abide the presence of anything outside himself, whomever that self was or was becoming or was unbecoming, and he couldn’t know which because the woman who accepted him for whomever he was had died. He had despaired of asking the woman he loved who or what it was she thought he was in case she couldn’t have been further from the truth and so would have loved someone other than him without knowing it until she knew it and ceased loving him. Whomever he was as the result of her death, despair liberated from dread as surely as it did from death and dying and the rest of the world. He remained speechless, too full of speech in his despair to have said something to someone if he could have opened his mouth. Instead he felt the presence of the dead woman he loved beside him day and night, then sat up in bed more than once because the room filled with fog, and only then could he hear her voice struggling to speak the way he struggled to speak to no one in the room every day. They remained speechless together in his hallucination, speechless and unable to touch in an intimacy derived from the self undoing his self the way death undid hers, an intimacy out of the madness they shared—his the madness of loss and despair, hers the madness of assuming she could speak to him and lie beside him after she was dead, his other madness that he too believed she could do those things. Dreams devoured him too, but enough of the sublime. He had borne witness to her madness, then carried her madness out of the room after she was dead because it didn’t belong to the mourners who had arrived after there was no purpose to it. As it was, he didn’t know the instant of her death and finally said so to no one in his room and then to his reflection from which he received no expression of empathy. She died in an instant, but which one, he asked the room, expecting an answer even if it came from the hallucinatory voice of the dead woman he loved. What precisely was he doing at the instant of her death? What precisely was he thinking? Her death occupied the universe and so the universe changed. As soon as she died, he said on the balcony of his room, looking for signs of her death up and down the streets, then for signs of her resurrection, she died again and again. He spoke to a reflection in the bathroom mirror so that it appeared to him he was speaking to someone other than himself, saying to it that the woman he loved had embraced his insomnia because she feared she would die if she slept or would dream of dying if she slept or dream that she wasn’t dying before she had to wake to the knowledge that she was, but now that she was dead he embraced insomnia, afraid that in his sleep she would invade his dreams filled with her death or of her living before dying, and yet in insomnia she lay beside him nude, macerated and speaking to him of the rest of his life before his death, of being saved in his dreams or by his insomnia at the arrival of the dead woman he loved. When he didn’t experience visions of the dead woman he loved, he overheard young and tiny whores giggling or weeping or being whipped by a belt at the ankles next door—playing in the dark of life, without happiness, among imaginary playmates, and he wasn’t sure how his life was different, though it was. During the lower half of his third whiskey, overseeing sunset from his balcony, he sat astonished at the fearlessness with which he greeted each day since the death of the woman he loved. If he strolled a beach of bathers, it may as well have been deserted, likewise streets where distance from one to another stretched immeasurably under his shoes. If the dying of the woman he loved devastated every day and every inch of space they occupied together, after her death he saw to it that neither time nor space could devastate him again. He couldn’t arrive late at any time, and he could never be in the wrong place anywhere. Ashamed to imagine of her death that she deserted him as if she’d abandoned him the way he’d abandoned his wife for her, he thought nothing about his love for her anymore than he thought about drinking whiskey or addressing the reflection in the mirror while he shaved or didn’t shave addressing the reflection or awaiting the macerated nude arrival of the dead woman he loved. She had withdrawn from him at the edge of her imminent death, love withdrawn at the edge of her nonexistence, so that he witnessed nothing of love between them except their thoughts of lost love or of losing love crossing the room or crossing the street or the beach or the expanse of the ocean before returning to them stricken with clarity that love could not survive death untrammeled or uneaten. A day came when a stranger found his face in the mirror and from that hour he was never entirely alone since there was always another being hearing or dissenting or bearing witness, even only another incarnation of himself the way the hallucinatory dead woman he loved incarnated again and again. He looked from his balcony to the future, watching the present come to an end so that the future arrived, but when the time came he only caught a glimpse of it leaving. For a time he had no palpable sense of her death and was so apart from the interior drama of grief and futility that her death he experienced as a disappearance that could be replaced by her appearance nude and macerated beside him in bed. He couldn’t address her, couldn’t say “you” to her, but alone in his hotel room he referred to the woman he loved as she or as her, but always in past tenses. He wasn’t beside her except in madness, and in despair he was apart from her, not there but here, not then but now, and so her death couldn’t illuminate anything except the time and the space in which his madness and despair because of it would occur. Her death left him mute, not only silent because he lost speech—he lost his voice. If he coughed or cleared his throat of a husk or vomited from too much whiskey or from too little, he did so without making a sound. He concluded that he couldn’t speak so that others would do the talking, so that he’d be spared having to hear his voice because it was the same voice the woman he loved heard until the day she died. He saw no one because he was mute, losing his voice because there was so much to say that he had nothing to say until losing his voice left him desperate to speak, though speak of what to whom with which vocables he didn’t know. He expected nothing to change until he expected nothing at all and then became free of expectations. Wherever he was whenever he was there, he saw strangers waiting to die, some knowing it, some not, others in disbelief because they were still waiting to live whether they knew it or not. He witnessed waiting, then waiting for something since waiting implied something to wait for, but mostly he sat and watched waiting for its own sake. To his surprise, he didn’t exude despair in his dealings with others, but patience and indulgence, until he was indulging in solicitude toward complete strangers. An elderly couple carried groceries from a grocery cart across the threshold of their doorway and then together lifted the empty cart inside. They did this expertly without exchanging a word or a glance as if they’d been doing it for decades. They hefted paper grocery bags one at a time into the interior of their apartment, where he could see a dim kitchen light above a sink and surrounding it cabinets painted sky blue because the room was small. Together they retrieved the cart from the doorway and, just inside the door, folded it. Closing the door, they saw him with alarm because he watched without moving a muscle. He stood still even after they closed the view to him, certain that they put away their groceries as satisfactorily as they’d achieved everything that came before it. Behaving as they did must have taken a lifetime to accomplish because he was exhausted after seeing them do it once since he took nothing for granted when it came to behavior. Then he swam for the first time in years, for the first time since by mistake he had swum among tiger sharks in a cove while his wife spread their picnic lunch and, seeing him duck below the surface, suddenly feared he’d lose a leg or worse, whatever would be worse to lose, a head say. She called him out of the water quietly and sweetly, even seductively so as not to alarm him, undoing the top of her bikini and revealing her breasts until in bewilderment he obeyed and took to the rocks where the nudity could be found. Once he did she burst into tears and punched the sternum of his chest. Life without you would be inconceivable, she said, and by then the bra was back in place though her nipples erected in the fresh air. Possibly across the remaining years of their marriage his wife had learned to conceive the inconceivable. Swimming in the ocean for the first time in years, he encountered a woman who soon left to dry herself, invading the shade of an umbrella he’d rented for the occasion. He trembled at the thought of conversation because nothing suited the vocabulary of his mind, and even in the shade the heat defied thinking until not far from them a bird fell from a great height sounding like a rock landing on a rock when it hit the beach. Though fewer birds were falling in the drought, those that did fell from greater heights where they sought stronger sea breezes and the larger birds greater wind currents. No one could say if fewer birds fell because the drought was easing or if there were fewer birds to fall because the drought wasn’t. So the woman remarked that it depressed her children to see birds falling from the sky, sometimes onto a windshield or even onto the head of another child playing in a park. Plump, buxom, sprinkled with sand and lathered in lotion she indicated her children at the water’s edge. I wish they’d just disappear, she said even though hers seemed happy healthy children playing in an ocean on a child’s idea of a beautiful day. Soon he realized that since he was a stranger, their mother told him the truth, and since it wasn’t his nature to disagree, they shared a moment of irresponsible intimacy. This woman despaired and because he didn’t console or dissuade her, she knew that he despaired too, that they shared a diminished language where life was concerned. He saw no possibility of love between them, but as they looked at each other in the heat of the day, he wondered if she wanted to be kissed in the shade of the umbrella to forget the afternoon or the evening to come or to make them bearable. He would have kissed her as another human being with no reason to go on living beside a throaty meaningless kiss shared with a stranger. She studied his face wondering if she could live with it day in and out or if anyone could or if anyone did until they shared the formidable recognition that nothing would occur to either of them to make life bearable and yet they would bear it. Thanks to her children and the husband who sired them, living her life wasn’t desirable anymore. They withheld no secrets by saying nothing so as not to lie and didn’t change anything because nothing could change anything for either of them—the darkest secret they shared as they were looking at the pores of each other’s skin, though hers were hidden by zinc oxide and a highway of sand along the forehead. Looking at the pores of each other’s skin, they would never be lovers, but they might have been made to love each other and if so might not have despaired for the rest of their lives if only they’d kissed in front of her children. For an instant he imagined her hairless and nude from head to foot, but immediately doubted their love since she might have deceived him as she would be deceiving her husband to be with him so that if she ever announced her intention of going to the beach in the heat of the day he could assume she would confess to a stranger whom she was kissing that she despaired of life with her husband, though while he was her lover she expected never to despair again. Eventually she gathered the unwanted children and waved clubby fingers from the shore, walking along the ocean’s edge in search of a place to drown them and herself on another day. He considered her husband’s existence and felt less sanguine about their encounter since despair endures as love doesn’t because despair resists temptation or it isn’t despair but optimism in disguise. Then he wondered if she had meant that she wished the dying birds would disappear, not her children. Living in despair all day every day, he foresaw life relieved of doubt or dilemma, exempt from the drama of personal existence, a life of nothing other than moods emerging and receding until nothing remained but the end of his moods with the end of everything that emerged before receding and then receding forever into nothing, the nothing that lasts forever as the woman he loved receded and receded over and over until there was nowhere left to go the way the ocean receded over and over because there was nowhere left to go.