YD6-43 A squirrel and a sparrow in a Transatlantic echo

 

(YD6-43 ~ Vitrine of Consciousness) Aetherea, a puppet master of consciousness, navigates disruptions and unexpected messages. The narrative is fueled by chaos, mirrored in the natural world outside Aetherea's window. A transatlantic call from Ingrid sets the stage for Francine's arrival, a graduate from Strasbourg. The story unfolds with a blend of introspection and humor, capturing the essence of human connection and the intricate ways in which the universe communicates its intentions.

I’ve always seen destiny as a walk through a rubber delta wing: my willpower offers detours. But those rubber walls always bounce me back. What feels like job misfortunes, in hindsight, reveals destiny’s thread — a network of connections from one universe to the next, like traversing the Atomium’s linked spheres? With my sister in France, I discovered Paris through construction work, and Yael’s world, the New Yorker, often reminiscences from her Sorbonne days, as a rapprochement — an unexpected convergence — loomed on the horizon. 

Friday arriving counter-wise, I feel the city’s evening drain toward the subways, and the nervous car traffic calming. In anticipation of the night and vacant streets, an evening crowd surges. I meet Yael among the neon lights. Leading me away from the vibrant Times Square corner. a few blocks toward downtown, I’m struck by a name plate plaque, ‘What makes a Manhattan square be named after an Israeli stateswoman?’ breezes through my mind. Past the bust of Golda Meir, Yael veers to face the hiss of automatic doors, to a stretch counter to a stretched out kitchen manned by orthodox jews. In the queue we ordered our falafel, to pass by a woman cashier at the end. Turning away, scan a through-floor busy dining hall, find an empty table and sit sharing our meal and drinks. 

Like a distant promise to Yael, I’m keeping up our weekend outings. Needing my retrieve, as the city struggles through the Wall Street Crash. On Monday morning, I return to my solitude, paging through the newspapers. My eyes tracing down the classified columns of evanescent small construction advertisements. I meet and walk out of meetings. Until a construction company is as desperate as me, see their savior. 

Handed the keys to a monstrous Cadillac. Which sailing sensation upstream along the highway to the Hudson River. Through the interchange and crossing the Washington Bridge toward Fort Lee, Half-a-dozen of contractors meet at the building for tender. I take notes, and in the details from omissions, aware I’ll have to construe a narrative for phantom protagonist tradesmen. Such as the contractors, ending the site meeting, I return to the Manhattan office.

For the next few weeks, I set into a routine. With the last staff locking up, I’m leaving my desk. In a trickling evening traffic, I descend into the subway tunnels to the platform, to the rhythmic rumble of the train heading home to Forest Hills. At twilight, I walk from home along a rising city pulse, healing to the building skirting downtown to the first floor office, to my desk where I left off. 

I’m immersed in writing a Bill of Quantity. Through the eyes of a doctor, narrate to breathe new life to the building. Each tradesman, a protagonist artisan’s work, flowing through the building, and listed as items. Echoing the principle of my book, “The Broes Construction Data And Pricing System,” I follow a focused path through building driven by the 100% ideal, But confront wasted in the manpower, man-hours, material waste, and idle equipment. Balancing idealism with pragmatism, yields a reliable estimate for the project’s cost.

Over the weekend, I’m perched on a kitchen chair, fingers dancing across the Compaq Portable’s keyboard amid the clutter of my CD player, the Okidata printer, and my phone. I’m recounting a vivid dream: seeing my spunky new apple-green Volkswagen Beetle, when I was an apprentice in Pretoria. Emerging from the Atlantic Ocean, I’ve turned forty, and drive into Manhattan, only to find every hotel full. Exhausted, I park by a parking meter in the street, to sleep on the sidewalk. In the morning, a traffic officer wakes as tow trucks haul away dust-covered cars. I drive away, leaving a gaping hole where the Twin Towers once stood, and I disappear into the highway traffic.

Dazed, I lift my eyes from the portable’s embedded little screen. From my world framed by the Panoramic window’s yellowed wooden sashes, which I dare not touch for fear of unhinging. The windowpanes, immune to reflections in the terrace roof’s shadow, offer a clear view of the backyard, suffuse a sunlight glow: a carpet of lawn expanse to the neighboring fences. A flicker of life in the stillness anchors me. Then, a squirrel peeks left and right at me to punctuate brief disappearances behind the courtyard’s telephone pole. Curiosity returns and rises higher look-outs to reach the top of the pole.  

I dawdle over the screen. ‘I’ve had enough. . .’ my mind says and drifts, delving deeper from my psychoanalysis to relay the elusive moral of the story. While I’m at ease in my daze, my outlines are stashed on the hard disk, until my mind decides to re-surge with dream details. I watch the squirrel atop the pole pass the weatherhead’s cable loops, spreading cables. A tightrope walker leaves behind the outlined butterfly wings, scrambling and pausing along the black telephone line etched against the sky. Until, the squirrel vanishes around the top corner of the glazed terrace door. Leaving me to ponder about the telephone cable’s wall anchor, and the squirrel jump, who knows how, or where under the eave’s rear facade, but the dedicated telephone line indoors, to skirt walls to the telephone cradles - rings, ring.

My hand reaches across the little table, past the coffee cup’s dark ring. I lift the handset, silencing the ring, my knuckles to my cheek. “Hello?” I mutter. 

“Comment vas-tu? — How are you?” 

I frown at the strange musical lilt of France-French, not heard in New York, and my Belgian-French rusted, a relic of sixth grade.

My heart pounds, as De-M’ma’s old saying echoes in my mind, “Geen news . . . — No news is good news … Bad news travels fast.” Ingrid’s voice, in the handset's cup, spurs dread. Just two and a half years back, Ilona’s call announced Ines’ death.

In disbelief, memories flash by. Ingrid, as a teenager, leaving our Kyalami home for Belgium. Sporadic postcards, then De-M’ma returning with Ingrid’s six-month-old son, alike with Ilona. The five of us remaining siblings had to decipher what our parents left unsaid, while our eldest sisters figured out their lives in the future. 

Jean and I honeymooned in Switzerland, crossing into France by train. Ingrid greeted us at the Belfort railway station. Drove us to the Salbert’s piedmont exurb, to the house. We meet Rico, her husband, and her second, a daughter. We shared dinner, to sleep over. Preparing breakfast by the kitchen window. A white blanket of snow-covered rooftops, spread across the distant plain, to the Vosges mountains. Ingrid’s farewells at the station. Our paths diverge. We head from my birth town, Antwerp, to Jean’s paternal family in Southampton, landing back in Johannesburg. Decades in the passing, I nestled in New York.

I sense the international phone call ticking, and Ingrid’s thoughts measured in French franks falling into a slot machine. She’s rifling eloquent French words, “My friend Jacqueline lives nearby. . .” she explains.

It occurs to me that Ingrid has skipped our sibling’s code, those warm Flemish greetings we exchange, before our shared vocabulary falters to switch our language. I ask, “Quelle surprise . . . — What a surprise from my sister?” But her voice still carries the surprise sting, her overriding my words. “Qu’est Ce-qui tenement . . . — What brings you? … ‘calling?’_” To wonder, ‘What’s going on with my sister?’ Thick with a lifetime of French, she leaves my understanding struggling to find the context. “Mon amie habite au bas de la rue . . . —  My friend lives down the street.” Ingrid says. “Her daughter is graduating and starting a job in New York. . .”

“Okay. . .” I say, but my mind lags, ‘What have I got to do with your best friend?’ 

“Sa fille fait sa graduation. . . — Her daughter graduates in Strasbourg.” Ingrid says.

“Okay — ‘Right. I hear you.’_”

“Elle commence à travailler. . . — She’s bound to begin work in New York.”

“Okay — ‘Right. I hear you.’_” blowing up my head, without orientation to anchor and repose my mind.

“She has to start work in New York. . .” Ingrid insists. “Tu sais l’aider. . . — Can you help set her up in the city — Can you put her up?”

In a glitch of bewildered resignation, unable to slot in a question, I sigh, “Okay — ‘Right. I hear you.’_”

Ingrid knows that a rose blooming girl, sent to a bricklayer’s smell of dust and sweat, is a dangerous combination. Not to Aetheria, at the strings of her celestial harp, plays to rhyme ‘Franc-ine’ resonates, transcending from the zodiacal forest. Not all innocent. Sending me a wave of warmth to wash under my skin, which my mind washes away with an anxiety chill.

Ingrid, Moon in Sagittarius, and Sun in Rooster, her sense of duty toward her friend, and a culpability sigh having to bother me, with relief she almost hung up, in that hesitation to address me in Flemish, “_‘n, hoe got het? — And, how are you?" Her belated concern for my well-being is jarring. But since childhood, our parents taught us to settle our disagreements among us.  

“Ghoe —  Alright!” I reply, though my thoughts are stifled. As swift as she called, she’s gone, leaving me with the echo of a silent handset cup. Feeling I had no input, I’m thinking, ‘Let things unfold.’ outside my shaded window, the neon glow faded to a sunbathing lawn. Ingrid’s emergency call fades from my initial thought. ‘What have I let myself in for?’ Days pass, dangling to mind, ‘What if Franc-ine is ugly? What if she’s obese?’ 

Weeks dissolve into limbo. My thoughts' frequency of Ingrid’s expectations less often. But sporadic and a fallacy to eradicate from my mind. Never to materialize, yet telling myself, ‘If I call Ingrid, and my call in quest weaves through the families. I’ll raise a sense of stalking a young girl just out of college.’ Lost in uncertainty, I drift toward summer. My initial anxiety about hosting a student fades, punctuated by a frustrating silence. ‘Why don’t I hear anything from your end?’ I wonder. While sensitive to telepathic nudges, blind, but a soul’s emotional graduation ceremony, administrative processes, diploma printing, and delivery, awakens in my unfamiliar world — as a school drop-out, working on the poultry farm in Kyalami, until coming of legal age to an apprenticeship. 

In the dead of silence, my fingers dancing across the keyboard and facing the gaping fascia of the portable shine its screen alongside superimposed diskette slots to which I back up my files. I'm struggling with Toshiba's update driver file. I seem to get more stupid, as what I learned in updates no longer apply, to get the CD player effective dictionary with the word processor. 

Escaping the text on screen, my dazed mind lifts my eyes to dawdle on the backyard green lawn bathing in yellow sunlight. With time in suspense, the neighbor’s fence efflorescent, and the telephone cable slicing across my window, to rooftops slumber against a clear azure sky. Startled awake by the illogical fly landing on the windowpane. Elusive, as a vibrant black star, emerging from the aerial cable. Pulsating in my face and hovering against the stillness. 

I fix my eyesight against the distant neighbor’s shaded eave to gauge the spec, in its trajectory lowering to the sunlit brick wall. Morphing to spread a blurry fluttering and detaching from the backdrop. Approach with a little bird’s eager fluttering wings across the courtyard. Hurdling square on toward the shaded glass. In a silent scream, ‘_Ho no!_’ in fear of tears, bracing for the inevitable thud. I foresee the bird falling along the windowpane to the windowsill.

Like a Star War attack fighter plane, wings swept back, a sparrow swoops before the windowpane. In a split-second ballet, it flares its wings, puffs out its breast, spreads its legs, and perches on the window’s sill-rail, tucking wings into its plumage, grooming up to the windowpane. Its tiny black eyes, sharp and alert, miss me behind a barricade of electronic equipment.

Ring, ring - piercing the silence, startling me, I grab the handset, cold knuckles against my cheek. “Hello!” I answer. Startled. A silky voice, lilting with a French accent, greets me, “Mon nom est . . . — My name is Francine. . .” I’m losing the words in her soft whisper, as I’m watching the skittish little sparrow. Captivated in its reflection, dancing on spindly legs, tilting its head, in front of the glaze transparent in the shade, oblivious to me. The sparrow turns facing the open sky, The sparrow lingering on the windowsill, poised for flight, but remains grounded.

“Comment. . . — How [what are you saying?]” I frown, blurting out, against her evanescing whisper. “Mon nom est . . . — My name is Francine…” She repeats, in a polite tone, academic. From the fog in my memory, “Francine” jars when boys and girls were on a school bench before a teacher, or a schoolyard in recreation. As I’m taken out of my comfortable solitude. The sparrow hops from the wooden window frame to the window’s stone sill, spreading its plumage, flutters wings, vanishing into the sunny backyard glow.

“Okay, right, — ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying?’_” I feel that umpteenth repeat with mounting frustration. I change technique, interrupt her soft whisper, as ‘le-clair’ echoes in my head. In doubt, voicing with a curt edge, “Comment. . . — How? Spell out. Get over what you have to say?’_” When rhymes to mind, a French lullaby. “Au clair de la lune, Mon ami Pierrot . . . — By the light of the moon, Pierrot, my friend, Lend me your quill, To write a letter. My candle is dead, I have no light left. Open your door for me, For the love of God. . .” Haunted by her soft whispers, a language familiar and foreign, I blurt out, “L-e- -C-l-a-i-r?” Francine, unfazed, spelled out, “L-e-c-l-e-r-c-q.” 

By now, I felt foolish. Her emphatic insistence, a dormant clue to the impending whirlwind, left me reeling. My voice, echoing “Okay — Okay — Okay...” drowned out her soft whispers. As Francine departs from her student life in Strasbourg. I’m losing my grasp on concentration, and a thought slips away. ‘Who’s paying? She called me. Okay!’ I’m drawing back to Francine’s calendar dates, but days of the week blur into a meaningless jumble. To Helios spinning the shadows of a sundial for hours, conceding to Nyx. She hung up the phone as I cried out in my mind, ‘Get to the point! — When are you arriving?’ and I’m left to imagine an aircraft departing, soaring toward the Atlantic skies, leaving France’s hexagonal outlines behind. 

‘What have I let into?’ I muse, drifting in the wash of destiny. My gaze glides down from the light stifling courtyard meeting the terrace’s shade, to the window. A leading eye sweep leads my hand alongside the cluttered table, dropping from the edge of the telephone cradle, to the littered floor of my studio. My torso twists down from my chair, I stretch my hand and grab the empty Microsoft Bookshelf Reference Library casing. Uncoiling to place it on my left atop the Compact Disk Player. Then bend back to retrieve the Astrological chart of the Egyptian Moons combined with the Chinese Sun signs. Placing the book on the CD casing. Twisting to my left, I grasp the ruffled pages of the Pictorial Oxford Dictionary, stacking the book onto the Zodiac and the DOS manual with a pirated DOS 4.0 startup Stiffy diskette. In the momentum, I rise and reach further, gathering from reams of paper and packets of envelopes, to a ‘Not To Forget’ telephone bill. Francine’s arrival looms, a catalyst for much-needed order.

I return to my keyboard, finger dancing, words sprawling across WordPerfect pages. I jot down notes from my dream: awaking beside my apple-green Volkswagen Beetle, on a street corner closed hotel. The morning roar of Caterpillars Bulldozers cleared rubble from the Twin Towers, as I’m ready to move on. 

Interrupted, my mind still on an elusive word, I’m eager to regain access to my dictionary. But with a few new driver files entangled my impatience into my mind’s jungle, from the previous generation. My CD player from interfacing with my Compaq Portable. I dwindle to despair. I abandoned troubleshooting the Toshiba Compact Disk Player, only to return, fuming. ‘Sue Bill Gates,’ I muttered to myself. Recalling the countless hours wasted by Microsoft’s $1000.00 all-inclusive, hardware and software ‘special offer,’ that turned me into a guinea pig. 

As Nyx trails Helios to creep into the backyard, without an echo, Nyx presses her face against the threshold of my window, envious of the light huddled within my studio, efflorescent walls. While I’m furious with myself. ‘How often didn’t I say, ‘Don’t update if it ain’t broke’… fueling my impatience?’ 

I rise from my chair, gathering scattered reference leaflets from the floor. My eyes scan the shower room wall, plastered with educational posters, and households, cartoon thematic placemats. Further away from the door, the United States’ map, New York subway system scotched. Preparing to melt under a steaming shower spray, dive into bed, I back step to lay the collected litter on the electronic equipment.