He drew on himself, every day: strange symbols, lines leading nowhere, circles with no particular inclination. His pens were continually running dry of ink, and if he took a bath, the water stained a blackish tint, as if he were washing away sins. The patterns he drew were a mystery of asymmetry, an ode to chaos; these markings were a war paint to a battle long over, and he had been on the side of the the defeated. No one ever asked him why he did this — there was a certain unknowable poetry to it, and people… people don’t ask questions when they think they already know the answer: he was a sign that the universe was as odd as they imagined. But if they had asked him, “Why?”, he would have answered, “This is what the whole of the world means — this is the way I see it. Each day the pattern changes, and when the old one washes away, I draw on myself what is new… like a reflection of it all that knows what it reflects, a world rewritten in abbreviations.”