YD6-97(3-Materne)—The Vulture’s Gaze: Torn Between Two Lovers a Worming Breach
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Epigraph: Under Helios’ breath, the courtyard walls crawl with shade. Between the Vulture’s surveillance and Victoria’s call, the narrator slips from fluorescent captivity into a highway of molten light. At two hundred and ten kilometers an hour, the glass bubble becomes both cockpit and confessional—love and velocity fusing in a single breath of rebellion, through the golden barrel vault where reason dissolves into pure motion.
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.
YD6-97(3-Materne)—The Vulture’s Gaze: Torn Between Two Lovers a Worming Breach
Dawning on me, Helios crosses over my shoulders with his changing breath, shade crawling along the courtyard walls around me. Blessed, I don’t feel imprisoned as I sit before Materne’s Bill of Quantities, delving into the item specifying “Excavation elsewhere.”
In the eyes of my mind, a bleached path stretches through the construction site where bulldozers scrape the earth and scattered figures alter positions—I’ve been there—laying out a construction site: an assistant holding a gauging rod, facing signals from the landscape surveyor behind a tripod-mounted theodolite, jotting down co-coordinates and levels in a pocketbook.
In a glitch, distant modular site cabins settle by the wayside, from behind which a foreman emerges, approaching across the terrain along the backfill of the concrete pipes, leaving exposed holes in the ground—the storm sewer system agape, ghosting a manhole cover between batter boards stringing the underground manholes.
In another glitch, my mind flips to the scene of a ready-mix concrete truck backing in, its drum tumbling. The driver-operator pauses, swivels the discharge shut, pouring a minute among a few workmen with shovels shaping a base slab—then moves on to the next hole in the ground, pouring, moving on, the aligned holes punctuating down the evanescent road.
The foreman is nowhere to be seen, save for the bricklayer, standing on the settled concrete base, with an assistant above, feeding mortar and packing bricks. The bricklayer spent his mornings, after lunch until the evening—laying header and stretcher courses around the gaping concrete pipe—turning onto himself, squaring walls out the hole, to the surface—only to begin another one further up the road, along heavy truck traffic. He’ll return to screed the benching at the bottom, plaster the walls smooth.
Immersed in the rhythm of the artisan and assistant, churning through a sheer number of items cascading in endless variations—dissimilar manholes galore. The flipping of pages slows to a snail’s pace, bogging me down on the page; my sight blurs as my mind relapses into intoxicated calculus.
Days drop off into an abyss. At an eye flinch, I gaze up from my Toshiba laptop, the scrapbook beside it. Offside, I catch the bust of the secretary—her silhouette a shadow behind her glazed corner office.
Her lost soul, who once gave me directions for my interview—an ambush from behind a swell of leafy bush to a weathered road sign, ‘Jumet industrial zone.’ She sits poised at the forefront of a maze of partitions that scatter into an empty warehouse, wrapping back abreast me across the corridor.
I catch from my interviewer—the Chief Executive Officer—a shears-eyed glance dropping to his desk; his shifty mind puzzles me. ‘Is he checking if I'm productive?’
Eli Godard, returning from his site meetings, sets down his folder and keys on the corner of our butted island of blueprint tables, drops a casual few words, and sits across from me, delving into his open file. On a wimp, I sense a leisurely air oozing out of the diligent Virgo—but when I glance up, he’s vanished.
I snap back to five o’clock, recollecting his figure as it swipes past the secretary's bust behind the glaze sill—gone—yet through the corridor, Eli Godard leaves me with a glimpse of Mr. Vulture's gaze.
Lampedia’s chill cloaks my shoulders—Aetheria’s means of fluttering my conscience of neglecting Victoria.
The phone rings, breaking the hush of the evening; my gaze checks upward to the dark glass roof, where Helios left me in a fluorescent box. My eyes fall back onto the workplace, a flush running through my mind: ‘Nobody rings me!—that’s for someone else.’ Yet by its persistent ringing, I lift the handset.
“Daddy! [Quand es-que tu rentres ?]—When are you coming home?” Victoria’s voice excels in my ear.
I glance at my wristwatch—‘seven o’clock!’—and as I hang up, silence floods the room. In a single reflection through the glaze across the adjacent corridor partitions of the somber office, I catch the CEO’s peering gaze—alive with his innate Libra—‘I’m in control of the switchboard; I’m not going to let her distract you—get on with the tender!’
But Victoria’s echo lingers in my mind—”Il a raccroché trois fois…]—He hung up three times on me!”
I’m stealing the next item out the Bill of Quantities, but my volition is compromised. I slap down the laptop screen, tuck in Rico’s executive suitcase, and—on a time trial—sweep through the corridor, past the estranged CEO—down a few stairs to the lower apron; a door leaf opens into the night.
Lampetia perches on my Audi. I settle in, tweak the ignition, shift gears, spin the steering back and forth, and drive off into the blurred shades of lamppost light—out of the industrial zone toward the white glow clouding the thoroughfare's onramp.
Lingering since the dawn of twilight, with the thoroughfare before me, a promise hums as now the headlights hollow out the darkness—uneasy with myself before the dials that glow like a miniature casino city in the distance. I’ve already compromised the perpetual waking-up lanes to my hypnotic fatigue; my decisive self-control snaps at 130 km/h, convincing myself—‘Only a notch, 140… the threshold of cheating.‘
The horizon burns its field-fire, spooling, reeling me in—again. I’m feathering the throttle, seeming to raise a tailwind, without taking the last breath out the pistons, with the rev-counter’s needle twitching over the top, heading into the yellow field-fire over the horizon.
Until I land into the worming glow and thwart Paris through the slip road, catching a doubling of lanes along the highway for flashing overhead gantry board Brussels. A loop plays out faster by the day, catching up the thread of Victoria's call; I’m damned, under Mr. Vulture’s surveyance—’I’ve earned my break.’
The luminescent yellow cloud perpetuates my way, worming ahead, until the conglomeration rises beyond the woods, where the interchange dissipates its roads into the night and calling my venue. I shun lanes leaning toward the off-ramp to face at the bottom the traversing roadway, weaving my way out the valley, and pulling up in Dr. Decroly Avenue by the lamppost shining onto the bay window; the entrance door couldn’t open soon enough; on tiptoes I close it, the hallway door following. As I creep through the interleading portal, angelic Victoria rises in the street-light shadows—I cringe. ‘Oh no!’
Daylight flushes across the ceiling—I wink onto a new world. Rolling to straddle across Victoria, descend the mezzanine ladder to the carpet underfoot, and dress. I slip from the apartment, as she awakes, into the street, saddle the Audi, weave out the suburbs, and converge with the herd—among panel vans of early tradesmen. Paris flashes atop the gantry signboards until I shun the lanes for Charleroi, curl beneath the interchange, the river vanishing besides me.
In the headwind my glass bubble keeps shooting—circling a void. Victoria fades behind me, a stillness I no longer touch. My driving delight volatilizes in a meager trickle of traffic—chasing the same sunrise—Helios spilling his cloak into the somber coal dust of Charleroi, overwhelming me in a trickling glare. I flash my headlights, tailing lagging cars, shriveling drivers out of their wits, overtaking—desperate for the next sign—until ‘Jumet,’ where I escape through the interchange into the industrial zone.
I pull up at the office. Under the watchful eye of Mr. Vulture, and coming around to settle, I bend over the Bill of Quantities—costing, converging mind and motions, boggling workmen’s breath, tethering tools and materials, the quantities into sums of francs.
As Eli Godard flits by—a last breath of survival for the company, the contract, the illusion—he takes the sunlight with him. Fluorescent light dawns over me, waking the fatigue. By the fourth evening; instead of answering Victoria's phone call, I’m dumbfounded by my employer's spying eyes—shifty, unaware he’s caught in the corner of my gaze, a sly withdrawal. Wrath stirs, yet obsession tethers; relationships fade, and my career, in incessant derailment, bends to the whims of Mr. Vulture—who obliterates my reason to care for the work.
I count down the hours, the days until the tender opening. Fatigue blotches reasoning; veins of thought stream traffic through the fog of my mind—road signs flashing numbers, item description, quantities. I rifle through a wave of outstanding pages, the latter bringing brief relief as tenders arrive from sub-contractors—splitting my brain, schedule in comparison, inclusions versus exclusions—reduce to a mere filling of blanks.
Eli Godard, returning from his site meetings, sits across from me—the diligent Virgo’s composure oozing leisure—and then vanishes.
My mind drifts, escapes for a distraction, recollecting his figure as it swipes through the adjacent corridor—the secretary's window, a bust of shadow in the maze of vacant offices—gone.
Lampedia’s chill cloaked my shoulders—conscience divides me. Just as I’m about to leave, a persistent ring rushes into my silent world. My hand reaches for the handset.
Mr. CEO’s innate Libra peer seemed to whisper: ‘I’m in control of the switchboard!—be swift.’
“Ma Petite!” I plead: [J’ai encore tellement á faire]—I still have so much work to get through!” But Victoria holds me online, while Mr. Vulture’s eyes circle my head. She relinquishes. I hang up.
Yet the night breeze leaves me hollow: ‘I’ve lost her,’ her solitude echoes through my mind.
Rattled, I rise from my chair, slap the Toshiba lid closed, and pack the briefcase. My mind’s numb; fatigue has collapsed beneath my willpower. I hit the thoroughfare—driving on autopilot. I shake my foggy brain, pulling myself back from flooring the throttle. ‘That’s not reckless driving,’ I tell myself with a buffer under the throttle pedal.
Over the past few days, the speed spools from a reasonable 150 Km/h to 170… as my volition wrestles with my consciousness. My glass bubble launches through luminescent clouds hovering over interchanges—bridges and underpasses dispersing into the countryside, evanescing into the hush of distant villages, where paired taillights are stalled for the night—until the horizon burns with yellow field-fires again.
The Renaissance streets recede, giving way to a gritty hedgerow of 1970s fenestrated brick facades, dead still—blinds drawn, the city itself blind across the blind marches of Forest and Uccle. I finally stall the car in Dr. Decroly Avenue, sweep past the latch gate and close it behind me. I step through the entrance, lean down the hall toward the apartment.
In the slant of the streetlight, Victoria rises from her perch in shadow—she accosts with an angry stride, her voice blasting: “[Comment ose-t-il… Ton patron m'a raccroché au nez]-—How dare… Your boss hung up on me!”
In a glitch of sight, the CEO’s scavenger eye darts away yet leaves me a clue—his hand creeping afar the phone’s handset onto the cradle; ‘That’s when he hung up Victoria's call,’ slushes across my mind.
I shrug my shoulders, eyebrows raised: “[Ma Petite… ]—My Little one, I guess so.”
In the crispy morning, I step into the Audi, tweak the ignition, and drive away, creeping the curb around the corner southward through the sleepy streets of Uccle, down toward the valley of Forest—workers trickling from doorways onto the sidewalks. Then veering, clearing the suburb, I pass the big-box stores—Home Improvement, Furniture-Home Goods, Discount Warehouse—on either side of a wide open-air green median, until, before the underpass, where the GB supermarket, Auto5, Bricocenter cluster, I break through the shadow to borrow the on-ramp to the highway.
Earning myself a leisurely drive along the highway with workmen in panel vans—shunting on and off the highway lanes—I set my mental speed controller at the flashing 120. So far, so good. Already, in case I do cheat, I allow a pre-emptive five-kilometer-per-hour tolerance, keeping watch on the needle of the dashboard dial. The dark haze lifts from the landscape sprawling around me as the sun raises its first rays through the thick bushy median—another world from the one I left a few hours earlier, heading home. I shun the pull of Paris, for Charleroi uncoils underneath the bridge, the river still dark as I head into the glowing sky.
I leave in my wake an inseparable cosmic streaming through the air; Jeffrey Osborne's voice echoes the main chorus of ‘On the Wings of Love,' the melody hushed the reality of the route—’You are the sunshine, That lights my heart within'—but my mind has other ideas, a phantom rhyme of 'love with time,' as the route unfolds under the hissing wheels of my glass bubble.
Until I pull up at the office, losing the melody as I sweep my way out the car, through the glazed corridor. My Gemini pushes back in the coulisse of volition, but the genie of my Warthog rises to the forefront—heart dark as hell—to burst wrath on the Vulture, the Libra man, after Victoria's revelation of my homecoming. At the doorway I U-return through the anteroom to the bright bay of the glass-roofed office. Placing my Toshiba at the pair of butted desks, I let the sunlight serve as a mind booster. But, in an eye-glimpse, I find a contrail—a sillage of intent—catching the CEO’s scent emanating from the pages of my scrapbook and the Bill of Quantities I left behind last night.
Daylight dims into the afternoon chill arriving too early, followed by Eli Godard returning from the construction site. He sits at the opposite table. We befriend as he prepares his site report. With a pen, I slit open the envelopes, pulling out sub-contractors’ tenders—too few a darling to open with a cascade of unit prices; others, lump-sum bids, enshrined corpses in clauses of inclusions and exclusions amid the technical jargon.
When I glance again. Eli had vanished—he had swept the secretary's living bust from the mazy glaze. Sentient of Victoria's consciousness descending in the atmosphere, I soften my attitude, withdrawing from my preoccupation to reason. 'She deserves a moment of attention.' I glance over my right shoulder to catch a glimpse—and, to my surprise, abreast of me, the warding-off, spying CEO’s eyes have vanished too.
In the evening chill, the phone didn’t ring, yet in my head the ringing went on. I unfolded a plumber’s submission and, preparing to break away, dug into the hangar’s steel structure and the shelter's cladding autopsy, growing lonelier in the hush.
In a swirl, I rise from my chair—now chasing the thread across Wallonia Flanders, rooting into Brussels' southeastern community toward Victoria’s phone call that never came. From a bird's-eye view, I retreat, slap my laptop screen shut, duck to Rico’s executive suitcase, tuck it in, raise the grip, swing my hips around the pointed corner of the island of tables—a steeplechase over the heads no longer there, cut the anteroom corner, out into the corridor—on a time trial I didn't see forthcoming, though long in the making, through the maze of empty offices, even in the absence of the crouching Mr. Vulture, lost in the shadows of his desk—jobs at stake.
Beyond the walk-down, at the pair of wooden doors, I grab the lever and open to the dead of the night. Drawing to latch behind me, while an eye-leap to my Audi gleaning—a romance neglected—amid industrial shelters’ half-wake of shadowing winks, crouched in the hush of punctuated lamppost glows, off-angle wavering lights and shadows blurring my way ahead.
In seeming kangaroo jumps—I rush through catching-up strides, slip into the driver’s seat, drop into sequence: a tweak of the ignition, headlights flaring on the brick facade, gear shift pulled back, heel of my hand spinning the wheel—the beams dissolve into the flowing asphalt. Spooling my glass bubble through an alley of light spills and meddling shadows, I flounder toward peace as the road unwinds me from the industrious chaos of the day.
As shades swipe through a spill of light inside my glass bubble, the margins outside sleek away from chaotic, tethering shadows—waving, folding, then lying dark. Yet bright, mounting ahead as a white hollowing cloud through Nyx’s skirt. I drive, curling through the underpass, skipping the luminous cloud over the on-ramp; my headlights cave through the thoroughfare’s lanes, awakening distant, scrambling village lights long settled for the night.
At length a lagging feeling mounts—falling behind the beams streaming the lanes. The dashboard mirrors distant city-lights beneath my sight, reasoning: ‘My foot isn’t flooring—so I'm not reckless driving!’ Interchanges wink otherwise their white luminescent cloud, flashing my glass bubble aglow—an awakening call flushing back into the rush.
Into the abyss of darkness, the rev-counter sits at five thousand, yet the engine doesn’t scream—I wanted to believe. Settled deep in the crotch of my seat, fingertips resting on the wheel, one elbow on the sill, my other forearm on my thigh. I reach the take-off strip to fly alone across a cosmic map—heart adrift in the surreal, gaze lost on the wasted roadway—deserted.
I’m a dream in the horizon's field-fire mounting in amplitude while crawling at a snail’s pace, flushing out pointers that promise escape—rhymes to mind “Paris” on the repetitive signboards. My mind doesn’t think; ‘the end of the thoroughfare is splitting up!’
Pre-emptive consciousness transcends through the voice of Hervé Vilard’s heartbreak—“Capri, C'est Fini.”
My mind corrupts the phantom lyrics with my own geography of pain: “Paris c'est fini, et dire que j'ai cru que c'était pour la vie! Paris, it’s over—don’t think I will return there one day…”
I drop back to the asphalt, flashing under the gantry signboard, ‘Brussels-Paris,’ warning myself: ‘You're going too fast to engage the slip road that’s coming!’—but I don’t react.
I’m stiffening in my seat, hands pressing on the steering wheel, weighing the curve ahead—but it's too late to rein in the unreeling speed. My glass bubble aflame with luminescence from diving into the plasmatic yellow cloud—a midway threshold risen every night athwart my path. I feel the grip of the tires through the bifurcation bend, merging with the Paris highway, the lanes streaming past in numbers, through the worm vanishing in the distant haze.
Alone, my mind leans on the accelerator, hitting the deserted highway, I pilot with ease, sense lost to speed, taxiing along perpetual lanes that open into a semi-circular tunnel, an open landing strip, carrying me in a whistling sigh through the air, hushing the pistons’ roar to a purr. The revs climb, the needle leaning toward the red—she’s my everything; driving her, through that floating sensation, the interminable descent of an aircraft after a long flight, awaiting touchdown.
Steadfast—ten kilometers before the notch, the needle overswinging as the night before, and one before that—the median’s massive masts, planted behind the concrete guardrail, are hurled toward me from the midst of the wild leafy hedge swells, spilling an unbroken flood of light. Then the gantry sign flicks over the top of the windshield: “Brussels.” My foot twitches toward full throttle but triggers a red warning strobing in my head—’that’s suicidal!’
The throttle rests beneath my foot, but I shifted for the middle lane—a precaution, as the mechanic who replaced the tires had warned. “[La garantie du fabricant est limitée…]—The manufacturer guarantee is limited to hundred-eighty kilometers an hour.”
But I trust the tire’s engineered safety margin higher, keeping a distance from the verges, the scene before me accelerated, except my brain lags behind the steadfast 210 km/h, the engine purring at six thousand rev.
From behind the woods herding the road’s shoulder, the city’s outskirt conglomerate rises out of the valley, the highway perpetuating its lanes—the gaping off-ramp coming up—and land without brakes, pressing harder, and harder on the pedal until vertigo sinks in, shaking me out my wits. My glass bubble trembles in a frightful vibration: beneath the door sills, the rubber treads scratch and bite the asphalt, catching grip.
In the bluster, carton boxes lunge toward me—the Auto5 besides the GB supermarket. The car obeys, the tempest settles, the green median of the traversing parkway reverences before me, to crawl the curb, engage the parkway toward the hillside suburbs.
Weaving home, to a lack of a gap in the chain of cars wrapped under a film of dew. I stall the car, track back to the apartment. Victoria sleeps among the floor of bright plastic-packed crates—bifurcating trails to the kitchen, and through the portal, to the streetfront bedroom.
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