YD6-79(MVDH) The Prophetic Machine: Helios, the Opel, and the Mirror of Aetheria
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Chapter Synopsis: Step through the fracture—where blueprints whisper omens and an Audi bears more than a nameplate. In this chapter, the geometry of power, exile, and intuition layers like a palm read in reverse: one line confirming another. As he drafts futures in cramped light and she recedes behind gestures too precise to be accidental, a showroom vision begins to gleam—KNU 778, glinting like a cipher. One acquisition. Three outcomes. A machine that speaks not in language, but in design.
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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.
YD6-79(MVDH) The Prophetic Machine: Helios, the Opel, and the Mirror of Aetheria
To Mr. Guy Duchatel, I said. “Oui—Sure!”
I follow in his wake—that slight figure in a fluttering beige suit. He veers, descending the switchback stair, descending toward the mezzanine-level niche: a tilted architectural drawing board tucked in the shadow of a corner, just beyond the sentinel of a door.
Occasionally, I’d cross a woman—glimpsed in the crack of the door. Her presence—fluid, nonchalant—came and went like the weather.
Over time, she left a trail—an echo of her presence—along the spiral staircase to the ground-floor reception hall. Crossing her, slipping in and out the front door. Her Chrysler Voyager—curb-parked or pulling in or exiting—stirred a quiet admiration. ‘It will be such a minivan,’ I thought. One I yearned to drive.
She walked with confidence, assertive, quick to engage a gaze. ‘A saleswoman,’ crossed my mind as she seemed to spring to live that sentinel of a flank door. Before Guy Duchatel unfolds the blueprint. “Can you design a hotel?” he orders.
Seated on a high stool, hunched over tracing papers. At a glance—1930s-stamped. A quiet confidence drawn from working off original blueprints, the bones of the mansion next door. I dive into the beast to tame—jostling around my brain with town planning regulation, shaping volumes, integrating private occupancies, so the streets won’t succumb to commercial desolation after nightfall.
Day after day, from the corner of my eye, the flank window seems possessed by a life of its own. Dissociated from the classic brick townhouses, the pane—wide and tall above a translucent yellow bottom rail—was grafted there to steal light from the courtyard. Only, the light behaves with chimney effect—cloaked in terracotta masonry, catching and reflecting a torquing, twisting sundial of Helios. His beam streams downward, then curls back, anchoring a convoluting mirage that arcs through the late mornings and early afternoons.
Daylight phantoms seem to breathe—possessing offices, weaseling resonance behind doors, whispers in the hush of corridors and stairways. As the receptionist has driven home, her thoughts trail the young engineer—his bones fusing in hospital after crashing his two-week-old motorbike.
Left in the lurch—a guinea pig. I can’t tell if I'm being tugged up the cliff or cascading down in demotion—from the logistics manager's desk, to the wrecked engineer’s chair in construction planning—a construction manager, or an insurance claim investigator, or the negotiator with a Flemish couple to finalize a standard house scheme—.
I fade into isolation. And the Alpha in me thrives—transforming a classic mansion into a consortium of hotel rooms and private apartments. Until Friday. Guy Duchatel’s Moon in Leo—Lion paws out the savanna—surprises me. He pays me in cash out of pocket. And beneath a soft roar, he says. “Will you return the car?”
The beast of my ego rises before me—I say nothing.
The absurd feeling. . . ‘A farce?’ Folders I’ve worked on vanish from reach—I slot the clutch-pencil into its holder and, without a qualm, detach from the project. I swivel off the stool and walk away from the drawing.
I’m heading toward that thick jungle undergrowth that seizes my mind—bushwhacking through dense vegetation, seeking the world I belong to. Since my repatriation from Bangladesh—evacuated under the looming shadow of the Gulf War—the last memory fading. Light on luggage, I descend the switchback flight of stairs. Veering from the sentinels of doors to their corridor, I step down the spiral stairs emerging in the reception hall. I cross Leo's traits—red—set against the agency’s white background, and egress into the street.
I glance back from Brussels—six weeks, flipped back: Paris, New York. But my trail’s grown into wilderness—I can't see my way back there! And yet, head, I approach the white Peugeot, at liberty to step in, tweak the ignition, and listen to the engine purr.
Though I’m baffled, conjugating priorities, ahead—unbeknownst—Aetheria wakes, an eye opening in the mirage. I drive on, into Helios’ distant golden evening glow, toward the source of the tram tracks’ silver thread, edging the distant gaping hedgerows of brick town-mansion facades. Fenestrated cracks give way—morph into windowless walls—then break, at the crack of a gateway.
In the chill of the shadows, I pull into the yard and stall the car amidst a compound of white hire fleet vehicles. Without a solution to my upcoming dilemma, I walk away from the Peugeot, toward a pair of glazed doors clearing into a fluorescent reception hall. I pull one open and approach the young male attendant behind a tradesman’s stretch counter. I hand in the keys—but I can’t imagine dating Victoria without the free rides a car provides. I ask: “Do you have a car for me?”
After a - Click Clack - of my Visa credit card through the manual imprinter, I step away from the attendant. Another set of keys at hand, I ruminate over my signature etched into the carbon slip. Pressed on by the flight of wages soon coming—and still, without income—I climb into the Opel, its glass bubble steeped in factory sillage.
I tweak the ignition key. Drive out through the gateway. The tram tracks thread their silver light toward the gaping hedgerows. I pass Team Construct’s bright storefront—shy behind my monster of an ego, I lend an inadvertent glance that alienates me from the past of the interior. The silver threads of the tram rails lead into the South Station plaza—a shade hiccuping beneath the elevated railway viaduct, then across the street, nailing the hedgerow of fenestrated facades, athwart my path.
I'm disheveled, driving with the clarity of a glass bubble—extending my freedom of movement—at a price—circling the old city along the Little Beltway. Then the Atomium’s silver bulb, nestled in the flocculent canopies. Across the city's peripheral ring, glittering traffic streams indifferent to my cause. I ride on, in a trickle, veering off into the deserted street winding into the heart of the hamlet.
It was just this morning I had driven away in the Peugeot—backing out of the shade, easing into the sun-dappled glitches cast through the old trees. Their foliage bustling for a breath of space along the open-air street—assured, as I drove out, that I would return in the evening.
In the evening I pulled up in the Peugeot at the thatched-roof house. Stop. Step out—free of a day at the office—my shoes crunching toward the majestic fir that faced the dwarfing half-gazebo of the entrance vestibule, gaping. But it wasn’t Helios’ habitual hush—the backyard stirred, drawing me close toward a figure, half consumed in a summer glare.
Jephte’s figure emerged from the half-glare, cloth-lines drooping from a furled tourniquet he had just unboxed, its pole planted into the ground. I approached. Lent a hand. He entered the phase of threading the line, bruised by the steel spider legs of a mechanical parasol web. It struck me then: Jephte has inherited the wrong body. A man—but fumbling with two left hands. His mind bent feminine-soft, fingers yarn-knitting. I grew frustrated by his illogical approach—yet somehow, we managed to unfurl the spiderweb.
We left the canopy swivel behind—destined to hang clothes and turn with the wind. Jephte pressed the kitchen door. Mariette sat at her table, a bronze in the evening light, waiting behind a cup of coffee—for company. I took a chair across from her. In Jephte quiet ritual, “Mariette’s gardener” cleared out her fridge into a trash bag, then headed off shopping on her behalf. But while we chatted, Mariette brought up Guido, again—in a hush, pressured me.
Mariette, her Moon in Taurus, spoke about her past benevolent work at a nearby hospital, and of heading to the hamlet’s church to ring the tower bell for the pastor. In the mix: her rascal, brother, August—once a foster parent to Jephte and his siblings—though that was long ago. The old woman spoke as if it were yesterday, and quiet, though Guido never existed until now.
So, as the weeks unfolded—driving the Peugeot back and forth to Team Construct by the South Station—conversations with Mariette gathered in fragments punctuated by mention of Guido. I crossed paths with Jephte on Wednesdays—his pronounced hip-rolling gait and dancing hands, also loosening his shyness. Half-shore, half-rendezvous—on the weekend, Victoria, offered a half-invitation for evening drinks on a downtown terrace. But the siblings, they ought to know. ”Guido?”—that is a tomb.
But as the month wound down into the week of Guido’s expected arrival—and the days stirred with talk of venue changes—the pressure mounted to liberate a single-bed room. Then it surged. Guido’s contact with his aunt remained elusive. It hadn’t quite sifted into my awareness that Mariette was the only survivor—and he, the only child in that branch of the Somers family.
I was only left to say: “My days lodging at the thatched-roof house are numbered.”
Still, Mariette’s lips stayed zipped. Her visitor, Guido—his father, August. And I was occupying the room. It had begun to sink in—her quiet sacrifice of her brother Frans, her silent lament. She opened his study to me, and I retreated inward, behind the flickering screen of my laptop, my fingers pianoing the keyboard.
I would never find out if Guido ever unseats himself from his maternal nest in France—because that evening, I vacate August’s room beneath the thatched-roof upstairs, from an atrium circled by sentinels of doors—ghosts of parents, and Mariette's other brother.
With my calf-bloated suitcase tugging my arm, I descend the U-turn stairs. The strap of my laptop’s executive case creeps from my shoulder, sharing clavicle space with my toiletry sausage-bag. I step out through the vestibule, past the reaching palm branches of the fir, crunching the gritty driveway, and load the Opel’s trunk.
Unsee, unhear—but sentient of Jephte—through Victoria. Though five years his junior, their twin-souls bond. She extended the invitation: an opening, indirect, to move in with him.
I return, in all fairness, a squeeze at heart—thanks, Mariette—before breathing a fresh breeze. I settle behind the Opel’s wheel, with a sigh, and reverse into the street.
I exit the hamlet on a reverse course, across the city's peripheral ring, reaching the outer communities. Clockwise around the old city, deviating from the shadow of the moat, veering outbound—weaving through southeastern quarters—until the tires patter over the cobblestones and the street wedges itself into a corner. I spin the wheel, pull into a bay, and coast to a halt.
Stepping out, I heave my luggage from the Opel’s trunk and edge toward an apartment block, its flank shared with a backyard wall—into the somber, gaping interstice, squeezing the luggage I carry. Midway down the alleyway, before the distant clearing connects to the street. I press a gateway’s buzzer that echoes in a distant room.
Jephte appears through the crack of the wooden gate, a gingerbread house unfolding behind him. He turns away, leading along the fenestrated facade and alongside a green courtyard, vanishing midway through the doorway. I catch up with him, setting straight onto stairs sweeping offside—a renovation in progress since yesteryear. I balance my step along the rising quiet void, where the handrail lingers a specter of the past.
I pose my luggage before a mansard window framing the front yard’s brick wall—an enclave opening onto a distant hedgerow of disjointed, fenestrated rear-facades: architectural shambles of saddled roofs, peeking gables, and chimney pots to the number of levels. Jephte, with few words, leaves me with the evening before me.
I turn in for the night, leaving a thought for Jephte, who hadn’t returned. Until—thumping dawn on me—my hearing drones, hovering offside, as the wooden yard gate drums under assault—beaten, and again. Victoria’s voice, intermittent through the echoes, calls. “Daddy. Open up! It’s Victoria.”
I open my eyes—moonlight pools at my feet—Aetheria's mirror cast across the floor. I raise my hand: the watch flashes. I exhale, exalting—‘Three o’clock? That woman is crazy?’
I leap from bed, at a pace, slip into my shoes, step across the attic floorboards. My hands acrobatic to a void grip, under the rooflight descend the stair’s sweep, racing against the outside—the thumping continues, wild and persistent—waking the neighborhood.
In my mind, I’m tracking her flight from home. Her blue Fiat Panda cuts across the northeastern Park Josaphat, while our communities shoulder the eastern periphery. her on-off throttle of a kangaroo ride—she sprints through deserted streets—her tightest trajectory wedges inward toward the old city, then spills outward again to the south.
I leap from the entrance door across the doorstep, clearing the muffled, “Open up!” and incessant bashing calls. I veer toward the arch gateway. Shy behind the monster of my ego, my mind mutters, ‘Patience, I’m coming.’ But the noise persisted in my approach, to reflect. ‘She’s mad.’
Then, I yank the gate. The bashing and shouting collapse into a night hush.
Victoria storms past me, rushing by the cottage windowpanes as I unlatch the gate. Pepish in her gait, she traces my steps—knowing where to go—as if bound by a pact with her Jephte. She vanishes through the crack of the doorway. I follow, catching up as she steps onto the stairs - skit, skit, skit… - her figure rising, dancing with the moonlit shadows along the steps, then flitting from sight. When I reach her, she’s undressing. Without a word, she slips beneath the single bed’s covers. After her, I climb into her open arms.
In my sleep, a noise dawns on me. My mind gropes around the mansard floor, then drops on the source by the stairs - ring, riling, riling. . . - ‘Jephte is not home—That’s not for me, or me to answer.’ Yet I perceive a threat carried beneath the tone—meant for me alone. Victoria doesn’t answer Jephte's phone. The livid caller persists—the timbre of the frequency speaks for itself.
I open my eyes—Aetheria’s mirage rests in the warmth of a mid-morning sunlight, stretching across our feet, in a shaft through the square pane of the window, reaching deep across the upper floor—almost pointing at the phone. Yet the caller, green with envy, refuses to hang up. The prophecy of the old-man—his breath on our first date six-weeks ago—had revealed itself in a flickering neon plasma: a scene in the work quarters across the corridor, inside the offices of Victoria and Marie-France. Now it forces me to lend an ear—livid. Victoria, however, seems to have known the character all along—one she’d already sensed trailing her.
Victoria leaps from beneath the sweep of the bedding in answer to my question—”Es-tu réveillé, Ma Petite—Are you awake, My Little One?” But she leapfrogs across the floorboards, swipes at the handset, and silences the ringing. She turns her back to the hatchway leading downstairs. Crouching, eyes glaring at the phone cradle perched on the side table. To assuage her deception, she musters a brutal voice. “Ja—Yes, Tonton!”
In Victoria’s hush, Tonton’s whining resonates through the receiver—running along the frequency, I read it: “What must I do with Pipo?”
She backsteps around the delicate telephone table and folds herself cross-legged—The Thinker—seated on the white armrest of the box couch. Then, her voice sharpens with frustration: “Mais. . .—But Tonton!” She throws back at him, as if echoing his own lines—‘Right your wrongs.’ She insists deliberately: “Can’t You Take Him Into Your Care?”
At the hush of the line, Victoria returns the handset. Bent under the cloak of her past, she sits awhile—shoulders rounded, bowed beneath a sinking weight—then breaks free. She lifts herself to her feet, but her steps drag—her luggage trailing as she crosses the room. Chilled, she stops at the bedside. Pauses. In a flip—desperate—she somersault, pulls the covers, climbs in, and slips along my side, stretching, molding her body into my undulations. Her gaze strokes my face, slow and rejuvenating. “J'ai envie de t'avoir à nouveau—I feel like having you again,” she says.
The summer morning birds are still chirping outside the cottage window, in the yard where a swell of creeping ivy cloaks the wall. Dressed, Victoria—seven-year-old in her frolic—crosses the cold slate downstairs, passing behind me with a flicker of lightness she once lost. As I step into the kitchen, she calls out: “Daddy, viens, allons-y—come, let’s go.”
I place the used coffee cups and saucers beside the sink, and retrieve - click - from the percolator. Victoria tracks back toward the entrance door, then veers off. She trots up the stairs and disappears, leaving me with a trailing thought. ‘Did she forget something?’ I turn the nightlatch, pull the door, and slip outside—down the doorstep, pacing in circles across the terrace.
I’m out in the alleyway, ruminating—mind circling the semi-rural ‘Path of the fox’s hole—just off a beaten trail—when Victoria catches up, her gait pepish, light across the concrete slabs. We egress onto the cobblestone street. She steps past the taillight, pauses amid the undulating roofs over the parked Opel, and eyes me. I blurt. “Ma Petite, et ta voiture—My Little One, what about your car?”
I veer the glass bubble into a miserable canyon of a narrow street, navigated by Victoria’s pointing finger. The vis-à-vis hedgerows of fenestrated brick facade—still wrapped in Nyx’s skirts—shades sealed doors, to tucked away lackadaisical households sunk in the quiet of their homes, languid, reluctant to breach the stillness of the summer weekend. Helios’ golden glow wriggles from the roofs, slips over the eaves, to wake up the street.
At a parking bay along the curb, I stall the car. We step out, following the line of basement windows that punctuate the sidewalk. In a clearing of sunlight at the distant intersection, a figure stirs the villagey corner awake—unfolding a Saturday terrace. With each table and set of chairs she arranges, her gaze shifts—glancing up the evanescent, deserted streets. She unfurls bright umbrellas, her eyes flickering, scanning for patrons: the appetizer crowd, the brunch people, the lingering lunch souls drifting into the day, toward the hush of evening.
The architecture stands strict against the surrounding community, hemmed in by terracotta ridges to warped saddled-tiled roofs—flat-decked boxed. We verge from the bright, luring terrace—cheating the traffic lenses' glaring tempo, crossing the street. At the cross-quarters, Victoria and I step into a medieval sci-fi scene—the silver-blue bow of a ship peeks out, berthing the blind street corner. Its fascia stretches outward, saccadate with our approach, spelling “Dieteren Audi Volkswagen.”
the naked corner—and again—approaching the hull of a curtain wall enclosing, sinking to a subterranean entrenched showroom. No sooner down the street, a passover bridge leads us across the cleft. Where I pause. Pull the plate-glass swing door. Victoria steps past and inside—drawn by the gleam washing the spacious, naked marble—untainted by mannequins. Only oil-slick, reflective chassis—molding undulated glaze: a four-door sedan, a station wagon, a microbus—each apart, except for a group of city vans framed along the peripheral curtain wall.
After weaving through the spatial floor, Victoria circles the four-door sedan. In the distance, a male mannequin—elegant in his suit—descends from the offside stage with a salesman’s gait and crosses the showroom, approaching. After a brief hesitation, and a few words, he leads us beneath the dealership’s cascade of brand tags. He guides us toward an enigmatic traffic ramp descending underground—overseeing a sunken workshop-showroom. Alongside, we follow a privileged sweep of wide stairs, meddling ourselves before a barrier of burlesque trade van muzzles, guarding their little sister—a charcoal Audi. He says, “six-cylinder motor.”
The densely populated showroom, tailgates against a weir of daylight pouring down the corner cleft, from which Victoria drifts away. While I remain poised before the dissuasive charcoal hue of an Audi, a heart’s desire nagging to experience its six-cylinder power. But, I stay untethered—Victoria dithering, striding back and leading us toward the upstairs showroom.
Stepping up to the silver Audi A4, after a flicker of my restraining ego—'I’ve driven Audis before—sufficient with eighteen-hundred cc.'—the salesman stands back, far from encumbering our private space, yet leads me to climb behind the steering wheels.
Victoria settles in the passenger seat. When we step out—step back—the metallic silver hue glints. Against it: a six-cylinder. . . I smile at Victoria and toss. “Which one?”
Victoria steps forward, fixated on the metallic sky-silver. “That one,” she says.
The young salesman leads us away, toward a half-dozen broad stairs flaring into a stage. Amid a welcoming lounge corner, he offers us visitors chairs at one of the three desks. We settle. Across from us, he seats himself. Papers flutter onto the desktop. Pen in hand, he begins asking questions onto completing the form—his spider-fingers planted on the page, then a deft rotation. He slides the sheet toward me, following with a ballpoint pen. I cowered behind a lifelong tangle with written words—sheltered by Victoria’s presence—to sign where the pen pointed, at the bottom of the form.
The salesman rises, pulling us to our feet—calming, possessed, dithering, slowing his flight—while gesturing a gentle wave down the stairs. He excuses himself, unsaid, ‘I have to process this document,’ but says aloud. “We’ll give the car a full service,” his eyes peeling away toward the elevator door—up to the administrative floor to begin the loan procedure.
The salesman opened a path, churning in my mind the coming week—my references at the General de Banque, where I had rushed upon my arrival in Belgium to open a bank account. Unassured, I pull the plate-glass door, Victoria steps past me into the sunlight. We cross over to a few early people occupying the open terrace before their drinks.
We step along the sidewalk toward the Opel—my touch meets the quiet obedience, the feel of a well-trained mount. Yet I’m aware: the hired car will be my ruin after the coming week.
Victoria, a dilemma in her voice: “I need to go home to Pipo.” Her urge to fetch her Fiat Panda at Jephte’s place, drive home, to a mother’s duty for her boy.
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