#phantomflight

Chapter synopsis: A season bends toward departure, tension gathering in fluorescent corridors and hushed stairwells. The threshold lies in motion—wings cutting through night, constellations glittering like hidden guides. What begins in shadows of routine unravels into an unexpected summons, where family bonds and old debts wait, fragile and insistent, beneath a different sun.

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.

YD6-87(ZA) Brussels 1991/92: Office Party, a Flight Through the Zodiacal Skies, Landing in Johannesburg

After I pull up in my glass bubble and lock the Audi door behind, I cross the street heading toward the foyer. Among the gleaming marble, I pass the blind door and I climb the bare concrete stairwell to the threshold clearing Forum’s offices—fluorescent bright that Friday—the air still holding the weight of an approaching storm.

That edging fear haunted me—nerves squirming under my skin—as the trees loose their leaves, filtering light through brushwood. I’d watched Victoria’s enthusiasm falter when the realtor hadn't left a message, her impatience swelling in the silence. After picking her up from the bustling moat, eclipsing the old Brussels, to pulling up home, in the shadows of the leafy barrel-vaulted Dr. Decroly Avenue, before the clearing of the intersection. Pepish in her gait, she crossed the front yard. I shut the yard gate, closed doors behind her, through the hallway, found her again in the light of the backyard window. She slipped behind the yellow sofa, reaching for the telephone, whisking the handset. Victoria dials anyway, as I weigh in on her drift. ‘My Little One, I wouldn’t pursue a real estate agent who neglects to return a promised call.’ 

Her finger taps the hang-up button, only to dial a few more brief calls to the agent. Until - Ring - Victoria whisks the handset, to a hush. After a brief exchange with the realtor, she hangs up, swings. “La propriétaire, Madame Van Goethem…—The owner, Mrs. Van Goethem has to come from Ghent.”

I drifted toward December, my open-date ticket’s expiry looming like the edge of a cliff. Anxiety mounted, the plane poised on a perch above the void of indecision. I stumbled into the waiting weeks, into the days—until a day decided for me, and I called Sabena Airline, facing the seventy-two-hour threshold, to reserve my seat aboard the flight back to Johannesburg—set for the day after the party. 

Beneath that forthcoming absence simmers the lingering phenomenon that has haunted my life in New York—losing my jobs. That shadow trails me, blind to the faux-summer holidays—a brief winter break in the northern hemisphere between Christmas and New Year—unaware I was being drawn into the peak of summer in South Africa. 

I cross the hallway toward a timid Canario—Mr. Rottweiler when roused—who smirks; he might as well bark, riling Mr. Pitbull across the island-gleam quatro-tables. My course takes me around his shoulders to the window, where I pull the chair to my place. Across the shadow cast by the window pillar, Mr. Doberman watches the stupidity with the hush curiosity brings to the eyes, nodding in chorus to Favi. owner of Forum's Charter of Quantity Surveyor firm, wheelchair bound to the poison of his own well. 

I lift the Toshiba laptop screen, my feelings in tatters against this manufactured machine—I presume void of Hard-Disk-Drive storage—starting with blank spreadsheet cells once the RAM has loaded. I take a deep breath, weighing the utility of re-formulating the setup. I relapse to the hulk of my ego, hiding the elementary school dropout, the family poultry farm boy, the bricklayer, the master of my own forge—and the dare to ask Favi, ‘Why?’ Unveiling my deficiencies—’You should know!’

Laurence is a mere ghost among us, slipping between the cracks of the walls, turning away to vanish into the gap of her office. Yet her presence roams, riffling through reams: her fingers pull the tab, a wave of sheets spilling forward as she points to items she’s found to discredit the Bill of Quantities prepared for each of our Work-In-Progress projects submitted. The report is due before the month’s end. 

She’s checked my numbers, but her greatest contribution is correcting my Englishized French without a stir. ‘Stupid!’—that unspoken sting of my concealed illiteracy bruises my ego. Yet as she turns away, my heart glows in her wake. I breathe easier, free from dwelling over the contractor’s month-end AXA report.

In a glimpse her silhouette recedes, trailing my admiration for her flawless and reliable secretarial work—and my invoice for the month. Trusting I’d see funds transferred into my General De Banque account. I later learned Laurence breached my trust, spread in the office to Favi of my absence, which they pictured through the window: conjured the skies, the flight, a vertigo landing at the tip of Africa, the savannah, and the wilderness of a lucrative safari. Favi is no stranger to hiring out a converted high-wheelbase house truck.

Just before noon, my ego trailing behind, as the office clan, Laurence only left me with instructions, abandoning me to the hush. When the last step fades, I flip the laptop screen down and follow her orders. Out in the street, I walk from the vein of a back street around the block into an artery of traffic—indifferent to my lonesomeness.

Louise Avenue fades into the distant haze beneath the Palace of Justice, its dome rising against the skyline over the Marolles’ old city’s rooftops. I count down entrance door numbers, seeking an address. I anticipate a glazed tower that reflects the preserved façades—defiant, along the artery. I approach the notched circle of classic bluestone mansions—exclusive—fall into admiration—then stumble on “HOTEL” engraved into a brass plaque. I veer and step through the airlock of a classic entrance. 

I hold my step, letting the gleam of sculpted woodwork draw me in. Across the wash-gleaming marble lobby, I catch—to my surprise—Mr. Pitbull’s and Mr. Rothweiler’s figures striding ahead, inadvertently leading me into the depths. Their presence reassures me. I inch forward, praying the elevator will take them before I’m caught in their soot-clouded minds. They volatilize, and with a breath of relief, I step offside, my finger reaching for the fading call button light.

I step into the melamine-clad elevator and press the first-floor’s glowing button. Ahead, a sentinel waves me clear: Favi sits deep in his wheelchair, flanked by Mr. Pitbull and Mr. Rottweiler. They rise from their reverence around Favi, folding their fully fledged wings onto themselves. I try to eclipse my ego, moving around to face him. Favi’s Leo eyes beam out between his hounds, his face set with the anger of a king. Through the gaping doorway he gathers his realm—into the legs and voices of the crowd clustered  around his wife. So fixated, I wonder if he is deliberately avoiding my greeting. That old recurrence presses in: an employer’s claim over my liberty—taking liberty from work.

Favi’s hand, clenched in rage, seizes the wheels’ handrims. He slings it, spooling the chair forward and leaving the hounds behind. Another catch, another sling—he drives into the reception hall, dwarfing himself only to throw a bow wave into the crowd. Pitying eyes fall on him, his wife with distance—all conversations pivot to Favi, leaving a ring of breathing space around him. 

I edge in, a distance behind Mr. Pitbull, Mr. Rottweiler, who join Mr. Doberman, shoulders pressed tight with a small knot of business invitees listening to Favi—the hurt lion. I detach, invisible to the hounds, skirt the crowd, and run into Laurence’s greeting. “[Charles. Mon mari]—My husband.”

The walls are cold-dead without music, the air holding a naked, concrete chill. My mind seeks an exit as I exchange a few brief words with the couple, while catching sight of other like-minded loose souls scattered on the periphery. My thoughts wander to Forum’s hire of the hall—a space meant for a dozen people. I’m not surprised I’m almost the last, save for Carlos, the computer draftsman who shares my shoulder’s width in the office, bent before his desktop monitor against the wall. 

I appreciated Forum’s thought, but after a couple of early leavers and a room of strangers, my patience thins. Then I catch a glimpse—and drift into Laurence and Charles’ tracks, slipping under the gaze of the cocktail party, through the portal, easing around the hallway toward the elevator. 

The chatter recedes, I reach the elevator’s grasp, the cabin returns empty. I step in, my mind fledging wings, feeling feather-light. Before me lies my flight—my past volatilizing, upcoming ahead, skies unburdened of responsibilities, until the horizon stirs to meet my boys.

Saturday slips into dusk, the airport glittering ahead. The life-changing threshold of these annual flights south simmers with family reunion--routine convoluted with upheaval, a lingering dread not yet surfaced as Nyx draws her cloak tight. Behind the curtain walls, Morpheus stirs in defiance, their conflict fracturing the promise of sleep. I move through a kaleidoscopic panoply of shifts beneath fluorescent light, until the uniforms of an aircrew guide us into the pod of the 747, the crowd pressing toward our seats.

Amidst the theater-seated crowd, tufts of hairs breaching the high backrests, there is no stage, no silver screen—only the prospect in mind, the sole option of surrendering to airlift, tuck in the crotch of the seat, steep into the skies. Then, leveling into airborne, the hush loosens, letting aircrew coddle us, amongst a dynamic of figures waning away. I gaze out the porthole into a cosmic darkness: the earth erased, the skies Helios abandoned. Now we flutter wings through the zodiacal forest—the mirror of consciousness in geolocation—constellations glittering like octopuses sprawling their tentacles. 

Now, visibly settled into cruising altitude, the zodiacal forest lingers, faintly mirrored on earth—the latter half across Europe southbound, spiderwebs of milky trailing stars, blacked out across the Mediterranean Sea, across the Sahara Desert. My body chafes against the hours—untenable, stretching into Sunday. Arms and legs shackled to the seat, I mutter oaths at the inch stolen this year from the footwell. Dozing back—child of the jungle, Tarzan in wonder—I ask myself: ‘have we crossed the Belgian Congo—Zaire?’ Seeking to shorten the long haul halfway down Africa.

After a restless night—kicking feet, flexing legs, tossing and turning—the first light leaks through the porthole. The sun flares over the horizon. Floating in my seat, I sink and glide toward a ten o’clock scheduled landing, as if Cape of Good Hope itself, at the continent’s edge, were our rendezvous. The cabin stirs. The dawn waits, while my mind spools impatiently forward. Blankets are gathered. An air hostess advances behind the food and drink trolley, ducking left and right into the rows, serving scattered tufts of hair wobbling above aerated headrests.  

Kicking my feet, shifting under the seat before my neighbor, only to retreat into my footwell. My knee sways side to side—a skier cutting a steep slope—yet confined between the backrest ahead and the crotch of my own seat, tray table down, my feet posed where they ought to be, in the footwell. I wait for distraction, only to awaken the subtle, continuous pressure of the voyage: my hip bone driven into its basin, joints aching, clamped in the fold of the backrest. The air hostess leans in. “Coffee, please,” I say. 

Far below the silver-clipped wing, sunlight veins yellow through crumbling ground. The land flattens; dirt roads darken to charcoal, reassuring me—roads I once cycled as a teenage apprentice bricklayer, feet spinning my racing bike’s pedals through the gears, until a country crossroads, its sign traffic-battered into a lopsided stance: “Hartbeespoort Dam.” The fusiform blue mirror glimmers, then vanishes, as the air corridor swings anti-clockwise around Johannesburg, camouflaged within the Highveld savanna, the outskirts a long detour to reach the East Rand. 

The midmorning sun creeps the undercarriage’s landing gear shadow along the golden savanna, a vague reminder of the double-banded highway below, with its pronounced median and wide shoulders—the course I drove a few years back after restructuring my construction company, my Mercedes 280 SE herded along with a trickling traffic. Shadows flashed across my glass bubble as 747 fuselages loomed overhead, gliding low toward the landing field perched above the highway. A mysterious little girl’s mischievous intone still teases in my mind: ‘When you’ll see me, your world will no longer be the same’—shimmering only as a reminder in the mirage, entangled with Helios. 

We touch down, breaking the air. Taxiing, I realize the descent has consumed the morning hours. The terminal swells into view, slow motion gaining volume as we steer the apron in rotation. The stop stirs the cabin—above the backrest, the tufts of hair rise into torsos and lost heads, wheezing toward the aisles, hands reaching overhead bins. Winter coats, bulging carry-ons, tax-free bags pull down in haste, I too, eager to stretch my legs, jostle toward the front. 

I step up to the distant terminal against the azure sky, the aircraft's gaping door spilling figures onto the passenger stairs, flowing across the concrete toward waiting buses. We are crowded and bussed to the terminal, the wave thinning, choked before the barrier of uniform passport controllers, then trickling to gather around the luggage console. With my suitcase I walk into solitude, passing through a pair of customs officers, avoiding their spying gaze that makes me feel guilty of nothing. 

At the translucent end of the corridor, the plate splits—doors sliding wide into the wings, opening to a crescent of greeters massed against the guardrail. I step onto the apron, and there is my brother, Ivo—the baby of the family, always holding a surprise--head taller than the crowd—his Sun in Monkey. That broad smile greeting me, followed by the emergence of his bouncer frame on the fringing crowd. Then his Moon in Cancer, softens his gaze, laughter rising as he suddenly whisks my calf-suitcase clear of the trolley, leaving me fragile at his side.

He draws me away from the crowd, across the concourse’s gleam toward a slit of peeking glow—dawning on me the airport’s growth, the child’s first immigration, a blustery winter whispering, ‘It all started here.’ 

Beyond the strip of plate-glass, the doors give us a head start across the driveway to the parking lot. His stride thread us through the lanes, rows of cars, until he singles out a gray Mercedes. He snaps open the trunk, drops the suitcase in, presses the lid firm. We split around opposite fenders; his laughter sparks, flickering as he paces onward about the two cement bags that had glinted like submissive pets’ eyes in the darkness of the trunk. “Better road holding. . .” the mechanic in him quips--leaving me supply the rest: ‘ballast on the rear suspension.’

‘Each to his own madness,’ I reflect. We skim along the undulated roofline to a halt; he tweaks the key, and I wait—patient for the pneumatic hiss of the actuator releasing the locks. He has already flumped into his seats; I follow, trailing in as the door seals with a vacuumed hush. The ignition stirs, he glances over his shoulder, hands turning the wheel—our glass bubble easing from the bay, edging into the lane, pausing, then with a gear toggle sliding free of the regiment rows of taillights.

He steers the car out of parking lanes, following stretches of new driveways that bend my mind into vertigo, borrowing the ghost of old airport roadways. He jokes away each phrase, yet behind the laughter guards the shrewd seriousness of managing his engineering workshop. Through home-country he drives, both of us engaged in a quiz of minds. I share the ride while clutching what bearing I can, holding on to my sanity—ever since stepping off a propeller-driven Douglas DC-4 in 1961. Relearning, and each year again, my whereabouts in this fast-morphing milieu I ought to know. 

He veers from the junction to prolong the highway’s security fence—on a greater plan, holding to the median past the plane field and a row of warehouses walling off the landing strip—until we descend, coasting through a slip road. Breaking free from the cast shade of the highway’s underpass, we burst into a blinding glow.

Ivo shows no confusion, forking away from Kempton Park’s business district into Rhodesfield, meandering through leafy streets that shadow the yard walls

A church spire rises above scattered canopies that share the suburb with hip-and-valley tiled-rooftops. At the corner, the fearless church bleeds its lawns onto the curb, absolving the sidewalk. We wrap the corner, crawling and coasting before the deserted side street, where the walls close in again around an athwart cul-de-sac with a bumper guardrail along a low mesh fence—a reminder where I just landed. Just as a South African Airways Jumbo spools across the gaping street, vanishing behind the suburb on its climb to takeoff.

He steered the car, breaching the suburbia’s protocol of security walls, the grass flowing free from the church around an eclipse flower bed to the front yard, where he swings onto the paved driveway and halts before the garage door. Offside, beneath the eave shading the white plastered facade. Carolyn paces to a pause. From the crack of the entrance door their seven-year-old, Sherrilee, slips out to cling to her mother’s skirt, while in the shadow the five-year-old Charlene holds back, bracing her hand on the doorjamb.

Ivo and I step out. He clears the trunk of my luggage, and we tread a glowing path past a trio of large darkened bedroom windows. The girls slip ahead into the hollow indoors, their fluttering dresses carrying the last of the outside glow—a trail through the strange darkness crouching in the corners, leaving the offside lounge’s couch backrest passage. His plumpish-petite wife presses the door close behind me. A weir’s gate of light spills through the lounge window. Softening into a hush of welcome—the upholstery poised in Virgo’s display at the entrance.  

I catch up with the little girls pattering around the blind corner in the corridor, passing the gaping doorway of their pinkish room. The next doorway spills a wave of brightness; I follow Ivo into Sheldon’s room—a thirteen-year-old boy’s domain. He sets down my luggage, and we drift back into the corridor, then across into the kitchen.

I joined the family gathered around the table, a stretch of table extended for a family to join in—like De_M’ma, mother always had space for another family that might drop by. Ivo glances at me. “Ilona wants to speak to you.” He says.

My sister’s name sinks to mind, and I wonder: ‘why that urgency?’ But first things first. I turn to Caroline. “May I call Jean—if I can get to see Lionel and Gavin?” 

As soon as Caroline gave me a “Sure,” I walk around the head of the table, slip through the doorways, cut the lounge corner, curl away from sighting the bar to the opposite sideboard, lift the handset, and dial from memory. Lionel answers, his voice already tangled with his mother’s in the distance. “Mommy says you have to pay what you owe first.”

I hang up. In the hush, sadness wells for my boys. Before me lingers a vulture’s ritual, waiting to pounce. I dial again--our eldest sister, Ilona, her Moon in Libra too--Jean’s sign as well. A controlling trait, unnerving—but she’s my sister. “[Kom eens langs!]—Come over!” She insists on Flemish, yet I’ve lost my vocabulary. Hanging up, the hush returns; my body crimps. I know I'm in for a surprise--but what?

On Monday morning I follow Caroline leaving the house, past the wide windows to the Mercedes waiting in the driveway. She climbs behind the wheel; from the far side I slip into the passenger seat. She backs out, toggles gears, and we roll away. Out of the suburb onto the Pretoria Road, memory of a thread past the railway station and Kempton Park’s business district, into the lost Highveld savannah. Flashing out the source of the clinker brick that once built the security wall around the Kelvin house, the cradle of both boys. 

Caroline slips from the thoroughfare, the road breaking free of the cast shade beneath the railway underpass, where long shadows still creep edging westward Spartan’s small industry. A block back, the way narrows into a parallel backstreet lined with brick-fronted, flat-roof administrative blocks, small complexes pressed to peek with a variety of industries' sheds. She turns onto the lawn-beaten parking apron and halts before one in a series of office windows. She steps out; I hold back as she comes around the muzzle of the car, letting her lead. She clears the entrance, and I follow her inside to the greeting of staff.

From the heavy earth-moving plant, Ivo walks me toward the glowing, gaping workshop door, hands me keys, and leads into the vertigo of a Monkey, until, in the driveway, he steps up to the Audi. His laugh say it; ‘There’s your car.’ I slip in, tweak the ignition, drive off leaving him standing, feeling that unwanted brotherly separation. I turn into the street, and now behind me having transport, with a bird’s-eye view, I’m recalling the earliest dirt track through virgin savannah across waving hills, before my mind upgrades to asphalt, suburbs nibbling into the grasslands. 

Leaving “Spartan,” westward through the suburbs, I meet the cooling towers and turn north, launching onto a thoroughfare. My mind anchors on the ghost of a country road, erased beneath the intersection that wiped all traces of the past. I search for “Modderfontein”--the dynamite factory that once sent blasts rattling the windows back home in Kelvin. I look for its shield, the bluegum forest, until a sliver creeps back into view around the shallow savannah hump. 

But the ancient country road draws me back from the highway into the township of “Tembisa,” skirting once more the bluegum forest. Another asphalt band sprouts alongside it, cutting through the grassland, the township’s matchbox houses creep to the edge, sprawling toward a labor threshold for a small industrial zone. 

The familiar dirt-road thread leads me through the novelty of new street signs and directions, dissimulating the prominent “Halfway House.” The Voortrekkers wagon horseback messengers’ outposts, once shaded beneath bluegum parasols against the scorching sun, tracing the Old Pretoria Road. I detour for the overpass onto the entrenched Pretoria-Johannesburg highway that obliterated the poultry farm. Recalling myself as a teenager at the wheel, Igor beside me on the bench. The Volkswagen Combi in the mirrors, breaching the air, a looming vortex of dust hanging behind us, we fetched eggs between farms back home to Kyalami. 

At a stone’s throw, the wild beauty collapsed into lingerie depression. I steered through the gateway, coasting the beaten track’s bristly grass hissing the chassis, toward the cottage planted at the heart of the smallholding of my early days as a building contractor. I pull to a halt along the gable wall. I step out, and peering through the glazed cottage windows for pilfering, moving shadows. 

Down the shaded pergola, from the crack of the entrance door, Ilona emerges. “We have to go.”

“Ilona, where to?”

“Come…”

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?

BOOK SYNOPSIS: Step into this journey of becoming, where the cosmos whispers its secrets, and identity blooms like dawn. This story is an unfolding suite of chapters clarifying my book: The Code: Horizon of Infinity—a philosophical memoir exploring: How The universe Sculpted Our Minds. Through Aetheria, the lens of consciousness, aware of her need for a body to reveal herself and exercise her wishes, the narrative leads to her birth and the name she will claim: Sunshine. 

Chapter Preface: Between JFK and Jan Smuts, the path blurs—Paris, perhaps, or Brussels lost in a contrail of forgetting. This is the phantom return: not to a place, but to sons waiting behind court orders, to a brother’s embrace, and an ex-wife’s silence. Aetheria guides the descent; Nyx veils the route. In the quiet hum of reunion, the question remains: Who gets to arrive—and who is allowed to stay?

#PhantomFlight, #MemoirInTransit, #FathersAndSons, #LabyrinthOfMemory, #ExileAndArrival, #AcrossContinents, 

YD6-71 (ZA) Phantom Flights Through a Labyrinth, and Boys: Across Continents

Riding on an Aladdin rag, with New York gifts in my luggage, and J.F. Kennedy is long behind. London’s Heathrow—cosmic, deja vu—wide corridors with leading signs that read, ‘Exit.’ The rolling walkway carries me among far-spread travelers. I dawdled in the gleaming wash of the floor slipping past. Then my stride awakens—to walk on. Thoughts trickle of passengers: A brief crossing over the North Sea channel breezes through, then eastward—through France. Eric waits. And faithful to my sister Ingrid, the journey emerged unfeasible.

I’m caught—entangled at the crux—splitting the skies, by a ten-day sleepover nudging Johannesburg into mind. I slogged my calf-bloated suitcase through Heathrow terminus, just as a British Airways flight boarding crossed my path. I jungled through Sabena exigencies—a run to the Foreign Exchange hatch, then back again—before a clean red carbon ticket issued in hand. 

I swore at myself, weaseling through the suffocating crowd, sweating out my original wish for London—booked a year earlier, born in the moment of an idea, walking through Sandton City’s mall where I’d drawn my departure tickets. A launch point to shed Jean and her legal team, piggybacking on my name. But the world has changed—since its needs.

On those end-of-year festive season flights, I seem to shed the worst of life behind. Looking forward carries its own promise—flickering in a labyrinth of crisscrossing journeys: Rio de Janeiro, Tel Aviv, Paris, Brussels. While my body cringes in its seat, mind twiddling. . . doodling in mid-existence, fading behind the boarding pass. 

I’m consuming another summer open-date flight—Paris hovering like a half-consumed destination. Walking the ground, overhead signs flash: a fork blinks. ‘Passengers in transit.’ I just spotted the easy way out of an adventure—but impatience weaves through me. I must wait until the end-of-year to catch my course—saddened that reaching my boys still isn't an option.

The music resonates—a voice breathes, “on the wings of love.” Cosmic, atmospheric—a gauzy spray paints my mind, like traces of Roman roads beneath asphalt. 1961 camouflaged—regretful behind progress. The rural airport has changed over the years. I walk the concrete apron to the terminal, shadows of memory trailing behind.

Across the gleaming corridors, past the grown plate-glass crystal barrier that chokes the passengers at passport control. I taper down the concourse. A carousel, self-service, heaving of luggage—passing under the scrutinous eyes of customs officers. Year after year, I slip through with an outdated computer for Lionel to tinker with. Or Peter Few’s ordered video camera. Now, Gavin's radio. Lionel's printer. I pass, chilled with anticipation of being stopped.

Then—at the whisk of smoked glass—my eyes leap free, held back by a crowd of greetings eyes, eager, but I’m invisible, not their character. Repose my steps, to scan through a crest of eyes and shoulders—fumbling my purse, pecking among the scatter of international coins—a twenty-cent piece. Beneath my search for a phone, a dark-blond boy breaches clear from a gateway of thick sliver tube that holds back the crowds—nearing. In a stroke, his round face shades from his mother, Caroline, to feature my brother Ivo, as a child—but he vanishes beneath my eyelid, as Ivo himself, figures, a head-and-shoulders above, pressing his giant frame through the throng. He emerges—solid, towering.

Cosmic, my words echo, “Hoe wiste U dat?—How did you know I arrived today?” We stroll behind Sheldon, his arms raised, hands steering the trolley stacked with luggage, gliding across a gleaming wash of the floor. From the peeking eye-slit of light—Aetheria's mirage spies on us, bending Helios’ reach to her own whisper. It dawns on me, intuitive: ‘Ilona.’ The usual family telegraph making its rounds, threading whispers through her siblings.

Cautious of the black hollow of the zebra line, but drawn by the surge of white-stepping stones of piano keys, the rhythm of our pace threading through the cast shade. Beyond the edge of the angled concrete columns, tethered to the overhead driveway logic architecture for ‘departure’ traffic—shoved the furthest thing from mind right now. We stepped into Helios at the crest of the day, the asphalt fading beneath the bright blaze of the Highveld summers, blurring the plaza and spilling into a glimmering parking lot beyond a shady curb. Sunlight prickles my face. I turn again to Ivo. “Hoe wiste dat ik vandaag zou komen, Deze morgen?—How did you know I'd come today. This morning?”

Contrary to Ilona’s draping shadow, Ivo echoed: “De M'ma het, gisteravond gebeld en gezegd dat je misschien vandaag op de vlucht zou zijn.──Mother did phone last night, saying you might be on the flight today.” We stepped the pebbled paved plaza down the curb. Ivo and Sheldon, in a breath, debated the parking spot amidst the glitter of glass and sleek undulations of metal. The heel of my steps cushioned in the softened tar, carrying me to the metallic silver-gray Mercedes as its trunk lid lifted. My luggage fluttered at Ivo's hands—like winged—before being stowed into the dark depths. Sheldon's flat palm brought down the trunk shut. We climbed aboard and drove away. 

I gazed through the framing windshield—an extension of a flight—hovering, still seated in the comfort of the Aladdin rug, the magic cloud of my life being tended to. My mind doodled over the airport's intricate roads, drifting from year to year. Only the Holiday Inn tower seems to have gained a moat around its island, and Ivo, justifying the detour, notched to the historic pivot, “Ik sal langst hier. . .—I'll try this way; it’s shorter, I think.”

Steering the car, a fragmented course blotched uncertainties. My seat, no more uncomfortable than in flight, yet my ego—ever surpassing—begged to wrestle doubts. I flipped through them: ‘Am I the only one bugging siblings for a place to lodge?' Squelching guilt as I rode with gifts in my luggage—involuntary to seeing the old year out and the new year in.  

We stopped at the intersection by the road sign, where the traversing thoroughfare was stitched with a dual railway line—shy, peeking against the azure sky. A sketch of convent’s black washing lines—memory strung out to dry—spanning electrified cable punctuated gantries, threads hung from another hemispheric. A gauze of Johannesburg blurring distant—valleys weaseling through the wavy hills—resurges a quarter of a century—more carriage than career—grounding what still hovered.

Exhausted—my spirit still trailing in the jet’s contrail—my brother, a decade my junior and at peace with the landmarks of the present, weasels onto a horseshoe overpass above trickling highway traffic, threading into a suburban street. The wheel coils a turn—into a side road. No sooner, we face a cul-de-sac, a flicker of deja vu—an island in the sky, a recollection of my landing, bright-colored fins shimmering among distant airport structures. He veers counterwise, but no sooner, a gateway to a villa in the sky rises—its eaves shading the fenestrated facade. The car rocks through the gutter and halts on the brick driveway before a green garage door. 

“But! This is not your house.” I exclaimed, thinking he made a courtesy stop.

“Het is thuis”—It is home--we moved. A bigger house. Sold the other.”

Then, Ivo, as if things happen in a flock—among siblings. "Het hele gezin is verhuisd.—The whole family has moved. Ilona to Hazyview, Igor to a smaller house at the far end of Randburg. Kidding me. “Het is al goed. . .—it's good I came to the airport; you wouldn't have found anybody.”

In a half-daze, I stepped to the rear of the car. "Leave it for now, I'm tired," my voice rhymed from behind the monster of my ego, gnawing at the fact that no verbal invitation had been extended to lodge with his family. But Sheldon and Ivo, untroubled, swung my luggage into sunlight. After them, I pressed the trunk lid into its shadowed depth.

Father and son led the way, through a facing gate bathed in the golden haze of an alleyway—wedged between the garage and a precast concrete wall that peeked over the bright white house gable of the house. A side gate swung open, and a pelt of fluff—a puppy—shot between our legs. Meanwhile, the father, an Alsatian, stood poised in the haze that blanketed the green backyard lawns. Ears pricked, alert to Ivo's command. Sheldon couldn’t master the pup’s erratic, wild greeting loops—no shouting could heel him. 

The kitchen window flickers—our reflection slipping past. We turned the corner to a stable door off the patio, Ivo stressing with the bottom leaf to keep the dogs outside. But Aetheria rides Helios’ light, spilling into the kitchen, bending the glare like threads of a mirage. In the shadowy depth, Caroline figures at the stove, steam billowing from simmering pots. Behind her, the two little girls—the smaller one sucking fingers—half-tethered at their mother’s skirt—shy, silent, yet driven by curiosity to welcome the stranger in me.

"Hi! Ivan." Caroline blurted, 

I sink through my knees—bent—tall as my brother is, she’s a little woman. We meet in an uneasy embrace, a brief kiss—her voice resonating: "I'll show you where. . ."

Turning away, Caroline and the girls—Charleen and Sherrilee—slip ahead of me through the gaping doorway of the kitchen. To the far right, Igor and Sheldon's shadows vanish, their presence echoing a narrow passage wall, exchanged in a piped echo—steps in the shadows. 

Until in the distant peeking doorway light, the little crowd jostles—fluttering before a wing of a saucer that dissimulates the planter’s manicured street-front yard. Aetheria’s flavor lingers—in the mirage. Bend in Helios' light, it crosses the shade of the eaves, pleading to the wall’s almost fully waking window, spilling over the trims and windowsill. Silhouettes gathered and bustled, emerging in Sheldon’s room.

"Come now, get out of the way." Caroline, with her Moon in Virgo, resonates with firm authority. Ivo echoes her in fewer, deeper tones. Little shoes scuffled, retreating across the parquet like a small storm pattering behind the blind wall, their echoes piping through the passageway.

A gauzy veil of light cleared to reveal Caroline—needn’t mentioned—the neatness spoke for itself. An inviting bed ran along the lateral wall, dressed in a brown-and-white checkered duvet. An oversized black pillow puffed with quiet pride beside the window’s deep—trimmed folds of gathered drapes.

I sized up the shelves—parked with a collection of scaled-down cars, airplanes, motorbikes. At my feet, on the bare parquet, stood an antique chest. Atop it, a museum piece: a mechanical typewriter, with a few blank sheets neatly stacked beside it. ‘What does a young boy of ten do with a typewriter?’ I wondered—forgetting, for a moment, my own legacy behind De_P’pa, my father’s typewriter. I thought, this is so fantastic. So neat, so precise—a world apart from my school exercise book, a quilt, and an ink pot to dip. “Just a fly’s walk. . .” echoed my teacher’s voice, as I scribbled tracing the faint ruled lines in my exercise book.

Then I turned, throwing a glance toward Caroline and my brother, the last trickle through the gaping doorway. My luggage posed at my feet—an unspoken invitation—lingering in stillness after Sheldon’s reluctance to leave his room. "First things first," I voice, edged with an apologetic reverence—"Can I use the phone to call my boys?" 

"It's in our bedroom, Ivan. Go in, you'll be at ease, to speak with your boys." Caroline’s words resonate like a pointer. "There."

I hesitated before darkness pooling in the angle, the shadows of sentinels juxtaposed at the corner where the passageway veers toward the rear bathroom and toilet doors. In my baffled pause, Caroline’s hand led, swinging the door inward, gesturing behind the door leaf, "There is the phone." 

In my hesitation for a phone in another spot, I sensed the thick atmosphere of intimacy I couldn’t shy from. My mind bruised on the king-size island of a bed—square and soft—in the gloom of drawn thick curtains, cracked with slivers of sunlight. Caroline’s sillage of fresh air trailed behind.

The red phone stared, gleaming rat-eyed, cornered and ready to leap. I snatched the handset—lyrical, a heartbeat, a verse woven into my fingertips, dialing. I turned away from the breeze-swaggering drapes, swung my hips into the cane chair, its creaks rocking me willingly. ‘Isn’t that fun?’ 

I waited, as the distant, muffled ringing stretched thin, tautening my patience.

‘Maybe I dialed the wrong number?’ echoed in my head, nagging. I  redialed, my mind lending itself to the keypad’s rhythm, tracing the 8-0-2—the Kelvin exchange rising from the savanna, as an incantation threaded memory. It rhymed with 5-00-5, the house before the cradle of Lionel and Gavin—but there is no answer.

The reed creaked—lamentably—as I was brought to the verge of anxiety. Flirting with thoughts: ‘If Jean had learned the date of my arrival. . .’ her Sun in Rat, raising her wrath like a storm on the horizon.

I left the chair rocking behind me, and out the gaping doorway. I walked the little wooden block floor, in refrain cosmic music sigh resonating in mind: 

“In the misty moonlight; 

By the flickering firelight; 

Any place is all right;

Long as I'm with you. . .” 

The melody wove into memory—Lionel and Gavin, captivated by those remnants from one of my construction sites. As the afterglow of sunset pressed against the sliding doors, shadows thickened before bedtime. They would balance each piece with careful fingers. Then pause—breaths held—before pulling one free from the bottom to their delight, watching the tower crumble in a cascade of laughter. 

By evening, after another try to reach my boys, I walked a memory map traced by the chevron parquet underfoot, each step an echo of their small hands stacking wooden blocks. I glanced through the gaping kitchen doorway, silent in its shadows. Beyond it, the next juxtaposed yawning doorway, they framed wooden dining furniture hunkered in darkness. Then, came around the wall, distant voices coming to fetch me. I brushed off the lingering stare of lounge upholstery—silent, heavy, watchful—as if shaking off dust from a forgotten room.

I crossed the somber bar-room and paused at the bright thread of light slipping beneath the flagstone step under the archway. Offside, the Alsatians’ sad eyes flickering beyond the glaze—occasional and watchful, begging to enter. Nyx’s dark cloak wrapped their shadows, her gaze lingering behind the glass of the patio’s French doors with wing windows, watching what I saw from my angle. 

Ivo's large arm draped over his chubby little wife, the three siblings twisted by their feet, eyes hovering over the coffee table. Fixated on the flickering colors of the television screen—absorbed in a cartoon’s whimsical chaos.  

I stepped into the limelight—no one perturbed by my intrusion into their cozy leisure. Catching Caroline’s inquisitive glance, I shrugged off the thought, its edges slipping out, gathering into a voice that lingered in the air. “I'll try again, later in the evening.” 

A cosmic rhyme drifted in, unbidden, threading through the stillness: 

“Is it all in the stars tonight?

Is it all in . . . mind? 

That . . . will never come?

A sentimental dream, my feelings based on instinct.” 

The words half-resonate, linger like stardust caught in the fluorescent light.  

Angelic and dozy, the children left for bed, from finding my place besides my brother on the wide couch. "Aren't you tired?" Caroline’s echoes past Ivo’s chest, lingering in the air for the umpteenth time.

"Yes," my breath rolls out, "but if I go to bed now, I won't fall asleep." 

The midnight’s broadcast on SABC flickered, then the screen swarmed with a gray gauze—static. We rose and drifted off, trailing through the passage until the corner doors. With a soft exchange of “Goodnight,” we disappeared into the rooms beyond.

I climbed into bed. ‘Black sheets?’ A breeze from my arrival swept across the black pillow, soothing my head. Who would’ve thought—Nyx—to slip into the arms of Morpheus.

Helios' peeked through the curtain cracks, after the birds had fluttered and chirped, splashing silly among the silent leaves of the bush, before the household awoke. I stirred—cocooned in the covers, weathering out patience.

By nine, I had dozed through worlds—landing, taking flights, checking my next options. My skeptical Warthog lay curled in its lair, while my free-spirited Gemini hovered, lingering for a place to nail myself down, to carve out a career I could bring among the normal—responsible. 

My thoughts drift to Ivo and Caroline's household awakening—tiny footsteps pattering in and out of rooms, warming the milieu after Nyx’s chill. Punctuated by those overriding giant stomps—until frightful, evacuated peace returned through the house. I dressed and went searching for the little family. Helios' glow seeped through the windows, illuminating their scattered silhouette around the kitchen table for breakfast. With hawk's eyes on my wristwatch, holding back for ten o'clock—not to rattle Jean’s feathers that bear upon my boys. 

Caroline offered her phone line, guiding me between the facing archways—opposite an African artist’s hand-whittled bar counter. The somber sideboard cradled a docile beige phone. I dialed, poised, listened to the distant ringing tone, dispatching the Hydra eyes of my mind's familiar craft, settling shyly, embedding the pine ceiling hovering the floor-through entrance. 

Helios' flaring across the north and south yards, glowing against the amber-bullion-glazed entrances. Light threads through the glass, coalescing in the hallway—a golden-bright mirage, suspended in the heart of home. In the shadow pooled by the northern entrance—cradle the phone. 

The line livens, Gavin’s voice chirps like morning's birds fluttering in the leafy swells. "Where are you, dad?" he asked—then fell into a thoughtful hush. 

"In New York," I replied, pausing—waiting for his response. It didn’t come.

"But, Dad. . . you're so clear," Gavin’s voice resonates, feathered with hesitation. I caught the edge of his doubt. I held the silence too long, feeling the pull of his longing.

Extending my tease for Lionel, I shortcut—saddened, leaving Gavin’s little heart adrift, held in that silence, the doubtful sonance of his voice, "but Dad? You're so near." 

"No, Gavy. . . " my voice breathes. "I'm here in South Africa. With Ivo."

A tremor of doubts crept back in his voice. "Are you? Daddy!" Beneath it, a vibrancy—certain in its ebb, his radiant little heart—I felt blossoming inside my chest. Breaking my cruelty, on a breath that reached into the past. "Gavy! How is your tummy?" 

"It's all right. Daddy." 

As this little boy could melt me to tears—puncture my heart—back in New York, when, with the help of his brother, his nightmare emerged, sentient of a flight crash. I sensed the truth unspoken—the cause, untenable: his longing. I had briefed Gavin about London, about the stopover where I’d changed course—rescheduling my flight. 

Then, I heard his peaceful voice rolling and fade through the house: "Lionel. Lionel. . ." 

The line held in a hush. In retrospect, I caught a pressure before an air current from the far playroom—stirring through the architecture, slipping across the lounge’s piled carpet. Footsteps squelch across the embossed Italian ceramics, surge in my mind. Then broke the silence.

"Hi, Dad. Where are you?"

“Lionel! What happened last night?”

"We’re at Granny’s, unpacking the carton boxes. . .” His voice surges to mind—Jean’s mother—then fades just as swiftly, like a distant dream slipping through the edges of wakefulness.

Yet, it was crucial to sense the prevailing temperature in their household. "Lionel," and in another breath. "Go ask your mother if you can come with me to Hazyview. To see Bon'ma and Bom'pa." I hung in suspense on the thin thread of a hollowed line. His spirit in tide and ebb hard to follow in his retreat—withdraw. Tasked with standing up to Jean—lounging, facing the illusion of the past on a television. Flinging over my sentient expectation—bounced back—his voice cracks through the line: "We can only come on Sundays." 

I understood. In Jean's language, that meant; NO.

"Lionel," I loosely insinuate—this isn’t a visit; it’s a sentence. "Go back to your mother. Tell her, "I didn't come from New York to see you on Sundays.” But then I was back on a flight. The skies opened; turbulence gave way to the calm. . . of oblivion. The ridicule of ten-to-five echoed across distant mountains, fading into an atmospheric gray blur, stirring up the past years. In despair, last year, I laid charges at the Bramley police station—anything I could think of: blackmail, extortion, contempt of court—knowing nothing would come of it.

“Lionel,”—“I've kept my side of the agreement all year. I wrote to your mother and made payments to your and Gavin's Bob account. 

Gavin returned, his little voice cutting through the line. "Daddy! My mother doesn't want to let us go with you." 

"Where is Lionel?" I gasped.

"Lionel is inside. He says he doesn't want to talk anymore." 

"Gavy!" I urged, "Go and call him back. Tell him, I promise—no more messages. I just need to explain—." 

A long pause stretched across the line, then Lionel returned. "Yaa?" 

"You shouldn't be in the middle of this"—"I'll speak to Peter.” 

"Peter's gone to Sun City," Lionel sighs. "For seven days." 

"Lionel, don't worry,"—"I'll sort this out. We'll be together for the holidays." The words had just rolled out, that my mind snatched back—an instinctive bank reconciliation, running through the numbers. "Call Gavin." 

When I hooked the handset, I repeated my promise to Gavin—Lionel wouldn’t explain what had happened. The line had gone cold, but I was burning.

I flipped through the White Pages of the telephone directory and dialed the number. “Sun City Hotel,” the native woman answered, then patched me through. The receptionist’s voice returned: "There is nobody." On the edge of her imagination, the hotel's paging system echoes a cosmic rhyme—Mister Few, there is a call for you. Please pick up the phone. Wherever you are. 

I waited—my routed call tracing a path through the homeland, threading across Bophuthatswana's villages of mud huts—how I wished it were so. Instead, from Kempton Park, I reached Hillbrow. Where I used to pick up Janine. I followed her pointing finger, listening to her Jazz, as we slipped onto the asphalt, stretching into the night toward the Magaliesbergs. Headlight vanishing beneath Rustenburg streetlights, before resurging on a stretch, then fading as we weaseled past the glowing parking fields, straight up the hill, and parked alongside Sun City Hotel. The ex-croupier unleashed herself into the casino, swallowed whole by the roulette table.  

"Peter Few," my brother-in-law’s voice broke through, splintering my sense of place. To figure out his pudgy silhouette, short trimmed beard, that telltale hesitation caught behind his breath.  

"You didn't guess it could be me, did you?" as I listen for my reception with this Leo.

"No." Short of breath, his breath short, gasping to match the urgency.

"I've just landed."—"And Jean is up to her usual malice. She won't let me have Lionel and Gavin."

"We're coming back tomorrow afternoon," Peter echoed.

‘Tomorrow?’—floated beyond the distant hills. 

By dusk that following evening, along the graded curb, the Nissan Bakkie came to a halt before the house. I had roamed the shopping center and the streets of Halfway House—impatient—until five to seven. When I pulled into Vorna Valley onto the grassy sidewalk. I peeked across the clinker-brick precast wall, behind which the house’s fenestrated facade sat quiet—its drapes drawn. Off to the side, the driveway was bare.

Headlight splashed against the locked steel-framed wooden gates. Peter unwound the window. "Hi, Peter,"—"Hi, Rita," as she stepped out, cutting the light beam, the gates swung, the driveway lay bare in a spill of light. "Should I close the gate?" as the red taillights of the coasting Mercedes. Stopped. Fluttering the wing doors. The entrance awakened from darkness with lights greeting, and figures flitted unpacking the car. As I slouched an approach, “Do you want me to shut the gates?” 

"Yes," Peter throws back, lugging bags from the car's trunk after Rita disappeared briefly inside the house. I followed, in a rescue mission for two innocent little boys.

"Take a seat," echoes with a shutting door. as Peter settled down more bags by the kitchen counter. Rita slipped through the back doorway with her two daughters—a few years younger than my boys—ushering them through their last leap to bed. I lingered behind, pulling out a chair at the round table with the widest view of the open L-shaped living area, watching as Peter unpacked food from the fridge and spread it out across the worktop.

Rita joined her husband. With the kettle on the boil, she poured three cups. "Ivan, you don't take milk? No sugar?" 

"That's right." My voice flirted in the air, untethered.

"And how are Lionel and Gavin?" Rita’s question shimmered.

"I haven't seen them yet," my reply drifted on a breeze.  

Peter touched the sore subject—not with the expected magic wand, of a phone call, but with a discourse—"I thought about it. Rita and I discussed it, and there is nothing I can do. Jean will not move. She has proven that before. She even told Rita to get out of her house. It had to do with the letters." 

‘The letters?’—awakening a ploy I didn’t remember. 

“The ones Rita used to hand the boys—quietly, once a week, when she visited.’ Peter voiced. "Jean found out." It sparked a thought when my boys complained, back when we were still a family: “If you ever want to hide something from your mother—tuck it in her wardrobe. Or with her stuff!”

"What about Ronnie?” broke through my thoughts.

“He won't talk to his sister,” Peter echoed. “Ronnie’s wiped his hands off the affair. He doesn't want anything to do with it anymore. He told Jean, ‘It's your life, and you better sort it out.’ Said she was wrong to use the children." 

"What about Jean's mother?" fluttered in my doubt, distanced and fragile. 

Peter’s voice emanated from behind the kitchen counter, busy with snackwiches. "The only one who can still move her," meaning, Jean's mother, “is the old lady herself." If Lionel had to go to his grandmother with the unhappy jam. . . I believe she’d talk seriously to Jean.” 

But! Don't forget,” Peter insisted, “the old lady wiped her hands off paying lawyers. If the old-man were still alive, he’d have let her follow through—that holographic milieu living before me ever since Jean packed her bags with her boys--lawyer hatching cases, folders spread on her lap. Peter sighs, “Jean’s mother—you know how tight she is with her money.” He breathed in another thought. “But! Lionel is her apple's eye. If anyone could get something moving, it’d be him." 

Peter brought his snackwich to the table, and with it, he quietly highlighted the old-lady's indifference toward Gavin. It twisted the knife in my chest. It hurt—knowing Jean preferred Lionel too. The toasts left a few crumbs on the china, as Peter added—outside, Nyx lingered, an eye staring through the crack of the curtain into the light, while Rita stood adrift, free from her mother and wife’s shores. "There is only one solution, then," Peter said. "You need to speak to her." 

Deep inside, I knew he was right. But the deceit—years of it—made the thought unbearable. "I don't want to do that," slips out of my mind, to them both. ‘Talking to Jean?’ creeps, chilling under my skin, infeasible. My heart sagged under the weight of not resolving anything tonight. Then the lion cub in Gavin purred his distant words, crumbling the monster of my ego to rubble. I stepped out of the rubble. "I think you're right, Peter."—"I think. . . I feel it's what Jean wants—to speak with me."

Trailing Peter into the sleeping quarters, behind a side door, the click of a switch lit the Kalamazoo System salesman’s study. He turned away, leaving me behind his desk. I dialed my boys’ house number. Lionel answers—his voice staunch. ‘You deserve to be punished for what's happening with us,’ crossed his mind. And I knew--I’d have to wait. Wait until he grew his senses, maybe into adulthood, and relationship did the talking. I sighed--"Lionel, will you call your mother?"  

Lionel came back on the line, "She doesn't want to talk to you." Through Lionel's doubt, my mind gives that little edge on me—"Just tell your mother, "--“if she wants to solve matters—she better talk to me." 

He couldn’t have said more than two words before Jean's voice sprang to live through the earpiece.

At the labyrinth of open fight tickets and gateways, I linger. Each year, my boys grow a notch—the little one trying to catch up with his brother. Yet, in my heart, they remain just that: the little boys, caught in a thought. And when I stand again at the hub—continent shifting behind me. the past year is still unconsumed. The road ahead across Africa spells one thing: a problem I can’t shy from—not unless I want to see the fool in me.

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, the quiet current of my subject?

Chapter Preface: Between JFK and Jan Smuts, the path blurs—Paris, perhaps, or Brussels lost in a contrail of forgetting. This is the phantom return: not to a place, but to sons waiting behind court orders, to a brother’s embrace, and an ex-wife’s silence. Aetheria guides the descent; Nyx veils the route. In the quiet hum of reunion, the question remains: Who gets to arrive—and who is allowed to…