To understand how Paulie Macaluso became a symbol—of what exactly, no one can quite agree—you must first imagine him: a sixty-three-year-old window washer with a nicotine-scratched voice and the expression of a man permanently five minutes late to something meaningful.
You must then imagine him briefly dangling from the 88th floor of that very skyscraper—a feat he survived with the dubious assistance of two security guards and what he later claimed was "a divine wedgie."
This was not how prophets usually arrived.
But then again, Paulie Macaluso never asked to be one. He only wanted to see her again.
Not her, capital-H Her, the Virgin Mother who allegedly winked at him through the warped glass of The Helix’s 47th floor. No, Paulie wanted to see Celia—the one woman who had ever truly believed in him, right up until the ventilator took away her breath and the pandemic took away her name from every registry except his guilt.
The board, of course, had no use for nuance.
They wanted spectacle.
Sanctity with a sales pitch. A miracle that could be monetized and branded with tasteful font. Paulie, however, chose a different kind of resurrection: he ran.
Two nights later, beneath the sharp scent of window cleaner and moral crisis, Paulie snuck past Helix security—who were distracted by a flash mob of TikTok seminarians—and climbed once more to the 47th floor.
Not via the elevator, but the way he’d always gone: with suction cups, muscle memory, and a prayer uttered to no one in particular.
Just as Paulie reached the 30th floor, the walkie-talkie he always carried crackled to life. It was Miguel.
"Macaluso! What in the f**k are you doing up there?”
“What does it look like I’m doing, you Puerto Rican prick?”
“Who are you calling a Puerto Rican prick?”
“YOU! I’m calling you …!”
“You listen to me! I want you off of that building!”
“Not happening!”
“You know what kind of trouble you’re in?! You’ve got security going crazy down here! I’m gonna have you arrested!”
“You do that! The cops are on my side! The city of New York is on my side!”
“Don’t play ‘Man of God’ with me, Macaluso! I know who you really are! You’re a drunk! Dollars to donuts—you made this whole thing up for attention!”
“F**k you, Miguel!”
“Oh f**k me? Helix is firing all of us! Because of you! You put us all in danger with your b******t lies and your Virgin sightings! All because you’re a train wreck of …”
“I don’t care what you or anybody else thinks of me! I’m almost there. If you were half a human, you’d have a scaffold waiting for me on the 47th floor! So either do something useful or go f**k yourself!”
Paulie snapped shut his walkie as he climbed higher. On the street below, every New Yorker held their breath.
When Paulie reached the glass on the 47th floor, the city stretched below him in all directions—a spangled abyss of steel and flickering windows. The kind of view that made people feel either infinite or irrelevant. Paulie, for once, felt both.
He stood still momentarily, one hand braced against the window frame, the other holding a worn terrycloth. His fingers trembled slightly—not from fear of heights but from something more challenging to name. He didn’t know what he’d come to see, only that he had to see it.
He rubbed the glass in a slow circle, the cloth squeaking faintly against the warped surface.
Clarity doesn’t come to the calm. Visions—if they come at all—don’t visit the righteous. They find the broken, the cracked vessels, the ones who’ve run out of stories to tell themselves. Not as reward, but as rupture. Sometimes the soul opens not like a flower but like a fracture.
And then she was there.
Not the Virgin. Not light and robes and halos.
Celia—her reflection framed in the uneven curvature of the glass. No divine glow. No choreography of faith. Just her—eyes dark and steady, mouth drawn in the same quiet line she’d worn the last time he saw her, before the hospital, before the silence.
She looked at him the way she always had. Not with blame. Not with mercy. Just with that tired kind of love—the kind that says: You could’ve done better, but I know why you didn’t.
He cried then. Not loudly. Just enough for his breath to fog the pane between them.
Religious experiences, anthropologists have long argued, are a confluence of internal crisis and external metaphor. Some see angels during epileptic seizures. Some see ancestors after days without sleep. Paulie Macaluso, suspended between sobriety and sin, grief and guilt, saw the wife he lost.
“Celia," Paulie breathed, his hand reaching out unconsciously.
She didn't speak, but her eyes held his, full of the forgiveness he'd never allowed himself to believe possible.
Paulie felt tears streaming down his face. "I'm so sorry," he whispered. "I ruined everything. I should have been there. I should have been better."
Celia's image smiled—that small, crooked smile that had made him fall in love with her four decades ago. She placed her hand against the glass, palm out, mirroring his.
And then she was gone, leaving only Paulie's tear-streaked reflection staring back at him.
He stood there long, his hand still pressed against the glass, feeling a peace he hadn't known in years. Whether the vision had been real or just his grief-stricken imagination, something had shifted inside him—a knot untying, a breath finally released.
The sound of the walkie-talkie crackling broke the spell.
“A*****e! Are you there? Let’s get a move on! They're going to replace that window in twenty minutes!” Miguel shouted through the speaker of Paulie’s walkie.
Paulie nodded, wiping his eyes quickly. "I know. I need a few minutes more."
Miguel spoke cautiously as if Paulie might either attack or begin prophesying at any moment. "So... did She appear again? The Virgin?"
Paulie looked back at the window, now showing nothing but the afternoon sky and the buildings across the way. "No," he said. "But I saw what I needed to see."
Miguel sounded disappointed. "So what happens now? Everyone's waiting for your next miracle."
"There won't be any more miracles. Not the kind they're expecting, anyway. Listen, Miguel … I uh … I apologize."
“Yeah. All right, listen, Mac, just get your ass down in one piece."
Paulie smiled. “I’ll do that."
Ninety minutes later, Paulie Macaluso stood on the makeshift platform that someone had constructed in the plaza outside The Helix. The crowd had fallen into an expectant hush; thousands of faces turned up toward him. News cameras whirred, smartphones recorded, and somewhere in the back, Walter Kensington and his board members watched with barely concealed anxiety.
Father Domenico stood beside Paulie, clearly thrilled to be associated with the day's main attraction. Jasmine and Deshaun had somehow secured front-row positions, Jasmine's enormous hat now featuring blinking Christmas lights arranged in the shape of a halo.
Paulie stepped onto the small, makeshift platform near the plaza’s center, blinking against the glare of camera lights and the morning sun caught in glass. A murmur ran through the crowd like the wind shifting. Phones rose. Someone whistled low. A few folks clapped—not reverently, more like they were applauding a street performer they hoped might catch fire.
Paulie cleared his throat. His mouth was dry, and not in the usual hungover way. With a pang, he realized that he’d never spoken to more than three people at once unless it was to yell at pigeons.
“Anybody got a cigarette?” Paulie said, half to himself, half to buy time.
A ripple of laughter rolled through the crowd.
“Tryin’ to quit, Prophet!” someone yelled.
Another voice called out—older, gravelly: “Yo, Paulie! Did God say anything about the Knicks this season? We sufferin’ out here!”
Laughter again, louder this time.
And then—“Let me guess, your ex-wife was the Virgin all along. Real original, pal!”
The crowd howled.
“Yeah,” came another voice, dry as rust, “somebody check if the window washer union covers resurrection.”
Paulie smiled faintly. Not at the jokes—those he’d expected—but at the noise itself. The warmth behind it. New Yorkers had a funny way of being cruel with love.
He raised a hand, unsure if it was for quiet or balance.
“Alright, alright,” he said. “Easy. You got good material. But if you could shut up a minute, I—uh—I got something I need to say.”
To his surprise, they did, not out of reverence but because heckling’s only fun when your target fights back. Paulie didn’t fight. He looked tired. Honest. That was something even a city this skeptical could recognize.
“I ain’t a prophet,” he began. “I ain’t holy. I ain’t anything but a guy who’s done more wrong than right and ran outta time to fix it.”
A hush fell. The kind that feels like a held breath.
“I didn’t see the Virgin to get famous. I saw her—or I thought I did—because I was lookin’ for something. Something I lost. A long time ago.”
And just like that, the tone shifted. Phones lowered. A few brows furrowed. One or two heads bowed—not in prayer, but in that slow nod people do when they realize someone’s saying something real.
Paulie swallowed hard.
“Her name was Celia. She was the only person who ever saw me clear and didn’t look away. And I failed her. She died, and I didn’t even say goodbye. So if there’s any miracle here... it’s that I finally saw her again. Just for a second.”
A pigeon landed nearby and cocked its head as if listening.
“I don’t know what that window is. Maybe a mirror. Maybe a trick. Maybe grace. But I saw her. And I remembered what it means to be responsible for someone. And that’s more than I deserve, but I’ll take it.”
He looked at the crowd—not as a mass, but as faces, lives, people.
Paulie took a deep breath. "We build these towers, these monuments to our own importance. We think they make us special, make us matter. But they're just glass and steel. What matters—what really matters—is how we treat each other. The love we give or withhold. The harm we cause or prevent."
Paulie looked up at The Helix, its spiral form catching the late afternoon sun. "This building doesn't need to come down. It's just a building. It's what's inside us that needs changing."
A murmur ran through the crowd. This wasn't the fiery prophecy or dramatic miracle they'd been hoping for.
"So if you came for a miracle," Paulie continued, "I'm sorry to disappoint you. The only miracle I can offer is the same one available to all of us—the miracle of doing better today than we did yesterday. You don’t need visions or saints. You just need to do right by people while they’re still here. That’s the whole sermon. No choir, no punchline.”
He paused, let the silence stretch.
Then, from somewhere in the back: “Paulie, God is merciful! As a Knicks fan, I can swear by that!”
The crowd broke like glass—laughter, applause, even a few tears.
“But seriously, whatever you saw … we love you!” And with that, the crowd erupted with cheers.
Paulie let himself smile for real this time. Not because he was redeemed. But because, maybe, he’d started walking in the right direction.
Father Domenico shifted uncomfortably beside him. In the back, Paulie could see Walter Kensington's face darkening.
He turned to look at Jasmine and Deshaun. "Starting with me. I haven't been a father to my son. I haven't taken responsibility for my actions. That changes today."
Jasmine's mouth fell open in shock. Deshaun looked up at his mother in confusion.
"And to those who own this building," Paulie continued, his eyes finding Walter Kensington in the crowd, "maybe there's a lesson here for you too. Maybe instead of trying to profit from people's faith, you could use all this attention to do some good. Turn some of those empty floors into affordable housing. Create spaces for community. Make this building serve the city instead of just the wealthy."
Walter Kensington's face was a study in conflicting emotions—outrage warring with the sudden realization that Paulie's suggestion might actually be good PR.
"The Virgin Mary isn't going to appear again on the 47th floor," Paulie said, his voice growing stronger. "They're replacing that window as we speak. But maybe we don't need more visions. Maybe what we need is to see each other truly."
He stepped back from the microphone, suddenly exhausted. The crowd's reaction was mixed—some looked disappointed, others thoughtful, and a few openly wept.
Father Domenico leaned in. "That was... not what I expected, Paulie."
“What did you expect, Domenic?" Paulie replied in a whisper. “I gave them the only thing I had left. The truth.”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant what you said was fine. I’m proud of you.”
Paulie said nothing as he descended from the platform. The crowd suddenly parted for him. Some reached out to touch his sleeve; others watched him pass with curious eyes. Jasmine stepped forward, her earlier theatrical piety replaced with something more genuine.
"Did you mean that?" she asked quietly. "About Deshaun?"
Paulie looked down at the boy who shared his eyes and stubborn chin. "Yeah," he said. "I did. I can't change the past, but I can do better now."
Deshaun looked up at him warily, years of absence not easily forgotten. But there was curiosity there, too, perhaps even hope.
Paulie lingered at the plaza's edge after the crowd had mostly dispersed—some still lingering, unsure if they'd witnessed a miracle or a man shedding his skin. A breeze kicked up, carrying the smell of hot dog water, subway exhaust, and cheap incense.
His walkie buzzed at his belt.
“Prophet Paulie, you copy?” came Miguel’s voice, laced with the smug grin only long friendship can justify.
Paulie lifted it slowly. “Miguel. You firing me?”
“Firing you? You should be so lucky. I just talked to the office. Word from on high—meaning Lord Kensington in his penthouse kingdom—is that all the window washers' jobs are safe. And get this: we’re getting raises. Back pay, even.”
Paulie blinked. “You serious?”
“Dead serious. Turns out, dangling your ass off the 88th floor bought us all a little job security. Nice work, martyr.”
Paulie chuckled. The sound was rough but real. “Guess I should’ve thrown myself off years ago.”
“Don’t get ideas. Your miracle tour is over, brother. Tomorrow, 7 a.m., you’re back to work. Same squeegee, same grime, same complaints.”
Paulie nodded to no one, the walkie warm in his hand. Then: “Sounds good.”
“No different than the last thirty years, huh?”
Paulie looked up at the twisted glass glinting in the sunlight. The 47th-floor window was still warped, still inexplicable, and somehow still waiting.
“No. No different,” Paulie said with a smile.
© Michael Arturo, 2025
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Michael Arturo writes fiction, 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.
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APR 16
The Helix stood like a wounded animal in the Manhattan skyline—88 floors of architectural hubris wrapped in glass that caught the sun at angles that blinded pilots and scorched nearby buildings. Six months after its grand opening, the tower remained sixty percent vacant, its corridors echoing with the footsteps of maintenance staff and the occasional lo…
