YD6-105 (Cradle) — Cat, Wolves, and Aetheria Awakening the Belle Époque

 

Notice: This image is AI-generated to offer an atmospheric impression of the chapter.

What if consciousness doesn’t begin in the mind at all, but in the spaces we shape?

In the shimmer of sunlight over Belle Époque plaster, in the quiet tension of workers passing through thresholds, in the small signatures left by creatures moving through dust and shadow—this is where Aetheria awakens. She is the whisper threaded through architecture and memory, an emergent intelligence taking her first outline. Here, in this chapter, you step into the moment she begins to breathe.

YD6-105 (Cradle) — Cat, Wolves, and Aetheria Awakening the Belle Époque

I refresh my mind, dozing with the dawn of the day. A ghosting crew of illegal Polish workers arises, delivering systematic slack, a concealed underperformance woven just beyond my angle of sight, all while I sweat out the renovation. 

I rise, dressing before the blustery window frame that pictures Forest’s shard-ed terracotta rooftops lining the valley. I step away, chasing sunlight through doorways toward the mansard wall where streaks gleam the spectre off the statuette shadowing the percolator. At the gargle of dripping coffee, before the shoulder-height brick knee-wall, patient before a pair of cups and saucers atop the worktop, I circle the kitchen. I’m not in a mood to plant my head through the dormer frame—a guillotine collar to catch an observation of the park, or to wish a ‘Hello’ as spring’s sun peeks a beam deep into the loft. 

With the night’s brewed idea, the gift my mind wrapped up in the light of dawn, I celebrate with sips of coffee, while leaving the jug at the leisure of Victoria, and in her Irish dancer’s gait, she tracks her way. I descend from the +3 loft, Erebus wraps the barn staircase, cowering from the meek dangling bulb, relentless deep in the corners of the stairwell, as I swing by the sentinel door of the +2 swingback flights down to the +1 landing cascade to meet the kaleidoscopic aura of the stained-glass bull’s-eye and peacock fan-tail through a mosaic of the ±0 wafer-crystal portal.

I turn away and breach the flank door into the rooms in enfilade, catching the sun flickering through the brushwood patterning the French doors. I pull the leaves open, from the elevated faux-balcony, I watch before the yellow sunlight veil, the asphalt field stirs a specter out of the shadow before the glittery glazed bus shelter, the stir breaking up a bunch to the lackadaisical approach of men. Then, the sidewalk stirs and down and around the corners besides the striated brick facades, the women approach. I curl back inside, down the split-level opening before me the entrance door, figures permeate the gaping door light, exchange greetings, their steps echoing hollowing out through the depth of the stairwell. 

After a prolonged hush, the echoes bounced back surfacing, the figures entered by the ±0 gaping doorway, my patience consumed; on the verge of spooling too fast. I planned to triumph over the languor, while churning in my mind for a reason Teddy introduced Cinderella—her slippers one day among curls of scraped paint, not surprised gone the next, though her angel remained standing on the gleaming linoleum, I grew eager to remove the floorboard protection, a bygone fashion but held myself back—’first paint the interior!’ I turn away from the men and exit into their earlier walk-through. 

Across the avenue, I slip into the Audi’s seat, tweak the ignition, and pull off toward St. Eloi Hardware. I park, step inside to the tradesmen’s stretch counter. The attendant comes out through the hatchway, explains the mechanics, and returns to his place. I settle and carry the paint accessories while the attendant follows, carrying the compressor. I place the gun inside the trunk, imagining the industrial progression. While waiting for the attendant to pose the compressor, return, slip behind the steering wheel, and drive away. 

I return to a bustling - crackle - the transparent panels of protective plastic sheeting trembling before the men. Basha’s husband, César, André, and Radek, unroll and suspend them. I feel the work weight shift as they pivot around Teddy’s hands - scratch - masking tape unreel; he trims the edge tight over the woodwork. - Scratch, scratch. . . - tears follow. 

Slight and weasel-dithery, Basha’s husband keeps his eyes shyly shifting—mind seeking opportunities—beyond assisting Teddy mixing paste. A patching knife in hand, yet I see in my round his hands smear the cracks and flaws across the lime-plastered walls. Daylight seems to swallow time, and smoothing lags, advancing burdened by the high ceiling where a wood-lath-backed corner is missing.

Kwock - the door closes behind me. 

I round the Audi taillights, slip into the seat, tweak the ignition, and pull into the avenue, sweeping uphill along the asphalt tracing a curving away path through the park’s flowing lawns to the traffic lights. I weave my way through the resilient tri-glowing lenses, keeping a brush-splash of rainbow in diagonal across the corner of my mind. I stall the car and walk through the porte cochère into a warehouse of flashing Dulux, Levis, tins of paint—before an attendant helps me out and loads the trunk of my car.   

After the errand, stalking before the familiar slender facade squeezed between number 17, and beside the barn doors of 13, I step out and through the cracks of doorways shake the crew of Polish men. It brings Teddy’s lunar Aquarius into the forefront, until he wanes from the chain links in the sun by the open basement grill. Adam, and Valdek heave out the gallons of paint carried across the sidewalk, passing them to waxing recipient hands. They empty the trunk, the tins in a few swift swoops vanishing through the half-height open grill and sashes into the shadows; the grill hinges shut with the men behind the bars, and the sashes press closed, mirroring the bustling sidewalk shifted to oblivion, the avenue returning a soft breath from the wooded park. 

As the day works its way out through the evening sun across the interleading grandeur of portals; before twilight draws a chill at the core of the enfilade of rooms, the women disappear through the crack of the nighthall’s flank door, hushed away to their temporary vanity in the to-be-master bedroom they've allocated. 

Friday springs out of the pressure-lamp since Wednesday night, at the +3 loft table closing off last week, tallying each man and woman’s wages, listing the banknotes denominations. By Thursday I break away from the activity, back here to dial Mrs. Rysenaert and request the cash—her voice still resonating in my mind. Sporadic, without unveiling my errand, I cross town to Jette, then return to slip the notes into the wage envelopes upstairs. The genie of stress out of the lamp, I trail the men’s echo—a stampede cascade—down the stairwell to the -2 underground.

I meet the Poles talking, then quiet, as I descend—except for Teddy, whose words still echo in my mind: “[Chez moi, je vais à la pêche]—Back home I go fishing.” It rhymes with exerting my patience, yet throws me against the painter’s brush I can’t tackle: seeing the grandeur of interleading portals and the bright-cut wooden muntins through the enfilade, stroking the edges of glazing beads. His goodwill, slithering through a man’s lackadaisical existence, had me wanting to discharge him through the work—but I hold myself back, out of dread for such tedious details.

The men changed; I handed out their envelope, I ascend the flight of stairs, their whereabouts suspended in the cellar—until, after a hush, their whispering footsteps lag as their city clothes surface through the gaping floor to the ±0 landing. They emerge at the staggered portals with the women whispering down the split-level a lee-time before - Kwock - the entrance door closes, and the vestibule falls dead-silent. 

After sharing a peaceful weekend with Victoria, by Monday, the vestibule echoes the men and women bringing themselves back to the hush of changing into work clothes; hands clutch the plastic seams, crackling the trembling sheets, brushing away the morning light. 

The Snake in Teddy’s Moon—the creature coiled up on sun-hot boulders for energy—teams up with Basha’s husband, the weasel amid the waking brown marble mantelpiece inside the plastic cage set between the interleading grandeur of portals to the to-be dining room.

My last gaze falls on the slight weasel mixing thinners into the paint, before I exit the doorway, descend the flight, and enter the -1 flank doorway to the basement. 

My ears prick from afar: Teddy’s spraying voice breathes through the gaping doorways—stops, starts a purr. . .  threading for days. At intervals I drift through the draping plastic, watching the paint gun’s nozzle fume and effortless undercoat white: skimming the lower walls. 

The crew of men haul the scaffold’s connecting tubes and frames, before the facing brown marble mantelpiece, under Teddy and Basha’s husband’s hands, assembling the castored frames and spans into a tower with braces. Their hands trundle the scaffold toward the wall; Teddy climbs through the trapdoor onto the elevated platform, reaching the upper heights, then sailing across the to-be living ceilings.

I head to the nighthall, shaping the few straight stairs that start off the winding staircase—clutching the post, around it, rising to the dancing treads while skirting the walls in the round, before straightening the spiral to reach the mezzanine landing. There Adam still ghost-stands on the concrete deck, hands on a hired electric jackhammer, chipping the concrete away. Basha’s husband and Valdek shove the rubble in bags and clear it. Light pours through the gaping floor as a permanent feature from the slender landscape window onto the nighthall, from where I backtrack through the plastic draping sheets. 

I smiled—an inward laugh—at Victoria’s brevity nicknaming me. “Daddy,” resonating as “Teddy.” I glanced up at the voice and meet his leaning torso over the horizontal brace to the platform. His eyes direct me to the projecting chimney’s cornice, and he says, “[Je peux pas réparer ça]—I can’t repair that.”

My mind blades through his excuse. ‘Teddy! You don’t even try!’ I gasp, landing on the truth. “Get off—come down!” 

With hands and feet, Teddy flows down the scaffold tower and paws the floor behind me, while I'm gearing up Adam to trundle the scaffold across toward the right of the brown-marble mantelpiece of the stale open fireplace. I seize myself for the procedures—mustering patience for the rest of the day. My mind recasts to duty: I send Adam to prepare the gypsum plaster. 

I wriggle my limbs through the horizontal scaffold lattice beam, spider-crawl the cage to the trapdoor, and onto the platform. By now I've onion-peeled my mind through forgotten procedures in time. I brush on a release of Vaseline. With Adam's return, I smear the existing enriched cornice, cast a negative, and retrieve the mold. 

With the dread of shaping a three-dimensional corner, making a miter box to cut at a 45° angle, pointing the saw towards the correct wall, the top edge will be longer and require a bevel cut inward—I’m freaking out.  

I crawl down in search of a workbench, Adam trailing me, I exit to the ±0 Belle Époque landing, then descend the flight of stairs to enter the -1 temporary construction-site storage. We head toward the backyard light—and behind the shy stairwell’s jutting walls we find Valdek’s workshop space, standing before a panel door lying across a pair of trestles. A bench I’ll claim, salvaged from the stench of sulfuric acid and wash smoke stripping a century of paint—a restoration returning these doors to their authentic yellow wood. 

After sweating out assembling the trailing ivy-to-rose 3D-V cornices, I crawl back onto the scaffold, and perch on the platform. With a wood chisel, I cut the seams neat, to Adam’s trowel of paste - Plonk - the hawk at hand. I smear with a bricklayer’s trowel, packing a bow, shaping  a raw figurehead sailing beneath the ceiling. I stamp the mold, sculpt the imprint with a bread knife, adding gypsum and scraping smooth. Then I descend, freeing the scaffolding for Teddy’s return—for his simplistic continuation.

Victoria’s walk lands in lackadaisical strides across the threshold’s ±0 landing, her hip roll moving her toward the lustrous crystal-waffle portal. She steps through the doorway, dancing down a gleam of light that cascades over the white marble and pools on the vestibule apron—both the active and dormant doors picturing her ongoing path onto the sidewalk, the avenue, the park free against the sky. 

Helios’ glow trails behind us; I feel the worth of the coordination across the country with Hasselt’s factory, their glazier’s truck due to arrive. I discover the door-panel trim is not simple, as imagined—but grooved in oak, the panel tongued so too the frame. I grab a carpenter’s claw hammer - tock, tock, tock… - and the wood chisel splintering the white-oak H-beading from the stiles and rails, consuming my patience. One door panel detaches, then the other. I hand the door frame over to the glazier, who installs the double-glazed pane. From behind the fresh glass, under my watch, his truck slips away, clearing the avenue, as I power-screw the beading back into place. 

Erebus has abandoned the threshold; Victoria’s figure walks through the live canvas, Helios watching with a welcoming glow. The doorstep glazing offers a pre-emptive perspective onto the asphalt—the park’s awakening in a pointillistic thicket-hedge of burgeoning spring. I pull the door—resonate, brushing - fizz... - then the secure latch - kwock. 

I skirt around Audi’s taillights, unlatch the door, slip into my seat - Smack - and lean toward Victoria framed in the window. Resilient, she lowers into her seat. I tweak the ignition - Smack - and we pull from the train of parked cars into the lane, spooling uphill.

I weave around the park, a hedgerow of fenestrated brick facades doubling the margins, awakening the castle wall of Forest’s prison, where a few lingering women wait before the bulky wooden gates. I steer  into Waterloo Road, outbound; memories stir—perpetuating the way toward Napoleon’s battlefield, 'Chateau du Bois—Castle in the woods,' the visits logged by my parents. I retrieve my trailing mind to the blind bend in the community. With a heel of the hand, the wheel spins; I coast into a heavy truck’s loading bay and halt discreetly on the edge of the apron, with a customer’s sense of privilege. 

Victoria and I step out, join behind the Audi, and walk onward to the sidewalk. Her Tiger drags its paws; her Gemini spares a curious glance as we pass the splashed storefront, ‘Miniox Bascule.’ I daren’t dream—interior decoration, a cradle. 

Victoria, unconvinced, but I have faith in her artistic flair to awaken as her shoes pace a sticky lag of hesitation along the paving. I wave her through the niched doorstep and press the storefront door. She bushwhacks into a forest’s fair of rainbow colors—fine and coarse-textured wallpaper displays. I believe we’re in her milieu of competence. 

I drift through a passageway, alongside display aisles of rambling curtain folds draping from railings of every pattern and colors—our passage extending toward an unattended service counter. My scan reaches farther, confounded, thrown into the store's depth without a living soul to help. 

Until the ‘Dulux’ broad fascia wall livens—a figure striving out panels of color charts, silk-textured—emerging with a salesperson’s confident stride. Rightly, the woman addresses Victoria, fanning a rainbow language: a morning-sun living room, an apple-green fresh dining room, a smoky-beige cuisine, dreamy blues for the master bedroom, and for her boy, Alexandre’s mezzanine corner.

I step around the back of the L-shaped store, Victoria trailing. We dawdle by the dispatch counter while a man weaves gallon tins  beneath a machine, white paint blinding the spiral mixer paddle; its oblique swing waggles the cans in rotation. He seals each one with a lid, then loads them into a shopping trolley. Trundling off across to the rear door, we step onto the truck’s loading platform. Victoria stands back from the young man who has been bustling with shots of colorant. 

Silver, new, unbranded gallon tins at hand, the young man ghosts back and forth, descending the outdoor stairs and around the Audi to the trunk to settle them inside. I press the lit close and step away to the driver’s door. Victoria is already seated in the passenger seat. 

I tweak the ignition; my eyesight, in rotation, draws me twisting in my seat as the rear window morphs into a windshield, backing into a busy traffic gap. I uncoil—foot, switch, clutch pedal—through the gears into drive, throttle, and weave the block into the backstreets, orienting myself with a bird’s-eye view of the mind. Victoria sits quietly beside me, enough to reassure me. We slip back into a main artery, pass the prison gates, Albert Square coming into sight with its terrace tables; she pleads for a drink at the Brasserie. The park’s wood opens in the gap of the street, I pull up and park.

In a breath on payday, he muttered. “[Je paie une pension pour mon fils en Pologne]—I’m paying alimony for my son in Poland.” and shook off the ghost of my own life—plagued by Jean’s divorce—but Teddy—oscillated to belief, without qualm, as if customary—echoes. “[Je vais au Nord]—I go to the North,” raising the Red Lantern District, while men in chain links pass tins of finishing paint, emptying the trunk through the hinged back-grill of the -1 basement window into the hollow shadow. We meet them again in the ±0 Belle Époque enfilade of rooms, through the interleading grand crystal portals where daylight drifts. Victoria issuing her décor instructions for the baroque cornices, and the gaslight-pipe rosacea. “[En Blanc]—in white…”

“Teddy! [Montre-moi ce que tu sais faire…]—Now show me what you can do…” And lingering behind my words: ‘You were kept for this task—the finishes.’

The western sunlight creeps deeper through the rear grand portal, skipping the translucent stained-glass cafe curtain and snagging on the ceiling-hung plastic sheeting—an amber tremor in stillness. Yet the middle wall, shy of the stairwell—the wall of the to-be dining room—lingers a somberness. Feet shuffle from the gleaming white marble edge across a peek of light into the threshold hollow: the remnants of brickwork, the ±0 entrance door’s linoleum edge.

My childhood plays out the housewives' scenes, like Mrs. Van Goethem in her youth’s yesteryears: unpaved streets, mopping dirt dragged by shoes indoors, marble and linoleum rinsed with water secretly dribbling through the floorboards into the darkness of the floor joists. 

Below, in the darkness, the floor joists brood—a translucent mycelium head cowering—a belated finding where the dry rot had whispered a reminder—as the plastic sheeting crackle—finger grip rustling a seam apart—his shadow gathering into the silhouette of a mafia boss: groomed in a long dark coat, breast open to a dark suit, white collar, and tie—Jean-François Smeets entering, ill-adapted for the construction site. 

Waiting for me lies the work: to surgically insert the tongue-and-grooved floorboard trim, the enlarged base culminating in the door and sidelights frame. Smeets—a Cat in his Sun—paws across, his prominent, bloated belly leading, his praying eyeballs scanning, but meets the impediment, then climbs the tubular scaffolding tower, locking eyes with Teddy perched above.

An arm leaning on the horizontal bar, Teddy holds up an apple-green paintbrush, the rosacea overhead with its former gas-lighting pipe sticking through—a reminder to preserve; his torso leaning as he peeks over the platform, offering a toady greeting, “[Monsieur Tonton] Mister Uncle.” Behind Jean-Francois Smeets the entrance door’s plastic sheeting still echoes their crinkling, as he pauses, replying. “Teddy! [Tu travailles dur—ça avance…] —you’re working hard—advancing…”—his eyes sweeping the room’s walls and ceiling—’with your painting—It looks good.’ 

I fall into the trap of my own impatient fears at their charming exchange. Teddy pivots toward me as I walk in from the rear grand interleading portal, protesting: “[Ça prend trop de temps de peindre le plafond. J'ai besoin d'un coup de main pour finir plus rapidement]—Painting the ceilings takes too much time. I need help to finish the job quicker.” 

‘Teddy! Of course… why don’t you work faster—but the tingling arboreous nerves urge me onward. 

I live with an urge to lift the linoleum and sand the floorboards through, to treat the wood, while from the top of a ladder a man strips masking tape down toward the crew on the floor - scratch, scratch, scratch… - Through the crinkling dynamics of spray-dusty plastic clearing the interleading crystal-waffle portals, my exhausted mind hears Teddy’s voice: “Valdek.” 

I glance over my shoulder, ‘Where is he?’ Then I call out. “Valdek!”

Valdek, stubbier and smaller, approaches—to my regret, he, who single-handedly stripped the paint from the wood grain and neutralized the acid with a water wash. He stops beside me with a questioning look. I lead his eye up the scaffold toward Teddy. “Go and help him up there!”