#HiddenRhythms

[kahztiy]

BOOK SYNOPSIS: This story is an unfolding suite of chapters clarifying my book, The Code: Horizon of Infinity—a philosophical memoir exploring how the universe sculpted our minds. Through Aetheria, the lens of consciousness, aware of her need for a body to reveal herself and exercise her wishes, the narrative leads to her birth and the name she will claim: Sunshine -- Step into this journey of becoming, where the cosmos whispers its secrets, and identity blooms like dawn.

CHAPTER SYNOPSIS: Michel arrives as the night swallows familiar faces, his mind still mapping invisible currents. Kuta flickers with neon and memory, Iluh slipping just out of reach. Between whispered astrology and restless roads, signals ghost across Bali’s fractured landscapes. The city pulses with dance and dissonance, while Michel lingers in quiet entanglements. In the mountain’s breath, a quiet knowing—Francine’s fire still flickers, even here.

[YD6-64(TRT) Chapter Code] Mentor: Mapping Microwaves, Drifting Through Bali’s Signals

By mid-October, after Michel disembarks into the grip of Friday night, his three team members unload the microbus -- small figures, dwarfed by the suitcases in hand and strapped to their shoulders. Through the Chinese entry pavilion, they approach the open-air redwood reception desk. Bustling around, Michel before scattering -- vanishing, as if swallowed whole by Nyx.

Amidst the disembarking chaos, Michel barely acknowledges me, his thoughts still wandering the wilderness. He knows he is about to meet an unfamiliar face to the team. His survey had led him to a remote post office, showing in his demeanor -- a man caught in the echoes of a telegraphed message from the Paris TRT Philips home office, expectation hanging in suspense. Until a casual voice ripples from the silence: “On peut avoir á manger ici?” -- Can we have something to eat here? 

“Il y a le restaurant Japonais!” -- There's the Japanese restaurant! I suggest, sharing with Michel how I've woven myself into a whimsical week in town, walking away. We stream like a breeze around the block, welcomed like a zephyr. The kimono-clad waitresses greet me with familiars smiles, as though I belong here. Michel streams by scattered patrons, while the girls swirl around us.  

Knowing each other’s twin, in a glance, we swirl in the current, bypassing the bar’s vacant stools where a barmaid attends in silence. My mind flips -- ripples into the previous evening, drawn back into memory. “Swan-Lake Iluh” -- a name she earned in the soft wake of Iluh, whose little capuchin monkey, jumped shoulders to claw mine. With Ilhu and the manageress absent that night, the girls’ spirit blurred in the aftermath of a share identity, distorted my perception. 

Ilhu stands before me, draped in a loose, sunlit-print shirt, colors crackling autumn oak foliage beneath a golden canopy. Her smile captured my heart. “Come here,” I say, She glows, her whole being responding. The petite Balinese girl rounds the open end of the bar. Stepping in slim-fit brown slacks, she approaches to stand by my side, while I ignore before me the fruit cocktail she has served. My mind doodles over a medley of neon signs and flickering lights swirling through Kuta’s streets before the town stirs awake. Straight from my heart, the words roll out. “Do you want to go to the disco?”

“That’s not for Balinese people,” she says. “My boss do not want it.”

I frown, breezing a thought -- ’Aren’t you free… Why?’ But then I exclaim, “Your boss. . .” I dare not finish my thought, yet lingering -- ‘Does he. . . she. . . own you?’ 

I walk out into the night, the cosmic music echoing in my mind: 

��I could have danced all night, I could have danced all night

And still have begged for more

I could have spread my wings and done a thousand things

I've never done before . . .”

Michel and I drifted toward a table, pulling back the chairs before settling a short distance from the karaoke stage. A kimono-clad waitress approaches, we order our meal, I push a brief question. “Where is Iluh?”

“Five.” The waitress replies. 

I didn’t grasp, and yelp, “What?”

The waitress gestures, “Five minutes,” clarifying she will be coming. 

Michel and I acquaint amidst teasing laughters, our attention diverted toward the kimono-clad waitress gliding over with the drinks. She lingers at my side. I wave at a chair. Another waitress places a sushi plate before Michel, then one before me. Glancing up, I asked again for Iluh. 

“Coming,” she says. 

Iluh’s silhouette fleeting the glow of the kitchen door, passing, offering no more than a regretful gesture before she melts into the bar’s shadows.

In the drift of our conversation, Michel flip, “Gemini,” when I asked his birth sign. Born in the year of the Rooster, he’ll be preening his feather -- offhand, he refrains from mentioning Nina, but he is emphatic, in the orbit of his work -- “Waiting for my girlfriend, to join me.” 

As the waitresses clear the table, he rises. “I have to finish work for printing off,” he says. I’m shedding glimpses toward Iluh, scattered like loose pages, as Michel circles the hall, his silhouette vanishing through the distant door into the night. Left to fine tune a land survey’s week on the road to report. I rise from the table, follow in Michel’s footsteps, but pause by an empty bar stool, lingering in conversation with the barmaids over a glass of wine. Then follow through -- stepping out into the night.

Circling the block, I enter the redwood Chinese pavilion. The garden lanterns cast lurking shadows, peeking from behind the trunks -- I’m no longer alone. Aetheria's magic mirage shimmers in the spill of the scattered lights. I swirl around the newel post, climbing the open-air stairs, veering onto the Chinese loggia, my gaze past Michel’s room. Last night lingers fresh in mind -- Nyx wakes beneath the moonlit fenestrated facade of the Japanese cottage upper floor from the black-tiled lean-to roof -- schism preventing the reach.

I extended a hand toward the bright eyes behind fine-rimmed spectacles -- elegant, a golden bracelet swaying at her wrist. Our hands pirouetted -- where hearts had earned their dance, entwined in the spirit of Swan Lake, suspended in memory.

By Monday morning, the night has unravelled, pulled away by an underhanded current. I meet Michel on the loggia, stepping toward the redwood stairs, descend upon a waiting crew below -- leaning against the counter, chatting with the young receptionist. In passing, Michel drew the slight men circling him deeper in the Chinese pavilion. 

I pause into the vacated space at the counter’s angle, greeting the petite’s receptionist, swallowed by loose, plain shorts and a shirt. I oversee her broad forehead, hair drawn into a ponytail, eyes up, yet sunk in the corner behind the redwood counter. Stealing the limelight by her exuding charm -- a daughter to the Balinese hotel managers. In my comings and goings during my past whimsical week. 

Yet, in the midst of a world where women hunker in the street, crudely painting the curb with a spatula-shaped brush, she carries an admirable ambition. When she muses, her voice light, her gaze drifts, lost in a soft glow of her imagination enrapturing: “I want to be a receptionist, or a secretary before I get married. . .”

Around Michel, his team moves bustling in their shadows at their feet on the dull paving. I’m taken aback by the ledge -- where a gleam washing across the terracotta quarry tiles, bleeding behind the petite receptionist, through the yawning doorway, into the chill of a clinical-white ceramic-tiled backroom. 

The jamb frames moose-faced yet elegant figures draped in canary yellow petal-fringed kimonos, cinched at the lower back with an exaggerated red butterfly tie. Their attire does not lend itself to a pair of room maids in a laundry-scullery, Yet a quiet sisterly care lingers. To the absurd, their feet -- the flip side of stylish -- Y-thong flip-flops skimming the tiles, while stand like statues graceful and unguarded.

As our words dance on the edge of laughter -- teasing, restrained -- restlessness gathers behind me. Sjefril stands there, his presence weighted, unease radiating in quiet pulses. He sees -- the playful, romantic current skimming across the counter. 

The engineer, sturdy on his feet, hesitates. His studious eyes, carrying a Virgo’s fatherly authority, waver in tides and ebbs, exuding flickering apprehensive from between Michel -- preoccupied with logistics -- and the quiet current passing between the girl and me. 

Sjefril’s gaze lingers amidst Michel’s busyness -- watching him trace routes over a map, issuing hushed instructions that weave over survey gears. Punctuating rhythmic thuds of hard-shell cases being loaded into the maroon Toyota Kijang parked just beyond the Chinese entry pavilion’s gates. Until, Sjefril’s restlessness uncoils behind me, a hesitant step winding up only to resurge -- wrestling with unspoken thoughts.

Then, bracing himself, Sjefril unleashes from the shadows of the backdrop steps forward -- a silent dare, his hesitation pressing upon me an unspoken fatherly warning. “Dangerous. . .” He exhales, holds his breath, warning himself the repercussions. He reads what he unknowingly mastered, what mushrooms within me, as I’m saying to myself. ‘It's going too far. . . my lovely!’ and echoing the music: 

“. . . where do you go to, my lovely,

When you're alone in your bed?

I read his expression -- his concern breaching through the melody, rippling beneath its echo. ‘All those strangers disembarking on the island, picking up our young girls. . .’ 

As Sjefril’s thoughts trail off, I chill a remedy -- shift my beam of sight. My pointillists golden rays, that had been basking the receptionist in a teasing glow, chaffing, illuminating -- pull away offside, dissolve into a broader scene around Michel and his crew. 

The warmth cools. Our chuckles fade, retreating from the crest toward a crescendo. Instead, my mind drifts -- to the crew, to the marron microbus, SUV, van-like, the snout of a small sedan -- not to be laughed at.  

 Sjefril follows Michel’s lead, stepping out of the entrance pavilion into the street. Michel tugs the skeletal, slight-framed officials along around the Kijang. In a burst, front and back doors swing open, silhouettes slip into the microbus, I'm meeting in the interior. With the closing doors, settle behind Sjefril as he leans forward, key picks the ignition, tweaks, the engine to a purr.

Beyond Sjefril’s head, and shoulders spilling from the backrest, the city street unspool, narrowing into a single-lane leading through the countryside. A truck heads toward us, but a tension rises in the approach, without either Sjefril conceding the asphalt band, and neither relent -- speed the rights to the single band of asphalt. The approaching windshield unveils the driver, freezing into a sculptured figure --  tense -- not sparing Sjefril's robust figure.  Kamikazes locked eyes, the stark white of pupils eclipsed in rigid concentration -- their silent game of persistence. At a last breath, both tug the steering wheel in sync, veering.  Tandem tires bite the beaten road shoulder. The truck cabin -- jack out the box -- to fear at the flanks window, to morph into an airbrush blur streak brush my window, to relent the cargo bed clear to peaceful countryside -- ‘You didn't fear me?’

I watched with fascination the driver's competency punctuated with bus, car, and winnowing villagers' scattered grains upon the roadway. The chaff lifted in the wakes.    

In a trickle of upcoming traffic, Michel, from the passenger seat, a topographic map sprawled across his lap, monitors the roadway shifting orientation. Blind to a median island, he is guided by the hand signals of a fool’s trick -- a dummy traffic police officer for deceiving drivers entering town. He tracks the trip odometer through a far spread village emerge tracing the invisible course against the broken skyline of forests and fields, rooftops and treetops where the microwave ghost a high-voltage cable swagging between the imaginary pylons. Yet to sketch a trellis against the sky.

In the open fields straggling the village houses, we pull over on the road shoulder to an expanse of bristle-green fields. Yet, the absurdity wanes, after Michel leans over underneath Sjefril's gaze, checking out Sjefril voice, “twenty-five kilometers,” before straightening and records from our base, our course creeps an inland course along the island of Bali coast. He resets the Kijang’s counter to zero. A midway course, resetting, before I step out, the two officials lingering close -- observant, assisting, carrying the sister calibrated altimeter. I'll learn to read, tracing the earth’s curvature from shielding signal interference across the landscape.

Michel’s body language chats through his procedures with the crew, as I’m absorbing knowing he’ll discharge me from his footsteps sometimes in the future -- he reads atmospheric pointers off the altimeter, marking notes on the map. Driver and passenger door swing open, we're meeting settling inside, to a choir of smacking the doors shut. After Sjefril’s assurance glance, all passengers are settled, we pull off. Following the leading asphalt ribbon unwinding a leading course through the countryside. 

We halt along tufts of trees, punctuating a stop and drive-offs, measuring the peaks of treetops, Sine computations map the swarming Fresnel Zone. Calculating the signal’s future arc.

Arriving in a village, with a different atmosphere, as our accompanying officials unveil his security clearance, to the leading telecommunications officer, guide us to the telephone exchange. Telecommunications officer, greets the Varuna telephone operator, to an existing town’s network. The operator with a softer underlying army exchange of ranks, names, and purpose of our visit to withdraw and relax as Michel photograph the telephone station’s wall. Marked-off with red tape a square for the forthcoming Integrated Rectifier-Transmitter wiring the switchboard existing infrastructure. Tread an imaginary coaxial cable to the outside, photograph the terrain. Record the topographic eastern coat implant to a ghostly repeater sketches a pylon trellis against the sky, crowned with antennas, before returning to base, Michel keeps a close to Nina’s access.

When we ended our survey on the western coast, calibrated a stationary altimeter with the sea, around the Tanah Lot Temple. Our return trip, ends a survey, backtracking into the fall of the night. The cruise headlight beams, awakening the asphalt band from the black hole of its sleep in the night darkness. While over Sjefril’s shoulder, the dashboard a skyline of lights amidst the speedometer needle a few notches higher than 40 Km.  To encounter glares freezing, until, on a kamikaze dive, one and the other thaw breach the night, in a sweep speed partying headlight to eclipse ok n a temporary blindness. To discover heading through the midst of a skyline of flickering village sparse lights, only to enter in their midst to pull up outside the Chinese entry to the hotel.

“Come.” He steps away, through the entry pavilion and past the gates, where the crew before him has vanished into the shadows of the night. 

With our strides, the narrow streets of Kuta unfold ahead -- streets bathed in sunlight I have come to know during my whimsical wanderings of the past week. But now, in Michel’s whim, the figures ahead seem to amass into a crowd, a humming illusion that dissolves as we immerse into the flurry of Asian eyes and blond hair. The night is ousted by spilling lights of stalls with exotic fabrics and nightlife stores.

From the rows of fenestrated facades, a street counter’s aquarium lures Michel, while my mind scans the terrace restaurant's feeble glow expanding beneath a nomad’s tent, shielding the night -- a vast recess of open-air seating. To my surprise, Michel pauses. Restless fish seeming unaware that the passive lobsters at the bottom have their claws bound in rubber bands. Michel’s gaze sharpens, settling with a connoisseur’s ease. He brushes off like a speck of a Gemini’s uncertainty, asking, "On mange ici ? -- Are we eating here?" 

Baffled, hiding behind my ego, unversed, I watch as a woman dressed in a traditional plain dress approaches, her figures shifting through the blue-lit water -- assuming the air of a chef’s connoisseur. Michel’s eyes flick toward the open aquarium, his pointing finger dancing over exotic fish as the grab tongs hover. "This, this and this." The chef weight in before settling on a lobster claws cinched in black rubber bands. I shrink back. The hostess’ gaze turns to me. ‘And you?’ 

I focus on a particular fish, scales gleam reddish flickering in the water, but as I gesture, I lose sight of the swimmer, which she had yet to lock onto. She questions me, ‘Yes.’ I nod, though her scoops catches dark scales. Under Michel’s gaze, she questions again, "Finis?" I answer, "Ça me va -- That’s alright," nodding, ‘Yes,’ to the chef. 

Michel paces past the aquarium’s flank, trailing behind the chef. Short of her vanishing, we're threading through the rows of tables, where shadowed figures linger beneath dim lanterns, scattered ghostly among the wooden beams and trusses. 

We drift off the aisle, a few stretch tables, settling on a bench. As we talk, my gaze settles beyond -- in the depth of the terrace, where the chef has retreated, disappearing behind the hush of a Japanese paper wall of sliding doors folding her away. A frail young man unfolds from the sliding doors, meandering toward us. He arranges our place settings. He fetches a beer for Michel, a thick mixed-fruit juice for me. Then, the chef reappears -- an air of quiet ceremony in her step. She sets the dish before us, her voice shaping my first Indonesian word`Goreng' Announcing the platter she serves, saying, “Nasi Goreng.”

Eating my fish, I watch Michel before me -- after the exotic names, and the ritual of nimble fingers savoring lobster, garniture. From the drift of our conversation, Michel quiet open, divulges his fifty-seven years, waiting now for his girlfriend to join him. Michel has charted his course, mapping landscapes while entangling himself. Back in France, his wife, once plucked from a life of prostitution, now unwavering manages, his three-house estates.

The waiter returns with a bowl of water, a napkin, we stand up, and drift away, toward the trickling street beyond the aquarium. I catch myself feeling sorry for the chef, lingering nearby, to draw customers from the crow with a curious glance at the glass-lit blue world of fish. To my dismay, Michel pays -- graceful -- the entire ritual unfolding of a man unsure what to do with the money he earns, although laughing off the bill of 50,000 rupiahs -- ‘Whoa?’ I sigh in silence. 

Casual, weaving through the shades of the nightlife street, among a flurry of shifting eyes, we drift further -- until the Peanuts character. Snoopy, helmeted, scarf trailing in the wind, perched from a street sing. The beagle, after racing his kennel, find himself saddled. Bigger than a human, giant to a gable. With the roof extending wings over a blatant facade trembling, the muffled throb of disco music. 

With Michel’s confident strides, I grow skeptical on the courtyard’s dirt apron. Beneath Snoopy’s watchful perch, a pink-miniskirted, perky young blond tempts a Harley-Davidson -- an ill-matched pair, though cute -- while the chatting bouncers remain oblivious. Michel’s gaze darts past, slipping through the pair of men in printed T-shirts, detached from their security duty.

As the door swings open, I flinch against the blizzard of sound. I creep behind Michel, unfazed, as he moves up to the front desk. Fumbling for ear mufflers against the fraying assault on my cochlea, I follow in suite -- while he hands over the entrance fee -- 5,000 Rupiahs -- to receive a ticket, I’m drawn to know its use. 

Michel, carving a path through the accent-thick crowd of rugged men with their Australian twang, fraying at the crowded belt around the toe of a horseshoe bar. I follow my mentor to the far heel, breathing a little space. Michel leans up to the counter, leaving the ticket behind, the pieces of the puzzle come together, as his drink was served. I order a rum and coke, with a drink at hand, to my disbelieve he slips away, effortless into the rhythm of the pub crawl, his ease at blending in stark contrast to my hesitance. 

I don’t warm up to the floor-pulse chaos -- the squeeze of bodies, the assault of the sound. Olive-tinted young men buzz feverish, lost in the mix of fair-faced women, their buttocks fattened, swaying laughing, shedding inhibition sip by sip. Michel’s voice troubles the words he attempts to form -- until, I breach my hesitation, piercing the din. “Michel -- excuse moi, je pars -- excuse me, I’m leaving!” 

Without a flinch, Michel stays as I turn my back on the folly of a drinking competition. The door shuts behind me, muffling the pulse. Leaving the pretty and young teeter on the edge of heat and recklessness, stir in mind. I cross the gritty apron into a villagey night, my ears drumming. Strolling from statue to a glazed building, pass the ghosting women painting the curb. Prolong the drain trench, to press the gate to the Chinese pavilion. I turn the newel post, gaze through the open stairs. Veering on the loggia, pass the middle window to the door folding and hinge back. Shedding my shoes, my clothes and dive into bed, into the arms of Morpheus.

I awake, glancing at the curtains aglow with waking soft light -- then freeze, ears pricking, detecting body movements. My hydra-headed mind, ears where eyes ought to be, stretching toward the loggia's end door. Thinking -- Michel, returning to his room -- I drift back into the arms of Morpheus. 

Awaken again, my hydra ears creeping into Michel’s room next door. By the whisper tumble threesome beach ball game, body motions -- or the lack of it -- I doodle in my mind a replica of my furnished room. His headboard against the paper-thin party wall, the restless rattle of movement one on either side, stretching a vacuum through the middle of the bed. 

Reasoning in all logic -- it’s Michel’s room, and he ought to be there alone. But that isn’t the frequencies being emitted from the double bed. I conclude he is stretched still, a silent divide -- his presence an emptiness of sound through the middle. Yet, on either side, at his flanks, the duet of women stirs in the ebb and tide of bodies, the rhythm of morphing figures -- side-sitting, leaning, reclining -- a choreography of motion unspooling. With a lasting though, ‘All this, and he is due to meet his girlfriend in the coming days?’ -- dies in silence. I doze off until the birds chirp in the tree canopies.

Sjefril steering the Kijang microbus by the interior of the engine’s muffled purr, with seating breathing space behind me, now vacant. Michel in the front passenger seat, his wards punctuate by backward glances, we ride out of Kuta. A trickle of weary cyclists borrows the beaten road shoulder, the odd motorbike weaving past, the leading asphalt band crisscross after a long ride, Michel signals Sjefril, to turn right. We pass the Club Med sign, leave the pointier behind. The tarmac fades -- abandons us to a ground beaten sleek road, spread shoulders by large seated bus route through dense forest. 

From the wilderness, offside, a gateway fresh and abrupt emerges, the road shifts, to a drive meandering through a groomed undergrowth, before the wilderness morphs to widespread park lawns, before white peeking fenestrated facades beneath pitched roof eaves. Sjefril veers to a roundabout, strangely pulls through the porte cochère to an entrance portal, further to a discrete halt. We step out, Michel avoids the clubhouse, contours, clearing the secluded grounds, to the seafront sports courts, the lawns dissolving into distant golden beaches.

Pieces of a jigsaw puzzle fit my imagination, Michel’s words echoing in my mind, “I used to coach tennis here on weekends. . .” He had repeated in casual conversations to exclaim, “I'm waiting for my girlfriend!” The whole image was painting itself, into the next day, after he said, “I'm moving to a more upstanding hotel.” and I couldn’t imagine a more beautiful home than in the midst of the Chinese Garden, next door to the Japanese restaurant.  

Our personal driver completes the tapestry of advantages as I sit beside Sjefril, the road stretching long ahead. As we ride inland, I glance behind -- Nina, burning with Aries Fire. Behind her, the wavering flames of Francine, I left behind in New York -- still creeping under my skin and pinching at my heart. 

Nina lost the typic Asian demeanor, into the Dutch colonizers, with Michel seated close with his young girlfriend, while on the flip side of telling our destination, my mind to a blank. The little engine at my feet, with an anxious whine, drive us straight up the mountain flank. Until the road rolling over the crest, unfolding amidst a bustling tourist outpost -- stalls circling a beaten apron. We step out, before the waterlogged volcano crater. In the midst of the mid-October sky, the blues stretch wide over Bali’s evanescent, turbulence landscape.

You are welcome to read all the chapters and explore more at my website: How the Universe Sculptured Our Mind. I spend an absurd amount of time chasing expression—perhaps to shame. But the challenge is mine, the shaping of my perceptions. The gift is yours: thoughts, echoes, reflections. I take them with gratitude. And you—who are you, reading these lines, stepping into my genre, my style, the quiet current of my subject?