Solomon came and went, night after night. He never revealed too much about himself—where he came from, where he slept. He seemed to belong everywhere and nowhere at once, slipping effortlessly between the city’s forgotten spaces and its most rarefied heights. There was something about Solomon that Elliot couldn’t quite grasp—something that made him feel both drawn in and unsettled. Elliot stopped questioning how Solomon fit into the world. Instead, they talked about other things. Art. Music. The city, always the city.
It had started on that first night with the Basquiat that hung in Elliot’s apartment. After that, conversations about architecture gave way to discussions about color and form, the fury of Pollock’s splatters, and the aching precision of Hopper’s loneliness.
“You think blindness cuts you off from beauty. But it doesn’t. It forces you to remember it more clearly.”
Music was the same. Solomon had played piano once—Elliot still wasn’t sure if he believed him—but his knowledge of classical music was encyclopedic. From memory, he could hum the second movement of a Mahler symphony, explaining why Chopin’s Nocturnes always sounded like regret. They would sit in Elliot’s apartment, whiskey between them, as Bach or Coltrane drifted through the speakers, dissolving the gap between their lives.
“You hear this?” Solomon once asked as Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue filled the room.
“Of course,” Elliot said.
“No,” Solomon had said. “You listen to it. But do you hear it?”
Elliot frowned. “What’s the difference?”
Solomon smiled, that cryptic, knowing smile. “One is passive. The other requires surrender.”
Solomon had become a fixture in Elliot's life without either of them acknowledging it. A presence that arrived without warning disappeared without explanation, but somehow always returned.
Neither of them said the word friendship.
As Solomon stood by the window of Elliot’s apartment, high above the city, his blind eyes turned toward the skyline, and as if he could see it, he asked Elliot to join him.
“Are you hearing it?” Solomon asked.
“Hearing what?”
Solomon smiled, his reflection wavering in the darkened glass. “You know. The city, man.”
Elliot inhaled. The hum had always been there, but he had never truly noticed it until now. It pulsed beneath the noise of car horns and distant sirens, beneath the wind threading its way through the steel canyons of Manhattan. A vibration, deep and endless.
For a moment, neither of them spoke. The city stretched out before them, sprawling, infinite.
As the weeks passed, their conversations deepened, turning into something more. Solomon spoke of architecture the way poets spoke of love, with reverence, with hunger.
“Why do we build up? The pyramids, the cathedrals, the skyscrapers—why is height always the goal?” Solomon asked, slouched comfortably in a chair. “You think it’s about reaching heaven, don’t you?” he said finally. “Some grand spiritual instinct, some old primal urge to get closer to God.”
Elliot smirked. “Isn’t it?”
Solomon chuckled. “No, man. It’s about ego. Every empire builds higher than the last. Height is proof of dominance. Proof that we were here.” He gestured toward the skyline beyond the window. “You see a city. I see an obituary. All of this was built by men who are long dead.”
Elliot frowned. “That’s a bleak way to look at it.”
“Is it?” Solomon’s voice was smooth, unhurried. “You think a straight line is order? That a steel frame makes sense of the world?” He tilted his head toward the window, as if seeing something beyond the glass. “People don’t move in straight lines, Elliot. They twist, they turn, they double back. They hesitate, they rush, they stumble. The buildings that last—the ones that work—understand that.”
Elliot crossed his arms. “Architecture is about reason. It’s about control.”
Solomon laughed, a low, knowing sound. “Yeah? And tell me, how’s that working out for the towers full of empty offices?”
Elliot blinked.
Solomon tapped his cane against the floor. “Look around. The world don’t move like it did fifty years ago. People don’t work like they did fifty years ago. You think glass and steel impress anyone anymore? A hundred million square feet of dead air? That’s not a city—it’s a graveyard.”
Elliot glanced back at the skyline, his gaze catching on buildings he had always admired. He saw them differently now.
“The spaces people want,” Solomon continued, “are the ones that give something back. The High Line—an old rail track, turned into a place where people walk. Little Island—built over the water, curves, no hard edges, no grid to keep you locked in. The Guggenheim—you ever notice how it moves with you? That spiral draws you in, makes you a part of it. Those buildings invite life. They breathe.”
Elliot exhaled, his arms uncrossing. “You’re saying my design doesn’t.”
“I’m saying if you’re trying to build for the future, you can’t build for the past.” Solomon leaned in slightly. “So what’s it gonna be, Van Alen? A monument to yourself? Or something people will actually live in?”
Elliot stared at the blueprint on the table. He had been so focused on making a statement, he hadn’t considered whether his building would listen—whether it would adapt, shift, invite movement instead of imposing it.
For the first time, he wasn’t entirely sure the building had come from him at all.
Elliot had grown up under the long shadow of his name. Van Alen. It carried weight, history, expectation. It was inked into the bones of New York itself, carved into the ribs of the Chrysler Building, the gleaming spire that stood defiant among the city’s giants. His granduncle, William Van Alen, had dreamed it into being—a cathedral of modernity, an Art Deco exclamation point piercing the sky.
And then, nothing.
William had never built again.
A lawsuit was filed against Walter Chrysler—a dispute over fees. The greatest triumph of Van Alen’s career had been followed by silence, by decades of invisibility. It was the kind of story that should have been a cautionary tale, a reminder that even the most audacious visionaries could be discarded by the city they sought to define.
But for Elliot, it had always been a haunting.
He had spent years telling himself that he was different. That his work would not be reduced to a single masterpiece. That he would not be forgotten.
“It has to be different,” he told Solomon one evening. “Not just taller. Not just shinier.”
Solomon tapped his fingers idly against the hardwood of his chair’s armrest. “Then what does it need to be?”
Elliot exhaled, rubbing his forehead. “It has to move.”
Solomon smiled. “Ah. You’re starting to understand.”
“I don’t mean literally,” Elliot said quickly, though part of him wasn’t sure. “I mean… buildings today, they’re all rigid, predictable. Boxes stacked on boxes. This one—it should feel alive. Like it’s part of the city’s breath, not just a monument to someone’s ego.”
Solomon tilted his head, as if listening to something just out of reach. “And what will they say about you when it’s done?”
Elliot hesitated. “That I didn’t just build another tower.” He looked down at his hands. “That I changed the skyline.”
“The skyline,” Solomon murmured. “A second horizon. A man-made constellation.” He leaned back, his blind eyes unfocused. “You ever think about how buildings outlast their creators? How a man can spend his whole life shaping the world around him, but in the end, the world moves on without him?”
Elliot thought of William Van Alen, of the Chrysler Building still standing, gleaming in the afternoon light, while its architect had been forgotten, reduced to footnotes and trivia.
“Every architect thinks about that,” Elliot admitted.
Solomon nodded. “Then the real question is: does it matter?”
Just before leaving Elliot’s apartment for the night, Solomon stopped by the door and put a firm hand on Elliot’s shoulder. His touch was light but unmistakably steady, the kind of grip that didn’t ask for permission.
“I’d like you to take a walk with me.”
“A walk?”
“From point A to point B,” Solomon said. “We’ll start at sunrise and finish by sunset.”
Elliot frowned. “Where?”
“From the bottom of Manhattan to the top. Battery Park to Inwood.”
Elliot let out a short laugh, leaning back in his chair. “Yeah, that’s not happening. I’ve got meetings tomorrow.”
“Cancel them,” Solomon said, his voice light, but not joking.
Elliot shook his head. “I don’t have time for some—some pilgrimage. If you have ideas for the building, just tell me.”
Solomon tilted his head, as if listening to something just out of reach. “Ideas,” he repeated, amused. “That’s what you think this is about?”
Elliot’s irritation flared. “That’s what you said it was about.”
Solomon faced him fully now. “How do you plan to design something for this city when you don’t even know what it is?”
Elliot’s frown deepened. “I know the city.”
Solomon smirked. “No. You see the city. Through windows, from penthouse parties, from the back of a cab. That’s not knowing. That’s glancing.”
Elliot said nothing, because it was mostly true.
“You want to build something that belongs to the skyline?” Solomon continued. “Then you need to understand what it stands on. The streets, the people, the rhythm of it all. You need to feel it under your feet. Like I do.” He tapped his cane lightly against the hardwood.
Elliot exhaled sharply, shaking his head. “And you think walking the whole damn island will give me that?”
Solomon took a step closer. “I think the reason you’re resisting so hard is because you’re afraid you’ve never actually known the place you claim to love.”
That stung.
“You ever hear of Helen Keller? Of course you have. Blind, deaf, and dumb. And yet, she could tell the Brooklyn Bridge from the Queensborough just by standing on them. You know what she said about skyscrapers?”
Elliot shook his head.
“She called them fairy palaces at dawn. Imagine that. A woman who never saw light, never heard the hum of the city, describing the skyline like something out of myth. Because she felt them. She understood the weight of them, the way they stood against the sky, how the world shifted around them.” Solomon turned his head slightly. “And you, a man with sight, can only tell me about numbers. Heights. Materials. Ideas.”
Elliot stared at him, feeling his pulse quicken in that uncomfortable way Solomon had a habit of provoking. The man was always a step ahead, always peeling away the layers Elliot didn’t realize he had wrapped around himself.
“Where did you say—Battery Park?”
“Battery Park to Inwood,” Solomon said. “We stop along the way. You listen, you learn, and maybe—just maybe—you start to hear what the city is trying to tell you.” He let a small, knowing smile tug at the corner of his mouth. “By the way, those Italian shoes you got on aren’t gonna make it. And don’t ask me how I know they Italian. A player like you don’t wear less.”
Elliot looked down at his polished dress shoes, then back at the skyline beyond the window.
“Fine,” he muttered. “Let’s walk.”
Solomon nodded as if he had expected no other answer, then turned to leave.
Elliot surprised himself by stopping him. “Wait.”
Solomon paused, tilting his head slightly.
“Stay,” Elliot said. He didn’t know why he said it, but once the word was out, it felt right.
Solomon was silent for a moment. Then, with an almost imperceptible nod, he set his cane against the wall. “Alright. But you don’t have to do this.”
Elliot gestured toward the second bedroom down the hall. “I know. But I got a guest room and I never have a guest.”
Solomon smiled, that same unreadable expression. “Luxury accommodations? You know, I can get used to that, Elliot.”
Elliot poured himself another whiskey and muttered, “You may know the layout of the city, but not this apartment. Let me show you the way.”
As Elliot guided him, Solomon let his fingers drift along the hallway wall, lightly skimming the paint, the wood—mapping the space through touch alone.
“Good bones,” Solomon murmured. “Oh, I’m an early riser.”
“So am I. 5 AM. Good night.”
Elliot, sipping his drink, watched Solomon disappear into the room.
Tomorrow, they would walk the city together.
And Elliot wasn’t sure who would be leading whom.
end of part two
© 2025 Michael Arturo
“Skyline” will return in two weeks with Part 3
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Welcome to Michael’s Newsletter. Writer of contemporary political/social commentary, parodies, parables, satire. Michael was born and raised in New York City and has a background in theater and film. His plays have been staged in New York, London, Boston, and Los Angeles.
Michael also writes short literary fiction. Below is a link to his first collection.
FLATIRON and other tall tales
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