[YD6-70 (MVDH) Chapter Code] Surveying Shadows: Aetheria’s Labyrinth—Paris to New York
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’s invitation: With the Gulf War rumbling at the world's edge, and corporate shadows closing in, I weave through curfews and betrayals, knotted by political unrest and personal reckonings. Across Bangladesh’s drenched clay, Paris’s waning streets, and New York’s shadowed corners, echoes pull at me—unfinished contracts, vanished loyalties, and the quiet hand of Aetheria stirring the fault lines, beneath my steps.
[YD6-70 (MVDH) Chapter Code] Surveying Shadows: Aetheria’s Labyrinth—Paris to New York
Days before first light, I weave through curfews knotted by political unrest. Out of means, with “the Gulf War…” leaking through curfew cracks—Aetheria crying, in the zodiacal rainforest, a symbol of her language. ‘I don't want that passport’--dangling unconscious before my duty—echoing in my skull a bad frequency. Rumors, plausible enough to haunt, whispers of a repatriation ruse—incidental, perhaps, to Philips corporate takeover of TRT, rescinding their contract. Oddly, I’m glad. The moribund delta of Bangladesh—humid dark clay seeping into my mind—drenching it, while I search for the spirit blooming in the flower girls’ wake.
We’re about to part ways—the last grains of rice cooling in porcelain, the shadow of a hand brushing across the table’s edge. Michel, ten years my superior, who reads the scripture of raw lands, who has stood in soils that bury empires, senses by the tease of a breeze. I notice a veil slips from his face—Aetheria’s mischievous, whispering through the current of his thought. French rolls off his lips—”C’est quoi. . . “--until, phonic stranger, I cannot flip “hypsometer” into English. Before the question, I’m mute. Like a professor masking an exam behind casual words, Michel tosses another geotechnical challenge across the table, uncertain of what I carry behind my eyes.
A friendly meal in the hotel’s dining room, hovers beneath the too-distant thunders of the Gulf War—too far to hear, too vast to see the oil-lit horizon of Kuwait. The mission: Abolished. Michel’s pause—nothing rattles a surveyor who’s wandered through the jungle scars of the Congo. flickers behind his gaze, weighing the fault hidden within me.
No ripple from the unrest in Bangladesh, or the phantom hum of Parisian nerves, disturbs Michel. But something flickers, as I trace the route in stereo, despite everything. I relayed towers, treading into sunrises, with dusk dragging on our heels, spilling us through the broken nights. Threaded the latent signal like high-voltage aerial cables, stretching across terrain that refused mapping. Microwave links anchors to the last village before the Bay of Bengal. Only the braided secondary lines to distant telephone exchanges remain.
The altimeter nagged—‘did I cheat?’—though the tenant swore it had only slipped from the windowsill. I saw the reading shift by some three feet and rectified it along the recorded route. But the clinometer—I wasn’t brave. A device that came without instructions and trigonometry alone couldn’t save me. A tuft of wood on these polders—any antenna atop an obelisk appears taller at sight—and my report haunted me.
Sentient of memory’s orbit, I interfaced with the leafy canopy’s outreach into the zodiacal tree. The trunk pulses through the threads wired beneath the bark, rooted in my brain, radicals reaching to the furthest tips of my skin—a sensory aura diving suit. My brain, susceptible to interposing numbers, letters—confusing words with meaning. In another context, they evaporate—braided, stowed in a cerebral drawer—waiting for the night to reshuffle their order, returning them intact, meaning rethreaded.
I’m seeing over my teacher’s back—her hand drawing on the blackboard: a circle, a square, a triangle. Marking angles, dashed lines, connecting edges—volumes bloom to the fancy of my mind: the sphere, the cube, the pyramid. But when interrogated to names of the lines, my obstinate mind can’t recall.
With Michel before me, I needed the impulse to reach my NEC laptop, punch the formula in, check the spreadsheet cell—until the structure holds, until it balances, and until a double check, reassures me. Until the formula speaks his academic dialect with clarity and precision—where I do not have the vocabulary rolling off my lips, and silence falters me.
Michel pauses, his eyes lifting into a strange gaze, ticking. ‘This should be known?’ His voice rises. A second question, propelled shorter, sharper, eyes darting over me: ‘You ought to know for the work you're doing?’ A third—shouted—like a slap in a concrete room. The Warthog in me freezes—defense tusks raised, a sharp gaze burning through him, no longer fearing the French foreign words, but stung by the shame of a self-made man.
My Gemini in my laptop, with formulae, scaffold of thoughts—exposing how I made myself, without speaking academic language. The Gemini in him shouts—sharp, raw--while my Warthog stands its ground. The head of my Hydra’s mind had risen to the forefront, better qualified than my Gemini.
Michel’s fourth noun didn’t get a chance--he erupts, ricocheting through the deserted dining hall. His face contorts, pulled into a tantrum. He lurches forward--pressing against the edge of the table, the threshold of cracking dominance tilting him--his confined lap holding him back—until a bestial scream tears through him, before he collapses back in his seat.
The fracas doesn’t frighten me. But it scattered my disbelief, breaks my focus—keeps memory at bay, keeps me on alert. Watching. Bracing. I wouldn’t have been ready, had he struck me—But his words collapse into noise, turning away from his reflection in a broken mirror.
Michel peels himself from the table. His anger splinters through him as he stomps out, leaving the hall without looking back. In his wake past the reception, likely for the hotel’s exit--carrying my suspicion to high-ranking TRT-Philips, and vaults his rant to Cogeplan.
Thai Airline, in flight. My enthusiasm lifts into the airs from Dhaka—flying on. After a stop-over in Bangkok, I settle again into the hush of cruising altitude, adrift on a ship without anchor. I wear my exotic shirt, soft with Bali’s remembered topographic base. Besides me, my russet-toned, mottled leather creaks—holding the scent of departure. Strenuous with two laptops shared across the tray, screens raised, scrutinizing the novelties of the Toshiba’s entrails before mirrored—resting on my jeans, with the heart of a little boy and his dinky toys in the dirt. From the one laptop, I’m setting up; the other, I leave to breathe.
I couldn't know Aetheria—scattering the stepping stones, chartering the puzzle of my path toward a matchmaker’s place. While my stubbornness, my restless pulse, traced my current against the tides—distracted by the hostess approaching, in violet uniform, dainty behind a cart’s glistens under cabin lights, lined with bowls of green, gold, and gingered brown.
She leaves the last mannequin—cushioned in pink and hibiscus patterns—our floral throne in this floating temple of hospitality. The soft rustle of silk breaks the spell.
“…lamb, sir?”
I heard Jean’s mother—mother-in-law to be—echoing in memory, as I was introduced to lamb at a family diner.
Afterward, I pulled both laptops screens shut—my NEC UltraLite’s not ideal, dark liquid crystal hush, and the Toshiba, a bright backlit novelty. Folded twin of thought, I tuck the clamshells away.
I glimpse her as she leans forward, her hair—sleek, sculptural—tender over her facial profile. One hand balances a porcelain plate; the other guides silver tongs over a lacquered tray of steaming lamb, bright red and green vegetables gleaming through the mist. Her traditional red dress glows, embroidered with the gold glint, as she comes to stand before me. With ritual grace, she spreads a white tablecloth, sets my plateful meal—‘will that be it?’ her eyes ask, voicing. “May I offer you anything else?” she says after returning with a glass and miniature bottle of red wine, in a final stanza.
After coffee, the stern environment settles over me. The hostess clears my fold-out table with grace, aligned with the cabin’s silent protocol. A stern mannequin environment—no children frustrating their parents, no teenagers slipping prematurely into adulthood, no couples bustling in their midst. Only me, returning to my laptop for distraction. My paired clamshells rise again—the dark liquid-crystal, almost a relic of the past, eyesight impaired alongside the light-emitting Toshiba, continuing to copy to diskette transfer files. Then surges that floating sensation of descent.
“Can I change my destination?” I had asked with New York in mind. The reroute request echoed upward to TRT-Philips headquarters in Paris, then back down—relayed coldly through Dhaka’s office: ’Obey, or you’re a fugitive,’ came the stern, tempered voice. “Your job began in Paris. You’re expected to return home base. . .” I had been folded so deep with the teams, respecting their thoughts: ‘We have to check out your work.’ Cogeplan—that name no longer tickled the edge of my awareness.
Thai landing at Orly, Paris—after a puzzling flight skirting Scandinavia, my mind, still ruled by a stubborn planar logic, tracing straight-line coordinates over a world that bends away. The air hostess disappeared to buckle up for the landing, trailing a friendly observation: “You’ve been working for the entire flight.” Below, dawdling, dwindling: quilted fields, tufts of woods—onto the undercarriage biting of landing at Orly.
My jacket, a second skin, spared, until now from mapped sun-scorched tarmacs, ferry decks, and the interior silence of desert nights. The grain in my shirt beneath—batik or near—printed with abstract wings and botanical echoes, carrying the twilight and earthbound weight of tropical lands. Halfway into my next departure, I wish the hostess well in her silk sash, the aircraft staircase behind—still from a reel unspooling across continents.
With an adventurer's half-content—leaning toward curiosity—I shrug off the bumpy landing, unaware, or unwilling, to flinch. A quiet authority earned walking through many borders. I emerged from the terminal. A leap into a taxi. Dropped in the city’s narrow streets, outside a hotel, I didn’t choose.
An exotic beast returning from vacation, overdressed for the European conservatism of streetwear. In my pocket, two gateways—neither call loud enough: New York, distant as Francine--and on the flip side The Reise Organization, still tethered to the duty of making a living.
In the wake of Brussels—quiet, unsought—whispers like a forgotten password, a flight to Johannesburg awaits--a cul-de-sac of my origins—my two boys—their mother’s gravity I’m not ready to be pulled into. I walk Parisian streets after a deception, untethered. I have no contacts at TRT-Philips to call. And Cogeplan—discarding me, silent.
From my Parisian hotel, I dial the Belfort code, Ingrid answers—a warm place to begin again. The next morning, a walk to Gare de Lyon. “Dijon.” “Besançon.” The names flicker down the station’s display board—familiar as old companions. I remember the team of land surveyors, triangulating the edges of sense—more tactile than the blueprints slipping out of a table-wide dot matrix printer in Clerget’s offices, drafting the section for the Paris TGV.
The screen on the train table--I’m taking notes: ”Belfort, Wednesday, February 6, 1991. French floats in and out of the train cars—voices, a nod-glance language, needing no speaking. On board the train, a gravity of homecoming settles around me. Brushwood streaks past my window frame, through slow-turning wintry fields, past villages, past empty platforms—small stations flitting by in a hush pressed into the landscape. My eyes gaze, my mind waits—for the next dream to manifest, and for willpower to catch, carrying me into a career.”
Pulling up amid suburbs, I alight onto the platform, climb the stairs to the gangway over the rails, descend to the station hall. Ingrid—my elder sister—welcomes me from within a herd of people. She is that Sagittarius, punctual, accommodating, while her Sun in Rooster, preens its feathers, an eye out bowing a greeting. We egress the station, leading offside to the Audi A6. I load my bags in the station wagon, meet her, slip behind the steering wheel, reverse, and pull away, crossing Belfort city for the exurb.
Evenings, with Rico, his eyes fixed, unmoving—television flickers: the Gulf War, the Gulf War… again, again. Ingrid peeks daily at news time, no sooner turning away. Until I’m also saturated. Heavy with images I never asked to hold. I find her in the kitchen; offer her the least—in our childhood with Ilona, the eldest to work. I took their home shores, for a fee. I bought a racing bicycle. Headed off from Kyalami at dawn, as a bricklayer apprentice on construction sites in Pretoria, returning home at dusk.
Extended my offer as capable of—the plunger—chatting as she’s moves like a bee, room to room, orbiting her husband and five siblings—what’s left. Then, with them in the depth of the night, I step into one of the children’s liberated rooms, besides my luggage, in bed, thinking.
History returns a voice, a dream to exploit. They called it the queen of vans—Clerget’s Renault 4F4. To a Frenchman, and to the expert surveyor’s fleet. But from where I sat, a soda can on wheels. A thin echo chamber rattling with equipment from long asphalt stretches crisscrossing Champagne, to off-road rides, seated on a bench, toward the next topographic sections for the TGV line. Now, prepared for my next day, to call back to Belfort’s Bis Employment Agency with nothing else to promote, I fall asleep.
In the morning, in need to unwind, shorten time, with too much to spare, I walk from the Salbert, the edge of the country road down the hillside, along the railway line and past the station. Around the block, I enter the agency, and greet, after a few seasons, Nathalie Beurrier again. As she has no offers. I walk out, the rush through my veins. from week to week, my chest hollows—traitorous, flickers like a candle flame—as her charm lingers, but I had to let go quietly.
Until, from Ingrid’s kitchen window—the telephone cable, thick, and black, a permanent slicing of sky between two hiding street poles. Beneath, grace returned a small morning ritual—car wheels compromising traction on the freshly plowed village street, each driver pulled toward the gravity of work. The snow-stacked rooftops staggered down the Salbert’s piedmont, breaching the suburb like a hush broken—a seam shadowing the railway line, more discreet than the telephone cable, Switzerland in hiding, Paris, hidden still. The cold announced itself: minus fifteen-degree, the window frames my dues course, to borrow. I stand dithering, my thoughts leaning further worlds north, watching the plain beneath a white blanket stretching onward—toward the distant Vosges, where the range of mountains holds their breath.
Before Rico leaves for work, he steps back inside with a backyard reading—the mercury thermostat shaded under the eaves. “Moins huit degrés—minus eight degrees.” He says. Trailing Ingrid, I descend the flight of stairs, out into the open sky. Snow shoveling the driveway as tire tracks bruise the fresh snow, and the neighbor’s car passes by. Until my fingers were no longer there. I head inside the ground floor laundry room, beneath a spout of lukewarm water, fire surges in my hands. And, there’s nothing I can do to reverse my mistake.
As the snow blanket melts, white fingers reaching outward toward the rust-colored woods of the distant Vosges—that range still cloaks in winter. After dishing up siblings home from 12 o’clock school break, clearing the table, Rico, too, returns to the Alstom factory for tow o’clock. Ingrid gave me a rendezvous for four thirty, for us to leave too.
Driving her Fiat Uno, I drop Ingrid off at the gate to her benevolent work, facing an angle over the Belfort Station. Then I carry on—toward the Town Hall. From the parking lot, with sight across the main east-west street, forgetting the post office in stone—a reminder weighed on the scales of decision. When I bought a stamp, affixed it to the envelope containing my invoice—the record of expediting my topographic mission during the Dhaka curfew. A quiet test, to see if Michel’s altercation echoed through the channels. His rant still lurks in the back of my mind. ‘I can’t do more damage than what already breathes in the silence.’ I slot the letter into the mailbox, addressed to Cogeplan—a small overtime gesture at nudging a connection with TRT-Philips. Now I can rest my stubborn mind, crossing the street into Belfort's pedestrian mall.
I enter the travel agency. The agent is busy with an indecisive client, an Egyptian seated across her desk. I ask her—quietly, in urgency—to overlook him, who wants to return home, but couldn’t accommodate amid the Gulf War—fatigue the wallpaper of every conversation, over every cup of coffee. She doesn’t look up. I walk out. Zigzagging a chevron course to the margins, a gaze past reading signs, the promise behind each pane, checking beyond the storefront life to another travel agency.
I stroll past boutiques and brand stores, finding myself drawn through the portico, into a backstreet—across the zebras crossing, where the doors to the uninviting cinema complex stand in a sentinel wait for the evening crowds. But I backtrack. Re-enter the travel agency from before. The Egyptian is gone. The woman looks up, eyes shifting on the screen, and asks. “Is the twelfth alright?”
“Yes.” I reply.
Walking out—seventy-two hours of lee time now tethered to my return flight. The shackles begging to unlace themselves. I head past a coffee shop, to settle the awe of emerging from a cocoon that stifled me in my anxiety lodging by Ingrid.
Then across the gap of the pedestrian mall, across a trickle of passing traffic, gleams a park of undulating mounds--and in the midst of parked cars. My eyesight tracks my path to Ingrid’s Fiat Uno. Unfamiliar with the French way of life. Crossing, two approaching traffic officers. My mind, is still tipsy from my departure, drift off in its fancy after a prolonged stalemate. “Pardon—Sorry.” I say.
“Oui—Yes?” One officer says.
“Pouvez-vous m’expliquer la différence entre la ligne rouge et les lignes bleues ?—Can you explain the difference between the red line and the blue lines?” A car pulls up, veers from the lane to stall, pulling the attention of one officer. The other, his voice acrid, asks: “Où est-ce que vous vous êtes garé ?—Where did you park?”
I realized the folly of my mind—imagining itself on stage, while the officers robotic in procedures, let their gaze darts sensors, mechanically trained, ready to cuff at the mere scent of a traffic violation. Too late, I shut down the urge to repeat an earlier observation—studying the automatic parking stand. It's the past, but not for those youngsters strolling public spaces for the slightest infringement.
’Ho!’ I exclaim to myself. “Je n’ai rien fait de mal—I did nothing wrong.” My finger points across the gleaming rooftop toward the Town Hall, toward Ingrid’s Uno, parked in plain sight. “Ne vous inquiétez pas…—Don’t worry. . .” But they hesitate. Somehow reluctant to release their clutches. My innocence pending their approval. I couldn't retract the gesture—drop, attracting their attention, just as theirs pulled at mine. I reach the parking pay station. There—by the coin slot—I glance once more, seeking some understanding into the cryptic signage: a red line, a blue line. At a guess, ‘for joint parking? Or another test, coded in color.’ I drive away, into the main street, weaving behind the pedestrian mall, through the rivetted steel arches across the railway, picking up Ingrid at her office, greeting a few collaborators before heading back home to Evette-Salbert.
I’m on the train, gliding through earth's seam, gazing up at the piedmont, against the wooded Salbert, trying to locate Rico and Ingrid’s house—that window overlooking the green plains and glazed blue ponds. Thoughts drift back to my sister, Ingrid. In the gapping opening from the kitchen to the dining room, the Sagittarius in her pulls the bow—blurt, release, an arrow aimed straight at my presence: “…ce n’est pas un ménage à trois—…this is not a threesome household.”
My mind, in sight of meeting Francine, creeps at my heart. The phone rings at two in the morning, echo ricocheting through the dining room walls, saying; ‘I know you are there?’ over the ceramic floor, ‘I know you walk these floors’ Climbing to the ceiling, orbiting, searching for the doorway. I leap from bed, slew past Ingrid and Rico’s door to their room. I skid around the backrest pushed against the circular dining table’s edge, thinking: ‘Stop, stop, I’m coming. . .’ Snatch the handset, cut the rings—but knowing my sister Ingrid, she’s had hydra’s heads, eyes and ears in every room, after every child, and husband.
‘Francine! It’s past 2 am.’ My mind exhales, but my ego stood bearish. Now, thought churns. ‘Who will I find—the girl I left in New York? Striving for a career.'
Aetheria hovers in the zodiacal jungle, while I'm bushwhacking—cutting through the undergrowth of a trail overgrown across the past year. I’m backtracking, retracing steps half-swallowed by time, while she—she’s etched her path—destiny closing in.
The train pulls into Gare de Lyon, I alighted with ample time—a safe buffer in Paris for changeover and ride the train south. No need to rush; instead acclaim Air France’s colors splashing into Orly International Airport’s concourse, gliding toward gateways. Boarding the Jumbo aircraft, I settle into my seat. The hostesses resign to their seats. We taxi that slow roll before I feel my body pushed into the crease of my seat, soaring, leveling off. Cabin crew bustling, the sun keeping with us.
As we cross the Atlantic, blues arc on a slight curve along the coastlines—floating toward landing at JFK International. I walk from the boarding ramp, among travelers, pause at passport control, luggage tourniquet, out onto the driveway. I direct the taxi driver into Forest Hills. We pull up on 63rd Road—the street unchanged. The familiar double garage door blocked, to an overhead stoop door, I ring the bell, welcomed by Mrs. Pinkasove.
“Do you still have the studio?” I ask.
She nods.
I fetch my luggage from the Yellow taxi, pulling away. The sun with a slight lean—as though still in Paris time. Indoors, the key unlatches. Tammy leads me through the galley kitchen to the room. I set my luggage down. And I’m aware—her brother Michael, upstairs by the internal stairway, and their babushka mother, are wide alert. Sentient, after all, Michael is the company secretary of my corporation—Aditon Inc.
Tammy editing on my NEC UltraLite isn’t ideal—but she’s young, finding her place in the shadows, with the dark liquid crystal hush. The Toshiba, my only work space. Aetheria’s barely stirring--still, unaware her prophecy will be born at the flicker on the screens.
I emerge from the subway, walk to East 7th Street, cross Avenue A, cut through spring in Tompkins Square Park. Beyond the trees, a row of fenestrated facades rises—iron fire escape stairs and balconies scattered, punctuating a wall of apartment blocks. I follow instructions, across the trickle of traffic, and am left to find the number--a red-brick facade squeezed amid white bricks--and walk straight into the entrance.
Behind the closing door, I move through a neat, modern foyer, the air whispering echoes off the gleaming marble walls, around my passage. In the depths off to the side a flight of stairs, off the landing—cracks, a door swings back. The gaping threshold clears a dinning room, filtering a through-floor with daylight. Her enigmatic self, exquisite, neat, curated, welcoming me in her silence. Around the corner, she appears, luring me, paused in the late morning light.
I had the blast of the past coming—the Ram in her charges forward, butting heads, inmate games. And yet, the Warthog in me understands aggression—rough play is her language. Moon in Aries, Sun in Horse. She’s that mustang: mane slicing the wind, running wild across plains, breathing freedom, born of it. That wild, bipolar character, volatile as the air I breathe—fluttering my heart, creeping my veins. But behind the shield of her linear art drifts a sillage of mistrust--a beautiful feline, her voice a French musical whisper at the sight of a cat curled in a sunny winter window on a Sunday morning.
Greetings. Yet Francine’s question lingers, drifting like an icebreaker, lighter than breath, rekindling a distant familiarity. Her voice, buttered and light: “Tu as rencontré…—Did you meet. . .” A flicker--from Ingrid's kitchen window, Rue Des Source spilling downhill, modest villas pressing against swells of foliage, brushing each other like hesitant neighbors. I had carried Francine with me, weightless, half-delinquent--into that kitchen, under the quietly knowing gaze of her mother and sister, seated there, an awkward trophy at the table, a role I had no language for. I answer Francine with scraps. But it is the dangling, unspoken half of our relation that clings to me still--Aletheia haunts me. Francine does not see. I had already taken flight, cowardice clinging to my heels.
I had few words, as unease creeps in—sentient. The Persian, from Gaetano Pesche’s studio, who measures glances like currency—Francine’s colleague, also Aries. I sense the man’s jealousy spattering like a wood fire—his absence, timed and fearful of what might have passed between us, imagined. Francine steps toward the split gauze windows. Daylight frames the curiosity of her pointillist world—I remember her by that: the park’s rusty winter brushwood fading behind burgeoning greens, leaves uncurling, the sensors of curiosity tilting toward us.
Francine drifts toward the edge of the winged plate-glass sliding doors, grazing the corner of the bed, her calves brushing the duvet. She speaks with impunity--like Yael, the Leo, before Francine saw downtown philatelic rising in every tower scraping the sky. Not that I didn’t have a notion. I had looked it up, chasing the meaning through my digital dictionary flickering on screen. Francine pauses like a queen before a king-size bed, without reservation, and says: “Il est jealous de fella…” My mind smoke out her intimacy--entirely diverting my attention from what I come for.
I shake it off—a half-laugh, curt, “No, thanks.” A brush-off, reflexive. A half-laugh to steady myself--to keep from slipping into a space too weird for my equilibrium. Forgiving her--letting her be who she is--but holding back my impressions—’is your boyfriend out-of-town, or… a threesome invitation?’
However, my attention spins to my boys--to Lionel’s box of music cassettes, ferried from Johannesburg to New York, wedged in a spare corner of my suitcase. Later, again, there was no room; what I had accumulated stayed behind, left in Francine’s care. Yet a child’s bewildered gaze marked me deeply--the silent ache of being robbed of music by his father.
“Tu les as encore, mes cassettes de musique ?—Do you still have my music cassettes?” I ask. Francine’s silence denies knowledge, behind her wide, fixed eyes, her mind flashes--the ghost of recollection, topped by an old destructive tantrum. That lost, I ask. “May I have my phone?”
“Sure,” Francine whispers--her words barely clothed. I step forward, lift the cradle from the side table—a hermit’s tool to the world. Outside, the street folds around me, and only then do I realize--I left her eyes stunned. I could kick myself. My heart still hungers for her love, yet my mind thrashes against the invisible rides she vanishes behind, that bewildered gaze—'Who is he, leaving me like that?’
I’m squandering myself away, slipping down the first hatchway through the sidewalk, through the hollow of a humming city, into the underground—distant trains wheezing at my encounter, until the platform breathes open, wagon windows flickering past, my mind anchored the silent movie of an interior, my heart aching for the sparse seating. Tugging at a leash, I stay standing, unwilling to fold into a seat—keeping my body taut, holding back my mind from slipping. Through the dark tunnel’s punctuated flash stations, I listen--afraid of overriding at a moment of inattention. Until the announcement cracks: “63rd Drive–Rego Park.” I step off alone, blotting Francine--the French girl, fresh from graduation--shading her from picturing the mile of 63rd Road, when she landed in my lap--home!
I come back to where the walls remember--a converted double garage, with Tammy coming downstairs, editing my journal. I feel myself growing closer to professionalism, to publishing. A project taking shape. But she moves away from her mother, the babushka landlady upstairs. Downtown, fringing Manhattan, her address etched into my mind, fades behind a hovering gauze—Tammy, folded into a clamshell NEC UltraLite laptop, working remote, grows into a dungeon. I squabble with The Reise Organization in my mind--key for Aditon Inc., the call that never came.
As I emerge from the subway, a few portals further, I climb atop a pair of hewn, bluestone stairs. Street traffic shimmers in the glaze of the fourfold, wood-framed entrance. I push the flimsy, overused door—squeaking on spring-resisting hinges—into a welcoming echo of the 1940s. I rise along an eloquent, widespread quarter-flight of granolithic steps to the throne of a built-in walk-up desk—perched atop the apron to a derelict stage—phantoms of the past still bustling behind the counter, before draped dusty curtains. Construction rubble--heaps of limp folders slumped in the gutter, their folds losing grip, papers spilling, from their cradle brown covers shoved into the reception’s gaping window, crushed against the counter’s extremes. I turn away, yet remain impressed—staged behind the counter, the archives draping from the ceiling, the history of The Reise Organization, scattered and available—for treasure hunters, at the coulisse--dusty, yellowed, curling papers spilling from the sharp seams of wall-shelf edges, from folds, from the tattered curtains of bulging, gasping folders, squeezed tight—a monument to bygone bureaucracy,
Searching my way toward a crack in the wall, I veer right and ascend a dogleg staircase, growing up to the landing, where a blank wall hits head-on before sprawling sideways into the wings of narrowness. I borrow the right-hand corridor, without assurance I’ll find the Indian, slipping through the evanescing plain whiteness. I pass sentinels of shut doors, one door, ajar, reveals a vacated chair, in the quietness of this concrete vessel, a desk buried in stacks of folders. Across the passageway, an accountant, bent in concentration, reads columns from top to bottom, diagnosing the financial health of the company.
Where lone doorway light spills, casting blocks across my path in the dim corridor, I reach the end, with of a crack opens into a left-gaping doorway. I halt at the threshold, casting my unannounced sight on the man, Indian complexion—Avinash Vashisht, his tensile mask expressing a web of conflicts. My shadow suffices, framed in the doorway--the light reflecting my shadow, messaging--’I’m here.’ But paying silent respect to the corporation’s property manager seated behind an executive desk cluttered with folders, my silence is telling, as his eyes burning into the ink on papers on his desk pad.
There, I had once sat in the visitor’s chair, as he laid out the conditions for winning contracts to outfit fast-food outlets for the Reise Organization—and gave birth to Aditon, Inc. Now, I’m still chasing that dream.
Watching the Indian rises from his chair, he lets the backrest swing, his eyes perplexed, still pegged to a sheet of paper lying on the green-blotting desk pad. Walking around the corner of the desk, his gaze sweeps his path, darting. As he approaches the doorway, I step aside, pressing my shoulder against the wall, giving him silent passage, unseen. He veers into the corridor, distancing himself, flickering by the open doorways, crossing the stairwell’s spill of light--a silhouette vanishing in the depths of the opposite wing, leaving an air of unresolved tension behind.
Then, with a wave of déjà vu, my mind stretches back into the meeting room I recognize from before—when my case was brought before the Reise brothers. The Hydra of my mind—an eye spying from the corner ceiling—takes in the scene. I now match the attendant in the shadow, shouldering one of the Reise brothers—Avinash Vashisht.
They had been meeting with my employer, the Greek contractor--who took flight shortly after. He left a vacuum, and I moved to fill it--founding Aticon Inc., chasing Avinash Vashisht’s promise, as it echoed the words of my ex-employer, the Greek--gone home under dark clouds.
The Reise brothers had gathered to address my confrontation with Erwin Reise—a squabble after I asked the octogenarian founder to step off my construction site I was managing in Central Station. As he strolled across the tiler’s freshly laid floor tiles, squeezing the glue from their joints.
I wait, sensing Avinash Vashisht’s return is imminent. A ghost drifts; his shadow reappears, approaching at a steady pace. His mask discarded. In the face of a sentinel—me—he swerves past, toward the gaping doorway of his office, and blurts. “Not for now.” I swallow my disappointment, steadying myself against the vertiginous abyss. The evanescent corridor tapers ahead. A crack of light spills open at the stairwell. I trot down the stairs, weaving an S-shape, uncoiling through the reception area, and bluster myself into the street.
Along the avenue, heading uptown and searching to waste myself, I gaze in orbit over traffic and the wishy-washy fenestrations of buildings--their facades receding in the shade, witchy in their forgotten angle and stubborn silhouettes. Until—I arrive at the block’s intersection, bustling with traversing traffic, and stop--caught by a mirage clinging to the far offset corner of the next avenue—unaware that Aetheria’s finger, an enticing spur, has already turned my curiosity.
In a zigzag trail through a trickle of traffic, I face the sunlight gauze teasing the canyon’s right wall, eager for discovery. After weaving through the slow drift of cars, the avenue beckons—streaked with efflorescence punctuating fenestrated facades, reaching blindly into the glow. Across the canyon, the opposing facades sit on the sidewalk at siesta, snoozing under a drooping sombrero, cozy in their soft hues—alive behind a waterfall curtain of sunlight, pooling in an efflorescing sidewalk. Until I slow my pace, creeping with curiosity toward the breach—a scaffold etched in rust, a black hollow, a dark-cast plinth stretched along the curb.
Bleached inside the cast shade, the boarded construction side stands stark, while a wheel gleams into light, waxing across a rubble-heaped tray—emerging: a laborer, driving the wheelbarrow, egressing from the hollow of an open gate. Behind him, the shadows frame the stripped, naked rawness of structural concrete columns deeper inside the construction site.
The laborer’s round face, narrowed eyes, and city clothes caked in white dust click into my mind. ‘How could I compete with Chinese exploited labor?’ I blurt the question toward Aletheia, desperate to fracture the last of my illusions. In plain view: a labor-intensive industry--and the beast of my own pigheadedness laid bare to witness.
Blinking back into myself, I watch him push the wheelbarrow into the tailgate of a large industrial container—my need to relive a life left behind, still tethered to the industry my heart could never abandon. He lifts the handles, dumps the rubble in the quiet of distance, switches hands, turns around, and tugs the barrow back into the dark entrails of the site. I lean my spying eye through the gateway, framing a gleaming outline of a concrete mixer, beyond stacked air-conditioning ducts, and a narrow passage through heaps of crumbled brick—but the laborer is lost in the shadows. The rawness lingers. I weigh the sweat, the dirt, the slow burial of man's effort--threading through Aetheria’s silent weave. I catch sight of three fluttering shadows—youths sweating out their borrowed strength.
At the sight of the Pizza Hut logo—“opening soon” splashed across the hoarding--a punch hits my chest, delivered by The Riese Organization. ‘I was good at pulling them out of trouble when builders let them down,’ I murmur to Aletheia. A stroke of envy claws through me, I fall into the hollow promise of a contract. ‘The construction site should have been mine!’
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