Ixidor emerged, dripping, from the river he had created. It would be called the Purity River, and the palm forest would be Greenglades, and the claw-topped mountain would be Shadow Mountain.
The arid air gulped water off his flesh. He was dry even as he stepped up to the easel. Naked and clean, the creator stood before a blank canvas. Below it, the pigments gleamed in their jars-ochre, saffron, woad, kobold, beet, reseda, calcimine, koal-absolute potentiality. With these pigments, these brushes, and this canvas, he could make anything.
Already he had filled this comer of the compass. A new canvas needed a new desert. He hoisted the easel, and naked and unashamed, strode through Greenglades. In furtive groups, rabbits followed him out into the new forest. The bugs in their ubiquity went too, and the birds after the bugs. All seemed to sigh, glad for the new lands.
Greenglades was a jungle of giants. Trees as wide around as villages rose to unthinkable heights. Vines draped from them crosswise, forming a network of elevated highways. It was a hot place, hot and wet, and brought sweat out across its creator's skin as he struggled through it.
He was glad to have so savage a place. He would have to make jaguars and anacondas, once he had the chance, but he needn't live in its monstrous heat, among its primeval foliage. He needed a cooler place, a place of sky and water, fluidity and potentiality. Already his palace formed in his mind, and he smiled. In a castle like that, with infinite rooms and recursive stairs, he could hide forever from his grief.
Ixidor reached the edge of his creation. The forest ended abruptly, its flora seeming almost crimped off by the edge of a frame. This had been the limit of his vision. In a rumpled line, the jungle gave way to wide-open desert.
Ixidor planted his easel in the sand and stared out across the blinding emptiness. While his eyes drank in that desolation, his hands worked. He opened the woad, mixed oil with it, and deposited some of the deep blue pigment on his palette. Opening the calcimine, he dipped in his fattest brush and mixed the white with the blue. When he had acquired the right color, he painted with broad strokes from the top of the canvas to the bottom. The horizon line, near the top of the canvas was the lightest blue, with the color deepening above and below it. White formed high clouds in the firmament. Thicker pigments in mottled tint and shade formed waves on the waters beneath the firmament. With a different brush and tones of light ochre, he created the dry ground, sands descending in the foreground to the beautiful waters.
Pausing and stepping back, Ixidor sighed. He had brought it into being. Before him to the blue horizon lay a scintillating freshwater lake. It seemed like a vast slice of sky laid down within the dunes. Ixidor felt as though he stood at the edge of the world and stared off into infinite possibility. He closed his eyes, letting his spirit roam over the face of the deep.
His mind traced out lines there-vast drums delving down through the flood to sit upon the foundations of the world. Above the drums and just above the water, he imagined a single massive slab of stone, two fathoms thick and a mile square. He cut out its center so that every chamber of his palace would hover above deep waters. On this slab, a rock below the sky and above the sea, he would form his world.
Ixidor opened his eyes. Already he was mixing the stony pigments. Gray slate and white granite, marble in red and black, tan limestone and jewels throughout the spectrum. He mixed and dabbed. Brush strokes scrambled over the canvas, coalescing into a glorious palace.
At its center rose a huge onion dome covered in gleaming mosaic. Its peak poked holes in the ragged clouds. At nine points around the dome's perimeter, ornate fountains clung and shot water up the tiled roof. The liquid gleamed as it ran back down, sluiced into channels, and poured from nine waterfalls into floating pools below. The streams descended nine flying buttresses to nine twisting minarets. From there, the waters followed the spiral grooves down to join the lake.
Just as water draped the palace in finery from top to bottom, so did foliage. Hanging gardens filled the castle, brimming with fruit and verdant with life. Enormous balconies held whole glades, palms flourishing amid fields of orchid. Vines trailed down to dip their tips in the flood. Everywhere, curtains of moss veiled the lower reaches.
Ixidor stepped back from the canvas and stared beyond it. He smiled, seeing his palace stand there, glorious amid the waters. The high lancets, the golden pilasters, the magnificent courses: It was a place of impossible beauty.
Ixidor's eye caught on one detail, and he frowned. He had miscalculated one of his vanishing lines, so that the palace's easternmost wall became a floor halfway down its length. In disgust, Ixidor stared at the offending lines. His brush angrily mixed the paint that would eliminate the error. He lifted the brush, filled with the colors of stone.
His hand paused above the canvas. His fingers trembled. The color was wrong-the gray of rotting flesh, the last color of Nivea before she was gone. Ixidor withdrew his hand. He would not eradicate this error, any error. They would help him hide. His palace would be perfect in its imperfection.
With a steady hand, Ixidor reached in with his stony pigments and modified another wall so that it too would flip to floor somewhere along its length. He repainted the flying buttresses so that they tangled with each other, the farthest arches overlapping the nearest. As each new line took form on the canvas, the reality beyond conformed. If it was possible in art, it was possible in truth.
Ixidor jabbed new colors on the brush and modified the front archway. The passageway became a solid slab and the stone arch above it dissolved into a space. Figure-ground relationships. He reworked stairways so that they never rose but only ran in recursive circles or ascended to the foundations or descended to the heavens. Every optical illusion that he knew, and some he discovered along the way, he incorporated. Solids turned liquid, and liquid turned to air, and air turned to solid. It was a building in the literal sense of the gerund, for it was always building itself out of impossibility.
Ixidor breathed. He could lose himself in this creation. It was exactly what he wished to do. Glorious, absurdly huge, gleaming and perfect, diverting, infinitely diverting, but he needed more than a shell. He clutched the edges of the painting, bent his head toward the canvas, and imagined each room. He hung drapes from the windows and paper from the walls. He furnished each chamber, put clothes in the wardrobes and food in the pantries. Bed linens, table linens, place settings and flower settings, supplies for art and supplies for life-everything he could imagine needing. He would live here the rest of his life. It was his undreamed land.
Those had been her words. Words held such peril. Even in this place of utter impossibility, Nivea intruded. He could not bear the pain of having her ghost instead of her.
Most men lived out their days surrounded by their memories. Ixidor would live out his hiding from them.
He touched his brush to the kohl and added a small detail to the shore. A boat, a barge, really-wide and flat, with low walls and a single long pole to drive it across the waters. It would take him to his home. He would not propel himself across, no. He needed a barge man.
Here was the great conundrum: He had not yet needed to make another thinking thing and didn't wish to do so now. Perhaps a huge ape could send him along, but what would be more dangerous than a gigantipithicus crouched upon his landing? He didn't want a creature with free will, with thoughts, hopes, and aspirations. He wanted a husk of a man, an unman.