What if birth is not merely biology, but the moment consciousness passes through architecture—through streets, doors, corridors, and the narrow passages of the mind?

As Victoria’s labor draws us through the winding streets of Brussels toward a cloistered hospital labyrinth, each doorway, pane of milky glass, and shadowed corridor seems arranged by an unseen geometry. Is Aetheria—the quiet intelligence shaping our perception—guiding us through this maze toward a single luminous event?

In this chapter, a taxi ride becomes a pilgrimage through space, fear, and illusion, until the architecture of the world itself seems to open—revealing a fragile blue child emerging into light, and the deeper question: are we merely born into the world, or does consciousness build the passage through which we arrive?

#AetheriasArchitecture, #BirthOfConsciousness, #CloisteredLabyrinth, #VirgoArrival, #AetheriaMirage

YD6-115 (1994-Dog) — Aetheria to Birth — A Taxi to a Cloistered Hospital Labyrinth Delivers a Virgo

The past week had been building, though I didn't hear a word of Victoria’s gynecologist over the phone, as she stood beside me, eyes hovering over my shoulder while I crouched at my laptop bureau. Words echo in my head—fear birthing in the car,  

A prominent belly swells under her skirt, her face etched by spasmodic pains, Victoria’s finger navigating. I, with a taxi driver’s instinct, cross the rays of narrow streets—my mind challenging a compass needle losing the North. 

With street names in mind, checking the blue enamel plaques tagged on corner facades—a live street map I would  later discover—we climb the eastern outskirts due North through narrow Renaissance streets: hedgerows of fenestrated brick façade, odd balconies beneath eaves cornices, the change to gables. 

As the veins of our course cross arteries, landmarks spur vague orientation, until we slip through the lenses of traffic lights. We cross an overpass, and discover—amid dense cluttered brick townhouses and terracotta tiled roofs—the absurd sight of deep entrenched silver treads, the light of a railway slipping away in emphatic pairs into the blurred shadows of the wings. 

I hurry, weaving through traffic—innocent traffic drivers riding their way. I map my way anchored on the railway line: through changing lenses a left turn to a main artery slipping wide, a trickle of traffic along a bus route through a shallow valley. 

In the hollow Victoria points across multiple lanes toward an engaging side street. As she searches the inlet for  street names, a red cross hospital signboard springs up. We curl its way, a mapped coil into the crotch of a monastic age. 

A dark weathered brick wall, bristling with iron prongs, steers us right around a blind corner—to face a squeezed single lane, cars chained along both curbs, their windows puncturing the sky in undulated iridescent sheen. 

Victoria retards, pointing the way—the next hospital sign—as I pull into an inviting ambulance demarcation. In one sweep I take the key out of the ignition; the door swings and my feet hit the asphalt. In long strides of no return, I round the Audi’s rear fender to the trunk—into the hush of the ambulance spot, a wailing siren haunting it in my mind. 

She heaves herself from the car, bearing the plateau of contractions sacked in thick elephant hide, weighing her as she braces on the doorframe. She turns away in small pacing steps. I catch Victoria’s stressed face—she lets go the grip - smack - the door shuts. Her arm under her belly and she waddles along the Audi toward the rear fender where I wait. 

We step on the curb, in sight of the soft irregular brick sprawling with a cloistered window in the weathered wall, My eye is struck by a tapering sleek gleam of bluestone paving through the front yard. Drawn across the building line, the illusion dissolves—the pathway squares wide toward the ghosting glazed hallway receding into the shadow.

Victoria steps; a small child before a high-riser. The swinging glass sheet hollows the foursome plate-glass reflections of the meek overcast street. Crossing, drawn offside. She pauses by an easel-sitting board. 

Her eye shifts from the visitors’ hours to a myriad of rambling words—none to her liking. She waddles off, slanting across the hallway toward a reception counter before a row of three life-disparaged women half-shielded. Victoria topples, top heavy, leaning her elbows onto the counter. She exchanges a few words with the first woman: the reception mechanical, her eyes rolling to point along the gaping hallway.

Victoria’s face etches stress, gazing with regret into the hallway depth. Dispatching herself from her resting corner, she waddles onward along the counter toward the plane of a clinical wall—only to doubt as the wall shades an embossed jamb to a blind door that catches her in a sheer grip and freezes her. Her eyes fixed on the flush door, she calls back her fear, to her willpower and regenerates courage to pace forward. Her stiffened hand leaves the support of her belly; her face cringes in pain as she lays her fingers on the door lever. The seam cracks, and a hinging leaf clears the flank wall, skirting a suspended wooden bench. 

Victoria paces into the cul-de-sac of efflorescent white walls, edging the bench toward a translucent door, like a police officer raising a hand—Stop! I’m taken aback by the robotic monster in the middle of the room, gleaming a dorsal spider, that sends my heart racing. My mind wraps the torture machine—decorticating the elevated spine, flex, and reflex, longitudinal shift—half-shaping its phantom. My mind flips away from completing the image of widespread ankle clamping in the mechanical limbs. 

Victoria pauses, teetering before a dressing mirror set in the face of a translucent full-height doorpane, expecting her gynecologist to welcome her—but in the absence raises anxious eyes that fall short of her feet, circling an escape course to the door behind her. She aborts the insane flight, reaching into her blind spot, lowers herself to balance on fingertips, then palms the bench and finds her seat. 

In pain relief, Victoria leans forward, Thinker-bronze, fixed on the passage of doorways at her feet—even I expected a welcome. She sits with the heels of her hands planted beside her hips on the bench, fingers hooked over the bullnose, nails clawing the wood. 

A mysterious dark blight flaws the translucent doorpane by her side. In the milky tank of light, a fluffy knot of growth gathers from the depths—octopus head, writhing, tactile, swimming—confusing as limbs detach and rejoin in the black-and-white waves of her fetus on an ultrasound, clean of the salt-and-pepper noise. 

The knots loosen, writhing upright, a child-shape trailing fluffy tentacles—blurred, a phantom tumbling and tossing. It swims, quirky—reshaping, shrinking, fading. My mind decorticates the haze: a maid bending at the long edge of a bed behind the doorjamb wall. Her movements waking bedding tossed to the floor, spreading clean bedsheets, until the unknotting octopus straightens into a figure, flexes an arm, and a wrist glues a print to the glass. 

Besides me the door cracks, swinging toward the vacant end of the bench—a light blizzard—spinning a midwife in white through an underarm turn past the leaf of a standby sentinel. To pause in a pirouette before Victoria’s lifting eyes, a glimmer of relief. 

In a matron’s tone the little woman throws curdling questions at Victoria, then swirls away with a clipped order. “Will you get undressed!” The latent midwife leaves folded laundry beside Victoria and pulls the door shut. Victoria cringes, relegated in vain to no-return, catching her courage stolen in the come-and-go whirl. 

The midwife swims away, bewildered and frosty, evanescing in the depths of the milky tank behind the translucent pane. Beside the door a bottom row of cabinet doors runs to a worktop, wrapping the milieu with a solitary baby scale in the middle. Short of the worktop—an eye-leap across the passage—she holds the end of the kitchen cabinet, gauging her leap to bind with the gable end.

With advancing spasmodic pains, Victoria cringes, her chest gravitating forward into a belly roll. Pressing upon her hands, straightening her arms, she heaves to her feet, her right arm sliding under her belly. Launching her left-hand across the door apron, she totters, planting the heel of her hand to the edge of the worktop. Her right hand comes forth to prop her overweight beach-ball belly on her stilty legs. 

Victoria, holding the folded clothes, slips her fingers at the hem of her dress and unbuttons, crawling up the front to the collar. The fabric loosens, sliding from one shoulder to hang down her arm. She swaps her support, freeing a hand, and let the dress fall to her slip. She unfurls the laundry gown, threads one hand through the sleeve, then the other, cloaking her shoulders back-to-front. She turns and stumbles back to her seat. 

Besides Victoria, in the frosted translucent doorpane, a blight reappears—wiggling, a growth body and limbs gathering from the milky depth into a quirky figure. The door hinges; a petite woman emerges from fluorescence in streetwear, her face etched with the haste of a sprinting mid-morning landing. She hasn’t shed her private composure, strolling into the room to duty. Robotic, she halts between Victoria’s knees, greeting: “How are you doing? — I’m Dr. [R.] Wolles’ substitute.”

Victoria’s eyes flash in disbelief—expecting an old man to emerge, not a student’s poise, ruffled and seeking the professor. Fright flickers in her gaze; her body moist, exposed to the fluorescent room’s clinical chill. Dr. R. Wolles’ treachery—the trusted warmth of the old man. A decade earlier he brought, two months premature, Alexandre to the world. 

Victoria seized a cheerful but short-lived smile. Calm as the gynecologist had cropped up, she rounds the door and pulls it shut, her quirky evanescence fading in the milky translucence of the sandblasted pane. 

After the gynecologist’s lapse for brunch—so I imagined—a fluffy blight gathers in the milky depths, swimming a morphing phantom. Around the door leaf, at an industrious pace, the midwife bustles before Victoria and calls her to follow. 

Victoria palms the bench and props to her arms, rising to her feet. One hand presses the gown over the prominence of her beach-ball belly. She totters around the door, which swings shut, dismembering the trailing phantom—evanescing to a blight, then nothing. I’m left standing. 

A blizzard breaks through the hush and startles me—besides me the forgotten blind flush-panel door swings open, and like a spider in the gaping frame the midwife grips the handle, dreadful and silent. “Follow me.” 

I step out into the main hallway as she pushes ahead, branching around the edging corner. I catch her across the way along the running flush wall at the first marked doorway, where she pauses—then vanishes. 

My Sun in Warthog—skeptical, wandering in trail—I slow my pace, peering through the cracks of the doorway’s view, my gaze widening on Victoria’s dark-blond ball of hair. Drawn by the inviting doorway across to the run of a bathtub’s skirt, to my mind’s surprise, imagining her reclined before I see her buoyant belly submerged in water. 

The midwife, in soft light from the bathroom’s rear wall, with the calm of a nudist camp, sighs by Victoria’s feet: “Il y a une chaise—[There’s a chair.]” 

I hesitate my way across the threshold, easing into the nook by the doorjamb to the wooden chair. From Victoria’s perspective, the fidgety small but sturdy midwife withdraws her hand from Victoria’s crotch. She approaches with the gait of a pedestrian in a busy shopping street—though she’s alone—passing me by. Her whoosh vanishes behind me through the doorway into the corridor hush. 

The midwife, after long intervals, breezes in, glances at Victoria, and coils by her feet. She whirls off again, saying. “Vous n’êtes pas encore prête—[You’re not ready yet]” and sweeps herself away. 

In the extended wait at Victoria’s side, the slow development—and Friday—spoke for themselves. The petite gynecologist in a white dust coat appears now and then, crossing paths with the midwife, exchanging codes, becoming too familiar. They follow through with brief appearances and inspections, raising concerns. 

Until they stand together by the prolongation of Victoria’s submerged feet, exchanging looks. ‘What should we do?’ 

They throw each other a prolonged gaze. In quiet accord they fiddle Victoria out of natural birthing. They leave the bathroom at the tick of time, their concerned voices continuing in the corridor. 

Upon the gynecologist’s return into the bathroom’s depths, she pulls up a chair from the shadows. Skillful, she slips on latex gloves, lowers herself, and dips her hand underwater between Victoria’s thighs, vanishing to her wrist. She draws back, rises from the chair, and strips off the latex gloves with a flick of the hand; they fall into the waste bin. She approaches, walks past me—the sigh of fabrics urging the birth—vanishing behind me.

The gynecologist, young and petite to the verge of illusion, calls with concern, crossing the midwife petite but with a weightlifter's torso, eyes loosening in their sockets. In a relentless coming and going over Victoria’s labor progression, pausing outside the doorway. The medics, in hushed voices, reveal their thoughts. ‘Awakening of an indolent fetus.’ 

Though their words dissipate and stumble, every other tolls. “Induce - induce…” 

The midwife, a medic rough on the edges, figures in the bathroom’s depth, the walls echo: “Elle pourrait être…—She could be…” Until the words resonate: “Prête—[Ready.]” 

The gynecologist, unsure, cues the midwife forward beside the bathtub. In unison they bend over the brim and grasp Victoria’s hands, raising her from the water. One foot heaves over the tub’s edge to the floor, then the other. Supported by—human crutches—Victoria walks past, soaked and slack. My gaze anchored, uncoiling me from my chair. They fade across the hallway through the opposite gaping door, leaving me to linger in the deserted corridor. 

The shameless trio inside the room doesn’t inspire me. In the corridor, an endless evanescent time awakens a thought: ‘In such a milieu, doors are an unnecessary burden.’ I steal brief glimpses into the clinical clearing of the wedged room. Ears pricked, I shield my eyes from stray fragments of soft, rubbery body movement. Short of freezing before the next doorway, I turn to check the hallway behind me—drawing from its wide and deserted hush a solitude to brood. I snail-pace between two doorways, alone in a long wait. 

Over my shoulder, an arbitrary voice breaks the silence. The midwife strides out the doorway. I think: ‘I mean… she left her patient in a critical state to call me?’ 

She breaks the hallway threshold and moves straight toward the raised bed. She plants a hand under Victoria’s shoulder blades, the other beneath her buttocks, and rolls her onto her side. With a nurse’s skill, administers a syringe to Victoria’s spine. As I wander in, she points me to a chair at the foot of the bed. As she mumbles, “The epidural injection followed the local anesthesia,” Victoria is released and rolls back onto her back.

Hips against the edge of the bed, the midwife stacks her hands on Victoria’s beach-ball belly and calls. “Push, breathe in.” Her palms knead the taut skin. The small, robust woman rises onto pointed feet, working for leverage. Her voice swells to a trumpet of urgency. “Breath—Push...” 

Victoria gasps and puffs. 

To add weight, the midwife swings sideways onto the high bed’s edge, kneading harder. “Breathe. Push…” 

Victoria gasps again, harder now. One of the midwife’s knees crawls onto the mattress; she edges up, flexing her leg, her hands spreading across the belly. 

“Breathe, push…”

In the clinical calm of the room, the shouting and gasping jar me; the cries spill through the doorways into the hallway.

The robust little midwife swings her second knee onto the high bed and settles astride the patient, elbows wide, driving her weight downward. 

Between Victoria’s spread knees the gynecologist crunches low, her eyes on the passage—like a motorcyclist behind a racing windshield. Her gaze flicks to the midwife and back, a ping-pong of alarm widening in her petrified eyes.

Alas!

”It’s too late for a cesarean intervention…” 

The gynecologist exhales in despair. “There isn’t going back.” 

Astride Victoria’s chest, the midwife drops her weight with pouncing thrusts, kneads downward with both hands, riding the swell of the belly as she barks: “Push. Push. Push…” 

Victoria gasps like a steam engine coming into the station - chuff - chuff - chuff… - as the gynecologist’s eyes lift and drop. “The little scalp… it’s stuck…” Then the gynecologist’s scooped hands catch the slippery, blue, rubbery little creature.