What if home isn’t decorated—but engineered by a higher longing?

A father's death shatters a Sunday. But the crisis is programmed into the walls.

Feel the silence and secrecy of the Marrano lineage; the guarded postures that still remember fire and expulsion. Watch the Electra bond hemorrhaging tension against the dark. 

Every shadow, every door, every piece of bric-a-brac is an Imprint—clues that the architecture itself is revealing fate.

The Crystal Portal Awaits. 

BOOK SYNOPSIS: 

Aetheria moves through the zodiacal forest—where birds sing and leaves flutter like wings bathing in light. The forest is a symphony, the cosmos whispering through its creatures. These chapters follow her presence as she guides me, a clarifying companion to my earlier book, The Code: Horizon of Infinity, a philosophical memoir on how the universe sculpted our minds. 

Through Aetheria—the lens of consciousness—her rhythm emerges. She seeks form. She gathers light. She moves toward the name she will one day claim: Sunshine.

YD6-106 (Cradle)—Nestling in Father's Death, Hemorrhaging of the Electra Complex to Aetheria's Imprint

The midmorning autumn brood swallows Helios’ glow, keeping its golden rays from reaching out to a western sky, as Victoria rises, dressing before the blustery paint of the rotted window sashes. She rummages onward, her feathers around the King-size bedstead, bustling to the coffee percolator and biting a sandwich, nurturing the Tiger of her mind to roam as a Sunday without a shadow in the valley, lackadaisical, unfolds the calendar page of September 19, 1993—a telling in a waking city hush. 

As daylight ousts the night from the dormer room, the garden folding-chair’s slats dig through my flesh grazing my pelvic bone—a lizard's patience for sunlight. I lean over the original 1912 blueprints—the mysteries of an aural thread knotted to, father’s date of birth. I sketched on the tracing-paper overlay the ±0 Belle Époque central room in tandem with the stairwell. Governed by the life of light in my design to a kitchen dwarfed beside the grandeur of glittering wafer-crystal portals opens to the rooms in enfilade, enticing Victoria into a culinary freestyle, participating in chat with her guests. with a clutch-pencil, and a ruler, by the module of plywood boards nestling in kitchen units—when, restless on a corner of the table - ring, ring, ring - Victoria, from behind me, with a receptionist efficiency, seizes the handset and breaks to a hush. 

She hands the phone over to me, raising me to exclaim to myself, ‘No one calls me!’ From a thoughtful breeze to my cold knuckles pressed to my cheek, I lazily answer with distance. “Hello.” My heart thumps in my chest—the inadvertent call flipping the 3D kitchen-cabinets sketch in my mind blanc. 

Ilona’s indulgent voice raises suspicion. She says, “De P’pa! [is dood]—is dead.” With a fist-tight squeeze of my heart, echoes her 1986 call dawn on me—out of nowhere to my New York home phone, as though yesterday—her nightmarish utter surprise: Ines’ suicide with her three children, after her husband, among patrolling policemen, died in a night ambush.

Ilona’s vocal timbre, never before heard, echoed a sadness out of that private sister, hemorrhaging a tension of her Electra bond and pressing upon me—‘This is your father too!’ But Libra in her Moon, in symbiosis with her Goat in Sun, projects her heart’s cries: ‘P’pa—why did you leave me!’

After a hush, Ilona’s sorrows wash over me, saying, “[Hij is net gevallen in de keuken]—He just collapsed in the kitchen—It was eleven o’clock—he probably died right away.” She exhausts her silence and hangs up. Victoria isn’t immune to the aura emanating from the phone line—her silent embrace of concern over my shoulders: ‘What’s happening?’

The monster of my ego before me, I say, “[Mon père est mort]—My father died.”

As Victoria’s sympathy weighs, I stand up from the chair, slip from underneath her embracing arms, and head toward the doorway to the landing—before facing the dark barn staircase that cascades into the darkness. Nowhere do I find an exit to pause. I concede to Victoria, step back along the bed, and, coiling with a twist, sink onto the soft edge before her. My sullen torso weighs, leaning forward, elbows on my lap as my hands cup my head. ‘Why?’ as I feel the vacuum he left behind. 

The Oedipus in me, since asking: “P’pa!—Why…” as I hung on his pants, interrupting a discussion with our neighbor of the villa perched on a flow front of lava, felt his hand strike my face. However young the Warthog in me—memory unforgiving—I turned away, walked out my stubbornness, heading back for our big corner house in perpetuity under construction. Never did I forgive De P’pa’s authoritarian Capricorn. 

My feelings thrown into chaos between De P’pa’s void and Ilona’s grief as I can’t hold back streaming tears—confused by De P’pa’s feather-stroke my heart and Ilona's distraught, grieving voice. In the hush, Victoria stands poised before me—helpless, yet intuitively grasping the gravity—her own abyss wrenched open, losing a father at the tender age of seven, still sheltered behind a warrior's comic shield. 

I stand up to Victoria’s saddened, questioning eyes. ‘Are you alright?’ Staunch, without pity for myself, yet careful not to jar her, I say, “[Je me sens bien maintenant]—I’m alright now.” She watches me like a paraplegic’s walk—her tacky sidesteps, her tentative leads—as she lends her fingers to the door lever, at the pace of the leaf swinging step to the +3 niche landing. I latch up behind, the keys jingling in hand. 

Before me, she sinks into the descent of the barn staircase, into the darkness of the stairwell, lending me her protective third eye from the back of her head; to exasperation, she relents under the meek danging bulb keeping Erebus cowering in the corners. Through the +2 swingback flight, the interim landing to the +1 swingback, the mezzanine landing, we descend toward the crystal mosaic portal glowing across the vestibule with the day’s streetscape. 

We reach the Audi and split up. I slip into the seat, leaning over the console and pulling the doorsill’s knob; resilient before the avenue, I tweak the ignition as Victoria lowers into her seat. Spinning the steering wheel, by her direction, we U-turn across the field of asphalt, sweeping away the park’s leafy hedgerow toward the bird’s-eye view of the sheer, bulbous dome of the Palais de Justice rising, a temple-shaped craggy rock hovering over the low-lying Marolles folding back into its narrow cobbled village streets.

Upon arrival, in the traffic hush of people along the sidewalks, Victoria stops navigating the Bohemian quarters—her eyes catching the flea market square, expecting to find her brother, Jephte, in the midst of stalls flowing a bric-a-brac to the paving feathering shadows in the breeze. At sight of a street block razed to the ground, where cars shimmer angled about, I follow suit; pulling into a meshed fence opening onto a field ghosting demolished workmen’s brick townhouses. Amid scattered cars, I halt, and we step out—skeptical about abandoning the Audi—in the tracks where people-phantoms and wheel ruts lead back toward the cobblestone street. 

Victoria heads along, alongside the bustling square, with folks threading between dashed tents and flimsy stalls whose bric-a-brac sprawls across people’s feet. Ahead, apart from the waking mid-modernity architectural arcade stance to a block staggering a view over the square—notched out peripheral hedgerows of fenestrated brick façades, populating through the blind corners—Victoria leads toward a white-stone quoin supporting a few floors of fluted windows, their jambs and red brick walls spandrel overscored: “[De Skieven Architek]—The Awry Architect.” 

Victoria’s hand reaches for the door, pressing the freshened, ancient, wood-framed glazed leaf to swim on its worn, flimsy hinges as she steps into the assured, pride-steeped world that Jephte patronizes—I wander in her wake, wondering where she has brought me. She heads across the entrance apron into a newsagency, glances over the vestibule of newspapers toward the glossy figures of shelved display magazines, and ascends through the panel balustrade a hatch to the split-level barn platform. Warm bread wafts through a lingering coffee aroma, besides a cluster of reed-angled baskets speaking for themselves as the buffet—swelling with croissants and chocolate rolls. The T-cross-leg passage guides us away from the ongoing aisle of a galley kitchen, where a young woman stands in profile, her hands bustling over some quiet preparation at a raw-wood counter spanning into the depth before the shimmer of a stainless-steel oven.

Victoria asks me. “[Que vas-tu prendre…]—What you’re going to have…” 

I drop a thought, ‘It's not breakfast—this is brunch,’ and the young, nimble woman responds to the emanating echo of customers lost in their hesitation, saying, “[Un serveur viendra prendre votre commande]—A waiter will come to your table and take the order.” 

Victoria heads on, after an off-side glance of choice toward the winged dining hall under a gutted interior, opening into the raw woods of a pitched roof’s hollow forest of trusses. We step alongside vacant commune tavern tables—merchants from the flea market taking a break after their early start, families on their outings. We sit. 

A young waiter, after flirting with scarce patrons, approaches. We linger, exchanging notes about the legend of our two family branches, with De P’pa as kingpin to our encounter. We glance over the menu, bringing the waiter to pause. Victoria responds, “Chocolate drink, a croissant and chocolate roll, please,” and far from lending a thought, distancing myself from entangling—I nod: “For me too?”

Victoria and I exchange, “Bon appétit!”—leading me to search for an affinity I can’t remember having for De P’pa, other than his pointing finger sending us, among siblings, chased into a room’s corner, kneeling on raw concrete, while Victoria speaks in admiration. She recalls crossing Father as a twelve-year-old, when visiting August Somers in the pilgrimage village hotel in Beauraing—an arm’s-length milieu to a waterfall, a behold of family grief, the burden of silence and secrecy: a deep, genetic reflex of the Somers family, a lineage still clinging to the fear of the Inquisition, echoes of the Marrano Jews expelled from Spain, Sephardic names burned out of history.

Victoria rises from the table as I settle the bill with the waiter; then we step onward and cross the street, where we meddle into an eye-buzzing crowd creeping through the flea market displays. We serpentine the lanes, face a townhouse and sweep back again, edging closer to the hedgerow—the wall of cracks, clear windows glazed in reflection—at the pace of the striated brick facade and doorsteps bringing us to the street corner. We step across the junction in view of the distant Audi—the bulldozed, raw, grounded block now morphed to fewer cars—crossing people loading trunks and folding a child’s stroller, and the odd car tracking back to emerge into the cobbled street.

Though my mind had to think through that De P’pa was no longer living his life—hunkered over his collection of stamps, or the Kardex trays by the thousand, typed and scribbled with notes tracking a sprawling family tree into the history of our name. 

By Thursday I’m back with the burden of wrapping up the illegal workers who stagger through closing the week: the ritual of making up the pay envelopes, calling the denominations of banknotes to the bank for collection of the cash by Friday to pay the Poles. 

With a notepad in my palm, a ballpoint pen ready to begin a new week, I stand between the embracing French doors before the faux-balcony, gazing down the avenue to the distant hush before the giant, old, flocculent, rusty woods. The street-corner—the backwash pooling of the park’s lawn—edges the bus shelter, its crystal front outlining in reflection; behind it, a hedgerow of fenestrated facades, cracks emanating figures shadowed in first rays of sunlight, dwarfs their reach toward the tramway shelter, while predominant and upfront, the approaching herd of Poles crosses the asphalt field. Given to retrieve myself, I press the door-leaves closed, loop my way around interior grand portals, and open the entrance door to greet the crew.      

In Indian file they ascend the split-level through the crystal portal door; on the ±0 landing, into its gaping hollow shadow, they vanish. Their steps echo through the gaping floor as they descend the stairwell to the -1 landing, then further down to the -2 to the doorway gaping the vestibule’s crawl space—the revamped technical room. 

Descending the barn’s wood-shaded louvered treads, I meet a genie of fresh air wriggling past—the engineering challenge of modernization laid bare: a draft pulled from the sidewalk’s coal-chute grill, rising from the -2 through -1, up the ±0, past the mezzanine, through the +1 and +2, the technical shaft exhaling from underneath the +3 rear eave. 

I catch up with them on the tiled white-ceramic floor beneath the stairs, before a twin fluorescent tube above the  ±0 floor plan blueprint affixed to the wall, alongside my notice board, while around me the men pull hangers off the rod inside the plastic wardrobe. Changing clothes, a herd’s eyes—subtle and jelly-wobbly among each other—scheme to outwit me; the timbre in Teddy’s voice resonates, his mind radiating—’send him off on an errand run’—as he envisages controlling the crew’s work to lay back. 

I glance at my wristwatch, clock their attendance, noting each in their presence, as in Indian file they loop back upstairs. I climb the stairs as the men scatter through doorways to their workplace, and I swivel around newel posts, the dogleg stairs, to the heavenly flight up to the +3 loft landing, entering the dormer room. Beyond the bed, I pull the chair and tap a few keys, my Toshiba laptop loading last night's data-input spreadsheet onto the screen. I dial the Charles Woeste agency of the General de Banque—Mrs. Rysenaert’s cold voice, wrapped in a kindness for customers. I read off-screen the numbers of a hundred, five hundred, a thousand, and five-thousand-frank bills for collection tomorrow. 

I hang up the handset, annoyed by the workmen—I can’t blame the lot of them, but I need them for my wild assembly-line machine; when I get into the work, tools and materials have got to fly into my hands. I rise to my feet, lower the laptop screen, and, seeking to relieve the pressure, with a hip swing I turn around and away from the make-do desk, heading for the doorway toward Erebus cowering in the corners of the stairwell. 

I descend by The Trucker’s +2 landing, flip my hips around the interim landing to the Spanish woman’s +1 door sentinel. The street’s daylight climbs to meet me at the swingback of the mezzanine landing; the apron at the bottom of stairs glitters the grand crystal-mosaic portal, planted in a gleam that washes the white marble. Beyond the doorway I step down the split-level to the glazed pair of doors picturing its source of light in the street. 

Pulling the door open, I pause on the doorstep in a sunlight embrace, and lend a glance up the avenue—yet instead of reaching the Audi, I lock eyes, seduced by the ash blond, shingled, petite woman, Dominique, framed in the crack of her doorway at No. 17 next door. 

She molds herself free of the doorway, her figure stepping down to the sidewalk, soft: she turns, often releasing inadvertent glances, while her hands sweep gentle gestures to close the door behind her, turning the key. Uncoiling with those relentless side-glances, a dossier under her arm, she paces across the wide sidewalk—stiffening, yet sparing herself the temptation of excessive backward looks. 

She drops another glance before stepping down the curb, emerging from the interstice between the cars’ bumper-chain along the street. In a countryside hush, Aetheria’s restlessness shows up, as the pretty woman’s glances wane under the constraint of her pace, stepping across the wide asphalt—with random heads turning. The petite blonde slips into the gap of a parked chain of cars before the rusty park’s hedgerow, veers and lifts the hatch of her car, ducks with hands full of folders, returns empty-handed; in the stillness of the day, she spares me another glance before prolonging her path to the driver’s door. She steps around the door swing and slips away behind its closing—out of a swerving Virgo’s flock of consciousness. 

Filled with such joy—Aetheria’s first appearance, nearly a decade ago, announcing her imminence, her warning that she stands close—yet I live in a world of the tangible—the blond woman, her imprint, framed in her window, pulls out from the curb’s chain of parked cars, tears away in longing, coasting downhill, disappears into the blur of the glazed bus-shelter zone and the tramway shelter’s drifting pedestrians. I seized myself—a step—stirred by the coal-chute plate - Twang.

The Audi in reach; behind me, I pull the door grip - Kwock - and step toward No. 17’s cracks. Its  classic door still dazzles with the ghost of the petite pretty woman. Uphill, gathering my senses, I weave through the train of cars and slip into the driver’s seat. I tweak the ignition, spin the wheel, and pull into the lane, spooling up toward the avenue sweep, bridging the park’s streaming lawns and winding through apartment blocks that oversee the wooded park. 

I weaved within the hedgerows of fenestrated brick facades, the vista opening—Altitude One Hundred clearing its apparently abandoned Art Déco church. I circle the soot-clinging concrete pastiche, where retailers perpetuate the ever-watching storefront eyes over a community whose spiritual light has since drained from its core. Past the concrete darkness of the church’s wooden portal, I cross tramway; then, before the next corner, in the drain of figures occupying terrace tables, I turn off into the ray of a mystified street–looking out for a workshop shed’s gate that ought not exist here. Resorting to counting down numbers given over the phone, and finding myself in the vicinity of townhouses, I veer away, pulling into a gap between perpendicular parked cars and stall before doorsteps. 

I alight, step past the Audi’s rear fender, and cross the street toward the barn-paired doors—innocent as the reflective mosaic of window sashes under the rooftop cornices to the fenestrated brick faades. I press the doorjamb’s calling button. From the barn door’s crack waxes a thirtyish man in mottled, glue-stained overalls; in the hush, his speaking eyes turn as he appears—Pinocchio’s woodcarver descendant leading me into the shadows. Walls swarmed with sawdust breathe the scent of wood; through the porte cochère, with timber laid along its depths—shadowing the ghosts of the carriage stalls where horse-drawn carts passed into the backyard. He veers through an off-side opening into a joinery shop, its quiet, industrious planer at rest in the distance, a spindle beside it; at the central bandsaw’s table, he halts. 

I returned home, scaling De P’pa’s counted eighty-two stairs to the +3 dormer, verifying the joint mattresses for a King-size bedstead. Returning to the joiner, the raw-from-the-mill assortment of wooden planks stands stacked upright against the fenestrated wall, with piled balks at their feet, sprawling across the floor in a variety of tints and grains. He lays a slip of paper on the bandsaw’s table and, picking a carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear, he notes the dimensions I dictate. I leave the man scarce of words, tracking my way back home.