When he arrived at the studio there was only J there.

“You’re here late! I was just about to leave.”

He hoped that J wouldn’t hang around on his account. Given that the space was shared by four people, and all of them night owls, the opportunity for a whole night’s uninterrupted work was rare.

He turned on the computer while J was getting his things together and putting on his trench coat. J seemed surprised to see the two tapes he was holding.

“You’ve made something.”

“That’s right.”

J smiled at his lack of elaboration. “I’d love to take a look at it when you’re done.”

“Of course.”

J sketched a playful bow, opened the door and swung his arms vigorously as he marched out, impersonating someone who felt the need to make himself scarce. He laughed. Once the laughter had subsided, it struck him what a long time it had been since he’d laughed like that.

—

The sun was well up the next day when he took out the master tape and turned off the computer.

The tapes had turned out better than he’d expected. The lighting, her movements, the atmosphere these evoked—all were breathtakingly compelling. He toyed briefly with the idea of adding some background music, before deciding to keep it silent, to make it seem as though everything on-screen were occurring in a kind of vacuum. Her gentle tossing, her naked body littered with gorgeous blooms, the Mongolian mark—against a background of silence, a soundless harmony recalling something primeval, something eternal.

He struggled through the tedious process of rendering for what felt like an age, smoking his way through an entire pack of cigarettes, sticking at it until it was done. The running time of the finished piece was four minutes fifty-five seconds. It began with a shot of his hand as he painted her prone body, faded out on the Mongolian mark, and then, after a shot capturing the desert of her face, her features so shadowed she was almost unrecognizable, faded out again.

It was a long time since he’d known the exhaustion that comes from staying up all night. He felt as if grains of sand were embedded here and there in his skin, a sense of everything having taken on some alien form. He wrote on the label of the master tape with a black pen: “Mongolian Mark 1—Flowers of Night and Flowers of Day.”

As soon as he was finished he put his hands over his eyes, consumed by the thought of that image that he knew he should never attempt to capture, but to which, were such a thing possible, he would affix the title “Mongolian Mark 2.”

The image of a man and woman, their bodies made brilliant with painted flowers, having sex against a background of unutterable silence. Their shifting limbs matter-of-fact in that vacuum. A progression of scenes lurching from violence to tenderness, with no extreme left unexplored. One stripped-down, drawn-out moment of quiet purification, extremity sublimated into some kind of peace.