I found a purplish bruise, recent, on her side where, perhaps, she had knocked into a table. On her knees there were three little childhood scars. I ran my fingers along the still-livid scar where, I guessed, she’d had her gallbladder removed. She had five painted toenails, all chipped, and five, on the other foot, unpainted: I guess she must have got bored. There was a lot of sand, mostly dry, between her toes, on the soles of her feet and instep.

She wore cheap silver earrings, but I didn’t feel she was interested in personal adornment. One earlobe was slightly inflamed. I also found a leaf on her leg, several insects, dead and alive, in different places, and dirt on her leg. The skin around her fingernails had been pulled and torn. Her cheap watch told the wrong time. Her teeth seemed good, perhaps she had worn a brace as a child; but they were stained now, from smoking, and one was chipped. There were random and quite deep scratchmarks on one arm (left), which I had noticed before but hadn’t attended to. They appeared to have been done with an insufficiently sharp object—a penknife, say, rather than a razor blade—as if she’d decided to doodle on herself on the spur of the moment, without preparing.

I peered into her ears and mouth, between her legs and then her toes, where I discovered another insect; I looked up her nose—surprisingly hairless, compared to mine. On her chest she had scored what I guessed to be the word poet. On her thigh, there were other words that had been recently bleeding.

I wrote, in the fatuous modern manner, “This Is a Person in the Here and Now Lying Down,” and jotted it down, forensically, working in silence for an hour. I kept the dead insects, the leaf, a couple of pubic hairs, an example of the dirt, a smear of blood and vaginal mucus, and a record of the words inside her notebook. Mostly her eyes were closed, her breaths deep and long.

I awoke her from her “dream” and showed her what I’d been doing.

“No one’s ever done a nicer thing for me,” she said.

“Pleasure.”

“You said to me once, ‘What people want is to be known.’ Can I ask you: What is that scar you have?”

“What scar? Where?”

She looked at me as though I were stupid, before pointing it out to me. It was under my elbow, in the soft flesh.

“You don’t know what it is?”

“I probably do,” I said, irritably. “I don’t even remember where I got it.”

“You don’t want to know yourself. You don’t know yourself as well as you know me. I don’t understand that. If you knew yourself you wouldn’t have done what you did with that woman.”

“I don’t see why we have to know either ourselves or each other.”