Suddenly self-conscious, he put his hands over his paunch and tried to suck it in.

“Don’t cover it…I like it. The petals look like they’re wrinkled.” She slowly came toward him. She bent over and, as she’d done with J, reached out and began to stroke the flowers on his chest.

“Just a minute.” Still naked, he stood up and went over to the front door, where he’d left the equipment. He set the tripod up, quite low, and fixed the camcorder in place, then pushed the mattress out onto the veranda, and spread the white sheet, which he’d brought with him, out on the floor. He set up the lighting just as it had been in M’s studio.

“Can you lie down?”

Once she was lying down he estimated where their entwined bodies would end up, and adjusted the camcorder accordingly.

She lay stretched out under the blinding spotlight. He carefully lowered himself on top of her. Would their bodies look like overlapping petals, as they had with her and J? Would they seem like one body, a hybrid of plant, animal and human?

Every time they changed position he readjusted the camcorder. Before he took her from behind, which J had refused to do, he first took a long close-up of her buttocks. After he inserted himself, he checked how the image looked in the exterior monitor, then started to thrust.

Everything was perfect. It was just like in his sketches. His red flower closed and opened repeatedly above her Mongolian mark, his penis slipping in and out of her like a huge pistil. He shuddered at the appalling nature of their union, a union of images that were somehow repellent and yet compellingly beautiful. Every time he closed his eyes he could see the lower half of his body dyed green, soaked from the stomach to the thighs with a sticky, grassy sap.

Forever, he gasped, all of this forever, as an unendurable sense of satiation shuddered through his body and she burst into tears. She who hadn’t let slip a single moan in close to thirty minutes, whose lips had merely trembled at times, who had kept her eyes closed and communicated her keen ecstasy to him purely through the movements of her body. And now it had to end. He raised himself into a sitting position. Still clasping her to him, he moved over to the camcorder, groped for the button and switched it off.

The image he’d wanted to capture on film had to be one that could be repeated over and over, forbidden either to end or to come to a climax. And so, this was where the filming had to stop. He waited until her sobs had subsided before laying her back down on the sheet. In their final minutes of sex she gnashed her teeth, screamed rough and shrill, spat out a panting “stop” and then, at the end, she cried again.

And then everything grew quiet.

—