[2003] LOSS & PORPHYRY the novels  

0099 – Part 22 -US Clairvoyance 3

I slept well in my bed at the Meadowlands Hilton, to wake refreshed at five o'clock local time. With nothing else to accompany my time, I explored the channels on the room's television set. Even at that time there were half a dozen or more in operation. Two seemed to be running cartoons non-stop, apart from the raucous commercials that seemed to intrude every five minutes. I couldn't imagine who would want a continuous diet of Tom and Jerry. Two other channels were transmitting very dated 'B' films and I began to appreciate that cartoons might be a lesser evil after all.

The channel I found fascinating, though, was a series of religious programmes. Folksy preacher after folksy preacher hosted chat-shows with the primly good and, just occasionally, the slightly great. Each played up to the gallery of clack-like believers that made up the audience. I half expected them to shout hallelujah, but instead they clapped and cheered as if each point made were the revelation of the decade. Yet the programmes exuded a quaint charm, and a squeeky-cleanliness, which surely could not be harmful. Or could it? Their views were simplistic, and parochial. They ignored the issues that lay outside the cosy middle-class, middle-America, that bounded the vision of their participants.

Eventually, having soaked at length in a hot bath, I got dressed in my business suit and prepared to make my way down to breakfast. Before I went downstairs, though, I threw back the curtains to let some daylight into the room; and received one of the biggest shocks of my life. There, before me, lay the picture I had drawn. It was not my hotel that my crude pencil lines had outlined, it was the view from my bedroom window.

The view was still scarcely rural, but it matched the images. The hotel was built on the edge of a lagoon, or tributary of some inlet. Over this marched a freeway, reaching out into the distance. Along the far side ran another freeway, rearing up to cross the first. To the right there was a low range of hills. They may well have been rubbish dumps, much as the lagoon might have been stagnant with sewage, but they looked like hills. Beyond the second freeway, the three towers turned out to be three tall radio towers. The peculiar round building turned out to be a baseball stadium, with a wedge cut out of it opposite the terraces. The wedge of cheese was the futuristic grandstand for a horse racing track that lay on the horizon. Again, the details were not exact but the concepts, no matter how bizarre they had seemed previously, were exactly matched by reality. Even the 'clouds of steam' were realised. A blizzard was blowing up, and the resulting snowclouds were being beaten to and fro by the wind.

Despite the gnawing pangs in his stomach, that demanded breakfast, I spent a good quarter hour just sitting at the window; drinking in the miracle of it all. The experiment had, after all, succeeded magnificently. Clairvoyance surely was possible.

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