How The Universe Sculpted Our Mind

[vofc-yams]

Your road trip ended on a sidewalk.

An avenue rising toward a speculative mansion. A tower slipping out of frame. A city trading heritage for a shoebox skyline.

She drove off. I was left behind — a wayside beacon in the scale of Brussels.

Inside the derelict hush, a phantom surgeon turned his pages. On a stucco wall, a mirage flickered.

Aetheria does not announce herself. She glows where speculation fractures certainty.

And sometimes, the path that feels like abandonment is the one that alters everything.

YD6-112—1994-Modulating and Speculating paths in the shadow of Aetheria--an echography frenzy

Against the hush of the western skies, the rear grand portal skims across the backyard’s saddled roofs, along the fenestrated brick facades cut with dark crags and nooks. 

When Victoria's shadow slices across the skylight, hold to the shady corner. Hands roll out cup and saucer; a short pour from the jug, a slip back to align with the percolator. In the briefest pause, she sips. 

Her face exalts—clear as water—lingering in thought through the grand portal’s small panes. At my end, cornered in the lounge, I’m caught behind the crystal mosaic of the V-stance folding doors. 

She dances herself free from the culinary enclave corner, caught by the time gobbling monster holding her back. She squeezes out the passageway, drops back the telescopic blades of the kitchen bar counter. Turns the corner, stretching at arm’s length to pose the cup and saucer on the edge of the table, and uncoils with a strange gaze for the exit door.

In her approach, I’m on hold, in the hush for that unpredictable outburst. 

“My Little One! Hé, attends!—[hey, wait!]” 

I spring to my feet, swirl around the slatted garden chair; a hand lags as I slap shut the screen of my Texas Instruments. A glance at my wristwatch—‘I'll be half an hour early!’—and I brush a shoulder against the V-doors’ stand. 

Her gaze avoids locking eyes; her mind sidesteps the knowledge of her blue Fiat Panda waiting in the street, not an option among a train of cars in the park cast wooded hedgerow.  As she sidesteps and my plan slips into oblivion, I swear in the hush, catching up, hailing, “Drop me off at Winy!”

In her swag, true to the pull of the entrance door, to its opening whisper, within that breath her urgent words, thin to a lingering—“It’s your baby, after all.” She steps onto the ±0 white-marble landing, veers toward the light in the crystal mosaic, and vanishes into the grand portal’s hollow. 

In the wake of Victoria’s flitting descent down the split-level, I pull the apartment door shut behind me - whoosh… clunk  -  the Art Deco frames sealing the hush before the doorstep releases the avenue: cast-shaded hedgerow thickets, peering from the depth the last twigs of winter’s brushwood. 

Victoria’s step across the resonating coal-chute plate, turns a cunning gaze at me: ‘Are you coming?’ 

A pause, farcical, as I pull the door behind me - fizz... cluck - shut. She spearheads ahead, keys trailing, jingling her proper bunch, and takes her stance by the Audi’s passenger door. I sidestep at the taillight, off the curb, scoot through bumpers, slip into the lane with a hip-roll rounding the rear fender. I catch the driver’s door on its opening crack, meeting Victoria’s keys falling to her lap—among a trio of excited bangles - smack - as she shuts her door. 

True to her rush, I tweak the ignition—glance over my shoulder, hand-spin the wheel—from stall along the curb, spooling into the lane, bending past the hedgerow of ashlar-fenestrated pre-WWI brick facade, the wall retrieving itself into looming, distant reflections. The asphalt carries us, bridging across a downstream of lawns beneath over-arching branches. 

Where Helios’ glow reaches the inner canopies, curled leaves flash gold, sprinkling spring with mottled light.

Victoria withdraws into the corner of her seat. She seems to have traced her path—through my line of duty—leaving me with the quiet question: ‘Where does her mind head now?’ 

We emerge onto the flocculent avenue. Inside the hush of our ride, the glass bubble holds its breath; Victoria bottles her deepest secret. We’re drawn into a sweep of converging lanes, filtering sunlight through thin, leafy branches along the grassy median. The road rises beneath an overbearing canopy veil; light speckles the windshield, rebounds off neo-modern hedgerows, fenestrated face-brick façades sliding past in softened reflection. 

In a trickle of traffic, we roll uphill to the crest, into reluctant reverence for the hilltop’s odious skyscraper—its staggered concrete decks scraping the sky, my mind dressing them down, willing it to crouch among the ring of surrounding communities.

At Albert Square, the intersection stutters—traffic tethered, then released at the toggle of changing tricolor lenses, a slipping chaos of stop-go packets bleeding through the crossing. 

We drop wayside past an industrial rolled-up paint-warehouse—splashed trademarks flashing by—sidestepping the looming local Match supermarket, escalator hollows sinking underground toward the tram station—under construction.

Among idle drivers, before pulling off, we ride the traversing Waterloo Road on hold, skirting away from the opposing far quarter where tables sprawl beneath unfurled umbrellas, inviting patrons. Victoria’s hands rest in her lap, clasping trinkets amid a scatter of keys and bangles in the quiet. Her gaze oblivious to the brasserie’s extended verandah splashed with beer brands—a puff of smoke, a cocktail, a Porto—her eyes locked to the leading roadway, edging toward the emphatic crotch of the staggering, towering decks.

The light bathing the intersection bends away into a welcoming effervescent spring green. The barrel-vault raised high on stalky tree trunks, airing the parkway, relieving it of its debuting median parapet wall. Slipping instead; raising gantry, treading suspended cable runs, tethers pantograph from the median as a tram surfaces from underground, cleaving a way through the parkway—silver tracks stretching through dedicated grass. 

Windows profile passengers’ bored expressions. Leapfrogging, a free ride, the tram distances itself through the median ahead until the halt platform. We flow in the wake of a virgin architectural rhythm, hedgerows of ashlar architraves returning amid face-brick facades. Narrow rays of side streets vanish into the community, outside her regard, as persistent foliage holds gables and eaves in passing, drawn along the artery’s far, closing blur. 

The haze clears as we approach a sunlit bifurcation pushing into  stop-and-go traffic. Released from the tram halt’s shadows, pedestrians cut freely across Square Vanderkindere, fanning toward storefronts and corner eateries; tricolor lenses toggle as drivers mischievously tease the loose end of the bottleneck.

We veer away from the right lane and cross the arid square through its appeasing chaos, threading past a few oncoming cars, meeting the bow of a townhouse shielded from sunlight as its corner entrance slipping by. We pass the dark flank of the corner retailer, its lintel tagged in a deep blue-backed enamel nameplate spelling, “Winston Churchill Avenue,” and the façade breaks open—commercial sideyard giving way as our path stretches ahead. 

Our glass bubble spools us into the barrel-vaulted arcade, Victoria’s destination sealed in her mind. Mine lies straight ahead. The hedgegrown crenellations of fenestrated facades should read as a lesson—speculation stacked before me, an avenue’s soiled heritage masquerading as success—I drive on a lost cause, bound to meet the umpteenth off-plan buyer at 208 Avenue Winston Churchill, speculating on the mansion’s apartments.  

The arcade’s foliage presses, in its hushed darkness, squeezed through the narrow breathing space. At the edges, branches glow and intrude, streaking a thin line across our path. The dark breaks—what‘s slipping behind, verse across a light beam swelling, releasing us briefly into sunlight, then folds us back under shadow again. We advance at the rhythm of time, counting the crossing streets, the cadence shifting through the Winston Churchill roundabout and tram terminus in the open. Leaving the circle, the median carries its silver threads onward in a dedicated, shadowed run through the grass.

This next approach is policed by tricolor lenses toggling in the shadow while others bleached out in the glare. From the darkness, I measure the barrel-vaulted span breaking across the traversing streets, opening the crossroads to sunlight. When lenses turn green to our favor, we coast through the bright crossing and edge toward the curb, halting behind a train of glittering parked cars. 

I tweak the ignition key, to clasp my keyring, as I step out by the unlatching door. I spared her a glance as she urged a foot across the central console. Her legs entangle; I think—You'd be better off stepping out and circling to my seat’—but she scoots, stuck on the edge of the passenger’s bucket seat, her thighs tackle the gear lever’s knob.

Smack - I shut the door. An assailing glance snaps to the traffic lenses. In a stride to jaywalk across the lanes, I stall, my eyes trailing back to the driver’s window. I skim the street again, gauging a break short of the zebra crossing. Behind the glass, Victoria twists and wiggles, ending her gymnastics with a seat shift, hands latching, her torso drawn close to the steering wheel. 

Our paths break at the corner of the street—Victoria’s Fiat Panda driving style, alternating a floored throttle with release. I catch my Audi kangaroo-leap into the lane, and to my dismay the tailgate storms down Avenue Winston Churchill, vanishes into the blur of the Bois de la Cambre, carried along Waterloo Road. It leaves me with a thought: ‘My Little One, you’re born under a lucky star.’

With my path in view across the avenue in its breadth, my feet lag behind, the Audi a reminder of the deserted lane. Before me, emphatic, two pairs of tram tracks traverse my way, their rails carrying light forward, skipping through the shadowed grassy median toward the wooded edge of Bois de la Cambre. 

Mnemosyne answers the call: under my feet the milieu shifts, and my ghost transposes half down the block, to standstill—stealthed among the dark trees lining the youthful branching, barrel-vaulted lane. In dabs of late-morning light, a pair of harnessed horses draw closer from the shadows, along the shouldering hedgerow of fenestrated mansions.

The horses draw toward me, the driver in a black tuxedo and hat seated high in the center of the cart’s bench, sliding through a sun-dab where bent leaf-branches unzip the sky between canopies. I let my guard down, yet still test the reach of my phantom. One step back from the curb, I stand within the English-style driver's field of sight, half-concealed by the lineup of dark barks—my gaze fixed on the man’s eye. 

Without gloss, an amniotic shield of light: a two-way membrane between our worlds. I stand in plain view of the driver, yet he spares me no glance. Bound to his period, he does not reach me—he slips past, while my present runs parallel, irreciprocal. 

I’m invisible, stealthed by the wayside, watching the horse-drawn carriage shapes up—hood lowered—bearing a dignified personage in Edwardian dress: stern gaze, stone-faced, his slender figure set into the rear seat. He parades past, neither drawn to my wayside presence at the verge, nor offering an acknowledging glance. 

Below the driver’s perch, the vacant seating—soft leather’s dull shine, and while in passing the footwell aligns exposing his feet through the gap of the tandem cartwheels, their spokes spinning a haze. Then, I’m called back to the driver, gathering the reins. He guides the horses into a wide arc, entering the driveway, toward the bluestone architraves. In the hush, the carriage halts, and before the horses the massive wrought-iron doors.

The obscure glass flirts with a blemish, a spot stretching into elongation. Beyond the horses’ pricking ears, through the crack of the middle stile, a groomer appears and pushes the heavy door leaf back on its hinges. He slips across the opening, catches the dormant leaf and hinges it back to latching flush to the wall flank. He stands by, collimated to the interior wall, as the driver flicks the reins. The horses enter the porte cochère, swallowed by the interior’s shadows, where I lose sight of the activity. 

I find myself back, pacing across the zebra lines toward a green pedestrian lens, crossing the asphalt with a sturdy step; my eyesight skirts the corner terrain, chewed by economic logic, given over to the odious shoebox towering apartment windows.  

I head for a residue of Greek pediment and white stone ashlar jambs—belonging to the 1911's mansion. Rounding the sidewalk’s plumb brick pillar, I walk up the driveway and pause by the wire-glass behind the wrought-iron scrolls to the door. I turn the key, set my right shoulder, and press. Before the weight on its hinges gathers momentum, I squeeze through the crack, sidestepping into the somber porte cochère.

Along the flank wall, square Corinthian columns rise, among them the phantoms gather around the horse-drawn carriage—the distinguished figure just descended. On the elongated marble treads before the glazed archway portal, he turns around and pauses. He issues instructions to the driver, straightens and heads onward vanishing into the shadows beyond the glass. In his wake, the groomer grabs the reins and leads the horses further on, their silhouette thinning as they pass the backyard’s daylight. 

I’m left pacing the ceramic-tiled floor, ice spikes rising through my feet, past winters held derelict in the walls. As I circle, the chill carries the echo of a distant school bell, tolling children into chaos—the mansion draining the last rituals stalled in the air. A painful grab tightens the calves of my legs, and I keep pacing in circles to kill the cold. My clothes crisp and creep along my skin, pressing into my flesh. 

The hands of my wristwatch lag mercilessly from one to the next five-minute notches. Then, to my relief, shadows gather behind the scrolls of the wrought iron door, shaping in the translucent scrim glass. An arm stretches toward the calling button. I step up, grab the lever, unlatch, and tug the heavy leaf open—facing a youngish woman, followed by an elderly man. 

The woman, says. “Nous sommes…[—We are Mrs. and I’m Mr. Hack—we have a ten thirty appointment.]”

I step back, begged the couple, “Suivez-moi!—[Will you follow me?]” 

Bang - the heavy glazed-steel shuts behind the couple. I lead the way, mounting the stretched thread, offering the potential buyers a sightline to the four-leaf grand arched portal, to the entrance hall, marble chill underfoot. 

As their eyes roam the infiltrating light, warmth sketches the dark wood raising the elaborate staircase toward a cathedral stained-glass mural, its efflorescent, sylphic light descending through enwrapping balustrades. I skip ahead, climbing the self-sale pitch toward the upstairs apartments. Across the hallway, I lead them into the featured mirror, replicating the entrance’s four-leaf arch portal. 

I sidestep to the far right of the mirror and crank the discrete door lever. The mirror swings back, opening onto a gloomy chevron parquet floor, haunted by emptiness, if not for a pair of narrow, tall windows casting soft shafts of daylight to the feet of phantoms on standby before an operating table. 

The husband lags behind. The wife’s eyes meander, gauging the breadth of the walls and the height of the ceiling, drifting around the surgeon, recognizable in his eloquence—issuing instructions, inserting himself among an assistant readying utensils on a side table for a surgical intervention—an untimely mystery, drawing me into his path. 

I sidestep into the woman’s path with my handouts, then fall in behind her reluctant man. The Hart couple unfold the A-3 sheets, their eyes questioning—‘What is this?’ 

My finger leaps, rubbing the color schema of the ground-floor apartment, but she steps onward, through the interleading doorway. Whether they notice—now dismantled to the backroom—a flash: the backyard portal asserts its character, cinder block masoned across against vandalism.

Around the corner, in the shadows, I meet the surgeon again—behind his desk—spectacled, studious crouched over an open book, reading through the rifled pages, wings spread. I’m drawn to the bookcase rising over his shoulders, replicated across his study in glazed doors shelved with stacked spines. 

The surgeon dissolves in the shadows, before the undeterred woman. Her curiosity slips from the bare room, her gaze caught astray at the wall paneling's blind door, then leading on climbing past the stained-glass mural toward the upper floors.

The woman drains my mind as she roams the apartment floor. I wait for her signal to continue, lingering toward the rear window, hovering there. From the blind backyard corner the groomer emerges, walking the pair of horses toward the distant stables along the men’s local. 

I turn away, meeting the woman at the door. She sidesteps from a peek to discover the adjacent flight of stairs. She further rises to the next floor, sparing glances through doorways. Climbs further to the mansard floor. Returns to her waiting man from the dust-blanketed maids’ dormitory rooms. In her passing toward the exit staircase, he blurts, “This wouldn’t suit us.” 

The servant staircase worms shoulder tight down to the scullery glass door. The man and woman step out, baffled, turning away from the backyard light. They head toward the tunnel light. In a brief greeting by the door scrolls, the translucent pane clears onto their dark Volkswagen Golf, speaking loudly of people set against outreaching desires. 

Bang - I turn back and lag in the surgeon’s hush, winter seeping up from the derelict’s basement, pacing up and down as impatience presses on, my brief expectation of Victoria picking me up thinning with each glance at my wristwatch, the next five-minute notch already slipping, until, in my search for warmth, I find myself edging outdoors—carried by the driveway tracks to the sidewalk gutter, where waiting resumes. I peer left, catching shadows and wild reflections sweeping across windshields, inoculating the drivers too as they approach along the alleyway. 

Befuddled, I scan the traffic for the Audi’s grille, as a few cars pass without flickering its muzzle out of the Bois de la Cambre, dissolving instead into the mottle dabs of the alleyway. I step along the curb, a wayside beacon—gadget—impatient paces not letting my feet root down, checking each undulating mold for the bubbly Audi, still failing to surface in silver-gray among the passing trickle, the thought of walking home doesn’t cross my mind, as wishful glances bustle over my shoulder. 

I weigh my options of drifting out of orbit as I anchor my gaze on every approaching car, still in disbelief that Victoria has forgotten me. Reluctant, I step down the curb at the corner, cross the street, and find myself stepping up again, stretching my orbit beyond being found, abandoning “Winy’s” street block behind. 

I pace along the stretch of sidewalk ahead, my mind beginning to churn—‘Call a taxi!’—only to be reminded of the telephone booth at the South Station hotel, that evening I landed in the country, Mariette Somers’ number in mind for lodging. 

The sidewalk extends my reluctant strides, drawing up a bitterness; then I doubt myself, a tram trundling past behind the thought, the question flickering—whether she can be blamed at all. It dissolves as the tram leapfrogging ahead—or back—to a platform along the grassed median tracks, its silver thread running light-stippled toward the scattered halts, and my own shortcomings—clueless at borrowing public transport. 

Until the monotony is breached by the hedgerows of fenestrated apartment blocks, I lag in my strides, hopes dwindling as cars glide past. Sheepish, I steal hopeless glances at the mismatched crenelated wall shining beyond the shaded arcade, a remnant that withstood the gutting of the classic mansions, while the modernized entrances now bear brass plaques, redesignating them as corporate headquarters. 

The lure of the brasserie’s bright red awnings answers my skepticism—whether Victoria would ever find me—with her lucky flair. ‘Victoria wouldn't miss a drink.’ 

Helios’ efflorescent light plays away from the awnings, the corner facade opening its wing deep into the sidestreet, Aetheria’s seizes the mirage spreading across the stucco wall, flickering and flushing out a blue enameled nameplate—‘Edith Cavell Street.’ 

It punctures the mind. Confusing, perhaps, but not to me: it pulls New York close, draws Yael nearer to home, vibrating with Edith Piaf’s voice, trembling through the walls. 

I press through the corner door, the airlock yielding as the beer hall opens onto a few turtle-crouched men over their glasses, sending me forward beyond the front booths. I slip along the opposing counter toward a woman with a long, wavy dark mane, a kitchen towel draped at hand as she rubs the sparkle into the long-stemmed glass bowl. 

I head further, halt before a poster on the end wall, claim the vacant corner. I sway hips onto the penultimate padded bench, scoot toward the window, and watch—through beer brands splashed across the glass—the upcoming traffic, scanning for my Audi. 

The black-haired retards her advance, slips from behind the bar counter, settles squared before the table—“What can I help you with?” 

As she leaves, I catch drivers flickering in the shadow of their passing, undulated windows—a last resort, drafting a strategy, while behind the brasserie’s teasing airlock corner door I imagine Victoria’s eyes peeking inside, sweeping the beer hall—though I know in my right mind, that wasn't going to happen. 

The waitress returns, balancing a platter. With her free hand, she places a coaster in front of me, sets down a mug of hot chocolate, then side-steps—slipping the ticket beneath the coaster—and retreats behind the bar.

I sip and let down with a sinking feeling, finishing my drink. I remain, elbows propped on the table, dawdling over the empty mug—hesitant to call the waitress and stir the beer hall back to life. Another drink wouldn’t extricate me from the crossroads weighing on me, nor ease the reluctance to resume the long stride home. 

Ready to face my betrayer, I spur to my feet, pause, and leave before the waitress her ticket with a hundred-franc bill before heading toward the exit. I emerge onto the sidewalk and glance back—’no returning.’ I swallow the simmering let-down and set off into the long, uncharted stretch ahead.

My feet slap the paving, thoughts milling. ‘She’s probably decided to go home—she’s likely forgotten me altogether.’ 

I steady my mind on the hedgerows, crossing intersections in laughing sunlight, reading in their crenellated edges a wall not designed but grown—remnant mansions niched in chaotic pattern, stalled jewels from another age—until Winston Churchill Avenue heels back. 

There, I crawl past the alternating street corners, short of the kaleidoscopic shimmers of retailers across Square Vanderkindere—a dynamic foreign to my purpose. I urge myself onward, drifting along the diverging parkway, the deserted sidewalk stretching ahead, the historic hedgerow architecture untethered in rhythm: neither sprawling mansion nor fluted slender townhouse, but wide facades holding the middle ground. 

Dragging my feet as though through freshly poured concrete, I pass another deserted plate-glass tram shelter, solitude drawing up behind me as the sun-bleached sidewalk stretches ahead. 

The jagged concrete skyscraper loomed ahead—pivotal—against the vista’s far blur. With each stride, the haze lifted; the bend carried the hedgerow’s fenestrated, craggy, balcony-riddled facades across to the other side. My path skirting the tower, which remained only a thought—fallen out of frame. 

Opening into the straight, the last townhouse cuts short Square Albert’s intersection—the clearing jump-starting a new row of offset gable ends, to the walls of facades slipping downhill along the median and its asphalt lanes. In my strides the parkway shedding its rows of townhouses as grand flocculent branches rise from the last shouldering corner. Where, I leave the wall of the fenestrated brick facades behind, cross the street, stepping into the cast shades swallowing the sweeping descent. I mount the curb, and prolong the park’s gritty graded sidewalk.  

The grit answers my pace in a whispering crunch, and as I near the low, overbearing branches gaping their foliage, my mind flips from pursuing the sidewalk home to a wilder, unstressed course along the wide river of lawns through the wooded park. I veer, duck beneath the branches, and find the bank’s gritty path, descending with the lay of grass, gazing through the thickets across the field of asphalt toward the freckled row of fenestrated brick facades, leaching my frustrations away.  

As the moonlight path opened behind the flocculent hedgerow, scattered beech spurred into sunlight at the whispers of my pace, and passing, immersed in the flow of lawns, I reached a cast-shaded island—the sturdy lone oak, proud, cloaked in its foliage. Beyond it, a park bench held the light of a shallow dugout, and through speckled leaves I monitored my bearings: the meddled brick and bluestone ashlars facades  across the avenue, searching for home’s doorstep by the basement grill, for the bright vestibule pressed toward the street—never assured while the thickets kept their blind spot, until they folded back, and the lawns drew into a backwash, pressing against the hard lip of Square Rochefort traffic. 

I step clear from behind the bus shelter and probed uphill among the trains of curb-parked cars, calling in the hush of my mind—‘My Little One? Are you home?’I jaywalk across the avenue toward the bright vestibule, scanning the stationary cars through streaky shades for my silver-gray Audi, in vain. 

Keys jingling in my hand, I mount the curb, lean off No. 13’s barn doors, and step up to the oak-glazed entrance clearing into bright white marble. I pick the lock, turn the key, press the door—mounting wrath dissolving, as I shut the door on a lingering hush, a derelict stillness that ought not be. 

I rise the split-level, making my peace with Victoria, cross the crystal portal to the +/-0 Belle Epoque landing, and meet the strange dark entrance pane that ought not leave me doubting what waits behind. I unlock - cluck - the door leaf springs back to a vacuum chill.

The bookshelves held their silence; the dining room gave no echo of Mozart’s symphonies. I stretch a hand, hook my arm around the doorjamb, reach across the sidelight, and with an awkward finger flick the switch. In the hush I lose myself, retracing my earlier steps around the V-stance of the grand portal doors toward my secluded corner in the lounge.

I hook a finger on the backrest and swing the garden chair onto a leg, then reach over to lift the screen of my Texas Instruments and press the On button. With one eye on the boot lines streaking across the screen, roll my hips into the chair, my shanks tucking under my bureau and bumping the Okidata laser printer on the bottom shelf. Finger typing, opening the screen where I left off earlier, only to remain lost and cold, wondering—‘Where is she?’—doodling through the figures of the construction project, while the city blurs her whereabouts in its scale. Until, ears pricked in the niche of the inner angle by the interleading doors, I catch a muted resonance threading beyond the walls.

In a gust - clunk, whoosh... -  offside in the blind entrance’s corner, the door flings open - clang, clung, cling - her bangles confused with Victoria’s bunch of jingling keys. She voices a carousel of joy: “Viens voir—[Come and see!]” And in the trailing - whoosh… - of the shutting door, her relentless thought spins on—‘Come and see what I have.’ 

As the thought ruminates—‘Find out what happened?’—Victoria’s sprightly mosaic crosses the grand portal, waffle-crystal beads trembling in their yellow wood alongside the casement architrave. She breezes from behind the V-folded doors that shouldered me. I catch the gap and throw after her: “Pourquoi n’est ut pas venue a Winy—[Why didn’t you come an fetch me at Winy?]” 

Ignored—‘catch-me-if-you-can flight’—I’m left bewildered by Victoria's blatant deaf ear, my words obliterated. I fold into her call—“Ça ne peut pas attendre un peu—[Can’t that wait a little?]”—but her persistent cry—“Viens voir—[Come and see!]”—tethers my glance, and drawn by her urge—her entry into the lounge across the floorboards past the bystanders of her yellow upholstered Bergères—I twist in my chair, wrenched counterwise over my shoulder, until her, “Viens voir!—[Come and see!]” slips beyond me in the long strides ahead. 

In revenge, blasé, Victoria blocks out my voice. A VHS cassette at hand, she strides toward the white marble mantelpiece, the television monitor’s cathode tube housed inside the open hearth. She dives for the anthracite Video Home System casing resting on the white hearthstone. 

My head rings with my own pleading. “Je serai tout avec toi—[I’ll be all togehter with you.]” I bluster, but fail to reach her,. “Ça ne peut pas attendre un peu—[Can’t it wait a little—‘I’ll be with you right now!]” But Victoria, slotting the video cassette player - klec - stoops, before - clack, clack, clack - blind gears set the tempo and draw the tape inward to a hush, the white-labeled spine with a brief scribble still before the open mail-slot lid.

I fall foul of an apprentice bricklayer’s vow never to swear—construction men who fire off their words like rap singers, a limited arsenal of vulgar syllables explaining their world—while I suffocate ‘Sh-t! Sh-t! Sh-t...’ behind my screaming mind, Mnemosyne tearing between me and my Texas Instruments as I uncoil from my chair and rising behind the backrest toward Victoria. 

She heels back, her eyes shifting on the television screen’s snow, then relaxes further, squatting on her feet, her girlish voice persisting: “Viens voir, c’est fantastique—[Come and see, this is fantastic.]” Her impatience draws a finger to an inept - pock, pock, pock… - then wilder pocking skittering across the VHS’s fascia and back. 

The tape player’s entrails respond - click, cluck, clang… - as Victoria creeps closer, expecting the snow-held screen to divulge its mysteries. Pre-emptively she paws at the screen, fingernails bursting dry - tick, tick, tick … - and does not weather the machine’s indignation, no signal rising to meet her. Frustrated, she jabs while I stand poised behind her—until she whirls: “Ça ne fonctionne pas—[It’s not working—do something. What is wrong with this machine?]” She flips back, in her runaway threatening tone. “Fais quelque chose—[Do something, this is your Loulou!]” 

Victoria’s attention lifts in flight between the cassette player to the television snow. In the hush, I breathe a thought. “Maybe it needs rewinding?” Then—the snow swap. Her wish granted: a wash of static gives way to a calm sky-blue.

Her irate  finger responds before she does. ‘If I can’t—You can’t get this to work either. I can do this.’ 

Wild-eyed, she toggles the Video Home System on and off—prophetic, convinced her touch alone will conjure signal. Her magic fingering triggers the casing entrails - click, cluck, clang - pause. Then, proceed - whiz-z-z. . . - The player halts—as if thinking—whines toward the tape's end - click - catches its proper rhythm - click - the entrails smooth. The screen blackens. 

I stepped up. “OK, I’m there with you.” 

She doesn’t hear me. I hover over her shoulders, her gaze locked on the parasitic screen. She wiggles in anticipation while I retreat inward, thinking. ‘A bad recording!’ 

Victoria isn’t deterred by the salt-and-pepper scratch of clawed static. Instead, she retracts, easing herself into a comfortable yoga posture. Girlish and sejant, myopic near the television, her eyes swallow the black-and-white grain. She holds herself there, wiggling—then wallops the screen again. 

The parasitic lines morph with the motion of a black-and-white weather radar. She advances closer, persistently pecking a fingernail at a convoluted throb. “There, there,” she says.

I lean in, trying to catch her enthusiasm—to blend into her joy. 

“That’s her head,” she say. 

After a while, I begin to grasp what she sees as she teeters and points. “Ça c’est son petit bras. Ça c’est son petit pied—[That’s her little arm. That’s her little foot,]” 

out of the noise—sound waves bouncing off a kick—arm and foot retreat into the grainy, vibrating gray, creating and reshaping themselves in doubt. 

Victoria  drops a palm to the floorboards, props her arm, and rolls on a hip to sit on her thigh. Her fingers taps the floorboard. I step closer, cross my feet, flex through my scissoring legs, and lower myself beside her.

[vofc-yams]

YD6-111 — Aetheria: Consciousness and the Corrosive Legacy of a Child’s Name

What happens when a name arrives before the body can consent? When inheritance moves faster than consciousness, and memory installs itself where choice should be?

Aetheria is not a ghost. She is the moment awareness steps forward—too late, perhaps—to notice how a life has been quietly occupied. Names repeat. Phantoms multiply. Damage accumulates without intention. And somewhere in the middle of it all, a question surfaces, simple and dangerous:

Oughtn’t I own my body?

This chapter doesn’t explain. It exposes. It lets the pattern emerge.

Enter through the crystal portal below.

YD6-111 — Aetheria: Consciousness and the Corrosive Legacy of a Child’s Name

In a seismic bedding drag, with a shoulder's twist, Victoria’s torso emerges from the befuddling duvet, propped on her arms, eyes sparkling—‘Listen to this!’ she freezes.

‘Where from do you come?’ I fix her sparkling eyes. 

A comical wakening, after a glimpse in the hush of the morning, her mind bursts to spill through her wide eyes, as she turns her face—quietly rolling in her pixel ball of hair sunk deep in the pillow—locking big, smirking eyes. 

She’s still propped half in her night’s cocoon, holding her eyes’ driving fixation. In the waste of unlocking her mind, I’m lured through the gap of the baldaquin—sailing light gripping billowing voile, split and strung back to posts—tailing into shadow, a lazy lie of the aisle before the window. 

The landscape window, framed by white and blue bands engulfed in the curtain folds, underlined by a valance. It pictures Helios’ starburst rays sprawling, chasing Nyx from the backyard’s jagged rooftops, saddling the hedgerow of fenestrated brick facades, her dark skirt lurking in notched corners and underneath eaves.

Victoria crawls, elbows pressing their stumps into my chest, eyes sailing through, Pringle-shingle glamour drawing closer, heeled hands rising, fingers unfurling to cup her cheeks. In laze she relents, her hovering sparkle imagining my response as she purrs, “Do you love the name Louis…” 

Victoria has suscitated my grandfather Somers—to brood his dead, I tell myself. ‘She’ll forget.’ 

But Victoria insists, surging me into reminiscence: my elder brother’s phantom living, my twin arborescent, chilling through my body, waning at the extremities of my limbs, leaving a blood-warmth behind.

“C'était le nom de ton grand-père!—[It was your grandfather’s name…] Victoria says, her eyes dangling—‘You should remember his memory?’

Gazing at Victoria, my mind rolls back into my childhood, vivid—as I lag behind our big family leaving the big corner house—under construction, half-perched on the bank of a rolled-out lava-river swell—I lag along the white, gritty driveway to where I toy with the Caterpillar scraper’s blade, grading the traffic-corrugated street spine, tires spilling the sand to the shoulders. 

There, at the traversing street, I dropped back from the familiar little herd, De P’pa and M’ma veering away from our usual school path that skirted the purlieu’s extinguished volcano, my parents and siblings distancing instead toward Grandfather Somers’ house. Standing back, I watched them blend into the black of the street, my stubbornness tugged toward a wrenching liberty in their disconcernment—no one realizing I was no longer following in their steps.  

Bush-hacked parcels, Goma’s nascent from the bush—the town miniaturized. Playing with my brother Igor - vroom - Dinky Toys cars through our town’s mapped sand streets.

Past the hedgerow, wild and giant, ripe black mulberries within reach—we pick at a brush of hands, then a diagonal leap across the street to a notched-out property, a villa, its driveway holding a bubble-Austin from my collection, before another bush-wack toward the colonial street mall—the Town birther—builder: Grandfather’s ash-block cottage, grown outward into a villa.  

Grandfather’s house rests shyly set back in the bush. Another giant pace across Avenue des Ibis pads a grass girdle to the corner villa—schoolteacher Van den Broeck—his snouty, curvy Renault 4 tucked into the driveway, ash-blond daughter riding the passenger window to and from on school days. 

I had sensed that procession building up, to bury him—as Victoria’s irritable persistence: naming: “Louis, Louis…” fuses a pressure to relive. 

De M’ma storms a shockwave through the doorway of Grandfather’s house, clutched by her heart; I am invisible in her path, taken back by the Somers household’s Garden Boy, leaping through the streets with the volcano behind him, trumpeting for help—feet wild, hands flutter—as he tears away down the street. 

“[Nenda kwa bibi yako — babu yako…] Relentless, he presses, repeating the glance. ‘Go, go, go…’—[Go to your grandmother — your grandfather…” 

I kick a foot, cross the whitewashed boulder curb, wandering, creep across the front-yard coarse kikuyu lawn, around a planter encircled by planted white boulders—ghosting Aunt Carla crouched in tilled earth, heeling to a myriad of bright flourishing colors—alongside the far beaten tracks of a driveway vanishing beside the fenestrated façade of a villa, a town without local architects—humble in its simplicity. 

I dare tread the first of a trio of doorsteps, drawn up to the threshold, stretch my arm, palm the door ajar and swing right back, holding a slink gaze as a gap opens—a chill rising, cornered and half-hostile; the terrazzo floor slabs meeting with an efflorescing green, while through the door and window an equatorial daylight slips in, pressing the shadow beneath the dining table to cower among the legs of Kiaat chairs in the far corner of the room. 

My gaze brushes the blank rear wall beyond the door stile, carried into the opposing wing of the room, until it is stirred by a red wood door; I reckon a passage back toward the offset original cabin, breaching the plane of windowless whiteness. 

My gaze is befallen by the wing of the room, caught at the backing of an upholstered brown scrim couch, vaulting a Kiaat coffee table before being swallowed by a landscape—rondavel straw village in the African rain forest—our school-vacation playground as little Tarzans and Mowgis—suspended on the flank wall, lifted by the street-front window glow. 

My eyesight narrows on the adjacent door, skipped by window light, too far in the corner of the room, creeping on—sentient that i wasn’t meant to see—while in the hush I move like time itself, edging toward the mysterious crack of the door, a familiar native call trolling ahead of me to obligation.

I sneak up to the exposing flush door; at the touch of my fingertips on the lever, the hinges give—with a phantom cause. The gap widens, right back, unfolding—wedging me into an intrusive entry: a made-up kingsize bed in the far corner. A mirage carries a backyard villa in the forward, against the suburb’s scattered rooftops. A ghostly pause before the sashes of the large steel-framed window.

Around the doorjamb’s latch plate, further from the shaded pair of pillows, as I cross the threshold, Grandmother silhouettes—seated, her petite frame indented into the foot of the brown bedspread. Head low, frail, forearms resting along her thighs, a flimsy mottled gray print skirting her knees; fingers woven, wrist drawn to the knuckles, held there. 

‘What’s going on with the Bon’m-Ma?’ 

Her cheeks glisten, a steady trace of tears.

I couldn’t imagine Grandmother praying. Her dreary eyes fixed on the floor, drawing me to a puzzling pile of raked-up autumn leaves behind her ankles. Then I catch her low block-heeled shoes; in their extent they outline a man’s shoe heels, awkwardly pointing apart in the air. I fold back through Grandmother’s missing ankle shield, revealing man socks.

The blind pieces construe themselves into an absurdity: superimposed, upside-down, lopsided leather soles, toe caps planted together on the floor, vamps swallowed in the window’s shade. From the scrambled leafy colors, they clear to diamond-plaid socks, climbing ankles into the cuffs of baggy suit trousers, running away alongside the low terracotta-tiled windowsill, down the blind aisle. 

‘Bon’p-Pa!’ my mind exclaims and takes flight from the scene, yet enactment draws pants and shirt into the shadows up the aisle, losing Grandfather’s image—his head dissolved into the far trail of gathered deep curtain folds, ornating the corner by the Kiaat night table, extending the headboard.

Victoria, in her whims, propped over me—big-eyed, close, zestful snaps.

“Louis?” Her gaze asks, ‘Why are you not excited?’ Grasp it—“Louis, Louis?”

Subtle as I showed up, I turn away from the pain inflicted on my grandmother as if it’s contagious. In the hush, dread reigns—a reality I can not digest, a truth to keep at bay. I inch away with the hinging door, leaving in the quiet the crack found earlier, zombie-like, fleeing a haunted house, through the shadow of a passage toward the sentinel of the entrance, shaking myself free.  

When a gale-force entry brings De-M’ma in short of breath, her anxious eyes storm past me; I’m invisible in her rushes—and only then does the apple of her father’s eye appear to me, charging toward the door I just emerged from. As she vanishes into her parent’s room, I hold my step—drawn to follow the muffled echoes behind the wall, pulled back into the gravity of their bond—he uprooted, sold out in Belgium, to settle for wild Africa.   

Against Victoria's enthusiasm, I have no words; I search for a way around a direct answer that might wound her thriving excitement. 

“Why Louis?” I ask.

Victoria retreats, her gaze questioning—’Why are you asking that?’

Thoughtful, I refrain from insisting, while I search for preemptive, gentle words to circumvent Grandfather Somers in explanation— 

When, from the living side of universes, a dark blotch soils the translucent threshold wall, swelling as it nears into a slender figure, until the threshold itself seems to vanish.

I guess Mother couldn’t bear the loss of her first infant boy—Moon in Sagittarius, Sun in Monkey—raising an envious trace that says: ‘that could have been me.’ In her strive to keep his memory alive, my parents passed on his name at my birth and sealed our fate.

‘Oughtn't I own my body?’ 

I lagged in the wake of the family, out the white gritty driveway, stalling behind in the back lava sand of the traversing street. They headed toward my grandparents Somers’ house, and I never buried De Bon’p-Pa, but for vivid recalls.

‘My Little One, let it pass!’ flashed in my mind; I dare not voice it. 

As I search words for the inexplicable, she leashes onto death—the seven-year-old little girl who laid on her father's chest when his heart hushed away. Victoria, to my dismay, is relentless, raising Grandfather’s zombie from his grave in Goma. 

“What would you do, if it’s not a boy?” I ask.

Victoria’s eyes open wider, fixed—her universe in turmoil—launching her gaze on a marathon, her imaginary strides repeating; “I know it will be a boy. I know. I feel it’s a boy!”

As Aetheria had made herself heard a decade ago, I insinuate, “What if it is a girl?”—‘Would you be deceived?’

Victoria’s insistence tires her voice. “It will be a boy...” Her tone succumbs to doubt. She releases her elbows from my chest, slips back into her cocoon, pulling the duvet up. She dozes off, her mind echoing, ‘Louis! What if you’re…’—into a hush. 

She sprints to her feet, mind set, dressing her way out before the window.

[vofc-yams]

YD6-110 (Job) Vitrine of Light Breaking the Vault of Nyx and the Handler’s Reluctant Tread

Architecture isn’t stone; it’s a nervous system.

In the heart of Aetheria, every spire and corridor breathes with a collective pulse. Can a city dream? Or are we simply the thoughts it chooses to house? You don’t walk through these streets; you resonate within them. The stone remembers your touch, the light anticipates your gaze, and the very air hums with a consciousness that predates our first breath. We are the architects of our own perception, yet Aetheria is the mind that holds the blueprint.

Step inside. Feel the shift in the atmosphere as the walls begin to listen. This isn’t a place you visit—it’s a presence you become.

The threshold is open. Cross the Crystal Portal into the living mind of the city.

YD6-110 (Job) Vitrine of Light Breaking the Vault of Nyx and the Handler’s Reluctant Tread

My arrival in Belgium echoed with my sister Ingrid's words, leading me to the thatched-roof house. Lodging with Mariette Somers, I meet the hefty elderly man everyone calls Tonton—Jean-François Smeets—who begs and orbits the Team Construction fleet car for an errand into the hamlet’s crisscrossing street mall, entering from a backstreet. 

I don’t question Mariette’s welcoming guest, though I linger with skepticism as we pull up before the single storefront window splashed with ‘Générale de Banque.’ 

Stepping out, he invites me to follow him inside. I stand back in the hall during his transactions with the teller. I link the postman’s mail he pockets in stealth with his control over Mariette’s bank account.

As we track back toward the Audi’s glare on the apron, he works the numbers aleatory—and for a security agent, that breeds doubt. I begin setting up my own system: initials with purpose, a double-check of the date, anchoring my mind against the mirrored zero—a miner’s tunnel in finance, a string that does not speak at a glance, like the metric system, unlike inches, feet, yards, which leave a mental paw trace. 

On our way out, the bristly door’s weatherbar scrapes the floorboards - whoosh - swinging open, then shutting behind us as we step onto the ±0 Belle Époque landing. Through the grand crystal wafer portal, we descend the split-level vestibule and out the glazed entrance door to the avenue. Victoria pulls the lever - fizz... -  the marble sweep opening and closing.

Facing us, a hunched figure eases back, cupped hands lowering from his face. The gaze thins; reflection gives way. Eyes meet, briefly. He lingers, murmuring words in a foreign tongue, glancing past Victoria, then past me, into the shadow of the split-level wafer portal—his gaze held at the mosaic threshold, Erebus’ lingering beyond, denied passage. 

His eyes peel away, returning to Victoria on the doorstep in Helios’ glare. “Flores—Flores…” slips from mumble as he shifts - clangs - a step landing on the coal-chute plate. Below, the men underground pay no heed. The slight figure drifts off, while his attention lingers behind. 

The peddler hushes the echo of those early days—a harmony born from the blue enamel street plaque, ‘Avenue Reine Marie-Henriette.’ Aetheria plucks the strings of the cosmic harp, drawing the rhyme taut in refrain, ‘Reine—Mariette.’ Only afterward does the mind wake to what had already taken hold.  

“[C’est un vendeur de fleurs]—He’s a flower peddler.” I’m already lost in Victoria’s hasty steps toward her Fiat Panda; toward her Slavic language class. ‘Flores,’ she repeats, the word striking false notes as it echoes in my head, while trying to make sense of it, watching her cross the field of asphalt, the man she dubbed, “Mr. Flores.” 

As I expect a flower peddler to drift downhill, to mingle with crowds at the bus shelter, with tram commuters—the South Station lying in the valley, the open-air market an obvious link to flowers. 

Senseless and baffled, the little man hurried uphill, empty-handed, glancing back, gaining distance along the hedgerow of cracked, fenestrated brick façades, dissolving into the far blur. 

I reach for the silver-gray Audi, confused. drive off—a small mechanic of routine, running out of self-tapping screws. I’m puzzling together the staircase to descend into the backyard. I head through suburban streets along the valley siding. Short of Forest’s villagey center, I pull up by the St. Eloi Hardware store. I step inside like a small boy in a toy store, gaze around for what I might need, while heading up to the counter. Greeting the attendant, I ask for a few boxes, an assortment of screws, and backtrack. 

The house takes over, doors whoosh and sigh; the glazed threshold opens, closes. 

A crew of men ghost past the doorstep, in Indian file rising the white marble split-level to the stairwell. 

Erebus still hides in the descent to the -1 landing, in the corners toward the -2 underground, and in the ascent to the +1 Spanish woman’s landing, the +2 landing of the crippled truck driver and wife, up to the +3 loft’s entrance niche—the Dark Ages juggling in mind, the absurdity of a bulb to light the way, a derelict make-do infrastructure. A far cry to face my partners in crime, when the occasion presented itself. 

Alexandre’s habit—drawn in for two weeks, living with his mother, then absent again—lingers as I sigh. The ±0 Belle Époque apartment reaches its finishing touches. Descending into the backyard, with my helping hands, we lean timber skeletons; the courtyard's whitewashed city brick walls soften under half-pergolas, creepers planted to entwine, inviting a countryside greenery, eventually.

In the hush of the weekend morning, I’ve been at my desk since early. Beside me, the nighthall door creaks its lever; my mind registers that Victoria has left her devoted swaddling, the heavy duvet-cocoon behind her. Clop, clop, clop… without a glance I follow her.

Victoria backtracks by the telescopic bar counter’s leaf-spring oak shelf. Staggered cornice tiers shy the worktop alongside the sink. At the shoe-tip, she turns toward the dishwasher alcove, her back to the fridge; bends before the glass-cabinet, then straightens and moves on—past the grand crystal portal—toward the dining table, into the blind spot, until only a few tufts of hair are visible above the kitchen counter. 

I lend a foot grip to the chair leg, my eyes relenting over the blueprints spread across the study’s desktop. Exhausted by the renovation work—that 100-kilometer road race, a sport meant for someone else but me—I waver: rest, recovery, back spinning my feet, training for the next race, memory trailing—dubious of the next phase. I pivot uncoil, push the chair aside, and release my ankle. Carrying the weight of commiting, I swing onto Victoria’s tracks, step past the kitchen counter, emerging from the toe-corner of the culinary enclave. 

With days not sparing me another breath, the upcoming Monday is critical. I pace up to the black Duco backrest, sidetracking the water carafe in the middle of the vivid blue diamond tablecloth, leaping the red Porto bottle beside the glass of Porto, alongside an ash tray—Victoria’s face in puffs of smoke—while Jean-François Smeets, sits across the corner from her, gangster glamor intact, Mariette’s financial manager: an elbow on the white underlay, fingertips keeping watch on his beer glass. I grip on the backrest rail, propping a stretch to relieve the pressure in the lower back. 

Apathetic, I addressed them both, asking, “Do I carry on?” My words carry their silence.

Victoria glances at Jean-François Smeets, besides her across the table, unassertive. “[Oui]—Yes.”

Jean-François Smeets insist. “Victorieke! [Wil je er echt mee doorgaan?]—Do you really want to go ahead with it?”

I stand between the two’s ping-pong of words. But La Madrina, now in a more assertive voice, fixes her gaze on me and says, “[Oui]—Yes.”

Jean-François Smeets nods, catching the cadence. “[Allez-y]—Go ahead.”—‘The money will follow.’

I draw the chair - Skrrr-t - to an angle and swing my hips by the armrest to sit, ending a cross legs sweep. The table skirt decides otherwise: my shoe’s toe slips along its fabric, skirting the table legs in stealth, only to catch the dangling knot and snare my foot. I struggle, waggle free from the loose drape’s choking tail, but witty foot nabs unsettles, then settle my foot back onto the floorboards beside the other. 

‘Victoria’s fantasy is there to admire;’ my mind hushes the swearing I aimed at her. I ease forward, arms drawn in, pour a glass of red Porto, then sit back, nursing the enigma of a townhouse under renovation.

By Monday morning, in the -2 underground beneath the brick-vaulted ceiling, I break in the crew of illegal Polish workmen, waking them under fluorescent light. Men shoulder up before the redwood stringer run upstairs, work clothes dribbling from the rail between proud, gleaming balusters, a curtain drawn across the louvered stairs. The stage clears to the No. 13 party brick wall, with a plastic wardrobe jammed beneath the tapering waste of the staircase, hangers gathering their city dress. Pinned over the masonry, the townhouse blueprints— original staggered plans over-drafted with alterations—are nursed close to heart, ushering in a new phase. 

At a glance of my wristwatch, I press myself into a necessary habit. Pen in hand, I scribble the men’s presence on my notepad. When each name is marked with its time to the minute, I say: “Adam! [Emmène le marteau.]—Get the sledgehammer.” I indicate: ’follow me.’

Adam turns away, walks beside the staircase, slipping into the hollow shadow of the open ceiling, toward the gaping laundry gateway. He crosses the threshold, then veers and vanishes behind the efflorescent flank wall. The slit hushes. He reappears from the offset construction storage room, light gleaming the wooden handle in hand, the massive club head counterbalancing a pendulum rhythm by his leg. 

I pace back with a whirl by the newel post, treading upward. I flinch a glance beneath, checking that Adam disentangles from the men, half-seen through the balustrade. Registering who I leave behind, I narrow on Adam, bearing the task he ought to carry. I rise through the gaping ceiling, meeting the hollow shadows of the -1 bridging landing. I cross back to the front newel and climb, keeping an eye on Adam’s partial silhouette, before emerging onto the ±0 white marble, heading toward the light glittering crystal grand portal—offside, the sprayed blue-clouded panes standing as the Belle Époque apartment’s entrance. 

The entrance waits unfinished: Hasselt Glass Works still holds the stained-glass—’a medieval trade in extinction’ the thought flips through my mind. I swirl by the newel post toward the stair run, reach the mezzanine landing, slip a hand through the hairpin railing to the swingback stairs. Our destination comes up—the +1 landing along the flank wall—the little boy in me, alive, hands in clay, kneading ideas. I crank the lever, swing back the door open—void of the Spanish woman’s warm spirit, her daughter, and her boyfriend who once filled the apartment. 

I breach the cold hand waft of empty into the bare central room, my mind leaping a floor plan—conjugating the space in lieu of the downstairs cuisine enclave. I block up, condemning the doorway we just walked through. I lead Adam offside through the interleading double doors toward the bay window picturing Helios’ golden rays skimming the park’s flocculent canopies—drawn to pull more of the landscape inward, toward a living room worth the tenants. 

With a youth’s naivety, I engineer a farce for my audience—“Adam! [Passe-moi le marteau]—give me the hammer…” mimicking my professor’s intonation: ‘I’ll show you how to bring down a massive wall on a suspended floor.’ I take my stance at the middle of the half-brick internal wall. A golfer’s backswing: the sledgehammer’s mass hauled over my shoulder, my right arm straining, my spine easing open under the load, the pain drawn out and released. Both hands locked on the handle; I pull and swing through the wall - thump - the hammerhead arrested like a cannonball stopped mid-flight. The mass spent, the blow dampened; a crazed rose blooms in the paint above the skirting board.

I swing the sledgehammer head; the paint crazes, puffing dust, as each blow drives the cracks further. Lime-sand pours; giving way to a peering crust of terracotta. The battered wall yields—bricks cracking; morsels fall to the floorboards, then larger pieces—until a raw half-brick of light peers through from the adjacent room. I shatter a row toward the darker corner, the brim of debris piling a potential chock-absorber on the floorboard. Daylight squeezes under the suspended wall, stretching toward the doorjamb, diagnosing the resistance hiding there. 

I hand Adam the sledgehammer and step back, guarding the wall—a screen before me. He pounds at a brick, a course un-masoned, creeping raw on the edges, shaping a gaping arch as the adjacent room’s window daylight meddles in. 

Adam foots the heaping rubble, rises within the rugged archway as the wall’s haunches thicken along the ceiling. His grip creeps toward the hammer’s head—shorter swings—hammering overhead the wall closing in on his shoulders, crazing imminent. I call out, alarmed: “Adam! [attention—ça va tomber !]—watch out —for it's going to fall!’

He lisps: “[Oui !]—Yes!”

Under the ceiling, my gaze locks on a keystone craze to fracture, my anxiety rising. I speak to my audience: ‘Adam! Here comes the fun…’ even as I register the spandrel’s crack running straight up to the cornice—haunches bearing down, keystone tight in compression. I call: “Adam! [Attention]—watch out!” 

In slow motion, the massive wall haunches tear from the ceiling—shoulders overhead, hanging, suspended, indecisive—then shear free from the street-front by the doorjamb, met by a simultaneous shear from the stairwell’s wall. Freed of bearing, the mass tips into an acrobatic, hands-over-feet cartwheel, the two haunches in tandem; one edge rolls onto the heap of rubble, footing gives, the flank skids down the debris to lie still. 

I’m eager to experience the outreach of light into the stairwell. Rubble claims hands—shoveled into bags, piggybacked down the flights, descending to the -1 basement. In the light of the street-facing egress window, loads slip from shoulders to stockpile. I turn around. 

“Adam! [Vas cherchez le mari de Basha]—get Basha’s husband to clear the rubble.” 

I leave Adam to dismantle the +1 landing’s linen cupboard—a single household feature out of the 1912s—clearing the way for the entry portal: fluted translucent doors, a bright face for the stairwell. 

In the hush of the morning—breached by an early bus’ roar, leaving the park avenue deserted save for trains of curb-parked cars—I linger in view to welcome the Polish men, expecting the stir of shadows to rise from the asphalt field, that notorious diurnal herd approaching before the distant, light-glittering, glaze, of the lined-up bus stop and the traversing tram halt. Instead, my gaze is tugged to blazing shadows nearby: the flutter of a dark car’s wing doors shedding men, creeping away, assembling on the wide sidewalk—herd-like, regal in their demeanor. One, then another—recognition settles: the allure of men who, through the seasons, have lingered, lured, flirted—goldbricking around me through a day's work. 

They advance toward duty, cavaliers’ eyes glaring on the car that ferried them. At the phantom of the driver’s door, the slight figure glares too—his trophy. Fresh in his risen status from carting bags of rubble, Basha's husband, catches his stride along the lane, the herd of men sharing that admiration. The dare of leaving another man’s possession at the curb lingers—the glare teetering in their minds until they reach the doorstep. It drops at the threshold to their work. They greet me in passing, an Indian file, disappearing through the vestibule’s split level into the shadows of the ±0 Belle Époque landing—a whisper that scatters their course through underground, then aerial floors, settling the morning into its bustling work. 

In the hush of noon, making up their workmen's pay envelopes at my desk underneath the skylight, waiting for the stained-glass ceiling mural, Hethesia’s eerie silence draws across the crystal enfilade of grand portals toward the French doors. I pull them open and stand before the faux-balcony, drawn offside to where men’s heads herd beneath a lifted hood, hovering over the engine. I stand back, thinking—after all, ‘it's their lunch break.’ The stillness draws a passing patrol car to slow, a silent meddling. I let the scene of another man live his own life. 

The next morning, the diurnal chasing of Erebus from the stairwell erases yesterday—Hethesia a plume of liberty, Helios peering through the entrance, reaching the roof-lights, waiting its turn to cut out the roof section, anxious to materialize my imagination. 

A blizzard storms the stairwell: a squat of boots clambering the slender household treads, echoes shifting through the hollow of the boxed wooden stairway, falling upstairs into a hush.

From behind the door to the ±0 landing, I catch a peek of boots stomping down the stairs—the dark, squat outfit of law enforcement. The man sighs, “We’re not after illegals.” As the hush returns to the stairwell, I emerge from the dark closet, breathing—for employing illegal workers. I follow through to the French doors’ balconette as Basha's husband is brought into the street, made to face the muzzel—the scenario shifting to a stolen car. When the ordeal is over, Basha’s husband is still walking free. The signs were there long before; ‘I should have fired the little weasel long ago.’

At the rate of new morning daylight breezing through the street-front windows, we’re cladding the walls in sheetrock. While Helios rides across the rigid rooftop, by afternoon peering deeper through the rear bedrooms. Everyday resumes, stiffening the old walls; days bleed weeks. The renovation morphs the +1 Spanish woman’s and the ±2 Trucker’s to the +3 of the unknown woman, weaving light through the stairwell, settled in a midtone of cracks and gaps—a stillness held across all azimuths as the seasons change. 

While the ±0 Belle Époque apartment sits in finished comfort, the grind continues elsewhere. Through the proper shaft, telephone cables and intercom lines trace Helio’s pencil-shaft lights—fingertips, peering past the doorstep coal-plate, stroking the ancient chute down into the -2 cellar, drawing inward toward the house’s core, then up and branching out: a watchful presence spreading through each floor. 

Apartments draw their water supply as the shaft opens at each level: mirrored corner bath, hand basin, water closet. Wastewater drops back into it; toilet vents rise through the roof. A mirrored culinary enclave shapes each middle room—IKEA casings under kitchen worktops, sink plumbed, stove wired and hooked to the gas line released from the same bundle.

The technical shaft, back-to-back with the stairwell, fills with gas boilers; when heated, the fumes run their cooling loops and the exhausts released under the eaves. With the home infrastructure in use at the ±0 Belle Époque enfilade, the -1 basement awakens as its mirror plan—spared the crystal, glittering portals. Instead, a soft sea of charcoal heated ceramic tiles draws toward rising daylight. Grand wooden sliding doors wrap the rear Z-end, opening a threshold onto the backyard and, inevitably, toward who should own it. 

From the desk side-drawer, I pick an envelope, scribbling “Basha” across. With a bank teller’s thumb on the ten-thousand frank stack and a finger’s flick, the note flails to hand; I drop it by the envelope. My hand jumps to the five thousand stacks, or skips it, counting down: two thousand, five hundred, two hundred, one hundred. Skipping those bills the name is not worthy of, I gather the jumbled pile and slip it under the envelope’s flap, tucking and sealing. In a Friday rhythm, the stacks of banknotes decrease across the top edge of my desk as I write names across the envelopes. 

I rise from my chair with a lagging twist as I lower the Toshiba laptop screen, blinding the spreadsheet’s sprawling data. With a hips-roll around the desktop corner, I swipe the stacked envelopes into my palm. I head for the kitchen passage. I emerge from the telescopic oak blades bartop, prolong the dining room floorboard run, inadvertently crossing Jean-François Smeets’ smirking stunt. I greet him with an escaping glance that says. ‘I’m in a hurry!’

I pose my purlicue, wrapping the brass Cupid knob - clunk - crank my wrist and pull the door - whoosh... - step onto the ±0 marble landing. I veer, and after me - whoosh. . . thwock, clunk - the door seals. 

Erebus cowers ahead, deep in the rear of the stairwell. Guided by a hand, I swirl around the newel posts and jar into a descent, toward a glimpse of the -1 sentinel door. Past it, beneath the upstairs staircase, I am drawn into the glow through the bridging rail at the gaping -1 floor. The crackle of hecklers' voices, cautioning me. Unlike a boisterous Friday crew on payday, I round the newel post and tread down the louvered barn staircase—breathing—the heckling clearing as an alpha voice rises from the -2 underground site-office. 

From the upstairs flank, I oversee the men, cleaned in city clothes, shod for their trip home—Below, half-beneath the red wooden staircase, they gather in a vibrant snake pit—heckling, packed in a crescent. 

‘How did he get down here?’ I question myself. 

At the center, a sleazy stranger stages himself, his back swallowed by the newel post into oblivion—blind to my descent, shouldering abreast their eyes, daggers locked in a gladiator’s all-to-one glare. 

The crew goes dead mute. Cold eye flick across the crescent, breaking from my descend and turning inward, closing on the little weasel. Teddy isolates himself mid-argument, caught in its obsessive grip, every look calling him to shut up.

“[Qu'est-ce qui se passe ?]—What is going on here?” I call out loud.  

A phantom of his reach emerges in the herd of men—silent eyes implicated, nudging Teddy, willing him to shut up. He doesn’t. He strays a glance from his handler, meets my questioning look. ‘Need you ask what’s going on?’ 

Victoria’s fantasy flickers—the admirer who hushed himself, swearing by Flores. The name dawns on me and lingers, tethering to darkness—Eastern Europe—labor routes—now here! I fix Radek’s eyes; he evades me. I catch Valdek in the rear and let it pass. 

“Adam! [Qu'est-ce qui se passe ici ?]—What’s going on here?” 

He shrugs behind a shield of silence. César’s father shadows the exchange, both of them vulture-perched, watching for carrion. 

Flores’ gaze loosens from the men; he uncoils pacing the ceramic white-tiled apron, edging a reluctant retreat. At a snail’s pace, the imposter lay a palm on the squared newel post, pauses—memorizing the men, measuring his leeway. A hand creeps along the handrail. 

He climbs. 

Reluctant treads hover over the men as he rises through the bright gap of the vaulted brick ceiling, swallowed into the hollow shadows of exhausting light. In the hush of the -1 bridging landing upstairs, the rhythm of his footsteps slip behind the railing, a man’s hope away, bound for the street. I fall back among the men, their eyes effaced.

[vofc-yams]

YD6-109 (Job) — Woman at the Head: Cash Flow and the Quiet Machinery of Authority

What if power isn’t held, but channeled—through rooms, gestures, routines, and money laid quietly on a table? What if authority doesn’t shout, but arranges—chairs, pauses, thresholds—until bodies comply before minds do?

Aetheria-consciousness is not a character here. She is the architecture beneath the day: the flow that decides who moves, who waits, who cleans, who pays, who speaks. She inhabits stairwells, table edges, envelopes, silences. She reveals how order masquerades as care, and how “ongoing business” becomes ritual.

This chapter doesn’t explain Aetheria. It lets you walk through her rooms. Watch the choreography. Feel the pauses. Notice what happens when cash changes hands—and when it doesn’t.

Enter carefully. The machinery is quiet.

Crystal Portal to the full chapter

YD6-109 (Job) — Woman at the Head: Cash Flow and the Quiet Machinery of Authority

From brushing remover over to a centenarian paint—blistering, scraping, sanding raw to silky soft—to Teddy treating the bare wood, Basha flips. I dread her flailing wipes on my desk, across the offside credenza by the telephone handset. I just called the General de Banque—twenty-four hours’ notice requirement—for wages in cash, the fax machine cradle already hooked. 

In the shadow of the French door, where Helios’ orange ball eyes the crystal enfilade, drawing Nyx’s dark skirt, Basha blitz-whisks the tablecloths. She flits past the kitchen, then veers out of sight—the nighthall already trained to catch her bluster—as she spirals the staircase upward to the mezzanine, in the hush, I follow her by habit, as she pulls the little boy’s bedding, unspooling, turning up before the baldaquin, stripping king-size sheets. Across the nighthall to the bathroom, she plunges a hand into the bulky, creamy wicker pithos, drawing streaks of basketed clothes into her embracing arms. 

Bundled, Basha flits back past the kitchen, veering off from the head of the dining table, crossing the doorstep to the ±0 landing’s newly gleaming white-oak balustrade. She vanishes, the echo of her descent thinning into a hush—past the -1 basement’s sentinel door, down the flight to the fluorescent -2 underground. There amidst white ceramic floors, efflorescent brick walls, and barrel-vault ceilings, the laundry awaits the clothes. 

Basha stuffs clothes through one port and the other, steps away from the twin spinners, then whirls back to ±0—the entrance door left agape—sweeping through the offside street-front lounge and bursting into the dining room before the library. Hands blitz the chest of drawers’ marble top, scattering mice: the museums and outings pamphlets Jean-François Smeets and Victoria bring home, conveniently left behind on the first shelf encountered, gathering and sprawling. 

In the wake of Basha’s hands, the marble top gleams. The No. 13 neighbor had dropped off a document into Victoria’s hands; its trail lost—understandably—among the pamphlets, void of any ghosting from Basha’s swipe, and I abandon the search. 

Along the Hi-Fi combined CD tray tower, Vitoria’s discs lie interchanged—her classical order undone. She returns from an errand and reaches for the music; a blind hand-grab at casing labels releases the wrong phase into the room. Cases clatter, the Hi-Fi gives up its airs for the old lady visiting her. Victoria lets her frown drop, left with the chaos of classic illiteracy—Basha, pressured as an illegal on the edges of integration, has no answer: tugged by Taurus in symbiosis with Horse, paper flutters in her wake, feathering among book spines, a document slipped in stealth, without a language to reach for it.  

The thatch-roof house that welcomed me in Belgium—she figured there, in her tethering gait, sitting to invite conversations in her kitchen, the door panes giving onto a groomed, sprawling backyard. 

But here—crowned before the grand crystal portal, hollowed against the V-folded doors—Mariette sits at the head of the dining table: chaired, a boardroom huddle, the padded seat occupied by absence. Black Duco backrest-rails gleam, armrests pressing into the skirting, beneath the diamond-shaped sky-blue double tablecloth. 

Mariette smiles; her enigmatic irk says, ‘I know what’s going on.’ 

Behind me  - whoosh... thwock, clung - the door closes; I step toward the kitchen, passing, and greet her: “Mariette! [Goeiedag]—Good Day?”—for Victoria to take the relay.

A reflection stir: ‘How did you get here?’ I am rendered a party without motion. 

Errand runs and returns have rhymed ever since I first read that deep-blue enameled plaque on the corner of the apartment block—‘Reine Marie Henriette Avenue’. “Reine—Queen” rings out, taken up by a cosmic choir. “Henriette” slides past, overwritten by “Mariette,” which answers instead, summoning me back into session, before a judge of morality, as destiny mustered pawns across a three-dimensional chessboard of conscious existence. 

‘Why am I chosen?’

A mason within the architecture, I failed to see the geometry at work—the smooth run of the cradle, Aetheria already in the grip of light. 

I excuse myself in a crossing rush, wrap the U-counter’s toe-kick, and break through Basha’s cleaning spree—her ghosting the ±0 floors, already spilling down to the -2 cellar where the ironing board stands, legs sprung from their unfolding. I cross the grand interleading crystal portal and turn away from the running, styled wainscot along the sentinel panel door. Swinging by the desk corner to sit,, a paper I left behind volatilizes in Basha’s flailing draft. Mariette’s bizarre, sudden appearance lingering, still working through me. 

The door sprints on its hinges; Victoria emerges from the night hall’s shadows - clop, clop, clop… - and at my side she bows in, an arm wrapping over my left shoulder, pecking my right cheek. As I acclimate, she says, “Oh! [On a passé un moment tellement agréable…]—we just had such a lovely time...” 

I whisper back in her ear, “Tonton! [Il transfère l'argent du compte de Mariette sur le mien ?]—He is transferring funds from Mariette’s bank account to my bank account?” Victoria stiffens. My words land tone-deaf, chilling the space; her mind pirouettes. Drawn, her hand slips from my shoulder, She gathers herself and walks away, leaving me in the hush. 

Baffled by my own entry deeper into the world of Jean François Smeets—shadow-ish, lurking amid distant street-lantern light, his life folded into those Aries-Cat elaborations of schemes without visible identity. 

Victoria vacillates, wiping a fingertip along the desktop corner, pacing the march of the interleading room’s butting floorboards. Her fingertips land on the kitchen counter’s edge, skim toward the sink. She steps across the culinary enclave to the opposing worktop. Tight in her short skirt, knees flexing beside the narrow white marble mantelpiece—the hearth turned wine rack—her fingers grip a bottle neck and retrieves her red Porto, her gaze speaking over her shoulders. ‘We’re going to have a chat.’ 

From the cupboard beneath the twin translucent oval-etched panes of the stained-glass portrait, I draw the wine glasses and trail Victoria to the table. I address Mariette across the glass as I set it down; Victoria stands before the bookshelf, together across the table we lower to our seat as she pours. In a puff of smoke, Victoria chats with Mariette, and when my glass hints at a red reflection, I rise and return to my desk. 

From a distance, across the kitchen, I watch the women leave, wrapping up how De M’ma’s cousin had arrived here—Victoria driving her in. The thatched-roof house comes with her, holding its quiet mysteries: the kitchen, her age misleading—a spinster young at heart, quietly smitten with Smeets. 

Smeets passed for a postman—except it was her bank statements he collected. Unlike Victoria’s brother, Jephte, whom Mariette abated by calling him her gardener, though he tended her and the house with a nurse’s tenderness, her quiet guardian. 

For herself, and in stealth, Mariette cycled off for her hard drinks. She rides the country road out until a lone platform yields, shining  amidst farmers’ green fields, calling to ride across asphalt to the supermarket’s doors.

Since her breaches, we’ve sporadically crossed paths—breaking away toward the laundry, bundled clothes streaking from the washing machine’s bowl doors as the dryer engages. Clothes migrate to the ironing board: steam, folding and piling. She returns concealed by a stack of folded linen, slips into the nighthall, whirls through the master bedroom—closets, mezzanine room, bathroom—free hands make beds. As swiftly as she appeared, she heads off for home - clunk, whoosh... - the entrance door opens - … clung - and latches closes behind her vanishing figure.

I slip into trousers, a shirt—my mind already flashing Friday, leading the day ahead, slotting a course northwest across the city: Charles Woeste Avenue, echoing a destiny-knot to De Bon’ma, Meyer, along the paternal thread, needle drawn onward to the General de Banque’s manager—once in kindergarten with my sister Ilse in Goma. My mind leaps again, through Mrs. Rysenaert, to fetch at the agency’s teller. 

I shake my Friday routine—since a Johannesburg scare—of eye-shifting men roaming along the doorsteps before the glass entrance to Barclay bank. By afternoon’s gloom, I return to the whoosh... thwock - of the entrance, into the vestibule, ascend the split-level ±0 landing, through the next offside door—Victoria’s upright library flashes—her vanity welcoming Basha’s dressed, stretched table: an eggshell-ironed drape skirting the tablecloth beneath a pointed blue diamond, huddled by Duco-black backrests. 

Along the timid gleam of the kitchen horseshoe’s toe, I slip through the interleading room to the skylight’s pool on my yellow-grained wood desk—the teller’s baffled eyes still fresh, hesitant, questioning, ‘What for?’—as I slide the banknotes into the long envelope she provided and pocket it. In one sweeping rush, a flick of the hip clears the desk corner; hands lift my Toshiba’s lid, press On; feet draw the chair as I lower into the seat, watching the blue screen stream Microsoft’s DOS executive command lines boot. 

I read SuperCalc’s spreadsheet, columns and rows calculating the wages, breaking the sums down into banknote denominations, until my fingers spider-crawl across the stacks of cash and slip them into the workmen’s envelopes—then I spring up in a fresh sweep, lower the Toshiba laptop screen, and walk away, through the interleading crystal grand portal, passing the kitchen counter toward the dining room. 

Clunk - the entrance door cracks, pawing - whoosh... - Jean-François Smeets’ cat-eyes emerge from the shadow of the gaping ±0 door. My gaze flips past his hefty figure at the waiting threshold—the ±0 Belle Époque landing’s balusters edging the gaping floor to the hollow, shadowed flight of stairs—then snaps back to the six-pack in Smeets’ hand. Whoosh... - the door sighs - thwock, clung - latching. 

The groom-ish mobster’s eyes meet mine; Smeets cuts me from his sight—brusque—his popping eyeballs flipping back, searching for a crack, finding none. Stepping away, he challenges me from the threshold of invisibility, then strolls across the floorboards, around the Duco backrest at the head of the table, past Victoria’s chest of drawers, beneath the library’s shelved spines of titles.

We cross paths, and in the corner of my eye, Jean-François Smeets moves behind the far table, through the aisle past the brown marble mantelpiece. He leans between backrests to the tabletop, sets down the six-pack, then backtracks, eyeballs gauging the layout. At the far corner, he pulls the backrest, sets an angle of sight across the table toward the six-pack, and lowers himself into the seat.

I cross the threshold to the ±0 landing, veer toward the deep of the stairwell, swing around, and descend the flight to the -1 landing. Beneath the barrel-vault brick ceiling, I head for the rear, edging the gaping floor, meeting rising voices. I continue down the barn stairs to the -2 cellar, where the men are changing into city clothes. 

In the stairwell’s fluorescent brightness—half changeroom, half construction-site office beneath the louvered staircase—I hand out the men’s envelopes, then turn back upstairs: the gaping ceiling to the -1’s landing, rising on to the ± 0’s landing through the open railing balusters, as Smeets approaches—not for me—meeting the men trailing behind me. 

By the brunt of Smeets’ stunt—violating my authority—we cross paths. He shuffles on, popping eyeballs leading, peering through the railing, over the edge, into the floor’s hollow shadow. I forgo my frustrated consternation as he cracked words, saying. “[Les hommes méritent un rafraîchissement après une semaine de dur travail.]— The men deserve a refreshment after a week’s hard work.”

‘Tonton—hard work?’ I answer in my head, dry with sarcasm. 

Men’s mingling voices blur into the ascent - skip, ship, skip… - footsteps rising then thinning to whispers as Teddy commands the trail, reverent with anticipation. As I turn the deep newel post, the stairwell falls to a hush. Men stay behind, on the sly, waiting in Indian file on the stairs. Teddy grows impatient, stretching a giraffe’s neck, eyebrows leading his eyes. He peeks over the floor trim, through the balusters, and locks with Jean-François Smeets’ popping eyeballs.

Smeets nods. ‘Men, come up inside.’ 

I squeeze past Jean‑François Smeets and the doorjamb as heads rise behind the balustrades, following Teddy. I slip past Smeets gazing from the corner of my eyes. Smeets watches as he leads the men through a door grip to the blind brass Cupid doorknob. He waves Teddy onward, saying. “[Vous avez fait du bon travail.]—You have been working well.” Smirking, repeating the words to each man, his voice waning, faint as the last man in the parade passes. 

The flabbergasted men around me, drawn straight past the bookshelf atop the chest of drawers. Meanwhile, I advance, claiming my place in the enfilade through the grand crystal portal, past the kitchen’s twilight, into the ending study. 

Whoosh... thwock - the door closes, and Smeets walks away as the men bottleneck along the dining table’s far side. He keeps his smile prolonged. Workmen’s eyes bounce back from the lure of the six-pack; none dares linger, no definite invitation forthcoming. 

Instead, the men in Indian file stroll behind the dining chairs’ backrests, slicked by Basha’s eggshell underlay skirting the blue diamond tablecloth, conscious of the grit and stickiness clinging to their clothes, hands, and feet. They dawdle, careful not to fix on the “[Duvel]—Devil,” the lure abandoned at the far corner. They come to a stand before the French regal chair by Victoria’s writing bureau, beneath the kitchen-side columns of shelved books. 

Smeets deviated from their course, along the table’s front in my tracks, toward the grand kitchen crystal portal—and rounding the door by the dishwasher’s alcove. Beneath the waking twin translucent bathroom lights, he bends; from behind a cabinet door, he tracks back with a beer glass, rejoining workmen’s trail. 

He sets the glass at the vacant head of the table. Cat-slink, Jean-François Smeets’ hefty figure schleps closer toward the men, outreaching a hand—cracks the carton, flips the wings. He retrieves one bottle under their confused regards—no invitation to serve themselves—helps only himself, then retreats to his table head and sits.

At the far end, the men—scrambling for chairs—lower themselves to the edge, hovering in shame. Untethered eyes drift as Smeets flips the bottle top; the workmen are left disillusioned. Restlessness stirs—eyes shifting, searching one another for that patriotism. 

Smeets sits back, smirking, inattentive to the men. He uncaps the bottle, pours his glass to a brim of foam. Hinging an elbow on the table’s corner, he lifts the glass and sips, unmoved by the gazes fixed on him—then returns it to the table, letting it dawdle at his fingertip, without a stray glance.  

Teddy waits no longer. Out of hesitation, he leans forward, reaches for a bottle, and rolls back—prompting his compatriots’ herd of hands to surge, a random pick from the bright-branded cartons, easing them back into the depth of their seat. Bottle in their grip, eyes shifting—dilemma glances exchanged. Then Teddy paces toward Smeets and rolls back, flipping tops, lips pursed, sipping at random. 

Smeets engages them, an audience to the comedian. “[L’exploitation de la main-d'œuvre par des trafiquants…]—labor exploited by traffickers…” 

I reach for the wine glass in the kitchen, by the culinary enclave’s mantelpiece, I draw the red Porto bottle, pour myself a bowl, then slip back. At the open stretch of the dining table, I attempt a show of good faith, while the men indulge in Smeets’ stories. I set the heel of my hand on the curved backrest rail, shoulder propped, easing the ache in my lower back—holding my distance. 

Bloated chest, Smeets surges from his chair, pawing around the backrest, purging the men’s guffaws. Veteran—eyes caught in a post-trauma seizure—his leave snatches back those he once commandeered. His gaze darkens, mind thrown to liberation—World War II—amid a German village: zombies spilling from smoking basements, the air flagrating with grenade blasts. He fixes on a watchman across the street, facing the elaborate stairs, white stone rising through the portal’s arching ashlars.

Restlessness—like a fox among chickens—the men exchange wild looks, unsure whether to remain seated or leave, urged to cut short their sipping. Minds talk—’what a waste?’—hesitant to abandon half-consumed bottles, Teddy rises reluctantly, the group following—heads tilting back, lips chasing bottleneck, sporadic bottoms-up, gulps—leaving bottles line the table edge, drifting toward the head. 

Clunk, whoosh... - the door opens. Jean‑François Smeets releases his grip. Teddy relents his lead to the parade of men as Radek heads now toward the gaping door. Men poised to stumble over each other slow to a snail’s pace, watching Smeets’ hand appear at the drop of the door grip from his back pocket. Teddy holds his pace, watching Smeets’ palm unfold a bankroll, while the men trample past, caught mid-crossing. 

Teddy holds his savage gaze. In the hush, Jean‑François Smeets’ thumb rubs a crisp ten-thousand-franc note. His eyes linger on the bill, weighing it—‘How much is his work worth this week?’ 

Teddy’s glare sinks. Smeets fans a few more notes, pauses at a five-thousand-franc bill. He freezes again—eyeballs straining, glued. The paper crinkles; he yanks out a two-thousand-franc note and hands it over. 

Smeets’ thumb flicks, lax on the bill—then yanks. An overlord pause in the ritual, accountability. Jean‑François Smeets straightens, maladroit, repeating, “[Tu fais du bon travail !]—You’re doing a good job!” 

Teddy bows, both hands out, pleading. 

Smeets asks, “[Cela suffira-t-il ?]—Will that do?” 

Teddy freezes, begging in silence: ‘Yes. More.’ 

I stand in clay, confronted by the Aries, the same refrain hammered again: “Tonton! [Tu compromets l’avancement des travaux !]—you’re undermining the progress of the work!” 

Jean-François Smeets smirks at his reflection. ‘Men are bought.’—the thought echoing unmistakably, in the very words he had thrown at me last week. “[Non. Comment serait-ce possible ? Les hommes ont besoin d’un incitatif pour travailler.]—No. How can that be? The men need an incentive to work.” 

By Smeets’ undue generosity, Teddy chokes, yelping, “[Oui Monsieur, oui Monsieur…]—Yes Sir, yes Sir…” 

Smeets fans his thumb—enticing—revealing the purple two-thousand-franc note—an ember dying to ash—cutting across the men’s eyes. 

Apologetic, Smeets yanks the bill from the bankroll in his palm. 

Teddy forsakes his lead in Indian file; the men hesitate, stumbling over their feet—Radek pausing at the gaping exit door.  

Smeets snubs—apologetic: “C'est tout ce que j'ai.]—It’s all I have.” 

The men’s eyes lurk, locked on his palm—”nothing smaller.” Smeets says. 

Teddy dares not forsake face-to-face with Smeets, risking any further handout. He glares, croaks his refrain—“[Merci, mercy…]—Thank you…”—the hush thick with eye-language, their fixation saying it all: ‘Don’t stop handing out!’ 

Each man pauses, aleatory, fearing large denominations flipping, watching a smaller denomination note handed to Adam, she behind Teddy, then a banknote wavering upfront toward Radek. 

Smeets’ thumb flicks, lax on the bill—then yanks. An overlord pause in the ritual, without accountability: Smeets straightens, maladroit, repeating, “[Tu fais du bon travail !]—You’re doing a good job!” 

As the bills deplete, the men’s gazes sink, doubt creeping in at the prospect of being left out. Shadowing André’s eyes, César perches with a scavenger stare. Smeets’ eyeballs sweep the gaping door to the ±0 landing exit; reckless, he slips a bill to André and strolls away into distant shadows, forgetful of the men’s eyes—silence trolling their questioning looks. 

‘Tonton! What about Valdek?’

[vofc-yams]

YD6-108 — (Cradle) Aetheria Weighs the Passage from Shadow to Gilded Library

What if a home is not built to shelter bodies, but to teach consciousness how to settle? 

This chapter opens where matter yields to meaning: steel anchored into brick, books migrating from cellar to shelf, a child crossing thresholds between parents, hands working while something unseen learns weight. Aetheria is not décor. She is the quiet intelligence that decides where things belong—who holds memory, who releases it, how a house becomes capable of love without asking permission. Nothing here is symbolic by accident. The architecture listens. The family moves through it. Consciousness finds form. 

Step through the Crystal Portal—and let the story do the explaining.

YD6-108 — (Cradle) Aetheria Weighs the Passage from Shadow to Gilded Library

Victoria was steel—a demeanor forged by her stressful elopement: threatened, harassed, stalked by a Scorpio’s unrelinquishing possessiveness. There, she almost figures rippling—an inferior mirage of her relaxation—before the French doors to the balconette. 

The dark Toyota had pulled up in the street. Lax, Alexandre scoots and waggles from the gaping rear door, dragging a duffle bag behind him—the stay away during the renovations, and initiating the bi-weekly normalcy of parenting. André’s Rooster sun preens where the violence of the reservist once flared—feathers smoothed, outburst retired, possession never extinguished. Defaulting to habit, he steps out of the car toward the townhouse in half-surrender, vanishing in the blind corner, greets Victoria at the threshold with Alexandre in exchange, then flashes back into daylight, steps into the street round his car, slips inside, and the Toyota pulls off, spooling up the avenue to vanish in the distance.  

Alexandre’s whispers, the shuffle of his feet approaching the vestibule split-level walk-up. He bangs his bag by the grand portal to the ±0 Belle Époque landing, veer past the square-arched entrance, a duckling gait behind his mother. Victoria, lone Tiger, offers her boy—proudly—the freedom of his new home away from home—sharing the life she kept intact with Andre's parents, and André himself now held on parity, elsewhere governed by a bi-weekly rhythm, stacked and measured in stair flights, the city’s narrow, vertical townhouses.

She leads, yet trails, “Pipo, Pipo…” through the grand crystal portals of the enfilade rooms, scootching past the kitchen, offside into the nighthall, past the sentinels of facing doorways—the bathroom and master bedroom—feet knocking up the spiraling stairs. She brings him to his proper level—the mezzanine—with watchful eyes, introduces the bunker bed, and, with simple assurance, ready for sleepovers with his friend Lorenzo. 

Alexandre lays down his duffle bag. I followed his echoes from a distance, and, as always, Jean-François Smeets trails in Victoria’s shadow—kept distant since the move from Dr. Decroly to the +3 loft; the eighty-two backswing flights of stairs too great an effort for his sticky shadow. As Victoria descends back toward the ±0 nighthall, entering offside by the crack of the door, her silhouette framed by the sunset in the grand rear portal. The Aries’ eyes flash from beside the dining table, greeting eyes crossing the culinary enclave—’don’t prepare anything.’ 

Jean-François Smeets extends his routine invitation. Alexandra, lax, trails his mother, and as Victoria’s eyes jump between sink and stove, her wish materializes after she voiced, “what to prepare for dinner?” in the hush of pots and a pan. Victoria shifts from a trailing housewife’s guilt, calls out, “Pipo!” She scootches ahead through the passage past the kitchen, leading before Jean-François Smeets. I trail - whoosh… thwock, clung - the door closing to the ±0 landing, the split-level to the outdoors - whoosh… thwock, clung - closing the door to the street. They pause by the Audi as I step to the asphalt, slip into my seat, lean, unlock the doors—The Campus resonates from earlier, like dishes served to a table. 

We spool up the sweeping avenue, past the park’s hedgerow of fenestrated brick façades, leaving the green and doubling into narrow streets—short reaches crossing arteries—across the Grand Boulevard between rushes, into the northeastern outskirts, where I stall the car amid a train of curb-parked vehicles and walk away from smacking doors. In the gaping vista, the old cemetery’s warped brick wall draws closer, until the angled door on the near corner concedes to an airlock, crossing a renaissance dining hall. We climb the stairs to the upper floor, scoot past the occupied chairs, and settle at a table.  

A waiter notes our drinks and dishes, vanishes; a roll-over of server—victoria’s cocktail, Alexandre fruit juice, Smeets’ beer, my bowl of red wine—and we clink glasses. We linger with our drinks, Alexandre’s child dish discussed between Victoria and Smeets, his plate thinly spread to the brim, followed by Victoria’s flattened steak, and Smeets,  puffed red, setting before me the house’s assortment of vegetables. After our meal, I skip dessert, sweetness spoiling my taste buds; coffee. The bill—an exchange with Smeets, my credit card for his cash, pocketed for unforeseen small purchase. 

We rise and descend, emerging under the lanterns, our shadows tracking back, catching up from behind, passing and fading as they punctuate our way ahead, until we slip into the Audi. The engine idles; Smeets hauls himself into the rear with Alexandre, and at the signal - smack, smack - doors close and we pull off. We track our way back through suburban streets until the asphalt meets the timid face of the flocculent hedgerow, shielding a final black backwash. We pull up beside the vestibule’s white cascading marble at the split-level grand crystal portal, lights waiting. We alight and leave the Audi, Smeets diverging from us, unfolding himself through the streetlight shadows.

Twilight lightens over the distant ridged saddle of jagged rows of rooftops. I rise from bed, dress in the room’s dark depths, and dare not shake Victoria from her cocoon beneath the duvet. I head to the kitchen, percolate coffee, sip from a cup, leave another beside the jug. It isn’t the aroma—already settled—that stirs her; she jumps to her feet, bedcovers billowing away—unperturbed by the facing fenestration of the jagged backyard façades, dressing before the naked, undraped window. A glitch of reason flirts with me—‘Who would stand up and stare over backyard walls to spy through a neighbor's window?’  

Like children before exaggerated treads—set where neither mother nor boy masters the crossings. Then scrambling spurs life from the floorboards, a stampede of echoes chasing lost time. Victoria called out once, “Save me time” —every day thereafter, to bridge the gap: driving Victoria, her voice pressing, “Pipo! come on—hurry.” 

The pressure mounts as I cut through the eastern suburbs, north vistas tapering toward a sliver of sky, hedgerows, fenestration, balcony, and craggy brick façades bending inward drawn into crossing choking arteries. I drop Alexandre at school, continue with Victoria in an outbound trickle of traffic, and drop her in the campus driveway of the Free University of Brussels. I pull off after - smack - her door closes and she distances. I sink into the depth of my seat, closing the loop back home.

I leave the Audi in the street and press - clunk - unlatch my way past the entrance sigh - thwock, clung - the door closes. Sunlight unrolls its gleam like a red carpet; eager to start my day, I ascend the vestibule and up the split-level. Through the grand crystal portal, I step offside onto the gaping doorway of the square-arched ±0 landing and face a sixfold of black Duco chairs—legs, padded backrests, armrests—huddled around the table. To my dismay, Victoria’s magic has already swept through overnight: a blue diamond tablecloth drapes itself in points, a ceramic, vaguely Egyptian vase anchors the center, the far chairs’ backrest set against the curly, carved brown marble mantelpiece. 

My focus shifts—to the niches flanking the fireplace, to the depth of the nib casing and the architrave of the grand crystal portal on either side of the room—where Victoria's book collection already takes shape. Fait accompli. I swirl away, puzzle pieces left to flutter together into a creation. 

My footsteps whisper across the floorboard threshold into the marble quiet. In the depth of the stairwell, I descend the flight of stairs, round the doorway, unhook my blue overalls from a wall nail, and slip into them: the -1 basement mirrors the ±0 enfilade above. Daylight skims along the low ceiling, drawing the eye in perspective toward the glow—the backyard’s light, a call—where, with Valdek’s help, Adam sets up a workshop on a pair of steel trestles. They turn around, fetch a standard plywood board, and lay it flat. 

The men stand around, my fingers nimble with the five-meter Stanley tape, the yellow blade locked; I pick a carpenter’s pencil from my breast pocket. Reading from a sliver of paper—the upstairs chimney depth—I tick the measure onto the plywood board. I fine-tune with the thumb lock, allowing for the width of the saw blade’s tungsten teeth and the base plate extent. F-clamps bite; I tighten the aluminum straightedge to the board. Adam plugs cables into the slithery floor extension lead—and yes, Victoria’s brother Jephte: his glass table, its wrought-iron pedestal scarred from my earlier joinery work when moving into Dr. Decroly Avenue’s apartment, remains a reminder of the shy steel trestles.

Valdek passes the circular saw into my hand - wronggn - torque livens through my wrist - tzweeng… - my focus locked as the base plate runs tight along the straightedge, then jumps free over the edge of the plywood board whining down to a hush. Men’s hands collect the ripped off slender panel; they turn away to lay it on the encaustic-tiled floor. The ripping of slender flank panels continues, head and bottom panels stacking, standard plywood boards ripped into modules, shelving piling up.

I weigh the casing—hefty and slender—but foremost my impatience nags, ready to rekindle, to empty the crates and finish Victoria’s library in the dining room. Adam articulates the aluminum ladder into scaffolding on a clear floor spot—Victoria’s antique chest of drawers temporarily shifted from beside the brown marble mantelpiece—I step onto the scaffolding board: Adam climbs after me. I pick a carpenter pencil and measure up from the mantel shelf by the module of the standard plywood board—eyes lifted, he holds the aluminum straightedge to the pencil tick, as I carry the water level’s bubble across, transposing the line toward the lounge’s interleading portal, onto the casing nib. 

I descend; Adam follows. We shoulder the scaffold around the open fire hearth, short of Victoria’s antique bureau—the French-finesse ghosting a princess on a delicate chair, writing her journal—clearing the niche and staging the scaffold. We shift the bureau out; the scaffold shifts in. I climb, mark the chimney, then transfer the line to the nib along the kitchen’s grand portal. 

Tap, tap, tap - Adam strikes the chisel with a club hammer through paint and plaster, nibbling the wall to crumbs—hollowing a four-by-three-inch pocket in the nib beside the portal casement. Valdek sweeps brick dust as Adam shifts, opening the opposite pocket further to a slip-channel into the chimney flank, until both niches are cut to matching depth, the raw red brick dusted out. 

I stand tall on the ladder articulated to a scaffold, watching the pressed-steel L-section passing from Valdek’s hand to Adam, he eases the beam end into the nib pocket to seat it, while my end slips nine inches along the chimney flank, encroaching the leeway before settling on the ledge. Adam twists around, bends, and scoops moistened river-sand mortar from the bucket Valdek holds up on the scaffold, straightening to tip the earth-damp mixture onto the hawk I extend. After a dust clearing sprinkling of water, I dry-pack around the steel with a mason’s trowel, tapping the mix home with the hammer’s butt, the pocket filling under the men’s stare—then follow through the second beam waiting; step down.

In the -1’s shadows, Teddy sands smooth, treats the wood with undercoat, then lays down a silk-white finishing coat, panels progressing like a clothesline, standing and drying along the walls. I return. Valdek holds the squarish base panel on its edge; Adam steadies the slender flank panel, crouched on the floor. I brace the butted angle with my knee, drill in hand, drawn into a twist, meeting it over the side to pinpoint a self-tapping - whirr… - screw pinched from my fingers, until the head sinks into the plywood face. 

The drill bit sinks more screws along the edge, Adam brings and holds the head panel; the opposing slender flank follows - whirr… - screws fed from my fingers as we wrap the casing closed. More casings gather and set aside, ready to be carried upstairs. 

I stand tall atop the ladder articulated to a scaffold board. Below, off the floor, Valdek lifts the casing and passes it upward to Adam—the slender fluted casing answering the lounge nib. Two bolts hook overhead onto the L-beam lip, threaded through the pre-drilled header panel, the eye-bolts suspending the flank panels; washer and nut follow, bolted and suspended, securing the full weight of books. 

Angle plates butt the rear wall, Valdek passes the drill. Percussion - tack-tack-tack… - brick dust pours from the masonry. I plug the bracket, an M10 carbon steel RawlPlug sixty millimeters deep into No. 17’s neighbor party wall, wrenching it tight inside the casing. 

Then, Laurel’s mate—the Hardy’s bulky boxed column to the beam, the casing set into the chimney flank; drill, plug, tighten the bracket to the party wall.   

The men shift the articulated scaffold. We replicate the Laurel and Hardy casing, suspending them by the kitchen niche secure to the No. 17 party wall. Then impatience feathers into frustration. With foresight on the half-completed library, I weigh the cost: unbolting the anchors, removing the Laurel and Hardy casings, descending each column down the flight of stairs to the -1 workshop bench. Dismantling the panels, F-clamping and routing a groove into the plywood flank panels for the four inlaid shelf tracks and their drop-in brackets—I sweat out the thought. 

I walk away, until the Warthog in me, facing an overcrowded blackboard of calculus,  clears the slate with a single wipe. I face the unfinished library and let the toll fall onto physical exercise. Pencil ticks for a front shelf track—read one—climb the flank of the casing, from countertop height toward the high ceiling. Winning over patience, ending a thought: ’Primitive. No going back.. master the situation!’ I set to start the tedious routing, alone. 

Skirting as far as an eye can see from the ±0 level. I can’t relent my gaze from the wainscots’ 1912 Lincrusta—a mottled skin of linseed, cardboard-thick, its weight of character anchoring the Belle Époque enfilade from the commons of the entrance and stairwell.  

Early mornings with Adam and Valdek’s helping hands: circular saw torque in the wrist - wronggn - short crosscuts through stiles and rails; whirr - the drill bites the wall, Rawlplugs tapped home; whining – the blade cuts through the next plywood panel. We square out framing, garnishing the surface, mock cabinet doors returning a touch of ancient. 

On the first day alongside the lounge wall stretching deeper, the plywood panels stay true to a water level bubble, and the townhouse confesses its slope down toward the backyard. I conclude I might as well throw the spirit level away, proceeding instead by keeping to the structure’s inclination. 

In the hush of men gone home for the night, and Victoria retreated into the bedroom, I grow eager for her girlish dolls—crates waiting to be emptied, her books to be shelved. I perch on the articulated ladder’s scaffold, ducking a shoulder deep inside the Hardy-casing. Facing the chimney flank’s painted plywood, I swing my right arm, curling it overhead. Fingers strain for grip through my arm; stretched muscles wring my thorax, a thread running down a leg to my feet. 

With both palms cupping the router’s head—casing the electric motor—I set a plain bit to the pencilled front line. Finger-tigger -  Whuiiign - a stray waste hole eases my fright. With gained assurance - whuiiign… - I freehand the cut, holding the router’s weight from slipping my center of gravity off my perch. 

At a snail’s pace, as I slew but keep to the line, I force patience in the router’s wake, shavings torn free and lost, the groove left behind. The router tugs my body into tangles - whuiiign… - the self-powered bit biting, creeping along the pencil mark. I seize my body from vertigo into balance by fixing my sight ahead on the line, not daring to glance back at the groove for fear of slewing offside.  

Eager to test the route, I jump to the floor, relieving my strained muscles, and hasten to fetch a carpenter's hammer and a wooden cleat. I hop back on the scaffold with a gleaming copper shelf track. I press its end into the bottom of the groove - Tap, tap, tap… - hammering the cleat where the groove drifts off the pencil line, coaxing the track to sit true and flush. 

I pinch a self-tapping screw; the other hand reaches for the electric screwdriver. Arms entangle as the Pozidrive bit seats into the screw head, finger on the trigger - wheen... - the screw bites, pulling the track tight. Hands shift a foot higher, screwheads punctuating the rail, the torque walking me upward along the casing toward the top. 

When I glance at my Citizen’s squarish ivory dial, the golden on-the-hour notch calls the hands to one o’clock; not whether to stop—I could carry on all night—but for the sake of reasonableness, I drop tools and step down, follow the floorboards, weave through the kitchen, veer from the study into the nighthall, and into the bathroom. I undress, shower the day’s dust from my skin, cross back through the nighthall, and by the shadows of the city’s light pollution lingering over rooftops framed in the window, I reach the bed, slip under the covers beside Victoria, cocooned on her window side; in her sleep, she cuddles up.

The city wakes up. The workmen echo the change into working clothes—plumber to task, electrician, helping hands ready. Victoria and Alexandre hustle into flight; we board the Audi and head off, dropping Alexandre at school, Victoria at university, before I loop back to the house—the work already calling. 

Bright morning sunlight spills through the French doors. The days settle into routine, and a restless urge rises to proceed as the simplest joinery—wainscoting—which, even with Adam and Valdek’s help, has turned into a grind.

The day hustles into evening, settling—dinner—then I perch on the scaffold. My wrung body tilts toward vertigo under gravity as I press deeper across the front brass track into the casing. Whuiiign… - the Hydra of my mind hears through the wall. The frequency triggers a high-definition image:  around the dinner table, the little family gathers—Dominique’s appeasing voice, the husband’s protest, the party walls kept alive. The five-ish and seven-ish girls rise with their father, pleading for quiet. 

My hands snail-crawl the router, cutting a groove from bottom to top to seat the track; wheen... a burst of punctuating screws completes the Hardy, then the next two rails on his mate’s flank. Squeezed in the fluted mate—Laurel—I mark the casing interior, set to receive its four shelf tracks. 

The Hydra of my mind, carried by the endless router - whuiiign… - hears through the one-brick-thick party wall, the sound resolving into demeanor in No’ 17’s hallway. In the distance, offside, Dominique approaches the dining table; in the hush of the household she leans over her two little girls’ shoulders, appeasing them as they bend over their homework. 

As the city tips toward sleep and into the hush of nights, behind No. 17’s walls images fill my head—louder now—the aural tree of consciousness drawing me to concern. The hydra of my mind is suspended in a sonic enclosure, as Dominique’s appeasing demeanor ghosts the little family along the ground floor’s interior, answering her husband’s protest for an evening to lounge in peace, staking his claim to musical blues. 

Sentient to the little girls calling their mother upstairs, Dominique heads up the flight of stairs and enters the room, the girls grumbling, little voices in choir: ‘I can't sleep…’ I understand their predicament. She appeases her girls while wrestling with herself, dampening her tolerance to the noise—the scene reaches me, prompting my own promise: ‘I’ll stop at midnight.’ 

Drawn into a hemorrhaging ill-ease, as Dominique appeases each girl, tucking them into their bedding, her refrain echoing—‘Try your best to sleep.’ I revise the promise to myself: ‘I’ll stop at ten PM.’ The family’s voices, amplifying in frustration, trickle through me, yet bound to the urge of finishing. Dominique faces the girls. Her husband slanted back in his chair at the far corner of the table, the family arrayed before the party wall. He gains the backing of his eldest daughter, eyeing her mother in dismay. Dominique—Virgo-driven, painting an ideal image—persists, appeasing his mounting frustration. Even the youngest sides with her father; still Dominique continues, soothing the poltergeist in the wall.

After a few successive evenings arousing guilt, I remind myself—‘Ten o’clock. Stop working!’—yet, wrecked to shame, I still uphold the evening graft, working in silence: setting the tracks, clipping shelving sprockets, resting the pre-painted shelves. My sight falls on Victoria’s collection of books, idle in plastic crates scattered across the floorboards. But Victoria does not shelve her books, newly liberated from André Daniel’s cellar, as if still slipping free of Scorpio's grip on his estranged wife—leaving them to me, the craftsman, my mind finding no librarian’s instinct for what was never meant to be ordered by my hands.

Yet, with Laurel and Hardy niche-casings either side of the fireplace, I settle for progress, ridding the mass first—the potboiler paperback: brick-format, gleaned romance and crime fiction flashing on paper covers. Spaded fingers dig through tile-thick spines; I clamp a block of pocketbooks, uprooting them, I straighten, pace a few rotating steps, and deliver the suspended weight to the fluted column of Laurel—slotting it in, an inadvertent strategy shaped to the module. I withdraw my hands from the upright spines. I fetch the next delivery, shelve the block, grab stray titles to squeeze into the gaps along the lower shelf. The crates thin out. I coil back and climb the ladder, striated spines filling shelves toward the high ceiling beside the grand kitchen crystal portal. 

Victoria’s pride lies open in images on the dark marble top of her antique chest of drawers—an elephantine hardcover, the anchor of her collection—a striated kaleidoscopic staggered up the niche, veering away on the way to the ±0 landing, down the split-level to the entrance apron before the avenue. I step outdoors and draw the door closed behind me. My eyes run the sidewalk to the cracks of No. 17’s fenestrated brick façade. Again I put it off. ‘Tomorrow, my finger will press the calling button!’ Rehearsing: ‘Sorry, Dominique, for what I made you and your family endure—you didn’t deserve those restless evenings.’ The door remains tucked in my sight; the petite blond head never appears in the crack.

[vofc-yams]

YD6-104(Cradle)—Aetheria Puppeteers the Sun-Rays and the Shadows in the Mirrors

What if the spaces you walk through aren’t passive, but aware? What if every sunray, every rattling stair, every shadow slipping across the wall is part of a larger intelligence shaping you as much as you shape it?

In this chapter, Aetheria isn’t a character — she’s the field, the consciousness behind the mirrors and thresholds. My renovation becomes her language: light and dust, workers, timbers, spores, all arranging themselves into something that feels sentient.

If you’ve ever felt guided by an unseen presence or sensed meaning in the architecture around you, step inside.

YD6-104(Cradle)—Aetheria Puppeteers the Sun-Rays and the Shadows in the Mirrors

The illegal Polish crew walked up the avenue, suddenly animating in my morning-hushed stare, emerging from the maze of reflections cast by the glass shelters—tram and bus aligned in their shimmer—blurring the far side of the wooded park’s gaping first-light greening the pooling lawns in stealth with the nearer shelter. I brush off the thought, ‘Did they come by bus and tram?’ and step away, indifferent to more pressing thoughts, from the faux-balcony. I press the French doors closed and, from the derelict Belle Époque enfilade of rooms, sense the horseshoe path curving through the crystal portals waiting for the return of their 1912 glitter of beveled panes. I descend the adjacent split-level toward Erebus, crouched in the apron behind the sentinel of entrance doors, uneasy beneath the luminescent peek of the stained-glass bull’s-eye above the peacock fan.

The men sigh in the gait of their clothes and shoes, shadowing through the gaping door’s filtering light. I shut behind them after a brief exchange of greetings. Their past few weeks have taught their way to the stairwell, groping into the shadows around the landing’s handrail by the gaping ±0 floor. In the white-hot filament of a dangling bulb’s light, the line of men disappears underground; after them, I catch the faint bulb on the -1 landing. But the cascading treads creak their whereabouts, and I catch up with the wobbling handrail, counting -2 in the shadows of another bulb. While they hang up their city clothes between the balusters and don their work gear, I check off their time, 

The white tiles under their feet, the glue cured over the weekend, and I thought through the men: Teddy—who claimed his art was a painter’s roller and block brush, and who wastes himself at the end of a fishing rod for bait as a hobby—stirred nothing in me, only dread. Yet for the weasel in him, closest to lackadaisical work, I assigned him to grout the floor-tile joints that would wrap up our construction-site office. 

I tug Adam and Valdek back with me upstairs—the helping hands who do not shy away from my command. Sentient of Adam’s meticulous Virgo and Valdek’s plodding, steady Goat, following, I remind myself of the -1 landing before crossing the threshold into the tunnel behind the panel door. I scan for where to implant our workshop: a waking wing-tips’ glow, faint, exhaust in the stale air, dies where light skims the low ceiling of the rooms in enfilade.

Heading toward the backyard glow, I slip into the hollow behind the stairwell projection, its walls dropping into the derelict basement. With Adam and Valdek, we set up a joinery shop there—the last resort, out of the planned apartment I had offered to De P’pa and De M’ma during their visit, the floor I perceived as their retirement refuge should they ever leave South Africa. 

Morning dawns on me: the rotten staircase I reverse engineer in my mind give way to geometry—clean, efficient, modular. I rise, dress, and head to work; rejecting the grind of the original design, I order pre-fab materials, and maximize for a low-skilled crew. The Poles had treaded from the sidewalk; Germeau’s truck had craned down the load; timber slid through the half-high window and settled on the enfilade floor, the room holding its hush, waiting until my planned gaze unfolds. Adam and Valdek lift a foot-wide redwood plank off the stack, carry the raw stringer to a pair of trestles, and cantilever the end for a working balance. 

Stanley’s thru-zero hook grips the end of the plank; the yellow blade draws; my carpenter’s pencil ticks 175 mm. With a hardboard template at an angle of 40° angle, I traced the cross-grain and deduce the two-inch thick tread. I mirrored the pattern onto the second stringer, adjust a circular saw’s tungsten teeth width, and half the depth, and clamp the guiding rail. 

Time and again, Adam hands me the circular saw - Wronggn, tzweeng. . . - miter-cutting grooves inside the pencil line through the red grain; mechanical, hands sliding the template, merciless blades  - Wronggn, tzweeng. . . - until the hush settles on a stack for thirteen mortices; the jigsaw snuggles the tenon-tread ends, the earlier claw hammer - Bang, bang, bang. . . - and the wide blade chisel chop out the waste.  

Adam and Valdek’s hands don’t rest; they hold and release stringers and treads, pass the self-taping screws, while I twist the screwdriver - whining - as three-inch screws punctuate the stringers and, in the morticed hollow, seize the tenon tread, before Adam calls the men. 

Orchestrating with Teddy, Cesar, and Andre on the -2 floor, I dismantle the balustrade, and descend for the last time with the creak of stairs. Watching the top -1 perch and the -2 bottom, raised hands meet; they unhook the old stringers from the traversal trim beam at the gaping vaulted floor and lay the rotten staircase on the white-tiled floor. 

Adam, Valdek, and Radek, perched overhead, slide down the redwood staircase; the top of the stringer locks into the -1 slab trim as Teddy’s team foot the base. We fix—three balusters to the tread, the handrail, the newel post—setting up the crew’s change-room corner beneath. And after all, the man in Victoria's shadow—Jean-Francois Smeets’ near accident—awakens my childhood: moving through houses under construction, primordial, a squat toilet reached from the rear courtyard—taught me to set up a convenient WC in the vestibule’s crawlspace the cistern against the street wall alongside the dozen-pencil light shaft that pelted the raw chisels coal-chute.

These Polish men stay close, teamed-up, swirling around me when I work amongst them—flowing like flies in desert heat, drawn to the faint moisture off the skin. I drop the Rudy-ghost effect—the Capricorn who once stood sentinel against the weasel in Teddy, wrapping the whole crew into his orbit—eager to send me errands in my glass bubble. I remain sentient of how lackadaisical they become as I distance myself, when I vacate their workplace floors.  

A hopelessness wanders in me. I never read a crew of Zulus coming—how it rhymes with Shaka Zulu, warriors with spears and skin-shields. I misread their demeanor, unlike the Italian, the Dutch, the Nordic features glow. Child of Africa, yet behind the dark mask of South Africa's dozens of tribes, I still failed to read the men. When I discharged one worker from my construction site, the crew walked off; one man turned away and said: “One Zulu is all Zulus!” That truth stays with me—just as the Poles would walk off site now. 

In the light of progress, the electric supplier treaded a three-phase cable from the street to the meters; then, under different regulations, a contractor treaded up the stairwell’s back wall, running back-to-back with the technical shaft, dropping a distribution board to every floor. My mind settles on the Taurus in Radek, sprawling—treading through the floors, walls, and ceilings. Followed by the intercom's wire, the telephone. 

An impervisible darkness lingers with the Vultures’ eyes perched on a black pipe—André and César at the ratcheting pipe-threader, overseeing a short-threaded pipe in the vise—Aetheria’s augury rising in the coal-chute’s shadow, where dozens of pencil-shaft lights stream with Helios arc winds-up the day. 

I wake up and churn back to where I left off yesterday—at the -2 with the Vultures, the ±0 Belle Époque stairwell cinder-block firewall, the city gas line diverted into the shaft; while the old runs in the +1 Spanish woman tenant, and the +2 truck driver and wife, who must be kept in water flow; and above, the +3 loft drains and flush toilets still feeding into the city sewers. 

I open my eyes at the loft window: the dilapidated frame, blistered paint, the watery-pane sashes. First light over the suburb calling me to rise. A glance at Victoria, cocooned under the covers, and it hits me—Alexandre, her seven-year-old boy, volatilized from our life. I flip back the duvet to Victoria’s side; logic settles in, as if I'm reading her thoughts: ‘Pipo is better with his father, André, while the Belle Époque apartment is under construction. 

I kick my feet to the floor, slip into jeans, shirt, step into shoes, and walk toward the +3 landing behind the gaping doorway. I stagger down Erebus’ crouch in the stairwell, cowering under the dangling meager bulb, until the ±0 Belle Époque landing, where I curl my way to the French door before swinging back, from the split-level’s rise before the bull’s-eye rose and peacock fan-tail hosts a mottled aura, before I crack the door open for the men in the glow. 

They trail each other up the broad flight of marble stairs to the ±0 Belle Époque landing, vanishing in the shadow of the crystal wafer portal before echoing down to -1 then -2. In the shadows of the barn staircase, where I followed them, I give them leeway to change into work clothes, tick their names in their shifting eyes as the starting time, and speak with each of them to resume yesterday’s shift.

In the makeshift -1 workshop, I pull my overalls off a nail in the wall, step into the pants, and pull up the shoulder straps. I walk away, calling Adam and Valdek upstairs, little did I know, a hyphae head—legless spider clung for life in the darkness of the floor joist. We walk the linoleum covering the floorboards through the ±0 interleading rooms in enfilade toward the rear grand glazed portal defined over the kick panels by a stained-glass cafe curtain. Stripping the warped hardboard, we clear the lamenting stained-glass ceiling mural—water-stained and dust-choked—a sunroom's skylight. 

My curiosity tethering the lamenting ceiling mural, as Helios crosses over the roof ridge, stays with us for the remainder of the day and into its sleep. Returned to morning light, I hunt the walls—in pursuit of a forest undergrowth reclaiming its habitat. I show the men to strip the plaster, astonished by the living white, translucent web of spores amongst seasonal brown dead webs at the outer bottom corner by the nighthall doorjamb—radicalizing, clinging to the bricks’ pores. The spores had rooted the mortar bed and perps, the wall—though thirst rid moist—showing advancing strands that permeated, trailing into the planned bathroom corner.

Now the master bedroom comes under my scrutiny, breaking a living enfilade—the tweak of a lateral pivot, the extension behind the narrower service enfilade, raised on stilts from the backyard’s -1 basement level. The Poles like a beehive, are stripping the ceiling, Teddy, with Basha’s husband, carry the wooden debris through the enfilade, out the half-height egress window to the container in the street. 

I continue scouting the spores, discovering intelligence agencies underneath the nighthall along the floor joists. Between rising daylights and falling sunsets, the whole crew of Poles, stripping the extension naked to the brick walls, until  roofless to the winter skies, the far window stripped, found the ramifying spores at the reveals. Exposure in the back of my mind, the sales deed’s clause on fungus echoes: ‘the seller is liable for the dry rot’—yet I was naïve of the monster living in the townhouse’s entrails. I doffed off my overalls downstairs.

I climb to the mezzanine’s landings, the swingback stairs by the +1 sentinel of a panel door, the intermediate landing onto the +2 sentinel of a door, before the heavenly flight of stairs, to sit at the table I share with Victoria for dining and vanity, facing the loft room’s gable wall. With the Yellow Pages open, the phone cradle before me, I dial a fungicide contractor. After a chat that wraps up the complexity, and with the man eager to come and take samples, I hang up—seeing no need to exert myself further. 

After a phone call spilling complexity beyond me, I welcome a  man in the glow of the entrance door. With his laboratory suitcase I lead him up through the crystal wafer portal, into the ±0 derelict shadow of rooms in the enfilade. The alchemist turns away from the extreme portals’ glows, crouches by the lateral wall, at skirting level, just short of the grand interleading portal. From the pouch he brings with him, removes a spatula—an investigation. Sophisticated evidence-gathering: he scrapes the raw wall and, with the diligence of propagating through the air, bottles it. He moves on to digested cuboidal timbers, slips it into plastic bags, offers a quick greeting, and vanishes as swiftly he had arrived from the derelict apartment.

A week later, in the shadow of the entrance door, I pick up the mail. From the unfolding report—to the rite of sealing the contract—I open the entrance to two men in white space suits arriving with spraying equipment. In the evening, they greet me on their way out, saying, “[N'entrez pas pendant quatre jours]—Don’t enter for four days.” They had quarantined the ±0 derelict apartment, leaving me to detour to the -1 basement and reassign the men there to keep the renovation progressing. 

Amongst the embracing extension’s raw brick walls, open to winter’s grey skies, Adam and Valdek work with me—on and off the shifting articulated stepladder. Teddy gangs up with the rest of the crew, feeding me the timber remotely from the -1 floor’s stockpile off Germeau's truck. A roof joist rises at the hands of men, to end up among twisting figures, lying on the wall-plates atop the facing walls; I drive nails through the plate-to-joist anchors, fixing the beam. 

As the sky withdraws, shying away from the framed joist ribs, I climb onto the beam’s edge, straddle over the void, balancing as a board is hoisted between multiple hands coming to rest across a few ribbed joists. I step on, punctuating with nails, while the next board floats beneath me, rising into place. By day’s end, we needed another barn-flight of stairs to puzzle together for access to Victoria’s futuristic plant-nursery terrace roof. 

Hands unrolled rubber bands of waterproofing, vulcanizing the joints and the turned-up ends against the walls. I left César and André to affix the sheet metal flashing and, along the opposing edges, the gutters and the water-draining downpipe. Then I return to a re-sealed master bedroom—somber—as the Scorpio quiescent in Radek feeds cables to light outlets, switches, and plugs, while I fit into the raw opening a new double-glazed, hinged sash window. 

Valdek shoulders sacks of gypsum from the -1 storage. He tears the composite paper and shakes the powder into a bucket of water. He lifts the electric mixer from the floor, plants the paddle shaft into the bucket - Whirr… - his gaze an extension of the swirling shaft. Retrieves the mixer for Adam, who leans in to scoop the pasty compound, slapping a cake off the bricklaying trowel onto my handheld hawk. 

I twist and turn with the hawk between Adam and the wall, scraping off with a plaster trowel and smearing the raw bricks. From the floorboards, light sticks in the white sheen; in the paste swathes of curved trowel strokes, a wainscot rises and climbs the wall faintly lighting the room. 

I step onto the articulated stepladder, hands shift as I reach the smear up along the roof joist. Then I descend from the scaffold and, facing the luminous wall, seesaw the straightedge from edge to edge—from floorboard to roof joist—filling the hollows, skimming, wood floating, troweling the wall to a gloss, believing the fungus’ lethal chemicals entrapped behind the gypsum. 

I backtrack through the doorway into the nighthall, leaving the plastered master bedroom exuding the window’s curiosity—daylight refracting off the fresh wall, Aetheria’s possessive mirage hanging in the middle of the room. I have no sooner passed on the curiosity than I’m plastering the damaged patches in the nighthall, backing out to the corner along the doorjamb where the dry rot seemed sourced. I strip off my overalls and hang up on a nail in the -1 temporary workshop, where dusks come and dawns rise in a rite. 

Until I storm the ±0 enfilade of rooms ahead and find the men downed tools, grouped beneath the stripped ceiling mural, the stained-glass already dispatched to Hasselt, Flanders, for a promising restoration. From the flank doorway to the nighthall, Basha emerges after Christina—her Moon in Taurus and Sun in Horse—her gait stick-limbed in her sister’s wake. Against the grand portal with the stained-glass cafe curtain, picturing the morning light ingesting the western-hanging night, Basha stands up to Teddy.

Calling out, “Teddy! [Il est paresseux]—he is lazy. . . I caught him out.” 

As I take my time to respond—with men caught in a crude herd of zebras before me, their black-and-white striations merging into one body, their leader lost in the mass—Basha’s gaze freezes on me, a woman suddenly finding herself alone. She awakens what is stirring between us, the thought rising in me, ‘I don’t know what to do about it?’ 

Before the pack of wolves—men in city clothes unchanged since the first day of ousting Lucifer from the -2 wine cellar, ripping up, breaking down, heaving bags of rubble through the -1’s half-window into the container in the street—Cinderella appears, a beacon of femininity. Teddy nudges her forward as the newest addition to the crew. Her eyes, dazzling yet unsure, whisper to themselves, ‘What am I doing here?’ She stands petite in a flimsy summer dress, as delicate as the girl herself, long wavy blond hair ruffled over her shoulders, catching the bare light beneath the striped ceiling mural. Among us—men stunned into silence, possessed by her beauty—I wrench my gaze away before exposing my foolish heart, leaving Basha to absorb the weight of an angel suddenly dropped into our midst. 

Basha’s words echo. “Teddy! [Ne travaille pas]—doesn’t work,” and beneath them a more thoughtful whisper resonates, ‘he’s robbing you.’ Bashful, Christina—the eldest of sisters—readily slips into Teddy’s charms, while Basha, the baby of the sisters, weighs out her strides, wrangling with Cinderella as she borrows a free passage along the lateral wall, trailing across the marches of the interleading grand crystal portal. 

The bathroom wall stands dismantled, the stained-glass combination panel already shipped off for restoration, leaving the raw brick that framed the door, both sidelights, and the transom wide open—waiting for me to slip into blues and block the opening up. The room lies bare, ghosting its modernization, the sanitary-ware delivery close at hand. César and André have already unpacked and scattered the pieces across the adjacent floor of the planned kitchen layout—Victoria and I have already crossed the city to Facq’s showroom and picked the corner bathtub, the wash-hand-basin vanity cabinet, the WC and cistern, and the kitchen sink. In the son’s need to stay useful, earning another day’s wages, while his father floundered beside him, Radek hovers over them, guiding with whatever plumbing wits they could muster, steering them through the glitches and coaxing their efforts to pipe the rooms for the fixtures.

The men had scattered, the women too, toward the front door’s interleading grand crystal portal. I stroll behind Victoria to the flank wall, where I replaced the former panel door—Adam and Valdek enlarging the half-brick wall opening and clearing the rubble—with the relocated combination of door, sidelights, and transom, its frame now a glazed threshold onto the stairwell ±0 landing, sharing light. I finish spraying with a can of blue. 

Victoria’s inhibition stirs as she approaches Cinderella’s shoulders—her flowing hair, her slippers among a field of dried shaved curls: It’s unimaginable: her silky fingers gripping coarse, gritty sandpaper, persistently rubbing the grooved profile of the delicate glass beads—medium, then fingers sanding down with the finest sandpaper—until the wood bead’s grain is silk-smooth, framing her girlish figure. I crave to catch her gaze mirrored in the wafer-mosaic of beveled panes. 

But at the adjacent set of folding doors, besides the shared, open five-gallon can of paint remover, Christina stills the razor-blade scraper—caught in a blister of paint along the wooden glazing bead. She lifts a gentle smile behind Cinderella… yet Victoria, in her stride, steers her eyes away from the work-women, charting her curve toward the flank exit.  

I return Christina’s smile, her hand tethered to the glazing bars slicing the casement door into a glassy grid—half open, half V-folded on its hinges to the door-wide grand casement. Afar, Basha’s spirited gaze; both sisters in jeans scraping paint in tandem, the paintbrush dribbling remover gel, blistering and mottling the portal as they shave off the dark-green paint—working through the tedious muntins. They’ve left a show of progression through the stiles, railings, and the bottom kick panels—pale yellowish-brown pine, unsealed to light after a century.

Victoria stirs a smirk, pulling the flank door, urging her exit across the threshold to the ±0 landing, as I retrieve a last gaze from Cinderella’s pianist’s fingers—an echo behind a heavenly harp. But on Victoria’s heels, I satisfy my mind: ‘tomorrow is another day.’ I step out onto the landing, pull the door closed, and catch up down the split-level vestibule apron, Victoria already stepping in the street. By the taillights, I round the Audi, slip into my seat, lean resiliently over the central console to pull the doorsill knob, tweak the ignition key—and as her door closes, we pull off, bound to skirt the eastern suburbs north to Zaventem.

[vofc-yams]

YD6-103 (Cradle) — Capricorn in the Crawlspace, Wolves in the Undervault, and Aetheria’s Triumph Over Lucifer

Aetheria isn’t a house. She’s a mind—one that breathes through brick, remembers through shadow, and speaks through light. In this chapter, as men carve into the underworld of the cellar, something older stirs. Not the dust, not the pipes, not the wolves of labor fighting for territory.

Aetheria. She rises through every fracture. She reveals what is hidden in the architecture—above and below. She teaches me that a house can carry myth, judgment, mercy, and vision.

If you want to see how a place can become a consciousness— and how consciousness shapes the fate of those who enter— step inside.

Crystal Portal →

YD6-103 (Cradle) — Capricorn in the Crawlspace, Wolves in the Undervault, and Aetheria’s Triumph Over Lucifer

The Capricorn in Rudy steadfast excavates the vestibule crawlspace, exposing Roman arches of brick, through the gaping, broken wall. The workmen meet on either side of the wall, Adam, from under the cellar’s bulb a shadow of light. He is not muscular as Rudy, but equally enthusiastic—with the percussive hammer of the chisel. The men labor in a luciferous darkness; my mind reposes on a century of moist ground to win back storage and wine cellar for a contemporary workshop and laundry machines. 

They shovel rubble into bags, ducking their shoulders beneath the load, heaving it piggyback a few step the -2 underground depth, before the creaking treads, scream each man’s muscles—men dare not voice—the flight of stairs rising them through the gaping ceiling to land on the -1 basement floor. 

There, in a weaseling light from the half-height window the sill seating on the sidewalk, the men pause before a corner swelling with heaped bags. While the one ghost—the other too rolls one shoulder down, tipping, pulling his supporting shoulder free from beneath the bag. They may be blind to the subtle squeeze of air beneath the ceiling. Blank-eyed, before a tedious return underground for more, driving their bodies into punishment. 

But then—to heal the house foundations—removing the water from mushroom spores, the fungal network, the capillary action that keeps them alive. Drying the walls, forcing the process into dormancy or collapse—has been churning in my mind. I need to liberate my thoughts. I rise, leave Victoria cocooned in the bedding. Beyond the paint-swollen window sashes, the liquid panes simmer the first light across the valley of Forest. 

I dress before the table—placemats laid for a meal, half a glass bowl of red Porto still on its stems. Last night, beneath my eyes, she had pushed back the tracing sheet I spread the night before across the house’s original blueprint—reviving the apprentice in me. On Thursdays, a break from laying bricks meant attending technical college: a clutch pencil in hand over the drafting table. I’m back, tracing these superimposing floors I dare not confuse.  

Through the exit door to the +3 landing, a flight of stairs dives into Erebus lingering in the stairwell—an aura of wish—skylights welcoming the first light’s glow. Beneath the meek bulb’s shadow, after a few cautious treads, my feet catch the rhythm—the nosings cascade, my fingertip gliding the handrail, down the barn flight of stairs. I swivel past the +2 landing—the truck driver and his wife, sentinels behind their door. My mind envisions the landing’s linen cupboard morphing into a milky translucence—a quiet grandeur brushing light down the stairs. Shading away the remnants of the night. Counting down, the swivelback flight reaches the Spanish woman’s apartment entrance, which I imagine echoing that same soft radiance, a stillness guiding presence through the house. Then the mezzanine wall of faux-doors—a reminder of where Rudy squats; I’m masoning a fireproof cinder-block wall—before daylight peeks through the luminescence of the stained-glass bull’s-eye rose and peacock fan tail, shimmering on the ±0 Belle Epoque landing at the foot of the cottage portal. 

I veer, entering the derelict apartment. Step toward the French doors. Turn the cremone handle—pulling the doors into the breath of the park across the avenue. On the threshold, held back by the faux balcony, in the hush of the deserted avenue, I scan up in line the striated, fenestrated, and balcony facades up the sweep, then down toward the mouth pooling green lawns. In the blur of morning—lining beyond the glazed bus, distant tram shelter, and the city beyond—a group of men detach, jaywalking across the asphalt field. 

I press the French doors close and tracking back around doorways meet the men down on the vestibule’s split-level apron, pulling the door as they step up the curb and cross the sidewalk. Clang - a step of the coal-chute plate, each man a shadow breaking through the gaping doorway glow—greeting. In a single file, they climb the split-level through the hollow of the crystal-waffle portal. I press the door - kwock - their figures reduced to sighs of brushing clothes, groping down the stairwell’s profound Erebus awakening. Their boisterous footsteps thump the hollow, wooden-box echoes of the staircase, fading on the -1 landing under the vaulted ceiling. Then, turning from light to shadow, they descend again through the gaping floor—down the wobbly staircase into the -2 pit, where men change their clothing for the day’s work in Lucifer’s stale air and darkness. 

The bulb’s soft light fluffs the whitewashed brick wall. Beneath the staircase, a planted nail holds the clip of a clipboard. I unhook it; on the sheet, each man’s name is listed. A glance at my Citizen wristwatch—the golden five-minute notches on the square white dial, a ritual since my teens—marks the startup hour. Timekeeping underneath the men’s gaze. I note the shift: the chessboard of Polish workmen, the electrician, the plumber—beyond my trade yet bound to my will—their tools, accessories, and the day’s materials to acquire. 

In the gaping break-through doorway, Rudy finalizes the vestibule crawl space’s excavation, exposing the sewer pipe for the relay and installing a toilet for the site under construction. In my madness to right the wrongs of a century ago, I seek to foot the comfort shaft through the stairwell. The footprint runs too deep for access with compressed-air jackhammers, and without a beltway to clear the rubble, I leave the six Polish men with a club hammer, chisel, pick, and shovel—breaking the moist brick floor of an old wine cellar, a rear room alongside another at the back of the stairwell. 

I’ll be gone, yet I’ll hear the blows through the vaults. Still, I’ll keep a close eye on their fatigue, watching as the rubble fills bags they hoist up the cringing flight of stairs, clambering through the gaping ceiling to the -1 landing, looping through the offside doorway. In the light of the window, they’ll twist shoulders, tipping off the dumping bags. 

Over the length of days, the pilling bags swell by the window whose sill rests on the sidewalk, the ceiling losing clearance, suffocating the street-front room. I sense exhaustion along the indefatigable Rudy. I think of ways to invigorate the illegal Polish crew—while I lack the courage to join in their tedious work. The scent of one man, Teddy, discourages my lingering in their milieu. Typical of a union-man, a weasel, each day he pressures me upstairs. 

I emerge into the street, fetch the Audi, and drive away. By the day, I’m drawn from the shelves of the DIY mega-stores into the massive industrial shed of a builder’s supplier—walking through the warehouse stock toward the shimmer of light at the tradesmen’s counter, growing familiar with the attendant after my initial order for river sand, crusher stone, and cement—the components for concrete.

After my errand to St. Eloi Hardware, returning with buckets, I descend into the underworld of rising voices and squabbling. At the creak of my steps, Polish eyeballs look up—half-startled, half-hostile—then fall to a hush at my descent. I step on the cinder-block treads, sighting across the apron, where behind the gaping breakthrough Rudy carved out of the vestibule crawl, in the excavated room, his gaze speaks—a pack of wolves encircling him. I fall short of patience, withdrawing in silence to a brief breeze of sanity. 

Rudy’s bodyguard duty is short-lived—his sweaty descent in the vestibule crawl space now morphing into a technical room. He stands at a warder’s stance, his eyes locked with a Capricorn’s gaze—these men are stealing time—awakening in me. ‘I’ve seen it in their eyes! I can’t pin them down to it—they're more valuable as assistants when I’m ready to perform my skills!’ 

My eyes scan besides city clothes hanging through the balustrades—the Polish wolves who’ve ousted Rudy from their milieu, mute. The weasel's eyes shift, but Teddy’s voice rises: “Rudy… Rudy…  Rudy. . .” It resonates in my head, amplified by Victoria’s outburst  weeks earlier over the phone: “Rudy is waiting for you… Rudy needs a place to sleep… Rudy…” 

I turn my back on Rudy’s illegal pack of wolves—the villains. With a hand on the wobbling newel post, I swing past him and say. “Rudy! [Vient avec moi]—Come with me.”

As I exit onto the ±0 Belle Epoque landing, I glance upstairs at the faux-wall of panel doors, hiding the discomfort of a squatter’s blanket. ’Go and collect your things.’ Without sparing a thought of reprisal, I say. “Rudy! [Ici ce n’est pas un hotel…]—This is not a hotel… Will you move out? We need the room.” 

Rudy’s effaced regard is bound to haunt me. My words devastate the sturdy, sportive figure into silence. In his pride, he stumbles off through the crystal-wafer portal, down the split level to the vestibule apron where dark doors wait for him. Given leeway, I sidestep through the flank door and, keeping his pace through the vestibule - Kwock - I cross the street-front room, I crank the cremone bolts releasing the French doors; from the corner of the faux balcony to the blind entrance door, Rudy reappears, walking his bicycle onto the sidewalk. 

He kicks the foot-saddle, coasts off—the pedals squeaking, the chain in a distraught run—squeals fading across the field of asphalt. In the blur of the bus shelter, he vanishes amid the confusion of a bustling tram stop, along the parkway’s brushwood, against the distant wall of fenestrated brick facades. 

I step back from a trickle of traffic along the avenue, my hands on the door leaves—male and female stiles rolling into one another—pressing close. I walk away through doorways to the ±0 landing; the hollow, gaping floor’s underground stairwell lie in luciferous silence, as though the work had stopped and the workmen were on siesta in the cast shade of equatorial heat. To my regret—impulsive—I had dismissed the one who should have been promoted to foreman.

After my errand to St-Éloi Hardware—returning with buckets, a plaster trowel, a wooden float, and an aluminum straightedge—I descend again into the darkness of the underworld. I step on a few more loose, stacked cinder blocks filling the missing treads and meet the men’s wide, startling eyes—dwarfed a foot deeper into the excavated floor. Sentient of the mysteries in the realm of darkness, beneath the bulb’s soft light fluffing the whitewashed brick walls and vaulted ceilings, I breach the rear doorway toward the paired cellar rooms. 

Then, I step into my blue pants—no more words than orders. The youthful men emanating eager helping hands, the damp-proof membrane unrolls across the sub-floor, smoothing out its creases. While men moved in the corners of my eyes, I pin the oversized liner with nails along the raised edges to the peripheral walls. Adam and Valdek bring downstairs, along with the other men, the two-and-a-half inch thick panels of insulation as I pack the liner for the raft beams. 

Hawk-eyed—Andre, and Cesar, Libra’s vulture eyes—they trail my every move, shying out of sight. Yet the rhythm calls upstairs, under Adam’s sweat, as he dust bags of cement, gauged crusher stone and river sand into the hired concrete mixer for the week. Buckets splash water into the drum’s dry mix, before the fluid concrete pours into buckets.

The men shoulder them—echoes gasping through the gaping ceiling as they descend, the stairs creaking. Each man dumps by my side; the membrane and insulation panels vanish beneath the pour. I track back, raking and screeding, edging backward from the darkest corner, drawing the surface bed across the thresholds of doorways, out under the floating staircase—the escape flight of stairs where I step off to dry land, leaving the floor bed to settle overnight. 

The herd of men emerges through the crystal-wafer portal, diverging down the split-level vestibule. The door cracks to a glow of daylight, swallowing the shadow of each figure before shutting—Erebus drops by to squat for the night. I press the pilot switch—the one bulb flickers, tracking the others along the swivelback flights—as I climb to join Victoria in the loft. 

Victoria lies cocooned under the duvet as I jump to my feet—a penthouse awakening, twilight sky behind the blistering window frame and water-pane sashes. I pull on my jeans, tuck in my shirt, step into my shoes, slip on the overalls, and don the jacket. Heading out of the dormer room, +3, I descend into Nyx’s dark skirt—the aura of a skylight yet to materialize, a dream seeing one’s way down—shadowing the balustrade. My fingertips run to hip-swings at +2, +1—the sentinel of panel doors, the aura of substantiating portals—spiraling down until I reach another pilot button. Click. From the mezzanine, I descend toward the morning light filtering through the stained-glass entrance and mosaicking through the crystal-wafer portal, landing in the shadows of the ±0 Belle Époque landing. 

I watch from the faux-balcony as the crew approaches from the bus shelter at the mouth of the park. I head off from the French door to welcome them inside and latch it behind them. From the ±0 Belle Époque landing, the line of men descends by the wall's dangling light—the -1 apron bulb. The head of the line disappears, but whisper of clothing betrays them underground, down the creaky staircase. Trailing them, I step on the few stacked cinder blocks, the -2 landing’s the newel post wobbles, and the odor of spanking-new freshness fills the cellar. We step onto yesterday's concrete surface bed and the men change into working clothes. 

Teddy—the speaker for a crew of illegal Polish men—eyes roaming, the crew to silence, ousts me on errand runs for accessories to distant electrical and plumbing merchants, while I'm still immersed, studying and quantifying the next stage of reconstruction.  

Returning from errands, I learn who is the apprentice among these men: Andre, the father; Cesar, the son—no more a plumber, though they tread the subfloor drain pipes from the laundry corner through the vestibule-crawlspace discharge into the street. Radek, the electrician, threads his cables. Then, I dawn in on the men—Radek’s hand stretched between the hunkered father and son, instructing them to pin down the hydraulic tubing to the concrete surface bed.

I’m left to see through these men—their skills, their rhythm. Apprentices at work, I fear a stall of production; the Flanders’ Dedonder Building Material delivery—river sand and sacks of cement—waits in the faint light of the -1 basement window. Yet I fear not their lack of skills; construction runs the blood’s hydraulics through my own veins. Still, I’m dumbstruck, by the men wrestling the wheel of stiff nylon spring coils—water tubes spinning wild behind them—trying to pin down the erratic snake to the floor. I backtrack upstairs, muttering, ‘At least Radek has the intelligence to help Andre and Cesar out.’ Better let them figure out how to tame the coils and lay them to sleep across the concrete floor. 

Then—the flood of blinding halogen light. Under the rayonnant heat, I crouch before men’s dazzled eyes, their deceit congealed. The crew drifts through the corners of my vision—a chain of buckets descends at the rate of the squeaking treads, tipping behind the heels of my shoes. Valdek at the wheel of a tumbling concrete mixer, its grind echoing through the gaping brick vaulted ceiling. Adam behind me rakes the screed—a backwash across the striate serpentine, over the mischievous plumbers—while my hands, on a sea-saw straightedge, fine-tune the floating sleek. I retreat before the stealth floor-heating conduits, backing through one doorway, then the next—the activity of men subsides, flowing upward, through the flight of stairs, into the hush of evening.

Overnight, the screed sets the rhythm of feet returning, with the emergence of the footprint to Aetheria’s cradle—rising from a mirage the fluorescent tubes morphed the wine cellar brick wall effloresce. In the quiet, I spread trowel-striated glue arcs of glue from Adam’s bucket; Valdek passes white ceramic tiles, I lay the tiles in rows, withdrawing through the doorway into the adjacent room, paving my way toward the stairwell.

At the threshold of the vestibule crawlspace, we pause. The construction site hushes; open joints of white tiles stare upward, awaiting their grout. The Polish crew vanishes into the street, the weekend slips in—a lee-time for the glue to settle. I climb from the massive, stifling-walled space airing the -1 basement, through the gaping hollow between the joist-ribs of the wooden floor, up into the ±0 Belle Époque: the flight of stairs to the wooden mezzanine, the swingback flights to the +1 interleading timber floors, the +2 towering the townhouse, and up to the +3—thin walls threading the loft between gabled party-walls—to find Victoria in the doomer room. 

With the coming Sunday, I’m hunched over the spread 1912 blueprints, tracing the load-bearing interleading—the staggering symmetry of the narrow spine of the functions enfilade aligning with the living rooms. Victoria breathes over my shoulder, pauses, and pleads for the Audi. Without breaking my thoughts, I fumble at my hip pocket - tingle - slide the bull-nose ring free, and loan her the car. 

After a prolonged silence, voices emanated from the stairwell. Victoria, with a sprightly gait, steps into the dormer room: “Surprise, surprise! [Regarde qui j'ai amené.]—Look who I brought along?”

I turn away from the blueprints, my eyes drawn away, twist in my chair, at the dawn of voices. Raising the Flemish that lived only among siblings—with our parents, our grandparents—our small village, Rumst, dialect resonating from the refined Antwerp tongue. Shadows gather in the gaping doorway; I break from studying—far removed from the race to secure the deposit before negotiating with the bank for the purchase—and say, “M’ma, P’pa! [Dagh]—Good day!”

Victoria, all Moon-in-Gemini communicator and Sun-Tiger cheer, lets her hands dance and her feet tap in their quick Irish rhythm. She chats with my parents while I listen in, her extraversion carrying the conversation with ease. Soon she leads them back toward the airport, sending them onward from their stopover, continuing their journey to France for a stay with my sister Ingrid. 

Upon her return, Victoria mocks our small-village dialect from the south-eastern outskirts of Antwerp, calling it hopelessly rustic. She laughs it off, contrasting her mother’s Flemish from eastern Flanders, Jean-Francois Smeets southern Flanders, speech against her own insistence on speaking, “ABN—[Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands]—the Common Civilized Dutch.”

[vofc-yams]

YD6-102(cradle)—The Corporate Prison: the reach of the Hydra's Trance, Descent into Luciferous Foundations

The Philosophical Question: If your success—your entire architecture of achievement—is built on a lie, what happens when the floor of reality gives way? When the pristine of corporate life shatters, is the descent into Nyx and the "filthy sheds" merely a fall, or is it Aetheria’s precise calculation weaseling self-construction, finding our azimuths out an exposed prison?

This week, the pressure breaks. The Hydra stirs, the tenders are opened in a chilling, silent exchange, and the corporate suit trades a boardroom for blue overalls. Join the plunge from the Belle Epoque's stained-glass glow into the humid breath of the underworld, nestling, only way out is through the breach.

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.

YD6-102(cradle)—The Corporate Prison: the reach of the Hydra's Trance, Descent into Luciferous Foundations

The mornings’ head-on urges—winding me up, loading myself for work as it had over the past month—feel strange in their void: a vacuum this Wednesday as I descend through Nyx’s skirt, from the loft’s height into the somber stairwell, counting landings to the ±0 level of the Belle Epoque. 

Before the crystal wafers of the portal, a mosaic of Helios spills through the bull’s-eye rose and the peacock-fan tail of stained-glass. I turn my back on the radiant vestibule toward Erebus, cowering in the stairwell’s profound rear.

My feet grope blindly down the treads, catching the fatigued bulb’s louvered shadows. I’m reminded of the Capricorn in Rudy behind the front wall, sunk deep in the crawl space he’s been excavating—wondering if yet he’s caught up with Adam downstairs.

I turn away from the apron’s dangling bulb, reaching into the rear, oblivious to the stairwell walls where Erebus wakes. Trailing my fingertips along the handrail to the ball atop the newel post, as I swivel, pause, teeter at the bullnose of the initiating stair, sniffling a sillage of rising air. I descend into a vortex plume escaping from Lucifer's stale breath through the gapping -1 floor. 

Flaring the waft, nostrils drawn into the plume from the -2  cellar, my mind wakes through Adam's breach in the fluffed light along the front wall. The stairs creak, the handrail wobbles; I leap the missing trio of treads and land before the gaping whitewashed wall, bathed in the humid breath of the underworld. 

The poltergeist in the walls—echoing the club hammer striking the chisel head, metallic resonance clammed in a chunk of bricks - clack, clack, clack. . . - speaks for itself: the tedious, incipient fissuring before cracking and chipping off a piece of wall leaves me sympathizing with Adam for his lack of progress. To my disbelief, the fossilized bricks, bound in lime-mortar by a century of humid soil, resist every blow. Yet the persistent pounding of hammer on chisel, two-and-a-half brick deep, hollows a hatch; the wall exhales—a faint, cool draught escaping the black hole—a sense of accomplishment. 

Peeking through, in pursuance of sniffling fresh air, the dark crawl space flutes a dozen pencil shafts of light, pointing toward the wounded streetfront foundation wall—the chiseled coal chute—a meager start to breath Lucifer from the underground. 

At the sight of progress, I turn around, skeptical, warning myself of the luciferous dark of a core truth. I clamber over the mischievously dangling treads, rising the flight, zigzagging through the higher landings. With a door swing, I step out the darkness into the brightness. Across the avenue, I fetch the Audi, slip in, tweak the ignition—and, in a rollback trance, head my usual course through the Valley of Forest, past the boxy brands of mega-stores weaseling into highway traffic.    

Rijssel (Lille) shunts its lanes into the woods; Paris flashes over my windshield, until I shunt and curl beneath the bridge along the riverbank leading to Charleroi. I ride amid a drip of vehicles, the flow thickening, until I quit the trickling traffic and slip toward Jumet—weaving through the industrial sheds to pull up before the office facade. I step onto the gritty apron, close the car door, and pace to the swing of the office door through the corridor. 

The glass partition reflects Aetheria on rendezvous in the courtyard office, where I linger after yesterday’s delivery of a Bill of Quantities to the CEO, rifling the ream void after having been immersed in those unrelenting pages. I’m left with the dawn of a greenhouse sunlight filtering over my shoulders, and I slip into my chair, twiddling in the hush of completion at the cleared blueprint table. 

Eli Godard echoing— ”Mr. CEO’s desperation at winning the Materne Industries project.” My eyes stray, abreast of my shoulder; the vulture, perched in his shadows across the corridor, ignores me—unlike before, when every precedent caught his stealing, spying eyes. 

I raised the lid of my Toshiba laptop to organize my notes for future references. By late morning, he rises from his perch and turns his back on me. I think. ‘Man! I’d mark up only one percent—but then I gamble, challenging myself on the construction site to profit!’ 

The slender figure in a beige business suit disappears in the profound shadows of his office— ’A back door?’ My orbit widens; the Hydra of my mind stirs, morphing from my laptop’s glow into the vertiginous, somber hall of the Town Hall. Offside, light cracks up the flank wall—sentient of Mr. CEO’s shadow entering from the doorway’s light blizzard, a figure shutting the exterior behind him. 

Tethered to the man who handed me, cold, the Bill of Quantities, I—Am I seeing him walk up past a pew-like arrangement of chairs, a few scattered figures, toward the front of the hall, where a lone polling table, huddled by ghost backrests, waits bare on a stage platform beneath the high light. A month’s oven-heated consciousness—the Hydra of my mind—settles to hover in a corner of the hall as the figure lowers himself among the audience. 

From the stage’s dark left-wing, a trio of men—official in their demeanor—advance toward the table, pull out chairs, and sit. Mr. Chair exchanges glances with his peers. One wingman gestures, passing an envelope across to him; the other slides a letter-opener, slicing the flap to unfold a trifold letter that travels back for Mr. Chair’s mute reading. 

The latent off-side man in the audience rises, curls through the shadowy and empty rear—a subtle drowning in an ocean, his lifeline lost. He knows his bid has failed. He cracks open the flanking doorway; a silhouette vanishes in a blizzard of light.

The language of a tender-opening session continues; figures remain seated, stretched in curiosity toward their competitors—already on the spree of the next bet—until, as the panel of men rise and step into the wing’s shadows, the audience backtrack toward the empty rear hall, their exit punctuated by the flanking glows of the door. The hall chills. My presence slips into a reticent dissolution—a single thought: ‘where to next?’

A shoulder’s call. I glance abreast—Mr. CEO’s shadow reappears in his corner office after an errand’s absence, now seated at his desk. I glimpse him above the wainscot partition sill, neck-deep between his shoulders—perched—the telephone pressed to his blind cheek, staring through the reflections of the glazed partitions, the ghost of his Flemish boss appears: a hefty figure, comfortable in an executive leather fauteuil. 

The call extends—a gamble between men—in a serious tone of those who sculpted a Walloon implantation branch for a Flemish corporation; With a Libra’s calm expression, his face reads: ‘We didn’t win the bid…’  

Brewing, it resonates with Eli Godard breezing through the office, dropping his casual words: “[Les flamand ferme leurs opération en Wallonie]—the Flemish are closing down their operations in Wallonia.”  

After Mr. CEO hangs up - ring, ring - I pick the handset, cold knuckles to my cheek. He says, “[Tu pourrais venir]—Will you come over?”

I cross the corridor and step through the door, veer toward him behind his desk. I hate these scattered abysmal ridges that shatter the continuum of normal work, but I need to hear his words—to cut ties, to move on. 

Only to walk out of the offices, out of the clutches of the dark indoors—a prison—into the mid-afternoon sunlight. I care to remember: the Audi glittering in its metallic silver-gray, waiting to welcome me back, eager for the cruise of its azimuths within reach. I tweak the key, swing the door, slip into my seat; the engine purrs. I shift into gear, back into the street, driving my glass bubble toward the filthy sheds and autumn’s dying colors—a world I’ve learned to forget in the lights and shadows of Nyx.

In a strange world, amid midday’s trickling traffic cruising through the countryside, the horizon peeks in the distance—my life under review—a new start dawning. Before the thoroughfare’s end, a signboard flashes “Paris” and “Bruxelles”—as if offering a choice. The lanes shunt through the trumpet interchange, an appeasing message, to settle with the tricking flow. The evergreen swell of the median drifts beside me, leafy and serene, “Brussel–Bruxelles” flickers again—an unnecessary reminder. I slip down the off-ramp into the valley, veer onto the traversing parkway, riding past swarming parking lots, the median at peace with flowing lawns, as figures weasel through the chaos before the branded mega-store. 

Across the Stonehenge roundabout, I veer through the lenses of traffic lights and ride the silver tram rails. Entering retailers throbbing around St. Denis Square, I veer outbound beneath a railway-arched underpass—a brick relic of the past—disappearing through hedgerows of fenestrated and balconied brick facades. Up the incline, until a side interstice opens—street prongs spreading around the purple crotch of curtain walls—rather than the lancet windows of St Eloi Hardware. Naive, asking myself. ‘What’s that for a name given to a Hardware store?’ I pull up beside mirror-warped plate-glass, the street segmented in reflection, watching my approach.

The plate-glass crack open - hiss - doors to either side, clearing an artisan’s bodybuilder in enduring stance—proud in blue cargo pants. A host on the march—imposing, with winter on the horizon, his chest open to a wool-lined jacket. I pause—a holographic being of myself—groomed for the life of me, before a well-stocked hardware store, I'm juggling with tools I left behind too long ago. I step past the mannequin, proud in his outfit, heading for the tradesmen aisle, prolonging the stretch counter and nearing the attendant on the other side. 

Patient, my new life churns to mind as I watch the one transaction end and another begin—the attendant leaning aside to serve the next tradesman. My boy’s eyes wander through the store, excited by the abundance of toy-like tools: a carpenter bench, circular saws, power drills. Deeper in, a floor sanding machine catches my gaze, waiting for my turn—a childhood thrill stirring: when Igor and I were spearheading through a stationery shop, drawn to the shelves stacked with the novelty of Dinky Toys displayed atop their boxes—’to add to my collection!’ 

One tradesman steps away with multiple boxes of screws; the attendant reacts after the next man’s brief words. He moved across the hatch midway into the store, before the security window of the accounting office, and returns with boxes of angle grinder cutting discs and a box of electrical trip switches. I slip alongside the counter as the attendant in a few swirls through a rear doorway, returns from the accountant’s office. He hands over an invoice. Then, I slip up, asking. “[Puis-je avoir…]—Can I have…” I spare myself the embarrassment of naming the outfit, instead pointing toward the sky-blue shoulders of the mannequin by the door—ready to walk out after the other tradesmen. 

Through the mid-way hatchway, the attendant loops out from behind the counter and leads me back toward the front—facing the mannequin. His eyes converge on the pigeonholes of folded blue outfits. He withdraws his hands with a pair of overalls, drops them open, unfolding, draping before me. In a roundabout glance, I search for change rooms. He insists I slip into the pants—while behind him, I stand exposed to the street. 

While he insists, it strikes me—‘After all, overalls are meant to be worn over city clothes.’ A flashback stirs: the youngster in a studio, trying my luck at another profession—only to disappointment when the tailor said: “No!” Though he frowned and scanned me, eyes resting at my ankles, he repeated, “No—You're three centimeters too tall!” 

Here again, I stand before the bright forking streets. In the gapping boulevard, cars whisk past, leaving the  median’s brushwood trees staring after them as an autumn gust blows off the last leaves. I step in the pants. I lift the bib up my chest, thread the suspender over my shoulders, clip the buckle, then the next button. I walk away from the scanning attendant, disappointed, as he calls the jacket back, folding the pants as well. For a moment, I had felt new—filled with the spirit to tackle the derelict’s renovation. 

The attendant returns from the back office, lays down a bank transfer order for my signature, and hands me the pack of clothing with the invoice. I step away through a - hiss - of parting doors. On a dancer’s feet, across the curved nose of the sidewalk, the Audi’s tires tethered to the curb. I tweak the door, slip into the seat, and lean over the central console to place the clothes on the passenger side. The pedals rest under the ball of my feet—brake and clutch weighing in—as I shift into gear and pull off, soft on the throttle, nurturing my new function in mind until I pull up a few blocks away, before the 15 on the facade.

At leisure, with a blue pack of clothes under my arm, I turn the key and press the door swing. As I reach the waking pilot light - kwock - the door closes behind me. I kill the fatigue daylight spilling through the split-level’s high crystal waffle portal; the shadowy outline of the louvered risers dies into the upstairs Erebus’ clasp.   

Muffled underworld sounds migrate toward me through the gaping floor of the stairwell.  As I descend the flight of stairs, the language clarifies—a head fight of two granite boulders - clack, clack, clack… - neither breaking nor giving way. The wall resists. Absent is the club-hammer sculptor's strike—the chisel’s metallic percussion trailing the echoes of tap-steps through the stairwell. My thought tightens: ‘I’ll be bound to invest in an electric jackhammer.’ 

Over Adam’s shoulders, through the hole in the wall, I greeted Rudy—shoveling broken-up soil into the woven waste bag. In the ritual of following days—he sets the shovel against the wall; his hands return to finger-dip the bag's inner selvage, twisting its ears into knots, winding them around his knuckles—fist tight to a thumb grip. He ducks, rolls a shoulder under the load, body sweeping as he heaves the cement-weighted bag upright. Straightening, he steps out of the morphing vestibule’s crawlspace and repurpose a technical room, through the opening’s across brick rubble.

Without sparing a thought, Adam scouting around, I ask. “[Tu connais d'autres travailleurs]—Do you know other workers?” Lingering a thought, as I turn away—‘You know your way out.’ Treading the stacked cinder blocks, instead of the three rotted dangling wooden ones, I climb, accompanied by the creak of the old stairs. At the -1 landing, I step aside and peek through the doorway: Ghost—Rudy and Adam—twisting, their bodies sweeping in a turn, shoulders rolling from underneath their load, dropping the bags that are claiming floorspace, stockpiled in the corner by the egress window. As I head for the ±0 landing, trailing a reckoning for a container size, I leave the mezzanine behind, and continue upward—past +1, +2, and the barn stairs to the +3 loft—wrapped in my mind the men and dumpster to fill.

[vofc-yams]

YD6-101 (Cradle)—Aetheria Weaves Her Nest, Adam Chisels the Path of Her Destiny

She gathers light as twigs — he strikes stone to open a path.

In YD6-101 (Cradle), Aetheria begins to weave her nest within the shell of an old townhouse, each beam of light a strand of awakening. Beneath her unseen rhythm, Adam chisels through walls and foundations, unaware that every hammer-blow sculpts the passage of her becoming.

Between the dust of renovation and the hush of revelation, consciousness builds its home.

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.

YD6-101 (Cradle)—Aetheria Weaves Her Nest, Adam Chisels the Path of Her Destiny

The weekend looms, and frisky as a morning bird fluttering in the poor, dilapidated dormer room, I dress before Victoria, head for the doorway, and find the barn-flight cascading stairs sinking into the tenebrific entrails—shuffling a hollow wood-box echo. I swivel beneath the dangling fatigue bulb at the Truck Driver and his wife’s door, hush with their concern over the renovations. 

I swing down another swingback toward the bulb before the Spanish woman, daughter and boyfriend—those intermediate landings shared with the Mezzanine. I peek a curiosity through the wall’s faux-spread of panel doors, step into the room where Rudi—a squatter’s whitish, muddled blanket piled on the floor. Scratching at my temple, nagged by the sight, I exit beneath the bulb shadowing the next flight of stairs down to the apron, before meeting the crystal-cottage portal. 

The sun foreshadows the gloom. I slip through, under the guise of the Bull’s-eye rose and the peacock fan tail window—an eager translucence swelling in the hush of morning into an enigmatic kaleidoscopic light. Pausing a moment in the early 1900s before the split-level’s marble whisper, I descend from the Belle Epoque, Nyx sits guard in the shadow of the doors’ apron. A crack of glow opens—ousting Nyx from her shy permanency—into a silhouette in the doorway. 

Her sylph-mirage—at the crack of the opening door—Aetheria eagerly crosses the threshold, and blends into a brighter interior, leaves me to face a gentle confrontation with a twentyish man as his hand reaches for the door calling bell. Soft-spoken, lisping a pronounced cleft of the upper lip, he distracts me—until I scold myself, ‘Don’t judge by appearance!’ With a distinctive Polish accent, and without a qualm, he says. “Adam! [Je cherche du travail]—I’m looking for work.” 

It’s not as if the avenue had construction sites or number 15 is plastered: ‘Seeking labor?’ Yets, startled by Rudy, I exclaim inwardly, ‘How do these men sense I’m about to renovate the house—when I don't even know by what means?’ I face the young man on the sidewalk—he takes the words from my mouth, saying. “[Je peux faire n'importe quel travail]—I can do any job.” I wince at his cleft lip, curse my mind—my Aries-Horse girl still under my skin, her words echoing in my head, the expression learned from her art professor, “[La beauté de l’errreur]—the beauty of the error.” I swallowed. 

I draw a deep breath—hard to apply. My thoughts wrangle: gather willpower to arbitrate. Ill-at-ease words spatter over my lips, my mind snagged on the question: ‘Can he handle a clump-hammer and a chisel to break through a massive foundation wall?’—’What’s your qualm?’ I ask myself.  

“Adam. [Bon ! Vient la semaine prochaine]—OK! Come next week,” I say.

“[Oui]—Yes,” Adam replies. He turns away, and after him I pull the door latch closed. I cross the avenue toward the Audi, along the thicket hedge bordering the park, while he walks the curbside train of cars uphill. I follow him with my gaze until I leave him to the ghost of my mind—at the top of the park, his figure dissolving along the bus route up the sweeping avenue among the fenestrated brick facades. Illogic enters my senses—as he drifts into the tight residential communities. 

I step in the Audi, slide into my seat, tweak the ignition, and drive down toward the square, still, waiting for the crowds to tickle onto the tram platform by the park’s pooling lawns. I drift away for the lopsided highway pointer, threading a course through the Valley of Forest. I joined the tramway rails through the cobblestone street, veer at the toggle of the traffic light—the grass median skipping past the Stonehenge to boxy mega-storefront parking empty before to overpassing highway—a reminder of the GB supermarket group, echoing my errand for the weekend: to fetch, amid the Brico hardware shelves, a club hammer and chisel to start Adam off on Monday.

I curl away beneath the highway, rise onto the on-ramp, and slip my glass bubble amid a drip-drop of commercial panel vans—Adam stirring my mind through the kinetics of their workday drift. The overhead signs flip: Parijs underscore, Rijssel besides it—the interchange drawing Rijssel (Lille) into the midst of the woods along vanishing lanes.  Then Paris flips back, suspending the lead multilane in a trickling traffic, disillusioning me by the flagrant French-Flander city. After a hypnotic stretch of asphalt, I shunt from traversing the wrought-iron bow-truss bridge, curling beneath along the glazed riverbank. The deserted thoroughfare, at every interchange, gathers a trickle of traffic in growing intensity nearing Charleroi—yet I veer off before entering the coal city, pulling up at the office. 

By the swing of the car door, I step onto the gritty apron, slam it shut, and approach the entrance. With a swing thr door leaf clear the corridor’s glazed partition run—its somber depth reflective of a maze of empty offices. Passing the CEO, who steals back his glimpses—the vulture’s claws perched on my shoulders—I brush him off, onto stepping a U-turn across the corridor through doorways and the anteroom toward the back-to-back blueprint tables bathed in the courtyard’s morning glowThere lies a lone ream of a Bill of Quantities I can’t see my way through, my head pleading once more—disect subcontractors’ quotes.

Trails of fax paper snake across the tables; the control-freaking Libra has verified my analysis, assuring me he’s checked the incoming quotations. I pull from Rico’s executive briefcase my Toshiba, to set it on the table, raise the screen, and boot up. Grounding myself in the web of electrical runs—power and lighting traced from the main distribution boards to sub-boards, feeding the jam’s industrial cooking kettles—I drop into the lighting layout: harsh, purposeful glare of the high-bays, and the security lights outside.

Over my shoulders, Helios’ noon cloak yields its warmth to Nyx’s evening chill - ring, ring - the phone slices through. Knowing it’s Victoria’s time, I pick up the handset, though my mind still hovers over air ducts, roof vents and extractors—clean air turnover waiting to breathe life into the space. Then, attuning to a twelve-year-old-lost voice, I hear. “[French] What must I do? Rudy is waiting for you?”

Across the corridor’s shadowy glazed partition, the CEO—vulture-perched—steals back his glimpses, muttering to himself—’Woman, let the man do his work?’ I return to the riffled pages of the Bill of Quantities in a wave of distraction. 

Unattainable, I’m stunned mute, unable to pose Rudy the simplest question—’What do you want…’ Victoria insists; her words grow larger than my head, sentient of Rudy seeking appraisal for his excavation progress. As she persists, my mind curses, ‘shut up, shut up, shut up. . .’ until, without warning, words leapfrog from the back of my mind: “[Pourquoi tu ne l’emmene pas un repas au restaurant ?] Why don’t you treat him to a meal at a restaurant?” 

Victoria hangs up, sentient of a faint glow at heart of her disillusion. My mind rattled—‘how can a simple excavation be so demanding.’ The nearby streets have quietened; the highway’s murmur sinks into the ground, dissolving and raising the hush of the Nyx. I succumb to a dread of the cosmic vacuum catching up with me. 

At a glance across the blueprints tables, I try to recall—Eli Godard chair, vacant; and in the same optic, the secretary’s living bust amiss within a maze of reflective shadows through the glazed partitions—vacated. Oblivious to Eli Godard's ritual pause, yet his routine lingers in mind: laying down his folder on the corner of the table with his keys, then sitting to open the folder and complete a construction-site report. 

Restless, I leap to my feet, breaking away from the analysis of plumbing subcontractors: cold and hot lines snaking through floors and walls, drainage drops, sanitaryware installation—bolt down, finesse.

 Across the partition’s glazed sills, the CEO’s perch had melted into the office’s shadows. I step past in vain, absent from his elusive regard. The entrance door swings; I reach out for the Audi. With a few tweaks of the key, I step in, shift through gears, and drive away toward the glowing-cloud—homeward. 

Headlights burrow the darkness, flashing across interchange’s cloud-glows, tracking back to the resigned fieldfire. I swerve through the trumpet interchange’s slip road, into the yellow-plasmic worm of the night, picking up the Brussels signs flitting overhead. I’m slow to pull out of my trance—the brakes shaking the car with fear, landing into the belated reverse thrust of tire grip on the asphalt, pausing before the median—the GB supermarket ahead, staring at me, its Brico and Auto5 bright fascias, glowing as reminders. I veer, weasel through the Forest valley, and pull up before number 15. 

Victoria greets me. Place mats are laid for a meal on hold behind her; half a glass bowl of red Porto stems high on the table. She’s pushed back the sheet of tracing paper I had spread the night before across the original house floor blueprint—reviving the apprentices in me—Thursdays, a break from laying bricks meant attending Technical College classes, clutching a pencil over an architectural table, drafting mechanical drawings—only a few half-dozen of us in the class. 

Between meals, over the weekend, Victoria and I clear the table pushed against the gable-wall chimney through the dormer room. I spread the 1912 plan and tape down my tracing paper, the cellar omitted—but De Bon’ma’s stories ruminate in my mind. The old house, its stingy basement flues and mean fireplaces, evoke a lineage of warmth and smoke—a family of coal-merchant’s house in Lier, horse-drawn carts hauling sacks from a soot-black yard. 

I face the dilemma: each room projects its hearth and its chimneys—a passage as vital as a stairwell for the voyage between floors. In memory, De P'pa’s cradle, on the ±0 Ground Floor in firelight. Those dancing flames, blind to their flues, licks across candlelite rooms—no mere fancy, but a child’s earliest image alive in my mind, form the nascent town of Goma, born of lava, where the Kilimanjaro’s plume of smoke pictured itself in my windowless window. 

The stack that rises through the +1 upper floor, accumulates volume by the +2 floor rooms, the chimney gathers so many flues that it swallows its own width to a double-bed headboard. This mass of brick is where the withe works hardest—devising a half-dozen smoke pathways looping around the mantelpieces of the other floors. Here the masonry is at its thickest, yet the flues breath—drawing air and memory through the house—before emerging onto the rooftop, each demanding its own stack pot, lining the gables its respiratory organs. I’m left to confront modernization: draw these arteries to a single vertical core, like the nervous system of the body.   

While the CEO waits for me to be plunged into the Bill of Quantities at the office, I stand before the sunrise through the woods of the park across the avenue. The faux-balcony holding me back as I lean over the sidewalk. When the bus shelter releases Adam’s approach, I retreat, spread my arms, pull the French doors close, and turn away—backtracking a U-turn through the doorways to unlatch the entrance door and greet him, closing it behind us.

The engulfed glow shut out, I lead him up to the split-level Erebus behind the crystal-cottage portal of waffled panes, through the hollow of the doorway along the landing’s handrail, into the profound depths of the stairwell where the bulb no longer catches the shadows. My feet grope the nosing, stepping in a rhythmic sink along light-fluffed walls landing onto the -1 apron. 

Gripping the front newel post, I spin beneath the brick barrel-vaulted ceiling—the bulb’s light shying away from the handrail trailing back into the depth. I swivel again by the rear post, dithering a foot onto the treads, sinking into an earthy mass. My nostrils flare, short of sneezing away the poignant musk of stale air, as I descend into the hush; the stairs squeak like mice underfoot, the railing wobbling beneath my fingertips,  faint light fluffing the bricks of walls as they dissolve into a luciferous underground. 

My foot fails to find treads that ought to be there. I step into the dark void—helped only by a faint forewarning—then plunge, stumbling over two floating steps before landing on the apron, springing forward to plant both palms on the front wall. My feet glue to the spot; shaking my senses. I draw back my hands and, with an over-the-shoulder warning glance, catch Adam holding his step—hesitant before my sudden disappearance, cautious of the mischievous hole. He lands by my side. 

“Adam! [Voici un travail pour toi]—Here is a job for you. Break through a doorway opening.”

I’ve seen Rudy on the other side of the front wall, descending through the vestibule’s crawl space beneath a dangling bulb. Each day, around the interleading portal nib in the far corner—half under the egress-window sill to the sidewalk—the front basement room at level -1 swelled with soil-filled bags. By the window, the heap of white construction refuse bags rose higher, marking Rudy’s progress as he dug himslef—from hip-deep, then to shoulder height at the toes of my shoes beyond the -1 threshold. Peering into the light of the dangling bulb, I’d watch the unearthen room sink deeper, the hole exposing the old foundations—residues of some Roman architecture beyond my imagination.  

I hand him the club hammer and chisel, paused to purchase over the past weekend, aware that on the other side of the wall, he’s bound to meet Rudy. Until then, I turn my fingertips to the wiggling newel—the post’s tenon planted at the foot of the stringer—a rotted hollow. I heaved myself over the missing steps, the staircase now my priority, a re-design nurturing in my mind. Tracking back beneath the dangling bulbs, I step out the entrance, stepping into a glow of daylight - kwock! - and reach out for the Audi, debuting my course to work. 

[vofc-yams]

YD6-100 (Cradle): Aetheria Decodes, and the Calculus Collapses by a Man’s Sweat

"Ever wonder if the spaces we inhabit are more than just walls and ceilings? What if architecture could echo the very essence of consciousness, a living, breathing entity that responds to our presence? Dive into the world of Aetheria's Architecture, where every beam and every shadow is imbued with Aetheria-consciousness, transforming mere structures into profound experiences. Prepare to have your perceptions of space, self, and existence beautifully unraveled."

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.

YD6-100 (Cradle): Aetheria Decodes, and the Calculus Collapses by a Man’s Sweat

I leave the Audi’s gleam behind, parked among the chain of neighbors’ cars under the streetlight—but when I gaze up at the night sky in confusion, I'm fixated until my brain flips: the cow patches above reflecting the city’s light pollution in the twilight of the day. Alongside the hollow darkness—not the thick, sullen clouds that shower down to earth—my quest filters toward the back of my mind as I face the horror of cheapness: the sack-painted 15 on the brick facade, a teasing disrespect that vandalizes the 1912 grace it once held. I cross the wide sidewalk toward the paired entrance doors, eager to see how far a man’s first-day excavation has progressed.

With a turn of the key, I step blindly across a dozen dim buttons scattered over the dark-drilled coal-chute plate, the holes so faint before the doorstep that I overstep—only to catch a spill of streetlight slipping ahead, a lost gleam pacing the door’s left swing. I scan the somber vestibule off to the right, stretch a hand around the dormer door, and press the pilot switch. A dangling bulb above lifts the fluffy walls, and across the apron a crowd of Nyx’s eyes glimmers atop the split-level’s crystal mosaic behind the beveled cottage-pane portal. 

Through the hollow of the gaping door, I cross along the finger-gliding handrail into the stairwell’s profound depth. By the newel’s swivel back, my foot gropes for the bullnose, then onto the descending treads—a rhythm rising out of the gaping floor’s darkness—until the -1 level bulb, shading a louvred cascade, guides my feet down to the landing apron by the hush of the apartment doorway. A horseshoe turn carries me through the off-side doorways to a threshold pause—foreseeing the door I’ll break-out and its opening I’ll block up. Beyond, a meager bulb dangles in the vestibule’s crawlspace—its light dawning into the eyes of a coal miner—as Rudy, startled, looks up at me from the hole he has dug himself into. 

‘Johannesburg.’ As a young man, in my Volkswagen pickup, I pull up in the shade of the morning sun under the Alexandra Bridge. Along the verge, the men wait—the quiet, watcher’s wild-appeased posture along the Drakensberg whining road I’d driven returning from the Lowveld’s homeland: hunched on the roadside barriers, hands out to the passing traffic, knowing the cost of the transaction is immediate. 

It doesn’t sink in, when Rudy’s eyes now ask, telling me, ‘I waited for you.’ He doesn’t speak out, ‘My stomach is empty!’ Norms apply here; I need not reason it out for him—‘Friday is payday.’ 

The illegal-workers, a troop with the same surge, would start early in the morning, eyes lifted from under their brows. I’d think about withdrawing cash before one of them came over—his Afrikaans rising through the bustle of workmen—“[Baas! Die mense is honger]—Boss! The men are hungry." That meant advance pay for the morning’s labor. Handing over the cash, he—the errand man—would walk to the nearest local store and return with half a loaf of bread and a tin of pilchards for each. 

“Rudy! [Tu ne rentres pas chez toi ?]—Aren’t you going home?” I called down.

Though I empathized with his long day—swinging a pickaxe to break up the in-situ red soil, as though it were half-broken bricks, shoveling the brockled earth into a construction bag, hauling them piggyback into the adjacent room—his muscular torso glistening with sweat—it didn’t cross my mind to ask, ‘Have you eaten?’ After a glance at my wristwatch, ‘Rudy! What are you still doing here working? It’s past seven!’ 

Rudy places the pickaxe aside, leaving the handle leaning against the wall. Walking closer, my fatigued mind barely registers his answering eyes, ‘I’ve got nowhere to go!’—yet those eyes will reflect, screaming. He edges up the ladder—recuperated from the mezzanine bunker bed before the move here—to the doorway. I turn away, giving him passage to wash, to change into city clothes; sentient in the way of a workman, he ought to have found a faucet during the day, taken a break, yet he trails me in his work clothes, backtracking the horseshoe through doorways. 

I climb the stairs, wondering. ‘Why wasn’t he discovered by a building contractor?’ 

He follows me up the flight, into the shadows of the stairwell. I stand back before the crystal-cottage portal as he drifts down to the split-level, retrieves his bicycle from the vestibule apron, and squeezes through the gaping door, into the streetlights—closing it behind him, pinching the light away. 

I climb the next flight to the mezzanine bulb—void of pilot light—rush beneath the swingback, catch the +1 impulse timer, dread finding myself in a universal darkness. The +2 bulb holds, and at +3 I cross the threshold to Victoria, brave in the dormer room—a concert hall—the walls orchestrating Mozart’s symphony, the CD spinning in the Hi-Fi tower at the table’s center. With her Sun in Tiger, Victoria’s great feline embrace overwhelms me; we crack a bite, and I draft a blueprint before tucking under the covers. 

I wait for the first light peek—the digital clock’s glow flipping in the distance—while the hush of Nyx draws her skirt from the mansard room. On the hour, the duvet stirs in a wave. I leap to break the alarm on the dining table, the cold linoleum biting at my feet. Peeling off the backrest, I gather my skirt, slip into it, my pants, step into them—Victoria’s chosen design—and, at the pace of walking off, I slip one foot, then the other, into my moccasins before crossing the egress door, into Erebus lingering in the stairwell. 

My soles catch a dancing rhythm, dribbling down the cascading stairs—blind, my fingertips glide the handrail—swinging back from the barn staircase to the wooden flights I count +2, +1—until the hush of the hollow steps stills its echoes at the ±0 marble’s whisper. Before me, through the crystal-cottage portal, Helios’ paws the stained-glass to bright translucence—the bull’s-eye rose above the peacock’s fan-tail transom. I veer aside to the flank door and step into the stale, derelict apartment, crossing the march of the crystal grandeur toward the French doors.

I turn the cremone, unlatching the transom and sill bolts, and pull the doors open—the railing in stead; the leaves lean close, embracing me. Beyond the faux-balcony, a faint rhythmic squeak awakens the street—Rudy. I gaze down the avenue to catch him before the bus shelter, arms spread, torso waggling as he diagonally crosses the wide asphalt field. I draw back inside, press the doors together, latch them, and trace a horseshoe through the doorways, descending the split-level in the glow of an enigmatic, hovering mirage—beneath, Nyx still holding her stubborn post behind the entrance doors. 

I crack the front open to sunlight urging a spill indoors, and there—Rudy kicks a foot back, dismounting his bike. I step back—the front wheel - clang - the coal plate rattle as bicycle and rider press themselves through the doorway. He parks his bike. I climb the split-level, leading him toward Erebos in the stairwell’s profound depth, descending to the -1 apartment. Dropping him there, before the pencil shafts of sunlight resting in the raw, chiseled-out chute, I turn away and head back—assured that Rudy’s day of work has shifted to the back of my mind. 

I encounter Nyx again—blinding—so I pull the entrance into the glare; my eyes fetch the Audi. Crossing paths with an early bus climbing uphill, I proceed to thread the avenues. I slip inside, tweak the ignition, and pull away from the cars glazed in night dew along the park’s hedge lingering in shadow. Tires patter as I cut short through Square Rochefort, past the lopsided highway pointer amid the prows of generational apartment blocks stifling the streets’ faint ray. I drive through the Valley trough, catch the tramway tracks, veer through the lenses of the traffic lights into the parkway, breach the Stonehenge roundabout, passing the empty parking lots before the boxy mega-storefronts—the grass median abandoning itself for the turnoff lane that curls under the underpass and onto the on-ramp, joining the stream of workmen’s panel vans. 

I pull into the wayside driveway, coasting beneath the bright projecting canopy of the filling station. I halt beside the pump, step around the rear KNU 778 registration number. The code echoes—‘Knull’—a rhyme rising into its own self-orbit, a personal reverberation. De P’pa’s shouts—“Idiot”—still simmers through the sediment of childhood; the sound inscribes itself before thought can intervene. It’s the same autogenic signature that once marked my Mercedes 280 SE—its name, its number—like a book title foretelling the body of a life, a relationship, an ending. I’m left baffled before these mystic correspondences, their echo circling in me. I move on, pull the nozzle to the filler pipe - click - the breather sighs as the fuel climbs in the tank. I return the nozzle, walk inside to the cashier, settle the payment, and step out again toward the Audi quiet on the driveway. Sliding into the seat, I tweak the ignition and spool away, running alongside highway traffic before zipping into the stream. 

A trickling lane of traffic flickers its indicators, shunting off at the windshield’s wink of passing gantry signboards. At the other end of the intersections, panel vans merge and pace my way. The signboards flash Paris, then flips to Flanders’ rendering—Parijs—and back through Wallonia, until I, in turn, shunt off toward Charleroi. I curl beneath the cast-iron arched bridge, joining the still river that snakes away, the thoroughfare stretching inland, gathering cars along its intersections as the flow grows dense. Then, on the lookout for the shy pointer to Jumet, I slip down the off-ramp, behind a veil of bushes, and weave through short streets of industrial sheds.

On the street front apron, before the office’s brick wall, I halted the car and step out—in the hush my strides crunch across until the door swings back clearing the somber glass-partitioned corridor. I pass Mr. CEO’s vulture retracting glimpse, my glance at the time-and-attendance clock. Further down the corridor, through the anteroom, and back along the glass partition toward the courtyard glow, I step around the blueprint table, to the Bill of Quantities, riffled open where I left off. The sillage of his visit lingers—he’s dropped in on my work—and I think. ‘I'm still on the job?’

Seated at my Toshiba laptop, I flip through the section Internal Drainage and Service Trenches—the items, placing and connecting internal drains, sumps, or inspection chambers beneath the floor slab. Then the calculus turns intense as I analyze the faxed prices that drifted to my table, riffling back and forth through the Bill of Quantities. 

Steadfast daylight at noon cloaks my shoulders, sparing me from a fleeting thought—’the flight of the day.’ When Helios’ warmth wanes and Nyx’s chill arises, I glance up at the skylight, where fluorescence glows against blackness. 

At the abrupt ring—a startle—I lift my eyes across the bare blueprint-tables. Eli Godard’s place in our pool of work lies vacant; ‘he’s left for home.’ The ring persists—behind Eli’s ghost, through the glass cubicle where the secretary's living bust has vanished too—it perpetuates unanswered through a warehouse’s somber glazed maze of empty offices. 

I breach my immersion, the calculus wrapping around my mind. I underscore—tackling the blank items, filling in Internal Walls and Office Fit-out—the trades necessary to build the Materne factory’s required administrative area, washrooms, and canteen—breaking down the Drywall and Ceiling Contractor’s tender. In the midst of that calculus, I quieten the ringing, the handset in my grip, knuckles to my cheek, as Victoria’s dramatic voice floods my ear: “Rudy! [Il n'a nulle part où dormir]—He has nowhere to sleep!” 

Her sigh hushes in the handset’s ear cup. ‘What must I do?’ I refrain from shouting—doodling in my mind, erecting drywalls and suspending ceilings, blustering with a contractor’s tender. ‘Oh no! No! Can’t you take care of him?’ But Victoria insists, her voice pleading, repeating. “What must I do?” 

Earlier, I’d forgotten to question the alarm—as Helios’ cloak lifts and Nyx hovers over the fluorescent glow, urging me to wrap up the day and switch off the lights. Yet her subterranean dread wraps my torso, imminent to reason: ‘Only one more item off the tender.’ But Victoria’s pressure, stirs my mind, a leap home from a half-baked thought, tugged between duty and distraction. I reach the morning mirage I left behind—the vestibule’s bull’s-eye rose and its peacock’s fan-tail transom, kaleidoscopic with Aetheria’s signature awakening my mind. I crawl through Erebus’ cloaks draping in the stairwell, descending to the -1 basement, ramifying through the derelict. Then I track back up to the ±0 Belle Epoque landing, walking through the enfilade-rooms, where Aetheria whispers to my mind: It's fundamental to my cradle—trigering the thought, ‘I can't imagine having a squatter under our feet during restoration.’ So I climb instead to the mezzanine—a level without a number, a room that doesn’t belong.  

As I flip back my thoughts, I say. "Ma Petite! [Qu'il prenne la petite chambre]—Let him have the little room!” At last, thinking of the mezzanine—a “donjon” room, wedged between floors, out of sight and out of mind—’for now!’ 

Sentient of Victoria glowing a thought—‘That’s an idea. Why didn’t I think of that?’—She hangs up, and my hand returns the handset to its cradle, chilled to the wits. The Bill of Quantities’ still lies open before me, but the calculus won’t restart—its warmth spent. The pages blur, a nest of ants seems to crawl from margins, scattering through my notes. My concentration fails; the mind refuses to hold focus. Feeling expelled, I rise, glance abreast—the CEO has withdrawn his vulture’s spying gaze. I step away, uncoil with sharp hip swings around corners, at the pace of a door’s swing, cross the gritty apron to the Audi. I slip into my seat and tweak the ignition. 

In my glass bubble, I slide past the swipe of lampposts lights along the shadows of industrial sheds, toward the glow-cloud pooling over the intersection where the thoroughfare yields to darkness. Spooling into the night, headlights perpetuate the deserted lanes. The horizon raises its yellow field fires; the thoroughfare flares into a trumpet interchange, diverging lanes under the gantry—Brussels winking at me as it slips over the windshield. The hypnotic yellow tunneling lanes to brake the trance; the car shivers, fearing to overrun the asphalt. The needle resists rolling back, until justice lands me before the boxy mega-stores ahead. On a calmer drive, I pursue Forest’s sleeping valley, riding the tram rails toward Queen Marie Henriette Avenue, where I stall the car beneath the familiar facade.