#aetheriaconsciousness

Cement-burned, calloused leather striates the wrinkled scars beneath my eye, carrying the old  apprentice-bricklayer inside me—the boy baked in scorching sun, a trowel clenched in the purlicue of my grip, laying bricks as if they were Lego blocks. Behind that practiced hand lies a deeper secret: the blind handicap of being dyslexic, my mother and father’s regard, the teacher’s voice still living…

Uccle, off Waterloo Road. The sidestreet draws my familiarity. I pull up along the hedgerows of seventies-fenestrated brick facades—the street is blocked off. I step out of the car, casting a glimpse across the street, checking for the shadow of one of my sister Ingrid’s in-laws. I pass along the flanks of idle cars, through the concrete barricade, a sheet of paper in hand warm from my…

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.