You’re curious about Marcus and his tower. About the title of that painting. Believe me I understand your curiosity. A man builds a skyscraper in Dubai, does nothing with it except fill it with water, and someone is bound to ask “why?”. I’ll tell you what I know, but please understand; while I knew the man well, I understood the obsession almost not at all.

  His obsession began in early childhood. For as long as I could remember, whenever he had the opportunity, whether it would be a pool party, or swimming lessons, he would sit at the edge and stare into the water, reluctant to enter. We used to think that he was scared of the water. Perhaps there was a time when he was scared of what he saw. Perhaps not. I am only certain that he did see something, because I caught a glimpse of it too.

  One day, at a birthday party, while the others were teasing Marcus, goading him to jump into the pool, I got out to ask him just what he was doing.

  “Looking at the lights,” he said.

  He pointed with his chin to the bottom of the pool.

  He was talking about the caustics, the fractured sunrays at the bottom of the pool. I stood behind him and watched the lights, watching them dance their cosmic dance, and suddenly I felt a tinge of fear. It was a primal fear. The fear of a small animal, hidden in the brush, hoping that it had not been seen. It was those damned lights, the caustics, and their damned writhing. It was alive somehow, like the patterns of a great snake! Reflexively, I backed away from the edge of the pool.

  “You see it too?” Marcus asked.

  “No,” I lied, “I don’t see anything at all.”

  He scrunched up his face, in disappointment or disbelief I didn’t know. He shrugged it off, and continued his peculiar contemplation.

  Marcus kept on like that for the rest of our childhood. He peered deeply into any volume of water, but was especially keen on large bodies of crystal clear water, where caustics could scatter on the floor.

  I never quite lost touch with Marcus, but in the years between the onset of puberty and the start of our first year of college, I knew him less. Memories of what the caustics revealed to me that day were overshadowed by the overwhelming need to conform with my peers, and the whims of my young heart. Marcus’s path and mine diverged for a time. Every chance encounter with him a reintroduction.

  When we truly reconnected in our first year of college it was as practical strangers. Marcus was no longer the odd child at the edge of the pool, he was a charismatic entrepreneur.

  I should mention that Marcus and I were born into undeniable privilege. Our fathers were leaders of industry. But while I had not taken to my father’s lifestyle of business and capital, Marcus had. He inherited his father’s aptitude for markets, and could have skipped college altogether, but he insisted on receiving a formal education.

  Something else had changed about him, something that had unnerved me. Though I could never say for certain what it was. But if I had to choose just one thing, I think it was his eyes. Marcus had always had marvelous, crystal clear, blue eyes, but now they had a depth to them that could rival the Mariana. Worse still was when his eyes caught the sunlight just right, they reflected flakes of shimmering gold. Like light bouncing back from a fathomless, crystal clear ocean. A memory of fear resurfaced from that fathomless deep, and I’m ashamed to say that from then on I avoided his gaze whenever possible.

  I was, however, forced to grow accustomed to the uncanny depth of his eyes when our second year of college rolled around. Fate decided that we would be sharing a dorm. As a self made millionaire, Marcus could have afforded his own apartment off campus, but he wanted to experience “real” college life. I loathed the thought of sharing a room with Marcus, but you will be surprised to hear, as I was to live through, the beginning of our strong bond.

  I grew to tolerate the man, and then to appreciate him. I am not embarrassed to say that I even came to admire him. He was disciplined, both intelligent and strong, charismatic, and wise. There was never a single second of the day that he wasn’t working, and never a moment that he wouldn’t drop everything to be there for his friends. He was a river to his inner circle. A fathomless, endless, crystal clear river that ran eerily calm.

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  From time to time I like to think that he had a certain respect for me as well. Inspired as I was by his character, I could never forget the maddening caustics; and so I dealt with my fear the only way I knew how, through my art.

  What I lacked in capital intuition, I like to think I made up for in artistic expression. I channeled the caustics into my works, and on canvases of purest azure I drew delirium inducing patterns of gold. Marcus always doted on these paintings, staring into them with almost the same eerie focus he gave to his still, crystal bodies of water. He even began to commision me.

  Yes, indeed, I think we shared a mutual respect. In my work, I was able to communicate something that Marcus had never been able to. He became my most generous patron, and most loyal friend. In time we developed a profound and familial bond.

  Now, the tower.

  I only visited twice, but I wish I had never visited at all.

  After college, Marcus did not slow in his capital endeavors. He became a part of that elite society which greases the cogs of the global economy. He was completely unlike the Elon Musks, and Bill Gates of the world, enjoyed his wealth silently in the background.

  His one ostentatious expenditure was the Ocean Tower. It was a skyscraper, whose height was matched only by the Burj Khalifa.

  He filled it with water, and mechanisms for keeping the water crystal clear. It had ten sets of elevators in all for staff, and one executive elevator for himself that led straight to the top. Taking the executive elevator brought you to a hallway lined with azure and gold reliefs that he had commissioned me to make before the building had been complete.

  “My dearest friend,” he spoke, as he led me down the hallway, “I would commission you one final time.”

  The way he said it. The conviction, the finality. I wanted to shout at him, shake him. What do you mean one final time my friend?

  “I–”

  “Do not worry about your payment, my friend, it has already been wired.”

  He dismissed my hesitation before I could even vocalize it.

  He threw open the doors at the end of the hallway to reveal the terror beyond.

  From ground to heaven, he had built a tower filled with the clearest crystal water. Within, there were lights, angled to scatter caustics along the tower's length. It was oppressive. Though the space within was cavernous, I could not help but feel a horrifying claustrophobia creep into my spine. It was just as it was in the pool all those years ago. But the pool had only been a pinprick that belied the presence of some great unknowable thing, where this tower was a window large enough for something to look back. I was frozen stiff before them, the writhing, undulating, mass of caustics. Their unnatural, alien, spasms told me I had entered the attention of something beyond my mundane perception. I could not comprehend it on this side of sanity.

  Marcus. YOU FOOL.

  “Paint me,” he said, “you will find suitable materials beside the door.”

  He stepped beyond the threshold, into the cavernous room. There was a walkway inside, suspended over the tower’s crystal depths. He sat down, and bid me paint. So I did.

  I steadied my trembling hand and began to work. Marcus sat at the end of his suspended walkway, staring deep into the crystal depths, and occasionally, to the scattered caustics on the walls above. It was then I noticed something, something I had missed all those years ago standing beside him at that pool. It was something in the way he seemed to bob his head, and then sometimes in the way that he would look at the scattered caustics above, always in the same place, as if he was meeting something’s eyes. He wasn’t just looking at something, he was communicating with something!

  Somehow, despite having to fight my own trembling hand to complete it, I finished my work. Each fine detail, each stroke of the brush, a madness of its own.

  “What will you call it?” he asked.

  That painting, which you well know. The reason you entreated me to share with you my experience with Marcus and his tower was called…

  “Communion.”

  Marcus, upon hearing the title of my painting, nodded in approval, and asked me to return the following day, in case I needed to make refinements. I didn’t think such a thing would be necessary. However, he made me promise to return anyways.

  In the end I did add one more detail.

  You see, after that day, Marcus was never seen again. There was nothing left of him, except where he had been sitting. On the end of his walkway, at the edge of sanity, was a smattering of blood, scattered on the floor as if it was a caustic reflected.