The Muralist of Babylon

When the tower was still an idea, they asked him to paint the ceiling. They would pay, obviously, but wasn't creating an imagined sky above real clouds finer than base remuneration?

He had said no, no it wasn't, that he would take money, and they had laughed but there was something lacking in the sound, which made him uncertain of where the laughter was coming from—from which part of them—as though it wasn't from somewhere inside but instead was being selected from the air: partial pieces of sound reconfigured in their bodies.

He was seventeen when they offered him the project. They had thought of getting someone established: Amontillado, the painter of the lovely Violet Frescoes, or perhaps Rastro the Younger who had painted the ceiling of the Royal Library of Ashur. But when Rastro the Younger (who really was quite old at this point) told them he would make it his life's work, well, at that point, they had looked at each other and thought: oh god, not much life left there to work with.

That instant, they decided to go with someone young. To go with someone who might not think of the project as a summary—as swan songs invariably are—but instead as something that might come into itself, which is a precursor of everything that is sublime.

So they picked the youngest prodigy they could find and gave him the two conditions of the project: 1) that this would be the only piece he would ever paint—that his name and the mural, by virtue of their individual singularity, would be synonyms, and 2) that he would paint both sides of the ceiling.

Then they told him more about the project. They told him that the ceiling would be farther than he could ever imagine: so far away that the frescoes, in the shade of their height, might look like stars or like nothing. And the idea of painting only once, a painting too far away for anyone to see, amused him. So he told them he would do it.

When the base was completed—with four slightly sloped sides, each measuring 1500 meters—the now-middle-aged prodigy knew that he would not live to see the ceiling. And he thought—though he had not thought it at the time—that he had known it all along. It was as though he had gone all his life never realizing that there had never been any paint at the end of his brush.

So the middle-aged prodigy went to Nimrod and said: I will not live to see this through. But, I have started to create something worthy of the ceiling. And the artist unrolled endless papers with charcoal seraphins that would make you weep.

By then, the artist had a child: a frail, sickly thing that grew up thin and looked normal only inside the tower, beside the beams and ladders of the scaffolds.

And the artist told Nimrod: After death takes me, my child will finish it all. She was born in the shadow of the tower, in the sketches and the drafts and the paint.

And though the child didn’t look like much, Nimrod saw something of the tower in her.

. . . .

The pattern repeated. Generation after generation of dismayed painters naming successors.

The ceiling shrank, the sloping walls converged. To paint the library of bodies, faces, and scenes amassed across all those years would have been a crushing of limbs. But still they continued to paint. Although some artists foreswore painting entirely and instead focused on sorting through the past. They were curators trying to make sense of a legacy of images. There were of course some losers, easy to launch from the canon: Ramblino who painted only flowers or Sosostelli who painted only torsos, as though preternaturally aware of how time treats sculptures. But, by then, there were also more images than any one person could sort through. In time, even curators were curated. And the ceiling drifted impossibly far away.

. . . .

Anatalia stared up at the distant no-ceiling, a spidery scattering of dark light. And something struck her in the eye, then her cheek, then the sound of rain.

In a few weeks, they would send her up to paint the ceiling. She would gather supplies and begin the slow climb up, allowing herself time to adjust to the altitude. She would have to chart a path up the scaffolding, which at the bottom was structured but quickly become undisciplined and hasty—a haphazard collage of wood.

When it stopped raining through the tower, she would know that the workers had finished the ceiling and she would begin to climb up. Assuming the latest dispatch of workers had made it: assuming they were working. If not, they would send others.

But for now she just enjoyed the rain: its long journey that would soon be shortened. Not before long, they would drag her to the studio to practice painting while suspended on her back: the paint falling into her eyes. She would review the endless drafts. The expressions. The shade of haloes and vengeful eyes. The color of flood-water and sun-dried blood.