THE Hale-Bopp comet had been of closest proximity to Earth on March 22, 1997, and consisted of a variety of elements: ice, rock, carbonatious crondites, methane, as well as organic chemicals such as ethanol, carbon and silicates. However, Hale-Bopp’s run passed Earth apparently had been of greater substance than that perceived by hundreds of millions of Earth folk. Indeed, at its closest point to Earth while passing our way, our planet was engulfed by the contents of the comet’s three, potent tails — one of which consisted of ions, the second of dust and the third of a thin tail of sodium atoms.

Due to the relatively close passing by this comet and its tails (not due to come back our way for about another 2,370 years), an extremely small quantity of Earth’s populace comprised of psychically orientated people had their varying abilities (some even greatly) enhanced and for some non-psychic-majority folk to witness.

Very few psychics could actually manipulate universal temporal reality and thus foresee future events — both of a good nature or bad, the latter being perhaps an approaching natural disaster — while some psychically talented people could sense the presence of spirits, be they residual or sentient, or see in their mind’s eye the exact location of a missing person — dead or alive.

As such occurred, it was recalled by some folk that about three centuries prior to the near passing of Hale-Bopp, one prominent and credible German psychic stated that her “spirit guide” — a proclamation that had gotten her hung by the neck — communicated “a knowledge” to her that on this precise date such a significant comet would pass, more specifically the zenith of its proximity to Earth, during which its three tails’ variety of unique non-Earthly elements would engulf the planet, thus settling onto Earth’s surface, though for no more than 60 seconds. This would enhance the psychic abilities held by an extremely small number of people who’d just by chance come into direct contact with the tails’ elements during that brief 60-second period.

When asked by her fellow villagers why only these few psychics will be affected by the comet’s three tails’ elements, the renowned psychic replied that her “spirit guide” revealed to her that those few psychics had endured severe mental illness and then died an untimely, unnatural death in their previous life as a result of the mental illness. Unfortunately, they’d once again be afflicted with severe mental illness during their current incarnation.

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HOW could something like this happen to me?! he screamed into his mind’s ear. You hear and read about such things, but to have such a horrific thing actually happen to me! It’s the absolute epitome of a nightmarish ordeal! A viciously malicious ordeal!!

George Blight was told throughout most of his fifty-seven years of life that he had some sort of fortune-telling or potential for extra sensory perception — though exactly why he had it or the potential for it was never specified nor plausibly explained to him by all of those tarot card readers, etcetera, for whose ‘services’ he’d paid handsomely. However, what was happening to him at that moment was crystal-clearly real and horrific, though never, ever, foreseen in a premonition by him or by any other ‘fortune-teller.’

He was in fact experiencing the very worst of ‘the very worst’ — stuck on a large DC-10 jetliner, caught in a very deep wind-shear, plummeting down towards the darkened eastern Atlantic Ocean, somewhere off the southwestern coast of France; with travel bags, pillows falling, sliding every which way, and hundreds of oxygen masks dangling from somewhere above.

Oh, God! … If only I’d taken the concord or … How in the hell could not one — just one — of those countless card-readers and storefront psychics warn me of this death trip, trap. Peter did want to meet with me just yesterday — he’d probably have known. But then again, he’s also a ‘fortuneteller,’ who’s also not nearly accurate enough times in his foretelling of future events, and especially so with such negative ones.

Oh, my God, I’m going to die!!

Peter might’ve foreseen this ordeal but decided he was likely wrong — as he is with such major matters, and especially likely so with airline disasters — and thus realized that since I told him that I really should make this trip, he didn’t want to scare me for nothing into canceling my reservation on this flight. He even assured me that I myself would almost certainly foresee such a disastrous event like this happen to me. He actually said, “I really believe you have it in you, Big George guy.”

But then it finally came. The sensation of the huge aircraft gradually leveling off, its nose and tail becoming parallel with the calm ocean below, all with the slow alleviation of the ear-piercing whine of the plummeting aircraft’s four, huge, extremely powerful bypass-turbofan-jet engines.

His life was spared. Every passenger’s life was spared; all 356 of them. The pilot then informed all that the aircraft did indeed fly into a formidable wind shear.

“But please remain seated with your safety belts on and secured. Thank you for your patience.”

George closed his eyes with praise, as two drops of oily sweat rolled down his forehead, onto his glasses then finally made their way onto his pale cheeks.

Thank you, God! Oh thank you, God! Thank you so very much!

When the plane finally landed, he, being traumatized, found himself fumbling his nervous fingers while trying to take the bi-polar-disorder medication that his psychiatrist prescribed him a month earlier. He was so shook up that he thought he might not be able to get his medication out of its bottle and into his mouth.

Though finally having washed down his medication with the funny-tasting, standard airplane drinking water, he hustled himself off of the plane, down to the baggage claim, then outside to catch the first taxi to the nearest hotel with vacancy just for the night. There was no sense in going for a nicer hotel deeper into the city, since he was catching an early flight to Cairo the next morning, anyway, and definitely wouldn’t have time to enjoy any of Paris’s posh hotels.

Rather than allow the taxi driver to see just how badly his hands were shaking, he simply dropped an adequate amount of francs onto the driver’s lap, bolted out of the vehicle and to the hotel entrance.

Regardless of his ordeal, he found himself hungry, and it was around breakfast time back home along the eastern U.S. However, he knew that there was a good chance that his unstable condition could embarrass him in the dining room, say, with a prawn shaking off of his fork and onto the table or, even worse, the floor.

Thus he’d splurge and order room service for dinner, along with a bottle of soothing, bubbly white wine.

Washing down his last mouthful of sirloin steak with the last half-glass of wine, George kicked off his shoes and threw himself backwards onto the bed. He thought about how even living with severe mental illness, life’s is not that bad after all, assuming that thought wasn’t just of survivor’s gratitude. For the previous thirteen years he’d been a successful chief advisor with a large, financial firm, the proud father of three healthy teenagers and the husband of a beautiful, successful lawyer. And I did just survive a jetliner’s plunge thousands of feet towards the icy Atlantic Ocean.

But still overwhelming the positive stuff on his list was the fact that he, for the last half-dozen years or so, has found life to be rather inexplicably unbearable — his good job, three healthy children with his beautiful lawyer wife (who were worried about his recent severely depressed outlook and short-notice trip to Egypt) had become, simply put, unfulfilling.

His negativity plus his recent ordeal in the air, all combined, were still not enough to keep him awake. Soon, he closed his eyes and slept …

“Hey, mister; what are you doing out there?” asked George, to the man standing outside on the hotel’s fourteenth floor ledge, which was but one and a half feet wide. “Get back in here before you catch your death; it’s a freezing wind out here.” He was the same bellhop who’d delivered George’s room service barely an hour before.

“Stay the hell away!” the man warned. “Or I will jump! I really mean it!”

“C’mon, guy; things can’t be so bad if … ”

Apparently, the bellhop had indeed been dead serious in his unrelenting desire to leap, and that’s exactly what he did. Although George turned his eyes away to avoid the horrific sight, the French man leapt forward and down to the pavement below — obliterated into eternity. He thought that he could even hear the blunted crack of the man’s bones upon impacting the pavement.

“Oh! Crap!!”

Snapping out of his slumber, George found himself lying on the bed with only about a half-hour having passed, according to the radio’s digital clock, which read 10:56 p.m.

Outside his closed-curtain window, though far closer to the window of the next hotel room, there were lamplights placed there to illuminate the hotel’s name’s large letters painted rose red on the outside brick wall.

I guess that’s why this room was so atypically cheap.

He then sat himself up, wiping away with his hand the thin layer of sweat from his forehead.

“It seemed so real,” he mumbled, getting up to walk over to the room’s sole window.

Bothering him were the thoughtless words he’d offered the nightmare bellhop during his final moments of life. “C’mon guy; things can’t be so bad,” he replayed his own, exact words in his mind’s ear, cringing. What a stupid thing to say; what was I thinking? Well, it was just a dream, and stupid things are frequently said and done in dreams.

Seeking some cooler night air, he found the windowpane sticking to the frame since so few guests bothered opening it. After some strategically placed knocks with his hand, however, he eventually loosened it free. A light gust of early-autumn Parisian air blew into his face and room.

He looked straight out towards the well-lit airport runways no more than two miles away, before looking up and over to the city core, lit-up comparably bright to that of London or New York City.

Again the ordeal of the plummeting jetliner began playing in his mind when he was abruptly alerted by a sound like that of a squawking seal. He initially thought that the strange sound may be coming from just some birds outside on the ledge; however, when he went to look out the window, to the right, then the left, he found himself stunned numb at the sight of a man standing on the hotel’s outside ledge, with his back pressed against the brick wall, quivering from both fear and the notably cold night air.

The man was not well built, a fact evident by the small uniform into which he seemed to comfortably fit; plus he wore a small and also befitting strap-on cap. The man obviously had been crying.

“Hey, you’re the bellhop who served me my meal,” said George, his nervous voice noticeable. “Why the hell are you out there? You’ll fall and kill yourself.”

“You are very bright, you are,” replied the bellhop, in a strong French accent, sarcastically then rhetorically. “One cannot get anything past you, can one?”

The distraught bellhop’s sarcasm aside, George wondered how a man seemingly so determined to take his own life by jumping off of a towering building’s ledge felt so compelled to lean back against the brick siding, appearing to grasp onto anything out there available to grasp. Then again, he recalled hearing somewhere that when some people determined to kill themselves by jumping to their deaths flail wildly on their way down in a futile attempt to grasp at something — anything. It must be instinctual, I guess, he mused.

“You’re not going to jump, are you?” he queried, really trying to not sound so stupid. “Please — let’s talk.”

“There is nothing to talk about, mister. Now, please go away!”

“I can’t just walk away and leave you out there,” explained George. Being only five-foot-ten and 291 pounds, he didn’t particularly desire going out onto the ledge to join the bellhop.

“Please, mister, leave me alone,” the bellhop begged. “There is nothing to talk about.”

“Sure, there’s plenty to talk about. For example, the jet plane I was flying in just a few hours ago actually almost plunged into the ocean. I sweated for God to spare my life, and here you’re planning to snuff out yours. The ironies in life can really be bitter, don’t you think?”

Finding himself considering whether he could’ve come across as more thoughtful than he had, he noticed that the bellhop wasn’t clasping so intently onto the hotel’s siding as he was before; rather, the man was beginning to lean a bit forward.

“Whoa, guy — be careful out there! Believe me, life’s worth living,” he urged, again sounding foolish, futile and desperate. “I mean … I mean things will … ”

It all, though, did not matter in the end, since the bellhop decided against George’s reasoning and pleas, however well-intentioned. However, it wouldn’t have mattered what anyone would’ve said to the deeply troubled man; things were, at least from his perspective, simply that bad in his life.

Thus George again, just like in his nightmare, turned his eyes away just as the bellhop jumped out as far as he could and fell like a rock, down onto the recently-paved street below. Had it not been for the noisy vehicular traffic, he believed, he would have heard an audible thud of the man’s body hitting the cement street and shattering within.

He could not believe his eyes. He had in fact dreamt virtually the whole thing just minutes before. How could’ve I known? Was my dream just that, naught but a dream followed by an extreme coincidence? Or did I have a premonition — a very disturbing peek into the future?

He’d dismiss it all if it wasn’t so disturbingly accurate; so extremely accurate. But then again, why didn’t I foresee the airplane incident? Oh, but nobody died in that incident; the plane didn’t even crash.

In his dream, the bellhop was dressed the exact same way as the bellhop who’d just really killed himself. And most important, the subject of his ‘dream’ leapt to his death from the same ledge, just outside the window, as did the bellhop in reality.

What’s all of this about? How the hell did I know?!

Regardless, he realized that French city police would probably want to talk with him about the terrible incident. But he decided that he had nothing informative to offer; any chance he had to have talked the despondent man out of committing suicide, was long gone, forever.

“I should leave it all alone,” he mumbled assertively to himself. “Yeah, I’ll leave it all alone and be on my way.”

If police insisted on discussing the matter with him, he’d just reply, “I didn’t hear a thing. I must’ve slept through it all; jetlag, I guess.”

At seven the next morning (about nine the night prior for his body clock), George got himself out of bed at the insistence of his digital clock’s alarm. He dressed then went downstairs to see if there was any mention in any Parisian newspaper regarding the suicide the night before. He doubted it, though, for the city is huge, and there must’ve been other, far more newsworthy occurrences on which to report than one low-wage worker jumping to his death.

Scanning the publications at the newsstand, he found that many of them mentioned that there had been a record-setting high in the rate of suicides during the preceding twenty-four hours.

One prominent newspaper printed as its main headline, “High Number of Suicides in City an Anomaly, says Sociologist.” He looked through the copy’s pages, stopping only to read, “Astronomers Scan the Sky for Hale-Bopp’s Closest Come-by.” That was yesterday, he thought, looking at the copy’s date, which read “March 23, 1997.”

He then left the hotel lobby and flagged down a cab for the airport.

There’s a first at some point in everyone’s life, he reminded himself, and for some or even many people, a first for the paranormal or supernatural. Perhaps Hale-Bopp’s effect on our planet is such a first for all of humanity.

He could recall reading or hearing about Hale-Bopp passing by relatively near Earth and that it, or more accurately its tails’ element-rich debris, would be abnormally visible to the naked eye at night, though necessarily away from interference by bright city lights.

He probably would have noticed it the night before when he first opened the hotel window if it were not for the bright lights from the airport and the city illuminating any darkness necessary to observe space-bound objects.

But as of the day before, Hale-Bopp was just beginning its trek away from Earth (it was over a hundred million miles from Earth at that point).

His cab arrived at the airport a few minutes short of ten that morning, which left him about an hour and a half before the departure of his flight to Cairo International.

Having finished a chocolate éclair he’d purchased there, he went over to a far-more quiet corner of the airport so as to get in a hopefully undisturbed nap. He set his watch’s snooze alarm for half an hour, positioned himself in his chair as comfortable as possible and closed his eyes.

How can I sleep at all after almost crashing into the Atlantic Ocean aboard a nose-diving large jetliner? Plus witnessing a suicide in a nightmare and then have it reoccur just so but in reality? To sleep at all after experiencing that, would not one have to be callous or even cynical?

George briefly pondered over this concept for a few moments before dozing off into a refreshing slumber. When his watch’s snooze alarm went off, he felt somewhat refreshed and notably relieved that he wasn’t forced to endure another violent-dream-premonition as he had the night before.

Soon enough, it was time to board his plane, which he’d dreaded repeating following the wind-shear incident, the fright flight of his life. But to his delight, he was not at all a nervous wreck — not then and not even during the flight; it was as though the airplane ordeal he’d experienced just the day prior had not even occurred.

As it would be, the uneventful two hour flight to Cairo only justified his said contentment.

Even so, how can I be so calm? I still should be an emotional mess.

He didn’t know why; just that he wasn’t at all a mess.

Landing in Cairo, George felt unusually and inexplicably elated, about which he did know what. He finally was exactly where, geographically, he wanted to be in this world — just a few hours from the Great Pyramids of Egypt; and, most important, it would be precisely there, he truly believed, where he was going to find true peace of mind.

Literally every single other effort had failed, and especially so with the fortunetellers of New York City, too many of whom, if not all, were corrupt. Every one of them had miserably failed and basically outright swindled him; thus he became determined to find something solid and pure with which to cure himself — unlike all of the psychotropic medications that he strongly felt did far more harm to him than good.

When he took his first step out of the airport structure, he was barraged by old men, young boys and the many in between, all simultaneously begging him to hire them to do any hump-busting hard labor to earn what amounted to peanuts back in the U.S.

“You, sir; can you suggest a decent hotel?” he asked one cabbie, before looking at one of the boys, “and you, son; please put my luggage into the cab.”

“Yes, sir; right away, sir,” said both, in unison.

“My interest here, in your great nation, is to visit the true, pure mind and soul healers or healing structures indigenous only to Egypt.”

Particularly at that moment, George radiated a form of positive energy, and there was a notable excitement in his demeanor (he wasn’t even concerned with whether the two Egyptians could even understand him).

“Yes, sir; right away, sir,” both replied, again in unison.

Before he climbed into the cab, he immediately gave one boy what amounted to about a dollar in U.S. currency but what was a small fortune for the north African boy.

“The best hotel, sir — for your means, of course, sir; the best hotel is the Pyramid Palace,” suggested the eager cabbie, while pulling away from the curb diligently but forcefully, hoping to receive a generous tip. “There, they have slot machines and card games.”

“Actually,” he hastily replied, “I’m not at all interested — not one single bit — in games of chance.”

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George Blight did make his way to the Great Pyramids of Egypt, although just two weeks shy of a year prior to suffering a fatal brain aneurysm. However, according to a woman he befriended in Egypt, only ten minutes before the aneurysm occurred, he experienced a vivid vision during a brief nap in which he saw himself place his hand to his forehead before falling to the ground. He immediately awoke fearing the worst, which apparently caused his already-high blood pressure to rise even higher just prior to dropping dead.