JOSEF AND ALAIN’S RELATIONSHIP HAD left a trace on my body that was more permanent than any traces of my own relationships: a constellation on the sole of my right foot. A stick-and-poke we’d made one evening after we found the needles in a kitchen drawer while looking for something else, a lighter; the needles were Alain’s. He’d forgotten about them. I imagined that at this point they’d probably been left behind in Josef’s apartment, imagined that his belongings were strewn across the home and that Josef would keep coming across them in the ensuing years; I imagined that the reminders of their life would crop up over time like archaeological findings. Alain always scattered his things about and never installed himself fully during the time they lived together; he seemed to be perpetually unpacking and organizing his belongings in great haste, always rushing as if he were going somewhere and didn’t have time to pause and decide where to put his stuff so he could find it later when he needed it, and this was what had happened with the needles, he’d forgotten about them altogether, he’d brought them when he moved in and then forgotten about them. At their rediscovery they suddenly seemed very valuable and he was excited, fascinated; he wanted a memory of dubious hygiene. Josef marked the motif, the dots, the stars, with a ballpoint pen. He left the room when Alain got started; he couldn’t bear to watch the needle going in.

Alain had a bunch of random tattoos, like a tough guy in a Jean Genet novel, but on his body they had the opposite effect, they made him look soft and pretentious, dated. Anchors, roses, hearts overlaid with banners. He looked like he was wearing a costume. His shins were striated by pale scars from cutting but not his arms, he never followed through on anything.

Alain had become obsessed with something he’d heard, which was that Fassbinder had wanted to make a movie based on Giovanni’s Room. He couldn’t stop talking about this nonexistent film, this film which would never be more than an idea. Talking about it made him so excited he sounded angry: just imagine the scenery, the shadows, imagine the oysters in Les Halles; he was fixated on that particular scene, the thought of oysters, he thought they were disgusting, the image of oysters in fiery technicolor light, the slime, the gleam, the stack of shells. He did not eat oysters. He said: it tastes like cunt. I said: no. Get a grip. It annoyed me when he talked like this; I knew that Josef also got annoyed when Alain’s clowning sometimes cut through his customary aggressive somberness, but there were times when Josef loved that humor, when he told me: honestly it’s kind of the only thing we have in common, we really like to laugh, and I hated them both.

The view of the needle piercing my skin entranced me, the ink that dried; I too was overcome by fascination, silence settled around us, all I could hear was his breathing. I had no sensation; there was no memory of pain. That’s when Josef left the room. But before stepping out he turned around and for a second right then I met his eyes, and I was struck by a sense that something deeply inappropriate was going on, that Alain and I were somehow violating him.