Skyline (Part 2)

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.”