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

 

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

BOOK SYNOPSIS: Aetheria, in the zodiacal forest—where birds sing and leaves flutter like wings bathing in light. The symphony of the forest comes to mind. This is the cosmos’ whisper through our creatures, and in these pages, she leads me. These chapters unfold as a clarifying companion to my earlier book, The Code: Horizon of Infinity—a philosophical memoir exploring how the universe sculpted our minds. Through Aetheria, the lens of consciousness who begins to reveal herself, her presence lives in the rhythm. She seeks form—moving toward the name she will one day claim: Sunshine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ilona, where to?”

“Come…”

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1. You are welcome to read all the chapters and explore more at my website: How the Universe Sculptured Our Mind. I spend an absurd amount of time chasing expression—perhaps to shame. But the challenge is mine, updates may occur without notice, shaping the timeline, perceptions. The gift is yours: thoughts, echoes, reflections. I take them with gratitude. And you—who are you, reading these lines, stepping into my genre, my style?

2. https://sites.google.com/i-write4u2read.com/howtheuniversesculpturedourmin?usp=sharing