YD6-82(Dr.) Lucifer and Nyx: A Boy’s Niche in the Shadow of a Mezzanine
Chapter preface: In the shifting light between Helios and Nyx, a Sunday unfolds across Brussels—where markets spill into the Grand Sablon and shadows linger at Dr. Decroly Avenue. Amid ceramic weights and antique wardrobes, a mezzanine rises, carved for a boy’s return. Yet, behind Victoria’s smile, storms gather—Andre’s voice, Smeets’ prowling, and the unspoken games of power pressing through the night.
BOOK SYNOPSIS: Aetheria, in the zodiacal forest—where birds sing and leaves flutter like wings bathing in light. The symphony of the forest comes to mind. This is the cosmos’ whisper through our creatures, and in these pages, she leads me. These chapters unfold as a clarifying companion to my earlier book, The Code: Horizon of Infinity—a philosophical memoir exploring how the universe sculpted our minds. Through Aetheria, the lens of consciousness who begins to reveal herself, her presence lives in the rhythm. She seeks form—moving toward the name she will one day claim: Sunshine.
YD6-82(Dr.) Lucifer and Nyx: A Boy’s Niche in the Shadow of a Mezzanine
By mid-morning on Sunday, the Cat’s eyes—Jean-Francois Smeets peeks through the crack of the door, prowling into the apartment. The Aries in him, wired to butt heads, sweeps his gaze away from me—as if I weren’t in his path. It doesn't dawn on me—he expected Victoria to be staying alone. Her words fall apart. He slips aside from facing me, drives his head away. Gathering himself, his Sun in Cat prowls through yesterday’s mover’s boxes, heading toward the kitchen, hunting her shadow.
In my search for tools and screws, I cross paths with him again as he egresses from the kitchen—having turned away from the head of the wrought-iron table undercarriage that found its way in here. A reminder of how I lost my slim-fit pants, shredded into ribbons by Victoria on Jephte’s terrace table. But there I veer at the door jambs, out one around into the other, slipping into the adjacent scullery. I rummage through Smeets’ arsenal of tools in plastic trays—shelved tools don’t quite share their wall with the bunker’s canned-food. But it's enough to forgive my own ridicule, cast on the old WWII veteran. thoughts.
Upon my return. Through the portal of the interleading rooms, Tonton was praising Victoria, unpacking in a corner of the bay-window—these conversations I keep distant, as they roll and convolute Alexandre until a brain reaches exhaustion to a simple fact—the boy is by Mamouch, for the week until Victoria is settled with a bed for him. With that understanding, Smeets leaves—his prowling eyes pulling the door close after himself.
In a glitch before the light of the bay window, Victoria’s silhouette rises from the shambles that surrounds her. She engages her pepish gait, crossing the interleading portal. “Vient, on y va–Come, let’s go!”
Her eyes dart the exit door. I don't mind what idea is spurred in her head—it's always entertaining—and asking will lead to nowhere, so I'm left following in her footsteps. I close the apartment, then the hallway doors behind us, trailing her across the yellow-tiled path. A stride through the gates, she veers from the brick pillars, past a few curb-parked cars, then swirls. Her pause before the Audi’s door speaks for her. ‘Door open.’
I come around the street side, slip into the crotch of the seat, lean over the console to hook the door latch, straighten as she slips in and seals us into our glass bubble. I tweak the ignition, the engine purr. We pull away into a fall of street names—I have no clue, but I follow her pointing finger. Bridging a green river, my mind doodles a sweeping hedgerow of fenestrated brick facades overlooking a park—landmarks to remember, as we weave our way into a fast-aging city.
When I pull into a narrow street crowded with curb-parked cars, we’re in the shadows of slender stone pillars topped with green-hued statuettes. As we walk away, the tradesmen arise along the wrought-iron fence—historians in disguise, as if sensing their own disappearance while trying to maintain a copy of what once was.
Our sauntering crosses the tramway, hollowed through an asphaltic boulevard that traverses the city end-to-end—so it appears. Cobblestone streets descend at either flanks of the cathedral-like church that blotches my perception. Before my eyes, dark ooze pulses—Nyx, wallowed by Helios—into the veil of a ghostly neon plasma, through which slips a return to the rural source of the brook. In the glitch of understanding, Helios releases his clutches from Nyx—now in oblivion, beneath the cobblestone streets.
My mind on the non-existent parvis, still caught on Victoria’s raising of “Petit Sablon–Little Sands,” only to have it left behind. But before I can deconfuse it with “Grand Sablon–Great Sands,” the square—Victoria veers aside, pausing beside a set of open barn doors, drawn to a poster. “Ceramic by the Kilo.” She disappears inside the porte cochére, leaving the confluent streets behind, where hedgerows funnel downward into the old city.
Pep steps—she enters into the Porte Cochére, the crack aside widening into a gaping double door. We veer into a warehouse shadowing a classic mansion—repurposed. We roam among men and women in their art of dress, hippyish, drifting through aisles of white catering pottery stacked en masse on a joinery raw shelves. I follow behind Victoria, picking up cups, saucers, plates—guided along a snake’s trail that leads us to emerge at the rear end of the porte cochére.
Unmistakable by the sentinel of a large dial, we pose our paper bags together on the industrial steel platform, watching the hand of a giant dial climb. We stand frozen, awaiting the next instruction. The cashier finishing with a customer before us. The young woman rushes from behind the register to the scale—eyes darting. She swirls with a ballpoint pen noting the weights. Pacing back behind the register. I read the tally, wallet in my palm, and hand her the cash. By now, Victoria is already in her strides with both bags. I catch up, tracking her through the Porte Cochére, out into sunlight. We veer toward the Audi; once there, we unload our hands into the trunk.
We face anew—anyone with a dream or an idea—staking their corners. At loss for uniformity or order—awakened from the ruins of time. A market spills behind crooked storefronts. Downstream, amid the confusion, chocolatiers, antique dealers, terrace cafés, and painters squeezed between boutiques. Victoria, meanders through scattered terrace tables. She settles. I join her. Beside us, trickles of coasting traffic slip past downstream—duplicated across the square, slipping upstream through bright umbrellas, and scattered terraces, pooling before a distant jumble of restaurants—but for one, in particular, beneath a fenestrated, gabled brick facade.
Victoria lights a cigarette and orders a red Porto from the waitress—one for me as well. She has only to mention, “C’est l’endroit que Jephte fréquente—this is where Jephte hangs out.” That the Hydra head of my mind is sneaking around.
The waiter brings our drinks. We linger behind another coffee, a glass of water—idling in the lull—until Victoria gets ratty—unsettled by Alexandre’s dilemma at Dr. Decroly Avenue apartment: only one bedroom—her boy stuck by his grandparents for a lack of space. Which lingers in my mind too. She calls a waiter standing by for the bill. As I settle, she rises, saying. “Il y a un magasin d'antiquités que je veux voir—There is an antique store I want to see.”
Across the “Grand Sablon,” exuding from dark vertigo hollows—the club. My mind flares out: Jephte’s silage, his trail. Inside the nightlife den he stakes out, he swims in the current of effeminately dressed men.
We stroll toward the crotch of the square, where the median is squeezed by the confluence of the cobblestone streets, narrowing into the light-stifling stretches of the asphalted street. Before us, a cathedral—another “church in the middle of the village,” as the expression goes. A corner deflagrated—succumbing to an incongruent 1960s awakening: a single modern store, its oversized landscaping display windows wedged into the hedgerow of classic fenestrated facades.
Reminiscent of my childhood, the brand “Au Bon Repos—At Good Rest” still rhymes in my mind. But Victoria prances past the bluestone plinth beneath the plate-glass lounge display. I glimpse—past a marble-clad concrete column—a dining room. Rounding the corner: a master bedroom, bedding, and furniture arranged just so; past the next marble column, a baby bedroom, then a children’s bedroom.
I freeze before the next display window, filled with a variety of bunk beds for children's rooms. Victoria lost in her thoughts pace onward—past the next décor displays. I called her back with a glance, but she paces onward, where the church blind girdling street unfolds toward a corner brasseries in the dark.
She relents her fixation—from the narrow, light stifled evanescent street, a recurrence of what we left on the Grand Sablon, only downgraded to a flea market behind dusty storefronts. At the pace of her backward glances, while I reverse-engineered the best from the freestanding bunk bed. Then, using modular timber available in hardware stores, I assemble what fits out needs—rushing off. Catching up with Victoria, toes on the curb before the zebra crossing. As I join her, she steps down. across the street, veers onto the sidewalk—her eyes mint through dust-clinging storefronts packed with a jumble-mumble of antique furniture. At the door, she enters the store.
After whirling through the store, Victoria comes up empty-handed, nothing stirring her to take home. She steps out, and we stroll upstream the Grand Sablon track our way back to the Audi. I slip in behind the wheel, unlatch her door, tweak the engine to a purr. We drift away, weaving from the older city into the younger, quieter communities until Dr. Decroly Avenue barrel vault leads us to the trunk at the gate. We unload the trunk, carry our bags inside. In the kitchen, we unpack the clinging ceramics, rinse then clean, and stow away on the bare shelves behind the top cabinet doors.
We step out the kitchen, through the living room still in shambles, boxes staked alongside a narrow trail. Alongside Victoria, I carry on into the night, assembling the panels of her black antique wardrobe—once meant for long garments, staple in its fashion, a re-design cupboard interior with shelves to stand proud with her curved doors against the living room wall.
Passing through the portal, repurposing the bay window room to a bedroom, still demanding unpacking. Her miniskirts and jackets need wardrobe space; at the flanks of the open-hearth fireplace, I measure the niches in mind to carry forthward. While churning over the memory of our earlier trip past “Au Bon Repos,” I’m doodling the design, molding a mezzanine into the height of this Belle Étage ceiling.” Overt under the lantern light, we roll into bed—Victoria, eased by the thought of her little boy's private nook, drifts off.
The morning daylight finds us, tickling an awakening to a second day debuting in a new world. In the hush of duty, we rise from clothes strewn on the carpet and, from our corner, face a Monday where duty calls. In the rhythm of Gemini, in us both, we step out into the outdoors. As Victoria heads across the street toward her blue Fiat Panda, I step into my Sliver-gray Audi and pull away, leaving her behind.
I head into the learned arteries from Jephte's place, early traffic breathing around me. My mind’s outreach doesn't surprise–the South Station lies only a stretch away, present at the terracotta rooftops nestling with railway among surrounding townhouses.
The morning light carries Aetheria’s mirage, suscitating a faded glow that still casts a quiet show on Wagon-Lit’s home office—a pointer to Andre Daniel leaving his office last Friday evening. A step across railway tracks, he boarded the restaurant train for a weekend trip—a governance figure for the railtenders’ usherette trays: snacks, drinks, aisle trolleys. He checks in on the catering wagons crossing international borders. This Scorpio answers to customers served at tables—meals and wines—while on weekend duty across a network of luxurious sleeper cabins. His Sun in Rooster, he preens for the merit of a few days off, alights the train pacing at dusk, pacing the platform, to his car, heading home.
In sight of the awakening architecture—a concrete skeleton punctuated by panes of glass, the ruthless pride of architectural evolution—razing an old heritage of hedgerow townhouses. Beneath the hideous profile, I pull up and park before the influx of the suburbs and exurbs flood the city street. I alight and cross over, passing through the chill of glass and marble, to emerge on the upper floor. I greet the staff and settle behind Forum’s laptop, the Bill of Quantities open as I left it behind last Friday evening—with one slight change, the cleaners have unfolded the wrong page on the table before me.
The morning mirage on my table—Aetheria cowering—away from Victoria’s frivolous self, as if she harnesses the Hydra head of my mind. She rides toward the northeastern community of Schaarbeek. following a thread to the hedgerow of fenestrated brick facades—knot—through the architectural railway viaduct, slips behind the shut roller-blind the floor-through to the rear of the house into the glow of sunlight.
In a glitch–velvet paws descend the stairs, dawn wrapped in the hush of the loft above, floorboards creaking under a pacing weight, prowling past the sentinel of bedroom doors. Sighs cascade, losing its grounding by the street front door, then tracks back with Cat’s paws to a rear of the stairwell doorway. He enters the kitchen, rounds a U-return, until the hush breaks—pressing on, scooping ground coffee, and echoing a spout of water for the percolator on the worktop. From the drip, Jean-Francois Smeets bustles through the flank door, eyeballs roll and ears pricked toward the floor above, as he steps into the bright light falling across the shut patio door, and poses: cup, sauce, plate, fork, knife to a single place mat on the glass-top dining table.
When Andre Daniel steps out the kitchen doorway, dazzled, he turns his back on the glowing backyard strip, the railway tracks shadowed behind a shield of poplars. Indifferent to Tonton, who butles a shield through the empty rooms in enfilade toward the shut, roller-blinded street window. Naive to the trickster, Andre grabs the backrest, with the quiet flaw of the trade flickering in his eyes, pulls the chair out, and rolls around, fixated on the dressed placemat for breakfast. Deaf to Tonton’s reverent lip talk—‘André, can I pour you coffee?’
Andre Daniel’s gaze shifts—drops over the table’s edge, jars. ‘Something is amiss?’ reflects in his eyes, onto tightening into a frown. ‘Tonton, what happened here?’
It dawns, gradually, in his baffled regard—the white flank wall slides past Tonton’s dark suit, seeking the flaw at his feet: a rectangular, unswept patch on the parquet, conjuring the fallen wizard down of the black antique wardrobe from Mariette and Tonton’s gossip over the kitchen table beneath the hamlet’s thatched roof house.
Smeets—lip talk. ‘Andre, would you like more coffee?’ André Daniel raises a delusional stare. ‘Tonton, you just poured coffee?’
Off-beat, curtailing, as Andre is still frowning. ‘You’re just overworked,’ Smeets, in his business suit, curtains the view, The Scorpio in André, calm, darts past.
‘Something is amiss?’ Andre peers around the other side of Smeets, close up to the table, his glances sliding further down the enfilade that ought to be fragmented with furniture—blemished furniture shadows swallowed into the hush of the parquet, fading bare before the street window’s shuttered blind.
Then a sudden shift—Andre withdraws, gazing up into Smeets’s eyes. ‘Tonton, where is Pipo?’
In disbelief, cold, Smeets says. ‘Pipo’s still sleeping. . .’ It doesn’t fit the narrative—his eyes flash a glare:‘none of your business.’ He catches himself, gaze brushing off, and blunders: ‘I mean, his room is intact.’ A shift—conceding, softening. ‘He’s by Mamouch. . . Your parents!’
Andre snaps awake—eyes spearing Smeets. ‘Tonton, where is Victoria?’
Smeets leans over the table with the jug of coffee: ‘Andre, would you like more coffee?’
A wave of anger, daggers darting through his gaze, ‘Tonton—my cup is still full!’
Andre Daniel’s ears flop, deafening Smeets’ gibberish. ‘Andre, consider yourself lucky. The table is still here.’
Smeets points—eyeballs popping—to a glazier’s reality. But André Daniel’s lap hides beneath the placemat, his gaze fixed on the table legs in disbelief.
The Aries in Smeets, butting his head like a game, remorseless, insists: ‘But, Andre—you’re tired. Overloaded by a long weekend.’ André Daniel’s face flushes red, locked in wide-eyed fixation. Then, without mercy, the man in front of him reads aloud: ‘Victoria and Pipo deserve better than you.’
Before my eyes, the Hydra of my mind volatilizes, leaving me with a last thought, ‘Tonton! You are caught in your own trap?’ A wiggling Leopard leap from its lair—‘helping Victoria,’ blind to the victory pact with her: a laughable arrogance. When the mirrors of the minds clash with such absurdity, static flickers. Me, paying for the Dr. Decroly apartment, staying by Jephte. Victoria moves in, and he—the Aries—all authority over her life, and her boy.
The daylight from the landscape pane of the window dabs my right cheek, flaring in the corner of my eye. A gleam washes across the island of four naked tables, each of us hunched over a ream of paper, the rifle of sheets splayed open. Vexed by the Toshiba laptop booting, the screen flickers—C:\123—Lotus loading, the spreadsheet spitting back blank cells. I can’t fathom how, or why. I keep working, trying to navigate the machine’s fabricated entrails—yet I dare not to approach the Forum owner for answers. With the weary task of regenerating yesterday’s implanted formulas.
The Warthog’s pigheaded grip of my Gemini tears at me, pushing me to abandon reason as my mind spirals into turmoil, my fingers pianoing the keyboard: In cell F3, I type +B3*E3, arrow down. Replicate the command. F3 to F99. Enter. In Cell F100, @Sum(F3. . F99). Enter. Retrieve to B100..F100. The calculations flash back at me—cold digits, yet strangely alive.
‘You’re good for the day. As long as the computer doesn’t switch off.’
I typed off AXA’s bill of quantities: item number in column A, contract value in B, budget in C, cost to date in D, percentage in E, and the month’s Work in Progress report in F. Each input, each overwritten item—a bead on a wire—slides into place—until a shadow surges in the corner of my left eye.
After Laurence, rosé and rounded face, emerges from her office gaping doorway, a brush past the doored elevator shaft, her calm strides traversing the passageway. Her eyes circumvent the other men. She passes behind me, leans over my shoulder, caught in the evening light of the window. She places my previous report on the table, opens the tagged pages, and points out the errors. Swift as she appeared, she leaves my side, leaving me with the task of correcting my report. When the staff clears the office for home, I couldn’t be more grateful to Laurence’s French—for a report going to land on Leo’s desk, the self-hating paraplegic owner, buried under a swell of papers, and I can rest my mind as he signs off.
Emerging from the lobby, we split. I head for the silver-gray Audi among a train of dark cars, Victoria’s call echoing in my mind—‘Porte de Namur,’ etched from our first date. I slip behind the wheel, tweak the ignition, and pull out, tracing the arteries toward the Little Beltway, the old discolored city rooftops cradle the City Hall's blurry spire topped with the flaring Saint Michael slaying a devil. Then, pulling up a block razed to a construction fence, across the street corner, Victoria detaches herself from a brand of mannequins in fashion, I stop. She approaches, framed in the window, and slips into the seat. I drive off, weaving our way outward. Days folds into each other, highways stretching far beyond the city’s edges, driving in our glass bubble with problems, pulling us into the anonymous zones of mega-retailers. Ikea after Brico and more—trips flipping and blurring each other, our returns and another idea has thought itself out.
After parking the car, I swing the door shut behind me, severing the street’s glow as a pall falls across the hallway. My eyes grope; offside, keys drift and jingle, my ears catch Victoria picking the lock—a crack of light flares, mischief spilling out, a puppy glow clutching her silhouette. ‘Ain’t I beautiful?’ Aetheria’s mirage, in a hush of homecoming, filters the exhausts at the threshold, unrolling an extended doormat through my feet. Outlining the wooden wainscots, the newel post’s grip, the streaking handrail, the baluster winding along the wall toward the tenant’s hush upstairs.
The door eases to a stand wide open, offering a glimpse of the phone cradle perched in the far corner, bathed in the light from the back courtyard window. I catch a glance behind the door—Victoria scurrying through the gaping doorway, leaving her grocery bags on the kitchen table. Circling, her Shiva arms swing open cupboard doors, unpacking, until her first flimsy plastic lies crumpled flat.
I, on the contrary, precipitate through the portal—orientating myself from where we left off, the mattresses on the floor muddled bedding in the bay window light—amid of a makeshift joinery workshop cluttering the room with tools. Seven-foot laminated planks, sanded smooth, I fetched from the Brico’s merchant racks. An inch-thick module, in a three-foot cross-section stacked alongside one-footers, leans against the wall—tucked into a niche besides the mantelpiece's chimney. The components linger in a 3D blueprint in my mind, to be assembled.
I grab a three-foot-wide plank from the stack and lay it flat on the carpet, then bring down the next one, setting its edge alongside. Twisting and bent, I straddle over the angled planks, one foot brace to keep them from slipping, my knee joint pressed against the ridge of the plank’s shoulder for balance. A screw ready in my left-hand, I swipe the screwdriver off the carpet. Wringing one shoulder over, I point the screw and the drill bit low, parallel to the carpet, and let the whirr speak for itself. The first of a three-inch screw spins between my pinched fingers, biting through the face of the plank into the butt edge, the head sinking with a dying whirr.
I step off to the end. Grab and rotate the pair, tilting from the flat face lie, to tumble onto the other edge, settling on the carpet with a roofline ridge in the air. There, I drive a screw near the other end, punctuating the middle with a steady series. Lifting and moving without reverberation is the test of the first leg’s sturdiness, shaped and placed against the wall. I move onto the second. Then third and fourth—smaller, one-foot cross-section planks—remain laying on the carpet, too risky to free-stand without guards in the middle of the room.
With a bit of acrobatics—balancing of the smaller pillars tied across with a footboard - whir, whir - and again - whir, whir - after I fixed the headboard across the three-foot pillars. The side rail fastens the slender pillars to the massive one, duplicate on the other side locked into a frame. I pull the 5-meter Stanley measuring tape, mark the interior, with a ballpoint pen, then drive one-inch-long screws through steel truss angle plates. I heaved one mattress box-base to rest onto the anchors, then slot in the other to pair them up - whir, whir. . . - fastening the seam together with truss plates.
Nyx is drawing up through the tangling leafy canopies, blustering and wild, as I sigh, over my final task—lifting the last single mattress onto its base, the one aligned with the headboard. I turn my back on the niche meant for Alexandre, granting him all the space between the four pillars. Stepping back, I hook a ladder to the mezzanine side rail, and call to Victoria to dress the beds—”Pipo, can come home to you.”
Lucifer creeps out of the skies, casting a wave of vertigo across the mirroring interior. Victoria returns from her bustling, crawling on hands and knees after waving the sheets and bedding to lie flat, tucking the edges with a whip of the wrist. Her climbing down says it: ‘Hoops! that’s done.’ She steps through the portal, content with the layout, her coffee table poised before her Napoleon III Cabriole sofa. She tests her decor, still in work attire, stockings, she settles and swings her feet to rest besides her. I join her across the table, sinking into one of the scattered Bergère chairs. Over her shoulders, the courtyard recedes and vanishes into darkness, its shadow paid for by the brightening of the living room—yellow upholstered glowing—where our reflection meets in the window.
The window sashes strain against the blustery, descending whistles sweeping through the little courtyard, a thicket lashing its leaves in front of trembling panes, anger flickering in the shadows over Victoria’s shoulders. I thrive on ravaging storms, rising into their renewal; the tempest rages on—stubborn in its disbelief. For a while longer, the dark pelting window softens to a beaded rainfall, calming to drizzle with veins purfling the glass. Darkness recedes as twilight filters back down into the courtyard, touching the lagging drops.
Ring, riling, riling… - breaks the hush, Victoria kicks her feet, frolics away, swirling around the sofa by the gaping kitchen doorway. She paces behind the sofa, eyes reaching toward the far reveal of the windowsill, and swipe the handset to silence. In a magical tone, answers. “Victoria.”
But Victoria stares into the darkness of the glaze, her eyes dropping to the sill, drifting back into her tracks. She steps away, but is trailing the telephone cord, held to an appeasing murmur: “Andre, let me explain. . .” But Andre’s distant horn shouts, cutting through her words—his screams ripping through the line—reducing her voice to a mere whisper: “Andre. . . Andre. . . Andre. . .” Distancing from the phone cradle, pacing along the window she lowers the handset from her face.
In my silence, the dark window pane mirrors my mind. ‘My Little One, hang up the phone — that’s what I would do.’
Andre’s screaming shatters every thought she holds. Just short of the gaping kitchen, Victoria stops, turns around, her eyes carrying the bewitching scars of a mother’s worry. Tracking back along the trailing cord, her gaze lifts—past the phone cradle—meeting the far corner of the room. His own screaming reaches his ears, its echo punctuating the silence; he is forced into reflection, appeases, and lies low, thinking out another strategy.
At the monster of a dead telephone line, Victoria hangs up. She paces off, distraught, the weight of it raising new questions: ‘How did Andre get our phone number? Up the road by his parents—or is Tonton into his profession, a double agent?’
You are welcome to read all the chapters and explore more at my website: How the Universe Sculptured Our Mind. I spend an absurd amount of time chasing expression—perhaps to shame. But the challenge is mine, updates may occur without notice, shaping the timeline, perceptions. The gift is yours: thoughts, echoes, reflections. I take them with gratitude. And you—who are you, reading these lines, stepping into my genre, my style?
https://sites.google.com/i-write4u2read.com/howtheuniversesculpturedourmin?usp=sharing