When he eventually set the brush down, he looked down at her body, at the flowers blooming on it, with all thoughts of filming gone out of his head. But the sunlight was gradually failing, her face being slowly erased by the late-afternoon shadows, and so he quickly set his thoughts in order and stood up.

“Lie on your side for me.” Slowly, as though timing her movements to some music only she could hear, she bent her arms, legs and waist and rolled onto her side. He panned the camera down the ridge of her side and over the soft curve of her buttocks, then filmed first the flowers on her back, the flowers of night, and then the flowers of the sun on her front. Once he’d finished this he moved on to her Mongolian mark, faint like some blue relic in the gradually fading light. He hesitated, he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do this, but as she gazed over at the pitch-black window he couldn’t stop himself from taking a close-up of her face. The screen filled with her pale lips, the shadowed hollow above her protruding collarbones, her forehead with her disheveled hair, and her two empty eyes.

—

She stood in front of the door with her arms folded while he loaded the equipment into the car trunk. As M had asked, he pushed the key inside one of the hiking boots that had been left on the landing.

“All done,” he said. “Let’s be off.” Even though she was wearing his sweater over her own, she was shivering as though cold. “Shall we go and eat something at yours? Or if you’re hungry, how about we find somewhere to eat around here?”

“Whatever you like,” she murmured, then gestured toward her chest. “Will this come off with water?” As though this practical detail was the only thing she was curious about.

“I wouldn’t have thought it’d come off too easily. You’ll have to wash it a few times to—” She interrupted him.

“I don’t want it to come off.”

Momentarily at a loss, he looked across at her face, but the darkness obscured whatever expression might have been there.

—

Heading into a more built-up area, they tried a few different alleys in their search for somewhere to eat. As she didn’t eat meat, they chose a place that advertised Buddhist cuisine. They ordered the set meal, and around twenty neatly arranged side dishes were brought out, alongside stone-pot rice with chestnuts and ginseng. Watching her as she ate, it suddenly occurred to him that, despite her having spent the past four hours stark naked, nothing he’d done had drawn from her any meaningful response. Of course, his plan hadn’t been to get her aroused, only to film her naked, but all the same it was surprising that the process hadn’t provoked in her even the slightest feelings of desire.