YD6~37 Aetheria (consciousness,) purview: Pygmalion footprint of sculptured lifestyle

“This chapter presents a complex and intriguing narrative. The author demonstrates a strong ability to weave abstract concepts into a compelling story, showcasing a deep understanding of human nature and the mysteries of consciousness.”

The staff had left on Friday evening, and the offices were eerily silent. With - flick - the switch at the rear of the IBM desktop computer’s CPU box. The screen monitor blacked out, and the cooling fan’s sighting shut down. Yael’s invitation echoes. “Let’s meet at the bar!” hanging up the handset, I relax my workday immersed in the woven fabrics of setting up the company’s accounting system in Peachtree. 

I step away from the rudimentary office of the construction company, run by the charming woman, her moon, in Taurus. ‘_How thoughtful of Yaely,_’ I think. ‘_At least, neither of our lost souls would be wandering Times Square street corner!_’

My competence lay in the early eighties’ mini computer account system for the day-to-day running of my construction projects. So I duplicated the accounting system, flip stocks movement to purchase orders, at driving Aticon (Pty) Ltd.’s forecasting construction projects, instead Jean, my ex-wife ran the accounts and gave me historic figures, good for Hilton Rogoff, our auditor.

I descend the flight of stairs to the front door apron, pulling the door, stepping out onto the deserted suburban street, closing behind me. I step away with the drop of a thought from the next door mafiosi restaurant, where a family of office staff, half-dozen we met around a table, for an end of the week lunch earlier. 

In the somber milieu, awesome, to be living a real silver screen scene teasing the blood circulation in my body. When in a dark long coat, and gleaming shoes. A Boss walks in through the entrance door, and I’m the only one, turning eyeballs. As the Boss heads for a far table, joining a mob of men's heads close huddling over the table, whispering, eyes locked in secretive discussion.

As the eerie deserted street reinforces my doubts, an awesome ant’s crawls, not knowing if in fear or pleasure with gaze shifts along my spooky Sicilian path to the subway. Passing rows of weather workmen’s townhouses. Unseen eyes peering from behind the cracks in the drawn curtain, countless in the past month. Yet, I sense the piggyback of beaming eyes, and the presence in the dark hollow behind silent solid wooden doors, sharing amid street corner shrines dedicated to a Madonna stands in silent devotion. The awe volatilizing as I descend the gaping stairs to the subway platform.

At a draft blowing past me, I turn away from studying the Subway line from this estranged track, to sight the dark, gaping tunnel. Flush out the glaze, figuring the conductor behind the wind-window trundling past me. Streaking the coach graffiti and windows’ cinematographic to the evening scarce seated commuters, coming to a halt, doors sigh open, to the dull lit interior inviting me into the antique carriage out of another century - clack - shut behind me. Pulling away, the windows, dive the coach into the dark tunnel, mirroring myself in the midst of a frail slumps crowd over their laps.

As the coach rumbles, flash lit station and platforms coming to peaceful stops, the commuters exchange through the opening and closing doors, raise people's youthful expressions, lively in their seat, ready to jump to the occasion. 

I ascended from the underground, emerging into Times Square. My eyes sweep, across a workday ebb to flow an emerging of evening meanderers, orienting myself to Yael’s directions, walk off along the traffic up Broadway.

Across the crisscrossing Broadway, 7th Avenue and 42nd Street, I’m leaving behind the skirting Times Square lights of the rudimentary boarded Nathan restaurant. Flashing as a reminder, the ghost of “Black Monday.” Landing the Wall Street’s crash haunting the streets. Although flawed, daunting the neon lights, among tourists to the world renowned square. Failing to cross my mind more than finding my rendezvous, as the weekends belong to Yael’s desires.

Following Yael’s instructions, I meandered amidst an evening flurry of people, befalling on me 7th Avenue’s large storefronts, impressive after years since I landed first and strolled the street, fooled by the blaring signs proclaiming.“In liquidation 50% off” Although from year to the next, I tempted to purchase gifts for my siblings’ family lodging, while I’m claiming my visiting right from Jean, to my little boys, Lionel and Gavin. I discovered next door, a store crystal deep to Broadway counters and locked shelves with a world of cameras, bringing back the pang of regret. 

Lodging with Igor, my brother’s little family, in Randburg, a cul-de-sac street flaring driveway, I assumed the cameras were safe. Unfortunately, a thief had a rather brilliant idea. I tucked a pair of “Canon Sure Shot Cameras” under the driver’s seat of his loan Audi, intended for my nieces, vanished to my regret.

Shaking off old memories, I focused on finding Yael’s designated “bar.” Knots of disappointment tighten in my chest, as the narrow storefront shadowed a somber interior. Trusting Leo in Yael’s panache. I sidestep the historic storefront bulkhead, to push open the wood-framed glass door, my eyes creeping across the threshold. Gleams harrowed past three burly men hunched over an evanescing bar counter in the dark depths, my calling turning the men’s heads. 

‘_Yaely! What’s this for a meeting place?’ I exploded, saying to myself. Scooting behind the yawning figures, a vacant stool shines between them, stopping over the counter. Each man, elbows spread like brothers in thought to draw guns, while hands cupped slightly around their glass of beer. The burly men’s third eyes rolling in their heads at my passage. I emerge from their oppressive atmosphere, to a semblance of normality by the dynamic barman. His wrist flicks, fluttering a white cloth wiping a streaming glass, mirrored through a mosaic of rear shelves glittering the formation of soldiering upside-down glasses, transferred from a dishwasher’s steam creeping from beneath the counter.

I step past the counter hatchway. In my approach to the rear wall looming in the dimly lit cul-de-sac of the bar, to a random wooden stool, I lend a hip. Turning my eyesight in my wake, past the scene through the gloomy tunnel of the bar. Glad the barman lags by the patronizing burly men, from pursuing me, for Yael arrives.

My mind drifts. ‘_Not a place, a classy Leo patronize?_’ I’m thinking to myself, as I fix at the end shadowing a bar’s miner’s tunnel, the sketchy street in misty daylight.

During my restless wait, shifting my cheek, seeking comfort on the stool. I giggle out of my wait, placing one foot on the bar counter’s foot rail. I rotate. Bringing my other foot up, I knock my knees against the front panel, pivoting on my seat, squaring up to the counter, and reposing on crossed arms. I’m awakened from daydreaming, raising my eyes from the gleam wash over the dark wooden bar, meeting the Indian barman’s gaze.

“What can I serve you?” His voice rumbles.

‘_Yaely! What would you order here?_’ I questioned myself, to realize how little I know of her habits. Without a clue, the waiter's patience, and bound for the long trek to his retreat, sways the idea of a remark flipped to me on the Champs-Élysées’ Parisian terrace. “You pay to occupy a seat” For the privilege in the din of the bar. “I’ll have a coke,” I uttered. 

The dark Indian complexion moves out of my line of sight, draws my lingering gaze, to pause. As he bustles about, facing the shelves lined with glasses to a soldierly formation of liquor bottles. My mind leapfrog, the bending barman, while at a guess, retrieves a drink from under the counter. My eyesight jumps into the window’s misty daylight retreat to distractive sculptured statues of the burly hunched men in the crosshairs of my vision. ‘_I couldn’t waste myself idle before a drink._’ I reflect.

The barman approaches, until a bottle of Coca-Cola slips with a glass across the counter to park in front of me, before retreating himself. Lackadaisical, I pour the coke fuzzing, returning the little bottle. While glancing offside, I’m sipping, when a paint stroke shadow emanates from the misty daylight and crosses the window frame, to a silhouette assaulting the door light. The door swings to vibrant sleeves off a floral printed shirt tucked in jeans. Elongated legs by mid-heeled shoes stride to a catwalk entry. She casts a dynamic aura, a hand tic flattening the crown of her puffed curly hair. She breezes past the hunched, burly men, and leaves a trail of hungry gazes in her wake.

Until Yael vanishes behind me, a furry paw on my shoulder. Her soft hand, a grating drag across my back. I’m freaking out, by the raw goosebumps of nerves tracking her hand down my back to my thoracic embrace. I grab hold of my mind, washing a hearty warmth from fledgling shudders, and stealing a glance at her face as she comes around. “Yaely! What would you like to drink?” I uttered.

Yael pulls back from brushing a soft cheek kiss, with a lingering hand through the hollow of my waist. She jerks a step back. “Come, let’s go,” she blurts, her eyes’ nervous flickers off towards the door.

In an upsurge, Yael creates a vacuum, to draw me into her dithering, retrieving little steps. As my eyes are lingering. ‘_I can’t let go of the drink to waste._’ I daren’t voice my warring inside, instead, conceding to slipping off my seat. As Yael is spooked to escape, expanding her agitation in anxious stepping circles. Her face stressed with an incessant draw flickering glances, spearheading away behind me. Turning my knees away knocking the bar counter, I slip off the stool, to doubt, grabbing my drink. Standing up to Yael, I gulp down my coke. Returning the glass, and at Yael’s tempo, I dig into my hip pocket, fumbling out a few coins, jingling to lie still between the glass with a bottom, and the Coca-Cola bottle.

I step off in Yael’s takeaway beat, to regret a coke bottom going to waste, while calling to sight. ‘_Mr. Barman, Is that enough for the drink and tips?_’ He doesn’t see me, as I’m in Yael’s strong drag. With an eye’s-call of the Indian barman. ‘_I guess he’s going to be okay?_’ I thought. Until, passing by, he returns a gentle eye nod, as Yael sweeps me away.

Stepping out on Broadway, I wonder.‘_Where are you taking us?_’ Yael leads in her strides through a flurry of people, as we’re immersed by margining neon lights. ‘I’ll soon discover.’ I tell myself behind her nurtured plan for the evening.

Then, a few doorsteps further, she turns away from the cheese wedge building’s wrapping fascia, as I’m reading the scrolling stock market two-thousand nine hundred points. She reaches for the plate-glass door of a widespread smoked storefront. As she crosses the threshold, hands to my palm, swing open the door, clearing the franchise’s disposing burgundy pallet colors across the dining hall, to my disappointment. ‘_I might fit-out industrial food outlets, but as a place to sit down and enjoy a meal?_’ I daren’t voice. 

Yael steps toward a few gentle customers’ queue, eyeing the crystal counter’s hot buffet’s choice. While I’m admiring Miss, alone, her energetic dance behind the glaze, her hands’ effective shifts and duck. Yael moves in behind an evening short queue. Convinced the lasagna, “Healthier with eggplant…” She repeated. When the Miss faces her to a pause, Yael places her order to animate Miss’s hands, dishing up an aluminum foil, to hand across the counter. ‘_Okay,_’ I think, unmoved by the menu’s perplexities behind the Miss, ‘_Instead of pasta. . ._’ I say to the Miss. “I’ll try it too.”

Yael slides her brown plastic tray to the soda fountain, drafts a drink. Sliding further along the counter’s tray run, pause under the woman cashier’s eyes, keying the meal to the cash register. As my stacked tray creeps behind her, while Yael dawdles toward a few scattered families and elderly diners across the dining hall depth. Settling with the cashier, and tucking my wallet away, I catch up with Yael, scan discrete corners, but conceding to Yael, in the middle of the hall - clack - she placed her tray. I sidestep behind the backrest to the second chair of her reserved table - clack - placing my tray's lasagna with a quelled appetite.

Yael pulls the wooden backrest across me, lowering herself to sit hissing up her tray, as I unpack my meal and drinks, discard the brown tray to the edge of the table, and lower myself to sit. Yael follows suit, stacking her tray. I’m watching. ‘_How are you doing?_’ My wrist torqued, cutting through a layered lasagna in a high brimmed foiled dish, with child-like plastic utensils -- a blunt knife and pliable fork. As Yael spears a bite, cheese streaks dribbling off layers of eggplant. I eat my meal, mirrored by Yael’s punctuated occasional sip from her carton cups, her choice of soda. 

Yael hints at departing, gathering her cleared aluminum dish, cup, and utensils. I crumple my napkins after table wipe, to discard in the cup, stacking Yael’s strayed pile, to a mutual rise from our chairs, walking away. On the way out. Yael dumps the remnants of our meal into the trash cabinet - clatter - slips the empty trays onto a stack. Proceeding toward the exit door. Stepping out onto the neon-drenched street. Heading toward traversing 42nd Street, crisscrossing Broadway traffic zips and unzips a flow with 7th Avenue, for the Subway a ride home to Yael’s apartment in Brooklyn.

In a change of season — before Persephone could scream, Pluto dragged her into the chariot and raced away — dissipating underground as the coach trundled through dark tunnels, flashing intermediate station punctuating stops. My mind dissolved over Yael’s weekends to oblivion. Transposes to the challenges ahead, finding flabbergasting solutions — the Taurus woman, my boss’s office scene, at breaking her keyboard calligraphy — obsessed with her typewriter perched on the countertop along the transversal wall. Upon insisting, she torques her mind, sprints to her feet, grabs the backrest, coasting her chair along the countertop to my side, having liberated the keyboard to the IBM PC’s glowing screen, with WordPerfect’s blank page. To my utter dismay, transitioning nimble fingers to stage on a keyboard, rhythmic as a troupe of Irish dancers. A spectacle to envy, the head of ants’ trail emerging from the page to serpentine down stack up lines filling the page.

I step from the subway to daylight in the street, arriving in the office, to sit behind the IBM PC’s monitor, proceeding with the setting up of Peachtree, until ceding my palace to the Taurus woman. I’m overseeing her carried away by a menacing page layout, frustrated like a stubborn student. At every end of the line, her reflex pressed ‘return.’ I resorted to repeating, “I’ll sort this out afterward. . .” When she trundles aside, and leaves her seat. I dive into her page of wild margins, bringing the text’s hidden codes to light: paragraph breaks, spaces, tabs, special characters, the words scrawl in a smooth snaking format and the page layout.

The construction office is a family niche from the streets of like mafiosi milieu — a Pygmalion, the Taurus woman. Falling in love with the statue, she carved a transformation from a reluctant computer user, through his unwavering belief. Seeing her company sprout, by my insistence and her determination. When hit with a lawsuit, brought upon her by her accountant, at picturing the plump woman, her desk chair shaped waddle, of years stooped over a ledger. Rumored behind me the accountant’s deposition, “She claims the staircase wasn’t sufficiently lit!” As the staircase lost luster to the ancient yellowed walls, with apparent original fluorescent tubes, to the flight of stairs from the door apron to the split-level floor, 

My mind races. Aware of the tricks my brain’s interface can play — reading remote resonant delays of digits cast on invoices, or ledgers. To fingertip keystrokes echoing, distorting data input. Lurching reverse checking numbers, I feared exposure to a snail’s-pace, when the Taurus Woman requested me to assume an accountant’s role. My mind spills out. “No!” I blurted out. So abrupt, that she freezes her eyes on me. She thaws, turning around with a thoughtful expression. She returns dismissing me, and I head with the burden of seeking employment.

An evening, bustling sidewalk morphs with a two-way lane of traffic zipping Broadway and 7th Avenue. Across, skirting 42nd Street, the boarded Nathan restaurant sits homeless, quiet, rudimentary amid Times Square’s dancing lights. A sore sight in the evening’s glamor. After these few years of silence. The ghost of “Black Monday” haunts the streets. Wall Street’s crash doesn’t cross my mind, as the weekend belonged to Yael. 

I find myself with Yael before pedestrians transform into a reckless mob. The Warthog in my wild jumps. Not missing out on the game to straddle with Yael in tow of the asphaltic deserted lanes. I lure Yael from her hesitation — the extent of Aetheria choreographing, destined to change, a covert legacy footprint, my mind tweaking, getting me to lunge for no reason than an opportunity to cheat the system. I dive into a straggling crowd, burning the red lens’ Stop Hand.

Yael, a pace behind me, steps down the curb into the gridlock intersection. I leapfrog by eyesight the trapped impatient drivers at the clawing steering wheel, shadowing through Times Square’s neon lights dancing on their windshields. Pedestrians flock, crossing idling engines, dodging the bestial glare of silver headlights, the snarling radiator jaws, and bumper butting that can send the crowd flying. 

In the lane behind us, the car peels across the pedestrian markings and speeds off. A while after I leapfrog by sight, to the next windshield shadowing a young driver harnessed a steaming bull, throttling. His face contorted in frustration, sparking a daredevil’s glints in his eyes. I quicken my pace, but Yael’s pace remains lame. I call out loud in my mind. ‘_You ought to liven up your pace!_’ But I dare not say, to my regret. With the youthful man, claws perched the steering wheel, going berserk for a break, to ram out the gridlock.

A horrific pig squeals’ kill. I whip my head around, to Yael’s stance against a car fender. Squeals, and dog yelps with her abrupt glance at her foot in a white sneaker. Her face contorted with her screams in pain. She hops from placing her foot on the asphalt, but I sight the massive black wall of the car tire wheel away. 

I follow, attempting to catch the wheel’s escape. Returning to Yael, her eyes looked back at the heel of her sneaker, hopping. “He hurt me!” Yael screams, her eyes searching ahead to rest. Hopping and screaming in pain, tears welling up. Fury surges through me, my eyesight jumping onto the car’s rear fender, slipping out of my eyesight.

I return to Yael’s dreams, and back to the car’s dead taillights, awaking the license plate. But stems bring aid to Yael, side jump to a dense sidewalk. Peering through the crowds for blue uniforms, plentiful otherwise in pairs. The approaching crowds thin across the widespread plaza, searching across Times Square glittery traffic, whirling in triangulating for a police officer to radio emergencies, in vain. 

The street falls silent. I’m invisible to a flurry of zombies. I divert to lock eyes, catching the culprit’s fleeting car. ‘_Take a picture,_’ I think. But fails, noting the license plate, ‘no pen or paper?’ I watch the distancing, blurry numbers.

My Seven Star mini diary with a miniature pen. My thigh pocket, a Canon camera failed to register. In lieu, clay at hands, everything escapes me, sighting the little white Japanese car speeding into the blurry street. My mind churns out the details, and in a grip of cold shivers, Yael’s squeal echoes with a slow squeegeeing resonance of a car’s rubber wall tire, pulling up along an unbudging curbstone. The resonance is relative to a crushing force of Yael’s heel bone. 

“Yealy!” I exclaim. Her shoulder shrugs my hand off. At shrieks, her toe touches the asphalt, appeasing along her excruciating scream. With hands out, flexing a knee, she swings around sagging, to resign perched on the curbstone, as I’m standing by, feeling useless along a passing crowd.

Eyesight short upfront, gathering herself, ‘_Courage girl!_’ she bemoans. Jumps to her foot, hops the curb, and away with excruciating pain, her Leo into a bustling crowd, invisible and deaf. “Are you alright…” I repeat, echoing louder in my head to break the stupidity. “Yaely, we’ll have to get a taxi!” I said. 

As we move through a misty plaza’s flurry of people, Yael limps, my words ignored, to her gradually setting down the ball of her foot, to limp on a collapsing foot. She sighs her pain. Forsaken, the crowd thins out. My anger mounts, inept to get help. A crack opens up the wall, the gaping entrance to the subway. 

Yael and I, descended the stairs into the subway, following the orange F train disk. Joining scattered figures along the platform, to stand along the edge of the dark ballast running silver rail tracks vanishing into the gaping tunnel. 

We wait for a longer-paced train arrival, before silent air rushes past us. A driver’s figure dwarfed behind the large box-window, to pass by, and shield a cinematography of the coaches’ windows from sparsely seated commuters. Trundling to a halt, to an exhaustion sigh, the doors opened. Yael limps into the carriage, grips a pole, swivels herself around, lowering onto a seat - clack - doors shut behind me.

The floor lunches beneath me as I grip the pole, standing tall over Yael. Windows to the bright station switching to black, mirroring our lit rumbling ride. I dawdle, baffled, realizing the defiant busiest street at reaching for aid, while the windows fall back — routine across the Brooklyn Bridge to panoramic city lights. Yael’s foot into oblivion, as our train rides and ducking into the monotony of our reflections punctuated bright stations. Random trickling of passengers entering and exiting the carriage, approaching Avenue P Station, habitual among the last passengers to stand up I. we prepare by the doors to alight.

Nights alone along a window display of empty carriages pulling away, clearing the silver tracks, to walk along and beneath the platform shelter. Passing turnstiles - click, click - far and wide in the silent night, to the hallway. We descend the steel staircase, meeting the misty streetlight shades. Illuminating an eerie, deserted street into the slumbering suburb. Walking up the familiar street block, and finding the brick block of apartments. Glaze the curtains drawn close, wonder in choir why Yael had vacated her father’s cute little suburban house. During daylight on Saturday, the street bustles with Hasidim families along the sidewalk, and the occasional joining in to the synagogue. Heightened Yael’s integration of the Jewish community. Persistent, in answers, turning the corner to Ocean Parkway. ‘_She doesn’t owe me an explanation,_’ Yael presses the entrance doors to an Art Deco lobby, inviting me to her abode.

I awake Monday morning, by Yael’s leap out of bed and to her feet. Her hand rolls back dangling black stockings legs. Steps in the ring, treading a leg and the other legging. Dressed in a leather miniskirt, and flowery printed shirt, she vanishes behind the bedroom door. I jump to my feet, pick up my clothes. Slipping on my shirt, fingers straightening my collar. Swiping across my collarbone, ‘_Something is missing?_’ Feeling naked of the palma chain Yael brought back from her journey to Israel. Yael’s wish, pepper-sprayed golden dust immortalizing the silver Chai upon purchasing — bound to be broken, by volition’s witchy spell.

The Chai trinket torn from my neck overnight — Aetheria, aware of Yael silent but fervent against having children, Aetheria’s finger at the harp of volition, plays the bewitching dissonant strings, bound to break Yael’s prophesied wish.

In a frantic search, under pillows, and crouching to my knees, peering under the bed. ‘_It must be here!_’ I thought to a more profound search, shaking off both, hers and my pillows. Slap - billowing waves through the duvet, brushing my eyesight and smoothing the bedsheet. I return, scanning the dark depth across the parquet for a glimpse of hope. In desperation, I abandon.

I step up to Yael, as she stands up to the kitchen worktop. Her nimble fingers at utensils in preparation of breakfast. As I’m levitating, having lost her charm trinket, she raises the topic of charity, extending into my mind’s silent wanders.

Yael declares her mitzvah. “I give a dollar to different organizations.” she says. But doodled in my mind, an accounting clerk, getting in the mail one dollar. ‘_How many clerks behind a desk are receiving one dollar,_’ I was sweating out. clerical Thank You notices, hands and pens with due diligence, ledger entry, banking. Spurs a piggy bank to my mind, and countered. “They don’t benefit!” I blurted. 

In our drift, instead of voicing my dilemma, I kissed her cheek, retreat toward the door. The door lever hung a flimsy plastic shopping bag, throwing her trash meanwhile, closing the door in the hallway. I’ll learn to adapt to her idea. After my mind shifts into a front wind mode of the Taurus woman, her words echoing in my head, echoing her answer that hit me like a bat swing. “We don’t need you any further.” I’m shaking off, heading toward fitting-out another franchise contract in midtown Manhattan.