#aetheriasmirage

Notice: This image is AI-generated to offer an atmospheric impression of the chapter. YD6-105 (Cradle) — Cat, Wolves, and Aetheria Awakening the Belle Époque I refresh my mind, dozing with the dawn of the day. A ghosting crew of illegal Polish workers arises, delivering systematic slack, a concealed underperformance woven just beyond my angle of sight, all while I sweat out the renovation.  I…

Epigraph: They arrive as shadows shifting furniture, but each motion redraws the house’s soul. Under the peacock fan of stained glass, light breaks through the marble hush, and a stranger’s voice at the door names the coming of work, of dust, of destiny. Thus begins the rebirth—Aetheria’s light entering through the cracks of the old world.

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.

Doodlers before a three-dimension canvass, the mover—like erasing rubbers—brush against a yellow Chesterfield, the sofa leaving the courtyard backdrop intact. Table and chairs bare the kitchen floor. Across the portal, where the bay window frames the street—blotched by a box-truck—uncouth men walk through the gate, past the tree trunk on the sidewalk, cross-crossing with bright plastic crates, before returning empty-handed. 

I’m dismantling the mezzanine that had formed a through-floor sleeping quarter—for us upstairs, for Alexandre below. Her seven-year-old’s toys spill across the carpet, and Victoria’s wardrobe, striated in bright colors, open beside the fire mantel and chimney, fluttering out. The mezzanine unfolds like a Meccano of planks, walking itself into the street, vanishing around the blind corner of the truck's tailgate.  

When the apartment returns, whipped clean for handover, I trail Jean-Francois Smeets in Victoria’s shadow—nine months erased, the clutter gone. The truck pulls toward the Uccle Town Hall at the bottom of the next block—the mansion, a sentry, policing to drive away from Dr. Decroly Avenue, switching through fenestrated hedgerows of suburban brick facades to the next. 

Windows stuffed with bedding, Victoria follows in her blue Fiat Panda, and I, tools rattling in my glass bubbles, weave toward the woods—bridging the river of lawns streaming through the park and short of the pool before Saturday’s phantom tramway, overseen by the sky-mirrored apartments, their prows tethered in a circle of architectural generations around the square, leaning with a quiet curiosity toward what unfolds along the sweeping Avenue Reine Marie-Henriette.

By mid-morning, I’m on the wide sidewalk, offside the lopsided, paint-peeling roller blind behind the faux balcony of the French doors—the haunted house. Solid in its wood and dark in its green, the paired panel doors stand before me. Startled, my eyes spin around, as if to catch headlight beams and thwart a leopard’s leap from the night to my shoulder—only to spot, across the broad asphalt, Victoria—bucket in hand—hesitating before crossing, ghosting from the tailgate of her blue Panda. After the whoosh of a passing car, she steps onward, tracing a diagonal across the asphalt field to the curb behind me. 

She pauses—bucket at hand, heavy with rugs, gloves, scrubbing brushes, and cleaner flasks. She spares herself a gaze at the White-Stone transom, like a ship waiting to sail—its sculpted figurehead’s hair caught in the wind, reflecting her long-held wish. 

My reflex strays past Victoria, further uphill from her stalled blue Panda, a few cars along the chain to a small white one—shadows blustering against the park’s thicketed hedge. Then, the shadows charged with energy, figures stirring over the undulated rooftop. As the blur dissipates and reason returns to my mind, I see young men alight and circle two figures from the far blind flank, slipping through the bumper interstices to join two others near closing doors. They gather to a restless stance, eyes rolling—heads turning uphill and sweeping downhill—before, to my surprise, they step into the avenue. The little group settles into a leisurely gait, crossing the asphalt, advancing, bound to sweat it out, closing in behind Victoria's tracks—cut off when the box truck grinds uphill and pulls to a halt along the curb. 

From the truck’s cabin steps the man known from the thatched-roof house—he used to slip into the kitchen for a chat with Mariette Somers, the farmhand from a family dealing in black money under the table, working behind at the mushroom farm and out front at the flower greenhouses across the street. 

The uncouth, thirtyish man, striding toward the rear, meets Smeets emerging from the blind-flank swirl to face the tailgate. Abreast, a pace behind, the young men trickle in—peeking among others while Smeets unlatches the doors. He steps back with the leaf swinging toward the blind flank; the farmhand steps up, planting the other door against the full-fledged cargo box.

Mr. and Mrs. Van Goethem-Polfliet—in the past. The heel of my thumb through my keyring - tingle - a key, handed in the notary’s office by Mr. Van Goethem, dangles to my nimble fingers; I slot it into the lock, tweak the latch - click - and press left the dirty, green-flaking entrance door, lending daylight to sprawl past my legs and lay a gleaming hush in reverence to Victoria. 

As I reach a finger up to the dormant door rebate, hook the flush bolt, and pull the lever down, unlatching the bolt from the scrolled transom rail. Victoria passes the doorstep behind me. I bend, lift the floor bolt, and straighten—freeing the ceased leaf from the dirt-gummed seams in the frame—then push the door right as more light rushes in, impressing upon the vestibule apron. 

Ousting darkness into the depth—the white marble awakens through its veins. Victoria climbs the half-dozen wide treads toward Erebus’ fledged stance behind the dark-green, full-screened crystal-cottage portal. She swings the door wider—Helios’ spill thinning to moonlight along the marble landing evanescing into the depth beside the sketchy staircase.

When I arrived on the spot, I unlatch the top and floor flush bolt and think, ‘I mean—who would have thought…’ as I push the slender half-door back toward the shouldered, dark-green panel door of the derelict Belle Epoque apartment—our goal, Aetheria’s cradle.

Outside the entrance frame, in bright daylight, the hands of men line up. The farmhand leads the youngster under Smeets’ supervising gaze, as they emerge from the blind truck’s tailgate—hefting a linked chain of bright crates and turning to approach. 

I head up the stairs, away into the lingering somberness trailing - Shuffle, shuffle. . . - after her eager climbing steps, before she flits from the wooden flight onto the mezzanine landing. As I reach beneath the meager, dangling bulb, I catch a flit of her shadow at the switchback above, by the +1 floor sentinel shading the flank wall’s embossed panels door. 

Downstairs, behind me, men’s whisper boots advance—breaching the entrance, crossing the marble vestibule’s walk-up and landing, edging around the airlock-portal’s fixed cottage panel. An army of footsteps raids the stairs, creeping echoes up the stairwell—to fetch me. But I swivel my hips by the returning rack rail on the landing; the +1 sentinel belongs to the Spanish woman—home to the trio: the woman, her nineteen-ish daughter, and the boyfriend. Together, the walls recede and hang in darkness. Then—just in time—a glow-fly flickers on the wall. I slam the pilot switch - click - its feeble light raises the stairwell walls once again. 

In the midst of Victoria’s footsteps maintained above me, an army of boots below. I reach the landing—counting the floor plan ‘+2 floor’ beneath the studious bulb, tracing a sentinel’s architrave before the trucker’s disability-insurance fauteuil and his wife’s, behind the panel door. 

Mirrored, a flip over to a catwalk—my gaze pauses on the handrail of a barn flight of stairs. On the landing, her ghost flits from a perch of a niche’s door. I’m doodling in my mind—the catwalk unfolding toward heavenly roof windows, rising into a cathedral apartment in the making. 

Along the shaft-walls to the perch, I reach the door and enter after Victoria. Mrs. Polfliet’s words still echo: “A woman tenant has just moved out—for the visit.” It hadn’t struck me how desperate a tenant might have been—to leave the ramshackle, skeletal moving into the dormer apartment under its lean-to ceiling stretching from the ridge beam to the window. 

I step through the gaping doorway into the darkness of a corridor. I shut my mind to what I glimpse behind the door ajar—the water closet's pipe rising to a cistern fixed high against number 13’s north party wall—engulfed in winter light, a forest of autumn leaves, warped  linoleum flooring, and a shouldering wall blotched with humidity-stained rings.

My mind screams: ‘This must be ripped out!’ I pace onward, scouting the cleft—a corridor rising to the ridge beam, wasteful cathedral height, ending against number 17’s southern party wall. A door stands ajar, ghosting the previous tenant's rush—an emptied built-in-cupboard with stacked shelving. My thoughts drop from the scene into auto-dismantling one of the walls. 

I glance across the corridor toward the remaining wall, pause by the gaping doorway where Victoria stands, bucket poised beneath the open Velux. Bright, red-gloved, she’s cornered by the L-shaped worktop, spraying and wiping the top-hung cabinet shelves, readying for the forthcoming plastic crate’s groceries. The detergent cuts sharp in the air, while beneath the mansard ceiling, the shabby lower cabinets face her with weary doors, pots and pans about to cling-clang out of their bright crates and be stacked away. 

I shake my head at the work awaiting her, while behind me echoes rise—an army stomping fast, approaching. I turn a curious glance toward the blind dark corner, where the kitchen hides around the door jamb, striking me with a heart-thump—miserable yet laughable—the previous woman tenant freaking out to flee. On par with a poltergeist’s muttering decay through the toilet wall water supply pipes and the shower cubicle’s exposed drainpipes whispering across the floor—an afterthought of a cubicle, crutched and barely standing upright.

I step on, entering the next-door mansard room, and set Smeets’ trays of tools onto the linoleum floor. Caught by the stomping of boots, over my crouched shoulders the uncouth men free their hands and stack the panels upright against number 17’s party wall. Then they turn away empty-handed, trailing once again—boots storming, receding through gaping doorways and sinking down the stairwell, to a hush—only to resurge in their own echo. I’m left behind, assembling Ikea’s panels and hangrail, hooking hangers to suspend Victoria’s desperate, coming wardrobe. 

Taking a breath, I lift the light-hatch’s pivoting sash and slip my head through the pillory—it doesn’t dawn on me what I’ve let myself in for—Aetheria playing her games with me. The eastern sky opens down to a community of shard roofs wiggling in their shades that rings the park: a peaked-cap row of peeking facades, glimmering windows—townhouses all eyes of curiosity upon an enclave of green, flocculent canopies trailing downstream.  

My gaze draws back to the box-gutter’s plummeting blind void above the avenue; retreating along the terracotta-tiled roof slope, I’m eager to take flight, its weight pressing on my shoulders—yet reason murmurs, ‘It will suffice—a spacious pair of Velux,’ a terrace in thought for the confined room, light and air dropping within. 

Peeling back tiles, I feel the power of an electric circular saw—yesteryears in my hands again, its load whirring, tungsten teeth grinding through the fibers of old rafters. Reverse engineering the frame to support the wasted view, I set a top and bottom crossbeam, opening the roof. The powerful screwdriver bites next, driving screws tight along the periphery, fixing a yard-wide, top-hung roof window, its skirt just short of the gutter. I withdraw my head, holding the twin panes in my mind, addressing the somber room: ‘Light is coming—to flood your walls, floors, and beds, and spill down the stairwell!’ 

I step out of the mansard room. Snub—spurn André.  

The space lends itself to Alexandre, during his biweekly stays with his mother—a personal room once shuttered by André's screams and threats, where Victoria would crash in tears—now reclaimed. 

On the flip side of the ridge beam in a cathedral-like, wasteful corridor—in the glitch of a living room—an instinctive glimpse of the 1922, rubber-stamped blueprint of approval, handed by Mr. Van Goethem, together with the house keys. I’m digging deeper than the sweeping glance the day of our first visit. 

From the stairway, the washing machines and dryer flit across the room, vanishing through the corridor doorways to a shadowy corner behind Victoria. She unpacks bright crates—utensils, glasses, cups, and ceramics to the top shelves—unwraps groceries and stacks the fridge. She emerges as the uncouth men loop through the sunbeam shaft of the window, stacking against number 17’s gable wall—the box-mattress pieces to assemble a king-size bed. Beddings puff into corners when Smeets appears, turning around: “Vicky-tje! [Klaar, gedaan?]—It’s finished?” He turns away, trailing the stomps to a hush, perpetuating the dead silence—until my mind accepts the notion they’re gone. 

Victoria tucks in bedsheets, the duvet, and scatters pillows against the barn-stair’s wall as behind her the liquid panes of the window paint a last glow—Helios’s blinding like Rooster, abandoning the horizon. We move through the corridor—Victoria preparing a snack and a drink, setting a dining corner amidst the desktop IBM computer with a few yard chairs. 

The terracotta shard, ridged rooftops, gables, chimney, recede, wiggling long shadows to blur away a sprawl across the valley of Forest, a crescent wrapping the horn tip into hiding, drawn along by the slip of an incoming train beyond Victoria—at peace with herself—brings home to mind Andre Daniel.   

Since I arrived in the country, Andre Daniel’s Wagon-Lit offices, are in my orbit. He's preoccupied with staff efficiency and train business, keeping his days and mind filled—but off the clock, Victoria’s estranged husband loses his grip, his threads loosened to the whim of leisure time, caught in the wind of her shifting life—from an ill-fit apartment for raising a boy to the derelict promise of salvation: the new townhouse.   

Behind the number 13’s gable and beyond the Rochefort square, our avenue descends into Park Avenue’s trickling lawn median—straight as hell—A variant tramway runs through, diverging at the midway tram shelter; those on track and duty run past the workshop, turning away before the underpass. The line continues along the elevated railway toward the South Station. Beneath the passenger platforms, amidst the yellow-brick facade, an arched window shadows the realm of André’s upper-floor office. 

I had stood by the highlight-framed window. Beneath it, in an advanced stage of decay, plaster pulverized beneath layered paint—deep through the stretcher-bond where the dusty mortar joints give way and mischievous fingers might pinch a brick’s drawer, sliding it out of course. I concede my imagination, gazing at the air-space beyond the terrace-roof. 

I stand again by the crumbling wall—sand grains running out can only mean the lime mortar had dehydrated from the very days it was cured’ Rotating the sash’s knob, my gaze traces the seams, unwilling to let go. I tug harder—a jerk, a pull—fearing that a brisk yank might dismember the mitered wood beneath its blistered paint. Before I regret scuffling with the sash shuttering its primitive glass, I sidestep past the middle fixed pane and grapple with the right one—only to imagine brisker yanks shaking the sash loose, swinging up and refusing to close again. I’m left to remedy my folly—flinging a foot over the rotten sill and bottom rail, clambering in one quick, awkward thrust through the glaze threshold onto the flat roof. 

Breaking-through—much to my regret—compromising a museum’s waterfall-fluid panes of glass for a fleeting leisure, to find myself at the threshold of a contemporary double patio door opening onto a wooden deck, where a raked guardrail emboldens the vertiginous edge. I’m called back from the drop’s living framed painting—its shard shades dissolving into the grid that severs through terracotta roofs sprawling away across the distant valley.

I click off the feeble dangling bulb; with a glance over the city’s possessive defiance—its chaos fluttering with constellations—Scorpio mirrored through the night’s flickering starry light. The grip of possessiveness in André settles, hopeless in its orbit, as Victoria tucks herself under the bedsheets. I reach out from the other side, our heads sinking into the pillows. At the fall of a thought, I whisper, “Where, in this city, do I find labor?” Her baffled breath—‘What a thing to think about?’—and her eyes drift toward sleep. 

At the wink of Helios, Lampetia reigns over a full-scale dollhouse, her artificial glow filling the bright white vaulted ceiling—rubble cleared from the corridor wall that shields the bedroom quarters. I brew percolated coffee, lay out breakfast, and scatter through the rooms. Victoria settles in for Sunday, hanging up her wardrobe, while I foresee, in the far corner, instead of balks, three-quarter-inch plywood boards, sharing the ceiling of the kitchenette—pressing up against a boxed-in bathtub and bathroom floor stacked above. 

We wake, and with a wink of Helios through the Velux—from the somber kitchen and Alexander’s waiting room. Yet I lie, my mind searching for a simile of those days—yesteryears, driving up in my Volkswagen pickup, pulling beneath the “Alexandra Bridge” north of Johannesburg’s PUTCO bus terminal, Black men lined up to leap onto the cargo bed, sit down—while I’d drive them off to my construction site. And now I'm once again in quest of such a labor pool. 

I grip the duvet, flip it back toward Victoria, and kick free my feet—the linoleum chills. Blinking from the sight of the derelict around the doorway, I lift the toilet’s lid and seat, and pee. Circling through to the kitchen, I’m drawn toward the hatch light, yearning for the park’s morning glow. I slump in the somberness, grope forward—turn the hot faucet to a hiss, reach for the cold until it bears heat. Dropping my briefs, I step into the shower cubicle, poised in the shower spray—my body cleansing, evanescing into spiritual steam, stepping out wrapped in air, whole again. 

I grab a towel, dry myself, as Victoria whispers through the air—leaps to her feet, whisks off, vanishing yet lingering in the adjacent Alexandre’s mansard room. I reach the draped backrest, grab my shirt, slip into my pants, and clear the slatted garden chair unfolded by the table. Victoria, dressed in bright colors—a coquette in a short skirt, blouse, jacket, and a headband in her hair—crosses back in a sprightly gait, pausing in the gaping doorway on the perch landing, eyes in quest. ‘Are you coming?’ 

The stairwell resonated up the shaft - Buzz. . . - as I bend to step into shoes. She flies off. I step onto the +3_niche’s perch, catching her descending below—Nyx still residing in the steep cascade of treads. Pulling the door behind me, I turn the long-shafted key - latch. Her hand trails the rail releases short of her swirl, vanishes at the bottom. When I’m clear of the barn stair’s tumbling risk, at the truck driver and wife’s +2_Landing, I pocket my keyring. 

I catch her flitting under the dangling bulb - knock, knock… - my fingertips brush the handrail. She flits through the swingback and after I leave the Spanish woman’s +1_landing bulb behind, the rhythm breaks beneath the mezzanine’s bulb—Victoria’s knocking heels fading to a whisper over the +/-0_Belle Epoque marble, to a mousy squeak from the airlock portal door.  

My leather undersoles slip over the nosing of a glider dancing down the stairs, until Aetheria’s blizzards of light crack through. I catch sight through a living mosaic—the cottage sidelight’s beveled small panes—fragmenting what unfolds ahead: a fluted mirage engulfing her, a sylphlike silhouette washing the white marble vestibule apron, ousting the glum. Victoria’s voice rings: “Can I help you?” and I, in question, ask, ‘What’s going on?’

Epigraph:  Under Helios’ breath, the courtyard walls crawl with shade. Between the Vulture’s surveillance and Victoria’s call, the narrator slips from fluorescent captivity into a highway of molten light. At two hundred and ten kilometers an hour, the glass bubble becomes both cockpit and confessional—love and velocity fusing in a single breath of rebellion, through the golden barrel vault where reason dissolves into pure motion.

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.

Dawning on me, Helios crosses over my shoulders with his changing breath, shade crawling along the courtyard walls around me. Blessed, I don’t feel imprisoned as I sit before Materne’s Bill of Quantities, delving into the item specifying “Excavation elsewhere.” 

In the eyes of my mind, a bleached path stretches through the construction site where bulldozers scrape the earth and scattered figures alter positions—I’ve been there—laying out a construction site: an assistant holding a gauging rod, facing signals from the landscape surveyor behind a tripod-mounted theodolite, jotting down co-coordinates and levels in a pocketbook. 

In a glitch, distant modular site cabins settle by the wayside, from behind which a foreman emerges, approaching across the terrain along the backfill of the concrete pipes, leaving exposed holes in the ground—the storm sewer system agape, ghosting a manhole cover between batter boards stringing the underground manholes. 

In another glitch, my mind flips to the scene of a ready-mix concrete truck backing in, its drum tumbling. The driver-operator pauses, swivels the discharge shut, pouring a minute among a few workmen with shovels shaping a base slab—then moves on to the next hole in the ground, pouring, moving on, the aligned holes punctuating down the evanescent road.

The foreman is nowhere to be seen, save for the bricklayer, standing on the settled concrete base, with an assistant above, feeding mortar and packing bricks. The bricklayer spent his mornings, after lunch until the evening—laying header and stretcher courses around the gaping concrete pipe—turning onto himself, squaring walls out the hole, to the surface—only to begin another one further up the road, along heavy truck traffic. He’ll return to screed the benching at the bottom, plaster the walls smooth. 

Immersed in the rhythm of the artisan and assistant, churning through a sheer number of items cascading in endless variations—dissimilar manholes galore. The flipping of pages slows to a snail’s pace, bogging me down on the page; my sight blurs as my mind relapses into intoxicated calculus. 

Days drop off into an abyss. At an eye flinch, I gaze up from my Toshiba laptop, the scrapbook beside it. Offside, I catch the bust of the secretary—her silhouette a shadow behind her glazed corner office. 

Her lost soul, who once gave me directions for my interview—an ambush from behind a swell of leafy bush to a weathered road sign, ‘Jumet industrial zone.’ She sits poised at the forefront of a maze of partitions that scatter into an empty warehouse, wrapping back abreast me across the corridor. 

I catch from my interviewer—the Chief Executive Officer—a shears-eyed glance dropping to his desk; his shifty mind puzzles me. ‘Is he checking if I'm productive?’ 

Eli Godard, returning from his site meetings, sets down his folder and keys on the corner of our butted island of blueprint tables, drops a casual few words, and sits across from me, delving into his open file. On a wimp, I sense a leisurely air oozing out of the diligent Virgo—but when I glance up, he’s vanished. 

I snap back to five o’clock, recollecting his figure as it swipes past the secretary's bust behind the glaze sill—gone—yet through the corridor, Eli Godard leaves me with a glimpse of Mr. Vulture's gaze. 

Lampedia’s chill cloaks my shoulders—Aetheria’s means of fluttering my conscience of neglecting Victoria. 

The phone rings, breaking the hush of the evening; my gaze checks upward to the dark glass roof, where Helios left me in a fluorescent box. My eyes fall back onto the workplace, a flush running through my mind: ‘Nobody rings me!—that’s for someone else.’ Yet by its persistent ringing, I lift the handset. 

“Daddy! [Quand es-que tu rentres ?]—When are you coming home?” Victoria’s voice excels in my ear. 

I glance at my wristwatch—‘seven o’clock!’—and as I hang up, silence floods the room. In a single reflection through the glaze across the adjacent corridor partitions of the somber office, I catch the CEO’s peering gaze—alive with his innate Libra—‘I’m in control of the switchboard; I’m not going to let her distract you—get on with the tender!’ 

But Victoria’s echo lingers in my mind—”Il a raccroché trois fois…]—He hung up three times on me!”

I’m stealing the next item out the Bill of Quantities, but my volition is compromised. I slap down the laptop screen, tuck in Rico’s executive suitcase, and—on a time trial—sweep through the corridor, past the estranged CEO—down a few stairs to the lower apron; a door leaf opens into the night. 

Lampetia perches on my Audi. I settle in, tweak the ignition, shift gears, spin the steering back and forth, and drive off into the blurred shades of lamppost light—out of the industrial zone toward the white glow clouding the thoroughfare's onramp.

Lingering since the dawn of twilight, with the thoroughfare before me, a promise hums as now the headlights hollow out the darkness—uneasy with myself before the dials that glow like a miniature casino city in the distance. I’ve already compromised the perpetual waking-up lanes to my hypnotic fatigue; my decisive self-control snaps at 130 km/h, convincing myself—‘Only a notch, 140… the threshold of cheating.‘

The horizon burns its field-fire, spooling, reeling me in—again. I’m feathering the throttle, seeming to raise a tailwind, without taking the last breath out the pistons, with the rev-counter’s needle twitching over the top, heading into the yellow field-fire over the horizon. 

Until I land into the worming glow and thwart Paris through the slip road, catching a doubling of lanes along the highway for flashing overhead gantry board Brussels. A loop plays out faster by the day, catching up the thread of Victoria's call; I’m damned, under Mr. Vulture’s surveyance—’I’ve earned my break.’ 

The luminescent yellow cloud perpetuates my way, worming ahead, until the conglomeration rises beyond the woods, where the interchange dissipates its roads into the night and calling my venue. I shun lanes leaning toward the off-ramp to face at the bottom the traversing roadway, weaving my way out the valley, and pulling up in Dr. Decroly Avenue by the lamppost shining onto the bay window; the entrance door couldn’t open soon enough; on tiptoes I close it, the hallway door following. As I creep through the interleading portal, angelic Victoria rises in the street-light shadows—I cringe. ‘Oh no!’

Daylight flushes across the ceiling—I wink onto a new world. Rolling to straddle across Victoria, descend the mezzanine ladder to the carpet underfoot, and dress. I slip from the apartment, as she awakes, into the street, saddle the Audi, weave out the suburbs, and converge with the herd—among panel vans of early tradesmen. Paris flashes atop the gantry signboards until I shun the lanes for Charleroi, curl beneath the interchange, the river vanishing besides me. 

In the headwind my glass bubble keeps shooting—circling a void. Victoria fades behind me, a stillness I no longer touch. My driving delight volatilizes in a meager trickle of traffic—chasing the same sunrise—Helios spilling his cloak into the somber coal dust of Charleroi, overwhelming me in a trickling glare. I flash my headlights, tailing lagging cars, shriveling drivers out of their wits, overtaking—desperate for the next sign—until ‘Jumet,’ where I escape through the interchange into the industrial zone.  

I pull up at the office. Under the watchful eye of Mr. Vulture, and coming around to settle, I bend over the Bill of Quantities—costing, converging mind and motions, boggling workmen’s breath, tethering tools and materials, the quantities into sums of francs. 

As Eli Godard flits by—a last breath of survival for the company, the contract, the illusion—he takes the sunlight with him. Fluorescent light dawns over me, waking the fatigue. By the fourth evening; instead of answering Victoria's phone call, I’m dumbfounded by my employer's spying eyes—shifty, unaware he’s caught in the corner of my gaze, a sly withdrawal. Wrath stirs, yet obsession tethers; relationships fade, and my career, in incessant derailment, bends to the whims of Mr. Vulture—who obliterates my reason to care for the work. 

I count down the hours, the days until the tender opening. Fatigue blotches reasoning; veins of thought stream traffic through the fog of my mind—road signs flashing numbers, item description, quantities. I rifle through a wave of outstanding pages, the latter bringing brief relief as tenders arrive from sub-contractors—splitting my brain, schedule in comparison, inclusions versus exclusions—reduce to a mere filling of blanks. 

Eli Godard, returning from his site meetings, sits across from me—the diligent Virgo’s composure oozing leisure—and then vanishes. 

My mind drifts, escapes for a distraction, recollecting his figure as it swipes through the adjacent corridor—the secretary's window, a bust of shadow in the maze of vacant offices—gone. 

Lampedia’s chill cloaked my shoulders—conscience divides me. Just as I’m about to leave, a persistent ring rushes into my silent world. My hand reaches for the handset. 

Mr. CEO’s innate Libra peer seemed to whisper: ‘I’m in control of the switchboard!—be swift.’

“Ma Petite!” I plead: [J’ai encore tellement á faire]—I still have so much work to get through!” But Victoria holds me online, while Mr. Vulture’s eyes circle my head. She relinquishes. I hang up. 

Yet the night breeze leaves me hollow: ‘I’ve lost her,’ her solitude echoes through my mind. 

Rattled, I rise from my chair, slap the Toshiba lid closed, and pack the briefcase. My mind’s numb; fatigue has collapsed beneath my willpower. I hit the thoroughfare—driving on autopilot. I shake my foggy brain, pulling myself back from flooring the throttle. ‘That’s not reckless driving,’ I tell myself with a buffer under the throttle pedal.

Over the past few days, the speed spools from a reasonable 150 Km/h to 170… as my volition wrestles with my consciousness. My glass bubble launches through luminescent clouds hovering over interchanges—bridges and underpasses dispersing into the countryside, evanescing into the hush of distant villages, where paired taillights are stalled for the night—until the horizon burns with yellow field-fires again.

The Renaissance streets recede, giving way to a gritty hedgerow of 1970s fenestrated brick facades, dead still—blinds drawn, the city itself blind across the blind marches of Forest and Uccle. I finally stall the car in Dr. Decroly Avenue, sweep past the latch gate and close it behind me. I step through the entrance, lean down the hall toward the apartment. 

In the slant of the streetlight, Victoria rises from her perch in shadow—she accosts with an angry stride, her voice blasting: “[Comment ose-t-il… Ton patron m'a raccroché au nez]-—How dare… Your boss hung up on me!”

In a glitch of sight, the CEO’s scavenger eye darts away yet leaves me a clue—his hand creeping afar the phone’s handset onto the cradle; ‘That’s when he hung up Victoria's call,’ slushes across my mind. 

I shrug my shoulders, eyebrows raised: “[Ma Petite… ]—My Little one, I guess so.”

In the crispy morning, I step into the Audi, tweak the ignition, and drive away, creeping the curb around the corner southward through the sleepy streets of Uccle, down toward the valley of Forest—workers trickling from doorways onto the sidewalks. Then veering, clearing the suburb, I pass the big-box stores—Home Improvement, Furniture-Home Goods, Discount Warehouse—on either side of a wide open-air green median, until, before the underpass, where the GB supermarket, Auto5, Bricocenter cluster, I break through the shadow to borrow the on-ramp to the highway. 

Earning myself a leisurely drive along the highway with workmen in panel vans—shunting on and off the highway lanes—I set my mental speed controller at the flashing 120. So far, so good. Already, in case I do cheat, I allow a pre-emptive five-kilometer-per-hour tolerance, keeping watch on the needle of the dashboard dial. The dark haze lifts from the landscape sprawling around me as the sun raises its first rays through the thick bushy median—another world from the one I left a few hours earlier, heading home. I shun the pull of Paris, for Charleroi uncoils underneath the bridge, the river still dark as I head into the glowing sky.     

I leave in my wake an inseparable cosmic streaming through the air; Jeffrey Osborne's voice echoes the main chorus of ‘On the Wings of Love,' the melody hushed the reality of the route—’You are the sunshine, That lights my heart within'—but my mind has other ideas, a phantom rhyme of 'love with time,' as the route unfolds under the hissing wheels of my glass bubble.

Until I pull up at the office, losing the melody as I sweep my way out the car, through the glazed corridor. My Gemini pushes back in the coulisse of volition, but the genie of my Warthog rises to the forefront—heart dark as hell—to burst wrath on the Vulture, the Libra man, after Victoria's revelation of my homecoming. At the doorway I U-return through the anteroom to the bright bay of the glass-roofed office. Placing my Toshiba at the pair of butted desks, I let the sunlight serve as a mind booster. But, in an eye-glimpse, I find a contrail—a sillage of intent—catching the CEO’s scent emanating from the pages of my scrapbook and the Bill of Quantities I left behind last night. 

Daylight dims into the afternoon chill arriving too early, followed by Eli Godard returning from the construction site. He sits at the opposite table. We befriend as he prepares his site report. With a pen, I slit open the envelopes, pulling out sub-contractors’ tenders—too few a darling to open with a cascade of unit prices; others, lump-sum bids, enshrined corpses in clauses of inclusions and exclusions amid the technical jargon.

When I glance again. Eli had vanished—he had swept the secretary's living bust from the mazy glaze. Sentient of Victoria's consciousness descending in the atmosphere, I soften my attitude, withdrawing from my preoccupation to reason. 'She deserves a moment of attention.' I glance over my right shoulder to catch a glimpse—and, to my surprise, abreast of me, the warding-off, spying CEO’s eyes have vanished too. 

In the evening chill, the phone didn’t ring, yet in my head the ringing went on. I unfolded a plumber’s submission and, preparing to break away, dug into the hangar’s steel structure and the shelter's cladding autopsy, growing lonelier in the hush. 

In a swirl, I rise from my chair—now chasing the thread across Wallonia Flanders, rooting into Brussels' southeastern community toward Victoria’s phone call that never came. From a bird's-eye view, I retreat, slap my laptop screen shut, duck to Rico’s executive suitcase, tuck it in, raise the grip, swing my hips around the pointed corner of the island of tables—a steeplechase over the heads no longer there, cut the anteroom corner, out into the corridor—on a time trial I didn't see forthcoming, though long in the making, through the maze of empty offices, even in the absence of the crouching Mr. Vulture, lost in the shadows of his desk—jobs at stake.

Beyond the walk-down, at the pair of wooden doors, I grab the lever and open to the dead of the night. Drawing to latch behind me, while an eye-leap to my Audi gleaning—a romance neglected—amid industrial shelters’ half-wake of shadowing winks, crouched in the hush of punctuated lamppost glows, off-angle wavering lights and shadows blurring my way ahead. 

In seeming kangaroo jumps—I rush through catching-up strides, slip into the driver’s seat, drop into sequence: a tweak of the ignition, headlights flaring on the brick facade, gear shift pulled back, heel of my hand spinning the wheel—the beams dissolve into the flowing asphalt. Spooling my glass bubble through an alley of light spills and meddling shadows, I flounder toward peace as the road unwinds me from the industrious chaos of the day. 

As shades swipe through a spill of light inside my glass bubble, the margins outside sleek away from chaotic, tethering shadows—waving, folding, then lying dark. Yet bright, mounting ahead as a white hollowing cloud through Nyx’s skirt. I drive, curling through the underpass, skipping the luminous cloud over the on-ramp; my headlights cave through the thoroughfare’s lanes, awakening distant, scrambling village lights long settled for the night. 

At length a lagging feeling mounts—falling behind the beams streaming the lanes. The dashboard mirrors distant city-lights beneath my sight, reasoning: ‘My foot isn’t flooring—so I'm not reckless driving!’ Interchanges wink otherwise their white luminescent cloud, flashing my glass bubble aglow—an awakening call flushing back into the rush. 

Into the abyss of darkness, the rev-counter sits at five thousand, yet the engine doesn’t scream—I wanted to believe. Settled deep in the crotch of my seat, fingertips resting on the wheel, one elbow on the sill, my other forearm on my thigh. I reach the take-off strip to fly alone across a cosmic map—heart adrift in the surreal, gaze lost on the wasted roadway—deserted. 

I’m a dream in the horizon's field-fire mounting in amplitude while crawling at a snail’s pace, flushing out pointers that promise escape—rhymes to mind “Paris” on the repetitive signboards. My mind doesn’t think; ‘the end of the thoroughfare is splitting up!’ 

Pre-emptive consciousness transcends through the voice of Hervé Vilard’s heartbreak—“Capri, C'est Fini.” 

My mind corrupts the phantom lyrics with my own geography of pain: “Paris c'est fini, et dire que j'ai cru que c'était pour la vie! Paris, it’s over—don’t think I will return there one day…”

I drop back to the asphalt, flashing under the gantry signboard, ‘Brussels-Paris,’ warning myself: ‘You're going too fast to engage the slip road that’s coming!’—but I don’t react.  

I’m stiffening in my seat, hands pressing on the steering wheel, weighing the curve ahead—but it's too late to rein in the unreeling speed. My glass bubble aflame with luminescence from diving into the plasmatic yellow cloud—a midway threshold risen every night athwart my path. I feel the grip of the tires through the bifurcation bend, merging with the Paris highway, the lanes streaming past in numbers, through the worm vanishing in the distant haze. 

Alone, my mind leans on the accelerator, hitting the deserted highway, I pilot with ease, sense lost to speed, taxiing along perpetual lanes that open into a semi-circular tunnel,  an open landing strip, carrying me in a whistling sigh through the air, hushing the pistons’ roar to a purr. The revs climb, the needle leaning toward the red—she’s my everything; driving her, through that floating sensation, the interminable descent of an aircraft after a long flight, awaiting touchdown.     

Steadfast—ten kilometers before the notch, the needle overswinging as the night before, and one before that—the median’s massive masts, planted behind the concrete guardrail, are hurled toward me from the midst of the wild leafy hedge swells, spilling an unbroken flood of light. Then the gantry sign flicks over the top of the windshield: “Brussels.” My foot twitches toward full throttle but triggers a red warning strobing in my head—’that’s suicidal!’

The throttle rests beneath my foot, but I shifted for the middle lane—a precaution, as the mechanic who replaced the tires had warned. “[La garantie du fabricant est limitée…]—The manufacturer guarantee is limited to hundred-eighty kilometers an hour.” 

But I trust the tire’s engineered safety margin higher, keeping a distance from the verges, the scene before me accelerated, except my brain lags behind the steadfast 210 km/h, the engine purring at six thousand rev. 

From behind the woods herding the road’s shoulder, the city’s outskirt conglomerate rises out of the valley, the highway perpetuating its lanes—the gaping off-ramp coming up—and land without brakes, pressing harder, and harder on the pedal until vertigo sinks in, shaking me out my wits. My glass bubble trembles in a frightful vibration: beneath the door sills, the rubber treads scratch and bite the asphalt, catching grip. 

In the bluster, carton boxes lunge toward me—the Auto5 besides the GB supermarket. The car obeys, the tempest settles, the green median of the traversing parkway reverences before me, to crawl the curb, engage the parkway toward the hillside suburbs. 

Weaving home, to a lack of a gap in the chain of cars wrapped under a film of dew. I stall the car, track back to the apartment. Victoria sleeps among the floor of bright plastic-packed crates—bifurcating trails to the kitchen, and through the portal, to the streetfront bedroom. 

You are welcome to read all the chapters and explore more at my website: How the Universe Sculptured Our Mind. I spend an absurd amount of time chasing expression—perhaps to shame. But the challenge is mine, updates may occur without notice, shaping the timeline, perceptions. The gift is yours: thoughts, echoes, reflections. I take them with gratitude. And you—who are you, reading these lines, stepping into my genre, my style?

CHAPTER preface: In the hush of thatched eaves and the coded tongue of Flemish thresholds, characters step into place like constellations flaring one by one. Antoinette appears with a vacuum pipe and Virgo eyes; Mariette spirals through gossip and antique addiction; and Martine—Victoria—swirls like a harlequin across the kitchen terrace. Through a surreal hiring ritual, the narrator crosses into…