Anger and bitterness came later. Shame. A feeling that I had been cheated, tricked into believing that I was normal, that I had had a real father just like everyone else. Hatred of the man for the loyalty he had given to another woman. And at last, when the hot flame of anger had burnt itself out, a lasting sense that I was different, I was an outsider.
That night, when my mother's tears had dried and she finally slept with the exhaustion of someone relieved at last of a terrible burden of secrecy, I lay in darkness with my new sense of isolation and my mind returned to the inexplicable vision which had triggered my mother's confession. I wondered what kind of dream could come when one sat with his eyes open in broad daylight, fully conscious. Yet it must have been a dream. The man of the vision was surely someone I had seen, or a projected image of myself, a man whose appearance had made my mother believe I was describing her lover of long ago. Was Ernest Cameron still alive? What would he do or say if the son he didn't know existed should suddenly appear one day to confront him?
I was never to find out. Less than a month later, investigators, easily backtracking along my mother's trail from Albuquerque to Los Angeles, traced her to our modest trailer court. She had been left half of an estate valued at over thirty thousand dollars by one Dr. Ernest Cameron, recently deceased, professor of physics at the University of Illinois, a widower with two married children who had divided the remaining half of his estate. In his will, re-written after his legal wife's death, Dr. Cameron had revealed the love he had kept secret for almost twenty years.
He had died of injuries suffered in a traffic accident on June 16, 1982. The day of my vision.
Now, nine years later, remembering that extraordinary circumstance as I sat alone in the small bright office, I thought how easily my mother and I had covered up the fearful evidence of the unknown. Almost by deliberate scheme, it seemed, we had failed to investigate the details of my father's death. There was no escaping the fact that I did appear to have dreamed of his accident, but my mother, who was a religious woman, found satisfaction in the belief that God had worked in one of His strange and unquestionable ways. And I found refuge in a recollection of the vision so blurred and hedged with qualifications that I was finally able to believe in coincidence, in a casual dream which had not really mirrored the reality of death occurring thousands of miles away, but had simply reflected some buried fear of violence of my own in a world in which accidental violence was commonplace. Ernest Cameron's death became important only because it brought my mother and me closer together and because it provided the means with which I was able to go to college.
Was I able now fully to believe in my own clairvoyance? Was the earlier vision a symptom of the extra-sensory powers which I was only now discovering in other ways? I had to believe in it. At the same time I was afraid to.
For in my recent dream of violence, I was the victim.
It was ten o'clock that night when I left the massive Liberal Arts Building and started slowly across the sprawling campus. The night classes were over and many of the lights had already gone out. There was a continuous cough and mutter of cars starting and roaring away. Clusters of students drifted by in heated conversation. Couples loitered in the deep shadows of trees or strolled hand in hand with intimate whisper of word and gurgle of laughter. I felt exhausted.
I wandered toward the modern area of stores and restaurants and bars which bordered the campus. I didn't feel like returning to my empty trailer in the hills. At that moment, I keenly regretted the strange compulsion which had kept me from forming close friendships with my colleagues at the university. Perhaps subconsciously I had been avoiding exposure to disillusion or disappointment, but in so doing I had created for myself a lonely place apart.