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.

—

In the dark blue light of dawn, he licked her buttocks for a long time.

“I wish I could transfer it onto my tongue.”

“What?”

“This Mongolian mark.” She turned and looked at him over her shoulder, seeming surprised. “How come you’ve still got it?”

“I don’t know. I used to think everyone had them. But then I went to the public baths one day…and I saw that I was the only one.”

He held her at the waist and stroked the mark, wishing that he could share it with her, that it could be seared onto his skin like a brand. I want to swallow you, have you melt into me and flow through my veins.

“Will the dreams stop now?” she muttered, her voice barely audible.

“Dreams? Ah, the face…that’s right, you said it was a face, no?” he said, feeling drowsiness slowly creep through his body. “What kind of face? Whose face?”

“It’s different every time. Sometimes it feels very familiar, other times I’m sure I’ve never seen it before. There are times when it’s all bloody…and times when it looks like the face of a rotting corpse.”