YD6-114 (1994) Aetheria’s Mirage: The Brooding Semester

 The apartment's enfilade of crystal portals, the shadow-gathering nighthall, the grand staircase—is this silent, ornate architecture merely a backdrop, or is it the physical sheath of a deeper consciousness? What if the mind is not in the room, but is the room? Step into Aetheria, where a failed exam, a phantom phone call, and the slow swell of life are not just events, but tremors running through the very structure of the self.

• YD6-114 (1994) Aetheria’s Mirage: The Brooding Semester

I wake from the morning warmth; a chill slips over my shoulders as the trailblazing sunbeam that had stretched behind me, and now retreated abreast my seat, through the draped French doors. My mind lifts toward the zenith, where Helios’ skirt draws trails across the ridge of the tiled roof, leaving the canary-bright lounge walls and high ceiling—once innocently mirroring Aetheria’s mirage above the floorboards—wane behind me. 

Suffering a niggling, warping call, I glance toward the V-stance of the bifold doors, the crystal mosaic surrendering its remnant light to a phantom siphoning hush. My gaze drifts through the interior twilight, down the enfilades of glittering grand portals, until dread gathers where shadows wrap the kitchen; a malignant whorl coils. 

Yet—against the skylight and backyard portal—as a hazy sky draws in to dissolve the study and breach my focus, I uncoil from my chair and pad across the floorboards through the gaping doorway, swinging a hip, dipping a shoulder around the century weight-bearing stile—now resettled after the weekend’s furniture reshuffle, Victoria’s Slavic class party wiped, save for ghosts trailing the back of my mind.

A thought trails the morning’s bright canary glow: passing the spotlight switches in the cool dining room, I leave the room in the dark, no need for crossing beams pooling the library and the table. Besides the somber kitchen wrap, I scoot along the telescopic-leg of the counter as blindness morphs, shading the study walls and reframing the panel door. I veer, drawn to meet the chilly breath of the nighthall. 

Caught by the offset Z-course around the mirrored wardrobe, beneath the mezzanine landing—Alexandre’s room above—I quietly lay my fingers on the door’s Baroque lever. The seam cracks, hinge the stained glass, ajar to the veil-draped baldaquin at the foot of the bed, still in wandering window light. 

There, Victoria sits in profile, undisturbed by the roaming phantom, seated within the black duco armrests of a dining chair pulled to her antique desk. She crouches over scattered papers beyond the leather inset, an open lever-arch folder, a year’s lecture notes rifled and fanned wide. 

Quiescent in the sweep of autumn winds, among the white oak leaves she had—in a stroke of folly—sprayed blue aerosol contours across the renovated walls. Void of a phantom sillage, half-ghostly, I withdraw from her studious calm.

I leave her to the upcoming trial. Oil hinge, grease latch; the door seals. I turn from the nighthall, passing the party residues—bottlenecked at the kitchen wraps. I skip their perch of hush and head toward the crystal mosaic, where my laptop—warped in the waffle-beveled panes—sketches the bureau waiting occupation.

Ring, ring, ring… The telephone needles me. Nerve rasping. Restless rings pry at my concentration. My hand drifts across the laptop screen before I lift the handset into a hush—cold knuckles to my cheek. From afar, I answered. “Hello.” 

Nothing. The phantom line. 

I hold, waiting for the reticent caller to declare himself—receiver hooked in the hollow of my shoulder, fingers still plucking the keyboard, eyes plunged to my screen. I probe into the first business day after Victoria’s Friday evening party. 

No click. No Breath. After a long drift, I tell myself the line has died. But I listen closer—ear to the pipe. The hush tunnels back on itself. I do not hang up, In that hollow return, a silent rumble gathers into a male contour, and I understand: I am not the voice sought. 

Tuesday, in the blockade week of the semester’s exams—by late morning - ring, ring, ring… I shunt the thought aside: ‘No one ever calls me?’ Even so, I lift the handset. “Hello?” 

In the hush of the open line, the phantom wakes, measured by my wristwatch marking five-minute notches on its dial—an incomprehensible hold. A thought creeps in: ‘a sound mind would hang up, or speak.’ 

Over the next days, the incessant ringing returns, fluttering into the corner of the room as if perching on the top shelf of my bureau. The phantom’s sillage draws tight in that corner—as though pressure were building a message. 

I lift the handset. “Hello?”

The tension pricks and collapses. What had gathered reduces to a muted rumble—like breath cycling inside a pipe. I hold, hearing the hollow turn back on itself, while my fingers patiently piano across the keys, the pointing stick nudging the cursor along the screen. I let the piped breath be, waiting for the phantom’s patience to wither and cut the line.   

Gradually, the silence teased out a perspective from the party—the fixed stare, the slump over the kitchen wrap, the stuttering drift of conversation. He sought to annex her brainstorming to exclusive sessions—bashful in her face, yet angling for entry—Mr. Prosaic—the mama’s boy shadowing the phantom hush. A four-year-old child would have grasped and taken a break, but the ringing persists—a coward’s routine intrusion. 

Ringing into the following week, my mind interrogates: ‘Are you ever going to build up enough courage to expose yourself?’ Wednesday goes by unperturbed, and I exhale. 

Daybreak half-blurs under the phantom’s logic. The lecture ends. In the university’s hallway, he reaches for a pay phone booth—but the oddity didn't play out itself there in the city’s open glare. 

Thursday profiles itself, with the return - ring, ring, ring… 

I answer. “Hello?”

It doesn’t surprise me—the phantom line—while I keep my TravelMate’s screen bright and animated before me. I let it hang. But the line snaps prematurely on the call of a thought, before a notch of five-minute has transpired. A small shunt in my mind: ‘that’s odd?’

A quarter hour passes. Ring, ring, ring… Again I lift the handset. “Hello?” 

I choke at the answering voice—lashing through the receiver like a scent breaking from its own sillage, after some severe tribunal with himself. 

“Puis-je parler à Victoria ?—[May I speak to Victoria?]” Heavy with Flemish inflection. The glitch resolves. ‘He has gathered enough courage to break through the barrier—to reach Victoria.

A tentacle of thought crosses the interleading grand crystal portal, along the enfilade—Z-slipping through the nighthall toward Victoria. But a soulless chill wakes instead—the master bedroom empty. 

My mind leaps to the - tock, tock, tock… - heels in steeplechase from the backyard glow, striking the kitchen floorboards, cutting through the dining room. Her shadow flicks across the crystal mosaic. In her flight - whoosh… thwock, clung - she seals the door to the Belle Époque landing, muting into a vanishing hush toward the street. 

I answer, “Elle n’est pas là—[She’s not here.]”

He severs the line—swift escapes from exposure, from shame—and I replace the handset.

Ring, ring, ring… - I am slow to unhook the handset, offering a lackadaisical “Hello,” my eyes fixed on screen, fingers pianoing the keys. The following Monday - ring, ring, ring… - he returns after a week of faltering. By Thursday he had skipped another week - ring… - hoping to catch Victoria by a fluke. The weeks quieten. The light of his courage stifles. Before a burned wick - ring… - a month in, he lay to rest the phantom of his telephone line—not to be heard again.

Throughout the past semester, smitten by her professor, Victoria passes her written examination. Yet she tugs the Hydra of my mind to hover above the mysterious door, perched in the ceiling corner. I watch as she steps inside beneath—pausing, poised, facing diagonally across the professor’s desk. 

He poses a question. Waits. No answer. Another question, he waits longer. 

Gradually the professor leans back in his swivel chair, angling alongside his desk, his silhouette cutting against the light of the tall gaping window. She remains standing in the confinement of his office. 

In the hush of infatuation, her dominant Tiger in symbiosis with her Gemini—that flourishing intellect—falls inward. Auto-hypnotized. Inaccessible. Clammed shut beneath the innocent charm of an aging man. 

My perception still lingering on her midmorning slipping away - whoosh... thwock, clung - the door closing behind her. Around the blind corner, the door sighs a ghostly entry. Errant in mind, she flickers across the crystal mosaic after that brief errand of encyclopedia examination, pausing alongside the V-poised bifold doors. 

I shift my sight from the TravelMate screen, twisting in my chair. Over my shoulder, she explains how she failed her oral examination. She fills in the holographic scene—her bronze posture unfolding before his desk, unable to utter a single word. “Même que le prof a été super indulgent avec moi…—[Although the professor was extremely lenient with me…]” she says. “Il a dit…—[He said, ‘I can’t help but give you zero marks’]” 

Victoria ebbs away in a silent tide, crossing the enfilade of crystal portals. The week drifts, Nathalie echoes the official board results pinned in the hallway at the Free University of Brussels: ‘Failed.’ Although the professor’s “zero” has already begun to lose its weight. The Tiger in her roams, without signs of the tidal wave that struck her. 

Around the kitchen wrap, the mock cabinet doors gleam—panel molds in reflective light—as she slips behind the wrap into the cuisine’s horseshoe enclave. She returns to the dining table with a bottle of red Porto and a glass. Sitting, pouring herself a bowl, a sip beneath a plume of smoke, she recalibrates her days. 

Over the following days, into the weeks, I collect a glass from the cabinet underneath the stained-glass-paired bathroom lights and return to join her hush. Between bowls of red Porto and Thursdays trailed by Basha, that settles into a pattern. 

Returning from her errands, Victoria spreads a newspaper across the table. Coffee besides her, Porto near at hand, a cloud of smoke curling upward, her finger runs down the columns of the Employment Smalls. She withdraws with her selection, recalibrating in the quiet of the master bedroom. 

Two floors down, underground, I cross Basha enveloped in a fluorescent glow. In an efflorescence of whitewashed brick walls and vaulted ceilings, my blue overalls hang from a nail—smudged with brick dust, mortar, carpenter’s glue, from renovating three apartments above, the cradle of Aetheria on the Belle Époque level. 

From the floor-heated white ceramic tiles, the illegal Polish workers have dissolved as a team, leaving only Basha—Taurus Moon in symbiosis with her Horse in Sun—smiling. On Thursdays she bustles, ghostlike, Mustangs loosed across open  plains: laundering, ironing, returning folded clothes, making the bed with clean linen, and walking away with a fresh smile, calling it another day. 

Weeks turn into months. Victoria stands before the door, bearing the slow swell of her belly. Thursdays fold into the two women’s comical accounting system—some weeks the banknotes outweigh the need; no small change; other weeks Victoria falls short. Yet they balance their ledger’s columns as Basha nears her interruption for the week. 

Basha lingers in the order she leaves behind—a refreshed apartment and crisp sheets for us to slip into tonight. Friday, after a morning phone call to her gynecologist, Victoria’s pressure tightens, her words echo down the crystal enfilade—“Wednesday is the day.”—long after she dialed again. 

I follow the fractured exchange—he didn’t scream, she didn’t plead—only a hinged request to André Daniel: ”... — Can Pipo stay with you…” and by early Saturday the Scorpio, seasoned by three years of jealousy fits, half-relents his possessive grip on his wife—his Sun in Rooster—executive in dress, athletic in gait, head high, still the master—as he passes beneath the French doors, vanishes into the blind corner of the balconette, and after a brief exchange reemerges with the seven-year-old Alexandre—a parental custody threshold at the edge of the new school year. 

Restless as a bird chirping in the treetop by the window, I slip out of bed with a tethering glance. She has grown into her difficulties; I drift alongside, naive. I slip from the bed through the parted gauze, leaving Victoria cocooned within the misty four posts of the baldaquin; thinning veils filtering the first light. Keeping to the darker side of the room, I find the door waiting—there, a Z-path through the nighthall’s shadows—only to be struck in the face by the light engulfing the study.   

Alongside the chimney, from behind the translucent cabinet door, I fetch the ground coffee and pour three measures to the filter,  drawing water behind me. I flick the switch; the percolator gargles, trickling into the glass jug. A bowl of muesli and milk steadies me at the worktop, as I turn to the toaster. 

Two slices flip up; I smear them with her favorite strawberry jam. Chuff - the percolator exhales. I pour coffee into a second cup - cling - setting it on a plate besides the aligned toasts. The plate feathery-light in my hand, yet bearing a lurking weight, I track back through the nighthall. I carry breakfast with a sense of being able to do more—possessed by an extra capacity—yet helpless before her advanced pregnancy. 

Upon my return, I cross the crystal portal—through the enfilade of rooms—toward my laptop bureau behind the wafer glass. I swing hip and shoulder around the bi-folded doors’ V-stance. Squeezing behind the Bérgere, my fingers run the TravelMate’s clamshell seam edging toward the rear hinge; I press the power button and coil into the slatted terrace chair, lifting the lid. Green command lines cascade down the waking screen.  

By mid-morning, a tremor runs through the crystal-wafer—I catch Victoria at the crack of the nighthall door, color wavering in the V-partition’s beveled panes. She waddles from the study’s haze, twilight brushing the telescopic-leg of the kitchen, and the stretch table’s backrest. At the nearby head chair, fear crisps her face—her step stalls. 

In small, hesitant steps, she composes herself and approaches over my shoulder, brushing past my arm—her beige dress stretched taut, her ballooned belly wedging into the corner of my bureau as she turns toward the facsimile machine. 

She lifts the handset and dials on the facsimile keypad. Waits. Her words timed to a labor cramp. She listens, answers, then hangs up.

’Her gynecologist on the other end.’

The waiting settles back into her face. She eases her belly free and backtracks behind me, vanishes. 

Tzzuu, click - Behind me the compact disk slots into place. I picture Victoria before her antique chest of drawers, beneath the ranked spines, as if the column were conducting Mozart—the air thick with a fine thrill that brushed the beveled crystals.

In the evening - click - the switch shuts behind us; quadruple spotlight beams collapse into their pools. Darkness settles over the lounge’s antique, the Mozart bust on its pedestal thinning into the wash of streetlights. 

Click - the dining room’s library recedes. We pass the twin opalescent panes set into the cut-corner wall—substitute for the windowless bathroom—their permanent translucence preserving the fine-etched scenic cameo in the stained glass. I - click - the kitchen’s horseshoe enclave falls mute. 

At the crack of the flank door, Victoria a length ahead steps through the gaping nighthall door. I’m up against the blackened grand portal. I - click - the study’s luminescent ceiling mural dissolves; the remnant glazes catch the deep backyard’s speckled neighborhood fenestration.

Offside, Victoria’s silhouette crosses the sanctuary of the pilot-light—the bathroom twins opalescent, waking at the stained-glass panel doors along the subtle Z-path to the master bedroom. She moves in the light of the night window; jagged rooftops hollow against the city night sky. She hauls her heavy weight to bed and digs in for the night - click.

The new week begins resonating, “... term pregnancy … “ entering Victoria phrases following these unprecedented words, “Wednesday is the day.”  

By late morning her absence weighed. My eyes drift from the clutter around my laptop in the cramped lounge corner. I look with an animal scent through the still crystal mosaic, along the enfilade toward the hush of unstimulated rooms. Drawn to uncoil, I rise and cross the apartment, slipping into the cool-shadow of the Z-path through the nighthall. The twin stained-glass door panels ease back; in the clearing window light, Victoria rests on the bed in the misty glow of the four-post draping veils. Unperturbed, I track back. 

Then, ghostly in a front-buttoned beige dress, Victoria approaches behind the awry glass of the bifold doors’ stance. She squeezes along my arm into the narrowing wedge, one hand supporting her ballooned belly. She turns, a deep frown setting in her brow, and reaches for the telephone. She lifts the receiver from the facsimile hooks; her face tightens. A finger presses the keypad. The receiver cup seals her ear; her knuckles press into her cheek. The line holds silence.

Her call is answered. She lowered her eyes to her belly. ‘I’ve had contractions.’ A pause. “Earlier this morning—an hour ago.” She listens. I read the shift in her face. ‘Not for today!’

Wednesday comes and goes. Thursday. Basha made herself scarce after collecting the dirty linen and clothes—she has the sixth sense, coming from Poland with her infant boy, she spends half-her-day in the laundry. Victoria just as scarce, after deeming her closer labor contraction relevant. 

A ghostly sillage lingers from Victoria behind me, drifting at the gaping V-stance of the crystal wafer of the bifold doors. She hesitates, pacing the marches between lounge and dining room, until she brushes her fears aside. Debuting her pace into courage, she squeezes past my shoulder and wedges herself into the corner. She turns to face the facsimile machine perched on the top shelf of my cluttered laptop bureau. 

Victoria hangs up. Her expression lingers—a pause—as the Hydra of my mind gathers the gynecologist’s words echoing: ‘That’s too early…’ Her eyes lift over my laptop bureau into space. The hand supporting her belly falls away, her mind turning inward to the child: ‘We’ll have to wait.’ Distressed, she squeezes out and through the gaping V-stance of the bifold doors, stepping over the seam in the floorboards—gathering herself for another day. 

She diverts toward the Hi-Fi tower, expressing. ‘Victoria, you have to be strong.’ She pauses. Her ritual demands a compact disc; before long the library begins to orchestrate Mozart, and a thin air of relief overcomes her. 

After the shuttlecock to the phone and back, Thursday bleeds into Friday morning. Her soft, suppliant eyes seem to plead: ‘Doctor, let this be over with!’ Labor is etched in her face; cramps bend her, spasms crave a tortured line through her petite figure, as she approaches from behind. She hesitates, stands back. 

My mind fills with the thought she does not dare voice: ‘It is too early for the white-collar workers!’ She waits by the phone and dialing again, for the gynecologist to report for duty to her doctor's rooms. She doubles back and lingers at the backrest huddled to the table head, suspended between the phone and the Hi-Fi. Her eyes circles. She stumbles, doubting her chance, and re-crossing the crystal interleading portal.

She relays the doctor’s increased concerns on the heels of the weekend, saying, “C’est en retard, mais elle veut attendre.—[It’s overdue, but she would wait.]” Victoria unwedges her belly from my crowded laptop bureau and reaches a wry conclusion. She’s not alone,  I too: the little creature too comfortable in Mother’s amniotic fluid, postponing her plunge into a world of self-sustenance.’ 

Victoria stands, eyes drained, until spurs her willpower with a sharp slap to her cheek. Bright eyes, murmuring in mind. ‘Victoria, my girl, you have to get through this.’ She turns to me, voicing: “It’s time to go.” Her gaze untangles from the handset. The beige balloon dress unwedges from the corner as she slips a hand beneath her belly. 

I’m left guessing at some finality as she brushes by my arms. Over my shoulder, Victoria with a ducking gait distances. I snap the laptop screen shut and uncoil to my feet. Doubling back around the bi-fold doors, I catch up as she pulls the door open clearing the landing by the mounting railing. The rising balusters gleam like orphaned children, their questioning eyes asking: ‘Where are you going?’—as we are bound to leave Aetheria’s cradle.

The gaping stairwell’s coffee-stained bronze flashes alive, mirroring as I grab her suitcase by the lower sidelight panel—packed since last week’s due date—and snap offside the switches - flick, flick, flick. The spotlight beams collapses and pooled light collapse into darkness behind us - whoosh... thwock, clung - the door shut behind me. 

I step onto the Belle Époque landing; the stairwell engulfed in a glow of daylight pouring through the grand crystal portal. I bash bags through the gaping door. Following Victoria descend in her ducking gait, the gleam cascading a broad wash down the split-level vestibule stairs to pool by the door apron.  

Cluck—fizz… - the door opens. Across the avenue the park’s overbearing autumn hedgerow sprawls behind a chain of parked cars. But Victoria’s gaze runs uphill along the sidewalk skirting the rows of facades, picking the silver-gray Audi out among the curb-parked cars. 

I pull the door shut and turn as she waggles uphill along the sidewalk, edging past parked cars. In a few strides I rush ahead, slip between bumpers, lift the Audi’s trunk lid and drop her suitcase into the well - Slam. 

Stepping back up the curb, in a dash I pass Victoria, unlock the door, and hand the grip over to a Tiger’s free roamer. I retreat and round the car by the trunk, my scrutinizing gaze tethered to her as she masters the descent—hands crawling over the door frame and chassis guiding her down.  

I slip into the Audi behind the wheel, tweak the ignition key—the engine purring—and beside me, Victoria pants. She wiggles-waggles, trying to square herself in the seat, cringing through spasmodic labor pain, Her belly arrests the turn; she cannot reach the door grip. She calls on her near hand instead, crooks her arm and hauls the door inward with a roll - smack. 

She raises a grueling hand, pointing the way across the dashboard. I pull into the leading avenue. With the heel of my hand—and shifting glimpses: windshield, mirror still; wing mirror, deserted; a blind-spot glance over my left shoulder—I steer our glass bubble into the street. 

Steadfast, accelerating uphill. Beside me, Victoria braves spasmodic labor pain, her finger gripping an invisible leash of breath. The sweeping avenue slips through Square Albert’s traffic lights, the skyscraper filling the windshield; she points our way, veering left into the narrow street. We pass a misplaced desert rough-hewn stone outpost—the prison’s castle walls, another oddity amid the hedgerows of fenestrated brick facades. We cross as a pedestrian hesitates, as the odd car slips across in a fickle priority to the right. I question but dare not ask: ‘Where are you taking us?’