YD6-116 Aetheria Witness to Her Birth — Consciousness in the Vitrine, Her Name: Sunshine

 

Witness the moment a fragile newborn locks eyes with the world—an unsettling recognition that feels far from coincidence. Is this Aetheria’s architecture engaging its fragile glass cage? Birth reveals a hybrid system: a body spun from matter beneath the stars, and consciousness arriving to inhabit it. Like the Sun casting off a fireball that became the Earth, Aetheria spins a spark of awareness that cools and settles—jelly-like—into the mold of that little body. For an instant the gaze seems ancient, almost adult—look who I am. And in that brief clarity, the infant has already chosen her name: Sunshine.

YD6-116 Aetheria Witness to Her Birth — Consciousness in the Vitrine, Her Name: Sunshine

The petite, muscular midwife leaps to the floor, ushering me behind the gynecologist to a grandfather’s club chair. She whirls away as I blindly sink into the soft, wide padded seat. She speeds to the low-seated petite gynecologist’s side, then—in a swing—at hand clipped ankles, interdigitally threaded, the blue and rubbery-skinned, head dangling low, grazing the floor—so it appears to me. Striding off again, my mind jumps: ‘That’s crude?’ I relent to the midwife. In a blitz of thought—‘Victoria’s newborn.’ The midwife’s head turns toward the mother, checking on her well-being. Victoria lies, extenuated by exhaustion, in the rumpled bedsheets.

The midwife swings the silent newborn to the rhythm of her strides along the stretched length of the bed. Alongside Victoria—her exhausted head planted deep in the pillow, eyeballs rolling toward the doorway beside her—her gaze relents its grip on her baby. I continue the course through the gaping room as the midwife further incites a ragged waggle, waking the infant overdue to breathe. Her eyes sharpen; she drops a glance at the infant’s head and draws, concerned, to a pause in the middle of the floor. ‘Hey baby, why don’t you cry?’ Her hand shakes, wiggles again, raising mounting urgency. 

A blizzard of air torches the little blue creature’s lungs, spewing back a flaming painful wail. The midwife’s eyes pounce toward the white channel-shaped scale atop the cabinet worktop, dragging with her the crying chest, its invigorated tissues crackling to life. Without a glance she lifts the little blue, attenuating creature to a soft landing in her other cupped hand, feathering the infant’s tufted head. I chill as the naked body comes to lie on the icy metal tray. Shielded by the midwife—Shiva’s many arms—I am blind to her dexterous hands releasing the feet from her crooked fingers onto the familiar tray with rolled-up edges.

My mind fills in the blanks as the midwife finger-pinches the weight slide, releasing the cylindrical mass to seesaw along the threaded bar. While the high-pitched scream dawns its intonations, she brings her fingerpads underneath the weight, rolling it to fine-tune the fulcrum bar’s poise pin with the tray’s. She plucks a pen from her breast pocket and jots the weight beside the scale. A glance up the wall catches the large dial’s hand; my mind wanders to Scorpio rising. She picks the white strip, wraps it, and snaps a hospital wristband onto the flimsy wrist.  

The midwife’s pinky slips through the rubber doll’s hollow neck, the remaining fingers of her left hand basketing the little head. With a swift right hand under the baby’s buttocks she lifts the infant off the scale. The little body passes from hand to hand, a cloth shared in her right palm. The cloth spreads the wobbly head and in a few strokes wipes the sleek hair. Two fingers drop to a cheek, then the other. The delicate corner of the cloth strokes one eyelid, then the other. Little lips—Cupid’s bow left and right. The cloth’s wings pass through the hollow of the little neck. A palmful of cloth wipes the hushed little chest, then wraps along an arm and a leg. 

The midwife sidesteps, the infant rolling amid her palms while her hand wipes over the shoulders through the hollow of her back, then along the other little arm and leg. She bends, lays the baby beside the scale. With seamstress-dexterous fingers, she threads a fragile little arm through a red cloth, then the other, a leg, then the other. She whisks the rumpled red from the worktop and turns. Pacing toward the doorway, she swaddles the baby, clicking snap buttons, closing the flimsy seams up to her neck. 

With peppy steps the midwife rounds the doorjamb, calling. “Maman t'attend—[Mom is waiting for you.]” It dawns on Victoria, extenuated—her lagging eyes rolling—her pudgy, blushed face tilting toward the midwife’s voice. Her eyes fall upon the little moonlit face, amputated from touch, as her baby comes to repose sideways on her chest, spanning hands. The midwife withdraws her hands from the red muddled bundle, Victoria, fixated on the little tuft of hair, says. “Loulou: —Ben jij het—[Is that you… ’you are here]’?” 

Vanishing behind the walls, the midwife sweeps back, hands whisking the little red muddled bundle off Victoria’s chest. “On nettoie la mère—[Let’s clean up the mother!]” she says, whirling away in strides. I exclaimed. ‘Oh no—not me!’ My mind flashes to my apprenticeship years, embedding bricks by the thousands each day. And the nights at the dance studio—The Gorilla and Beauty—when my thick-skinned hands held an angelic partner’s delicate hand and the hollow of her back as the Waltz played, and the encores. 

In a continuing sweep of motion the midwife does not stop at my left armrest. In a hush, she gestures gently—’Your turn now to help.’ I look around for a qualified nurse to take my place. But the midwife won't have my hesitation—saying, ’No, I can’t.’ Her arms flex; she leans toward my lap, lowers the little face with big eyes to view, while I fear my fingers a crusher of the delicate little creature to a pulp.

The midwife urges me on—’I am on duty.’ As the red rumpled bundle nears, not to miss my lap, obliged to straighten, shaping me stiff as a wooden chair. I claw the empty velour sleeper. Then, in the thick soft cloth strike the gelatinous body slipping. My fingers tighten to stop slipping. The midwife pulls her hand away; I wrench a grip wrapped by the floating sleeper. She spins off before dropping her shadow. Helios, near the summit, drops a beam behind the window—too steep to enter—wakes a mirage. Aetheria dabs my shoulder: guard my citadel 

My eyesight on the sly caresses the little figure brushing my fingerpads, little shoulder blades slipping through until her little armpits hook on my purlicues. I sigh relief—’halted,’ Victoria’s Loulou slithering. Now with some control, my upright fingers, like rattan weaving the base of a basket, slip through the gelatinous hollow of her little neck, spreading to a basket wall holding the wobbly head. I’m struck by her big eyes locked to mine. ‘Who are you—do I know you?’

Behind Loulou, sparky and ongoing, the midwife halts by Victoria, extending both hands. She rolls Victoria onto her side, claws the linen sheet at the head and feet, tearing the corners free and clawing them up, bundling them close in an embrace. As she turns away and vanishes through the doorway, it dawns on me—Loulou’s big dark eyes, flabbergasted by Aetheria’s subliminal odyssey, stare back from the soul of her universe, persistent with curiosity, without the slightest shame or wince. 

I ask, ‘Loulou, am I that imposing?’I recall my childhood in Goma—a puppy litter at birth, their eyes glued shut. From the depth of Loulou’s eyes it seems she is storing impressions, overriding the last of her ethereal consciousness, as dawn opens her newly acquired vitrine to the ease of the material and tangible world. 

I keep my fingers clawed around Loulou’s gelatinous body in the rumpled sleeper, her sacked little feet dangling on my lap. Feather-light, yet the dead weight of my arms soon fatigues my muscles. I spread my elbows toward the armrests, but old wives’ tales from my childhood eavesdropping echo in my mind. Afraid of crushing the tender little bones of Loulou’s feet, I think, ‘Loulou, your legs cannot carry your weight.’ Instead I lower my elbows to rest beneath my belt, on my hip bones. Soon that hurts too, holding her suspended, and I wonder, ‘Can you sit on your tuchis?’ I wiggle her legs over my knees, yet still fear her rubbery little spine might collapse, just to sense those little buttocks perched on the edge of my legs, as she stares into my eyes.

The gynecologist’s mane of hair vanishes over a shoulder. Boredom sets in; I divert a glance across Loulou to the robust midwife’s hands rolling Victoria on her side. A laundry linen sheet unfolds; sleek hands crease and tuck the corners and edges. My eyes shift. I am mesmerized by the surreal magic of tiny fingers—such minuscule phalanges and the teamwork of the palm. I thread my index finger into the barrel of crooked fingers. The little spirit charges my heart. My toying thumb strokes her little backhand. A faint spasmodic withdrawal—her little hand yanks away—stings me with a break of confidence. Rejected, my spine collapses into the deep padded chair. I scowl at myself. ‘Grow up — let the freedom of her soul reveal Moon in Virgo and year of the Dog, the wolf's beauty, Loulou.’ 

Faced with Loulou’s big eyes weighing on me, my eyes adrift to her mother, anchoring here and there to peek at the wristband, hand-printed. I swallow my curiosity—a small poison of misappropriation spelled out there: “Daniel.” But I jump back, questioning Loulou’s big eyes. ‘How are we going to pass time together?’ Then it dawns on me. I’m befuddled by a newborn—her hypnotic stare, already steeped in a cultural heritage, a flagrant déjà vu. ‘I know you from somewhere… Who are you?’ The rumble of my proximity through her mother’s gestation.   

Nascent across the seas, carried ashore on a mirage, gently on a subliminal breeze, Trini Lopez’s rhythm and voice rise before I even name the singer. Shamefaced, I hear my voice sing, “You are my sunshine…” I stop and glance around the birth room, but no one seems distracted. I look back at the relentless fixation of those big eyes on me. It dawns on me—I am murmuring, humming the tune washing softly in and out like water on a beach’s golden sand, the refrain filling my head.

Locked with Loulou’s transfixed big eyes,  the verses roll over my lips. I sing, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…” I stumble through the song; the lyrics don’t come easily beyond the refrain. I search my mind for the missing lines when I notice a faint flinch in the depth of her eyes, striking as I sing through, “sun-shine…” It wakes me to her gaze. I brush it off as a circumstantial illusion. As I reprise the refrain—“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…”—the lyrics gather, and her eyes strobe dark in the depth, the throb subliminal and faint: as the verse rolls over my lips: “The other night, dear, as I lay sleeping, I dreamed I held you in my arms… you’ll never know, dear, how much I love you…” Yet I remain dumbfounded by the little creature’s presence, her enigmatic gaze—like a distant village bell resonating across the countryside. To my dismay, the curiosity of a newborn unsettles me. ‘This can’t be—I must be seeing things.’

Unconvinced that a rubbery infant has the faculty to respond, I sing again through the stanzas. “You are my sun-shine…” I remain as transfixed as Loulou’s wolf stare, studying her eyes. “You are my sunshine…” In the depth of her big eyes the darkness seems to strobe—a black swell in the depth—at the strike of “sun-shine.” Focused now, beyond the refrain, I set the test, promising myself: ‘If Loulou’s eyes strobe at three consecutive strikes of “sunshine,” I’ll believe it’s not my imagination.’

I sing on, beyond the refrain, bedazzled—flints striking a profound ember dilation in the black of her eyes, succinct with the beauty of her intrigue. I pause, yet continue, striking the word “sun-shine” as distinctly as a piano hammer on a note. Three successive strikes—and I capitulate. ‘There must be some truth. You, and only you, have chosen your name—”Sunshine.”

The midwife walks up beside the chair’s armrest and pauses, overborne with a stupefied gaze at my Sunshine, seated on my right knee. She says, “D'habitude, les nouveau-nés tombent de sommeil après l'accouchement. Elle, ça fait deux heures qu'elle ne dort pas—[Newborns are usually exhausted from birth and fall asleep immediately. She’s been up for two hours now],” and, with an expression that reads ’what an amazing newborn,’ her hands reach out. In a sweep she seizes Sunshine from my hands and turns away, to my regret, as if a breath is taken away. 

Sentient of a void, my clinical attendance expires. To my regret I rise from my comfort and track the midwife’s steps, disappearing through the doorway. At Victoria’s side, I say, “Ma Petite! Ta Loulou…  elle a choisi son propre nom—[Your Loulou has chosen her own name—Sunshine.]” 

“The baby and mother are going to sleep,” the midwife says, insinuating that my presence is no longer needed. Ousted, I turn toward the gaping door to the maternity corridor. Across, lost in the vacuum of the crystal barrel-vault, I trawl my feet, trying to bring some life back in my stride. My head fills with a clutter of thoughts: a postcard—who should be on the front, whose address on the flip side. 

I pass a few people as the street pictures itself through the quadruple plate-glass. Outside, I round the blind corners and follow the long monastic brick wall. Across the street, the hedgerows of fenestrated brick façades, open a side street, the block tapering away into the shadows of our earlier arrival from the main artery on a bus route. But I follow the one-way asphalt stream, between curb-parked cars. Rounding the hospital crotch to the prong of the next street, I rise in the dicey backstreets to a bird’s-eye sense of route—landmarks, traffic lights, the tied-arch bridge over the ditched railway line, a horseshoe course out Etterbeek’s community toward the Little Beltway. I slip into the Audi’s seat, pull into the narrow lane, taking my chance, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs out of the shallow valley. 

At first light gleaming over the shallow valley, a scarce distant car and Saturday void of a bus, I veer into the handle of the two-prong fork of the side street and stall the Audi in yesterday’s backstreet. I backtrack the sidewalk along the monastic brick wall to the crotch of the cloisterous hospital. Wanting to be first, a thought justifies itself: ‘I’ll take my chance.’ I step away from the bare ambulance box-out in the car cluttered street and stride toward the glass portal. Restless, without a clue about visiting hours, I peer through the glaze to catch a moment for reflection ahead. The plate glass whisks open, hissing into the wings. Ill at ease, I step into the clinical milieu and pause by the easel posted with visitation hours, which assured me I’m an intruder. My presence exposed in the deserted hallway, I imagine nurses beginning their shifts, their flight in-and-out corridor doorways. 

Given the living busts behind the reception counter to stop me sneaking in, the receptionist, to my surprise, waves me on, saying, “Tout droit—[Straight ahead…] ‘You can’t miss it’.” Guided to a glass cave, to a memorial cloistral precinct, I walk the tunnel diagonally across a cloister atrium. At its end, the ward corridor lies athwart. In hesitation, I glance left and right, then, in a moment of curiosity before a profound search, cross straight the doorway, its number clicking in my mind. I pace across and around the door leaf jamb jutting into the room half-screen, to Victoria sitting upright against a stack of pillows. A mother’s giant hold plays doll—soft little lips sleeping at the teat of a tiny tilted bottle, a quarter-filled dose of milk preparation filling Loulou’s little face. 

Around the bedstead’s foot I step to a visitor’s chair in the window light, patient as Victoria lifts the bottle to sight, gauging the remaining milk, and frowns, “Loulou, waarom eet je niet—[Why don’t you eat?]” She urges the suckling, then sets the bottle aside. She lifts Loulou in the beige rumpled bundle, the wristband flashing as little hands spread over mother’s shoulder, the sleeper draping down. While Victoria’s hand rubs circles on the little back and taps gently, I ask, “My Little One. Pourquoi…[Why Daniel?]” 

Fresh to mind, Victoria too is alerted. “J'ai dû donner mon nom de mariée à l'hôpital—[I had to register in the hospital with my married name.]” Her anxiety shifts. “She doesn’t burp. Loulou-kee, kom, boertje doen—[come, little burp.]” Victoria steps out of bed, and roams the room, rubbing Loulou’s little back. She stops, damning the pediatrician. “Le docteur Chamberlain aurait déjà dû être ici hier—Doctor Chamberlain should have been here already yesterday. He hasn’t shown up yet!]”

At ten o’clock Laurence steps out of the glass tunnel and approaches the gaping doorway with the brisk efficiency of the secretary every businessman wishes he had. Victoria stands by the door leaf, cradling Loulou. Loulou’s smiley little face disappears under Laurence’s blond-highlighted hair as she leans in, cheering the mother’s infant with instinctive chit-chat. Laurence walks away cradling Loulou, surprised by the baby’s big eyes. Loulou fixes Laurence—‘Who are you?’ the stare seems to ask. Laurence chats as she rounds the bedstead, as though she hadn’t three of her own.

After Victoria climbed into bed, leaning against the pillows, the bedsheet pulled waist-high.  Laurence—still chatty—lowers herself to the chair in the window’s light. She mesmerizes the little miracle as Victoria and Laurence talk, until Loulou’s eyelids fall shut. A nurse peeks into the room. Laurence rises to her feet and, in a sweeping motion, crosses the aisle in a few strides. She hands Loulou back to her mother. Rounding the bedstead—subtle as she had earlier appeared in the doorway’s light—she vanishes. After the greeting break, I too turn for home, thinking of the afternoon visit.

Upon my afternoon return, in long strides, I cross the hissing plate-glass doorway, my gaze searching the hallway for the crystal lights. I walk the barrel vault glass tunnel through the courtyard and straight across the corridor toward the gaping double door sprinkling bright colors. The floor is strewn with bouquets, the doorhead raining strings, to glittering messages balloons shading the ceiling. I sweep the room around the door leaf and, to my surprise, encounter Victoria’s mother, Antoinette, beamed out of time, standing in the aisle with her back to a child’s crib. She cast me a glance from the dark corner of the room while continuing to chat with Victoria in bed, her shoulders nestled in a basket of pillows. Antoinette’s moonlit face catches the far window’s light, a subliminal bewitching as she oversees the porcelain doll cradled in her arms, smiling and chatting with her daughter. 

Early Sunday, Victoria in bed after tending to Loulou’s earlier bath, still worried by her baby’s sudden burst of crying. At the offside angle of the room, in the gaping door, Jephte appears in the maternity corridor with a companion—a stand up living treillage raised from a bright-colored parterre, hippy colors worn with a curious elegance, a floating bouquet.

Jephte a pace behind: a Comanche-brim hat, sports pants and jacket. He doffs his overcoat and drapes it over his arm while I stand back in the dark corner of the room, rendering myself invisible among Victoria’s visitors. But Jephte, with a chip on his shoulder for me, inches through the doorway’s light—elegant as a brand mannequin in a shop window, matching belt, a tartan woolen scarf over a beige suit. 

Sheepish, Jephte pauses at a distance while his companion—a jubilant bouquet—breezes around the bedstead, eyes fixed on Victoria in bed. Passing through the window’s light, the companion leans low for cheek-kiss greetings, straightens chatting, backstepping toward the chair. He sits cross-legged, wrists overlapping on his knees, a needle-straight spine in the window’s light. 

Jephte creeps up the darker side of the door, along the aisle beside the crib where Loulou’s little sleeping head lies almost swallowed by the bedding. He kisses his sister’s cheek, steps back, and takes distance from the conversation. Standing by - Tick-Tock… - he lingers beyond their visiting time. 

As I linger to the tempo of the maternity nurses, the morning bustle had dissipated from the corridor. Loulou feeds and falls asleep while the window shines, then darkens. Outside, autumn welcomes me to walk and think through the changing seasons. A routine begins to settle beyond the visiting hours: I slip away after the evening visit, after lifting a small burden from the nursing staff—I drift home through a jumble-mumble of Sunday drivers’ traffic. 

I arrive before the townhouse and enter the derelict cold of the apartment. I dig myself into a lonely bed for the night—a lodger in Aetheria’s cradle still waiting to receive Loulou. 

At first light, urged awake by the birds’ chirps, I drive off again. Tradesmen cross the street toward tram shelters. Monday’s drivers appear—fresh and smiling behind their wheels—as I meddle among their vans and trucks, weaving my course through the Little Beltway toward the hospital.

I’m greeted by a peaceful clinical milieu: Victoria sleeping in bed, Loulou alongside in her crib. Standing, in the shadows, my back to the built-in-cupboard, the gaping doorway beside raises a figure to my dismay—a tombstone gunslinger in a black matching hat, trimmed black mustache and beard, frock coat and white shirt. Fortyish, releases his hands from imaginary holsters and rounds the door stile to greet Victoria. While speaking, he turns aside to Loulou in a deep sleep. A crowish strawman dives over the crib’s guardrail and, in a rapacious sweep, lifts my Sunshine into cupped hands. He cradles Loulou away as Victoria raises more questions than he cares to answer. Besides the bedsheet cocooning Victoria’s legs, he sidesaddles the bed.

I snapped, ‘What a jerk. Is he a pediatrician?’—and I’m reminded of myself at an early age, ripped from my deep sleep, tormented while dawning toward full wakefulness. The lanky pediatrician lays Loulou, her silk-satin eyelids shut, along Victoria’s thigh. Dexterous fingers pop the snap buttons at the crotch of her diaper, the sleeper peeling like a banana from one leg, then the other, the seams clearing her feet, before he rolls the cloth upward to expose her silky little birth-suit. 

Victoria, throughout the weekend had felt a pediatrician neglect her concerns, now faces the man without the slightest inclination to reprimand him, while I—who would have blasted him—stand back as he indifferently dips a hand into his jacket’s pocket, withdraws a stethoscope and in a hand sweep, plugs the earpieces, to reach the dangling bell. 

The doctor’s voice stirs the Hydra of my mind. One head awakens and follows the plume of his sillage, sniffling out the unseen wake of his consciousness, his milieu floating holographic before my eyes: the pediatrician lounging in a box chair, legs crossed, a cigar clipped between his fingers. The telephone rings; he dismisses it—bugging his companion, shy across the coffee table—”these mothers…” he dismisses with a wave of the hand, trailing a plume from the cigar tip. 

He dabs roundabout Loulou’s little chest. Releases the earpieces hanging from his neck a dangling bell, his fingers grope along her skeleton until she yelps and again screams. He releases the pressure of his fingers and says to Victoria. “Sa clavicule est fissurée…[Her collarbone has been cracked. She needs handling with care until repaired.]” 

He gropes her crotch, then scoops her in his hand, stands, turning to her crib. Gentle feminine hands,  lay her down to pull the bedding up to her neck while speaking to Victoria. 

A nurse in white crosses the gaping doorway to begin her duties. The pediatrician—black long coat and hat—out of a western—Walks away, I shake off the image and step into the vacuum he left. Victoria, lying her head propped up, briefly speaks—concluding an idea begun nine months ago—I make my way out, without a glance at the slip of paper she had handed me. 

Out of the glass tunnel I hasten toward the living bust of a woman seated low behind the counter. Crossing the hallway, as the receptionist looks up, I ask, “Pouvez-vous me dire où se trouve l'Hôtel de Ville—[Can you tell me where to find the Town Hall?]” 

On foreign terrain I gauge the distance with the ease of her guiding voice—imagining it just around the corner. I stepped through the hallway wing, across the threshold of hissing plate-glass doors, onto the paved front path and into the street cluttered with cars nose to tail. Not worth pulling the Audi from its stall, circling Etterbeek only to hassle finding a bay again. 

I withdraw along the prong of the one-way streets, the façades stepping in a Z my course while my path crosses the asphalt to the other sidewalk, a shallow S through the hedgerows of fenestrated brick façades before the straight of the handle spill me onto the main road. In my strides I recount the maternity hospital receptionist’s few words. “Just a few blocks,” The valley’s wide bus route stretches up the slope into a haze. I need reassurance before loosing my reference by the woman’s map along the unending block, flirting with ‘Sunshine.’ I accost a passerby. “Pardon—[Sorry! The Town Hall of Etterbeek?]”

I weigh ‘Sunshine’s’ name—’too sentient, too personal to splash into the world’ The Town Hall stands closer than expected. I veer into a niched entry path. André Daniel, a shadow in the glaze. I press the grip; his Scorpio’s possessiveness in the shadow resists at the spring-loaded threshold. I pressed harder and hollow the hallway. A mannequin at the reception desk steps out of his poise—the man stepping in my way. He asks: “Quel est l'objet de votre visite?—[What is the object of your visit?]" 

He directs me down a split-level toward a row of wicket windows at the far left. Downstairs, I step to the glass, the phantom a jump ahead of me, settled into bureaucratic sloth. I call out. “Ma fille est née avec le mauvais nom—[My daughter is born with the wrong name.]” Nothing forthcoming, I call the woman out to wake her to respond. “Que dois-je faire—[What must I do?]”

A reluctant voice, a susurrus dragging out of a distant echoing hall, says. “Vous devez reconnaître l'enfant—[You have to recognize the child.]” 

French—a pathetic missed opportunity—flashed through my mind: ‘Should I have addressed her in Flemish?’ Her plumpish hand, almost imperceptible, slips beside her curved bulk below the darkish bullnose countertop. I’m left in limbo, wondering where next I must go. At a snail’s pace, her hand rises from beneath the countertop and returns with a shy sheet of white paper, creeping it across the countertop. A thumb-swipe flicks up a dog-ear among her idle fingers. Through the glass, I read the page: void of any official letterhead. The omission grips my conscience—almost swindling me of any official claim. Her surplus fingers crook and stretch the sheet toward me through the window slot. 

My fingers, in a pair, swipe the rudimentary, grainy, form to my thumb—an umpteenth-generation master photocopy, withered by repetition. Expecting the form to demand a child’s birth name—but none. I sidestep along the ledge toward the pen on a string. With a few scribbles, the white sheet now emboldened with my name and address—the ingredients of a farce. I slip back under the window and walk away. Behind me, the white form flies off as the apathetic clerk rotates a quarter circle in her seat, discarding it as trash in a pigeonhole cabinet. 

My eyes skirt along the hall’s series of windows past a seated area scattered with a few figures. Flabbergasted—I had expected, like a deed changing a property, a receipt stamped with an official seal. A doubt lingers—whether André Daniel will ever unleash Victoria. I slip in after a woman queued at a window headed “Registration.” The woman clerk, hearing my voice, eagerly slips a form through the wicket. 

A voice in me awakens to the gravity of my thinking, saying, ‘A name is for her lifetime—don’t kid.’ I sidestep from the woman clerk’s window with a form in hand toward the ballpoint hanging from a fine ball chain in the corner of the window ledge. I spread Victoria’s note and copy the names. I check each letter, and backward, and again. My idea of Sibyl had not been Victoria’s spelling—it bends toward the musical French, Sibylle. I return the completed form, accompanied by my identity card. The woman glances from my face to the photograph, reads the corresponding names on the form, and returns my identity card. At peace with myself—lest I commit a stunt of madness—I step away, cross the hall past the portier, and pull the plate-glass door with an assertive grip, my way into the street.

In my stride I muse over a collage layout and text for a baby postcard, while a few cars pass and lose themselves through the shallow valley. I pass a deserted bus stop but turn a blind eye. The throughway opens between the hedgerows of fenestrated brick façades onto the side street. I approach the claustral, wavy brick wall, drift left before the crotch of the hospital, and hinge the corner into the rear street. Pebbled streaky gleams line the curbs. I fumble the keys out from my hip pocket and finger the Audi’s. A pick of the door and I slip into the seat, tweaking the ignition. At leisure I pull out and weave in my glass bubble, chancing another shortcut toward the filling station perched on the embankment above the ditched railway. 

I drive a meandering course in the shadow of the city moat, dipping through the troughs of city gates, riding the waves to the sprawling city, cresting and slipping out of the Little Beltway, weaving into the community to join the 51-tramway tracks. Short of Uccle’s Town Hall at the end of a side street, I stall the car in the shopping street by a flashing print shop, my Snappy Canon camera holding the last shots of Victoria and her Loulou. I alight from the car and step into the store, where a massive central machine drops pictures to view like an automated distributor. Offside, before the storekeeper across the box counter, I snap open the camera’s back lid, remove the 35 mm Kodak film spool, and hand it over for development. 

I question the photo shopkeeper, following his pointing finger across the kaleidoscopic street. I leave the store, weaving through bumpers, and jaywalk diagonally through traffic, losing track in the midst of sizzling bright colors—the row of storefront goods and dynamic advertising. 

A fire-engine-red chevron warns to keep the porte-cochère clear for the rear retailers. Short of the courtyard, off to the side, a conventional printer sits beneath the splash of signage. I press the door open and ask the man behind the front counter: “Pouvez-vous imprimer des cartes postales—[Can you print postcards?]”