3
The following night I worked late, correcting a batch of the interminable freshman themes. I didn't have any night classes, but the offices were bright for the lecturers who did. I found it difficult to concentrate on the semi-adolescent exercises in expository composition even though the office was quiet and almost empty most of the evening. Near the bottom of the pile of papers I came across one theme that jolted me. It was called "How to Conduct a Seance." It was a juvenile and jocular approach to the subject, and I had never placed much credence myself in preternatural events and influences—or in extra-sensory powers. But now I found myself feeling defensive, resenting the spoofing tone of the student's theme. Wasn't anything possible? How much did we really know? Wasn't the wisest philosopher actually as ignorant as this nineteen-year-old?
I wondered if a man could have unusual perceptions, strange mental powers, for twenty-seven years without knowing it. Wouldn't a talent for thought transference or for hearing the mental communications of others make itself known early? Or would it be necessary to have two sensitive people involved, sender and receiver? Could you be a telepath without knowing it simply because you had never encountered another?
And I remembered the incident, distant in time and dim in memory, which I had refused to recall during the disturbing recent months. In itself, the experience, though startling at the time, was not unique. At least you hear about similar things happening to a great many ordinary people. You hear about it—but you brush off the story as coincidence or as the product of an over-active imagination.
I have mentioned my father. Until I was eighteen, I never knew who he was or that he was alive. My mother had always talked about him as if he had been killed the year I was born, during the brief Chino-American war of 1963. After I had the extraordinary vision, she told me the truth, her story muffled by tears long contained.
Ernest Cameron was a well-known physicist. He was married and had two children. If my mother can be believed, his was an unhappy marriage, but one which he did not feel justified in renouncing. During part of 1962 he was in New Mexico working with the army on atomic field weapons, the kind that did a hell of a lot of damage in a confined area, what they used to call "clean" bombs in those days before all atomic weapons were outlawed. My mother was at that time a woman in her early twenties living in Albuquerque.
She met Ernest Cameron when he was on a weekend leave. They fell in love, suddenly, catastrophically. Their passionate affair lasted for nine days. Then, as the threat of war intensified in Asia, he was abruptly transferred overseas. My mother never saw him again, but she was already carrying the infinitesimal germ of life that grew into the son he never knew. Me. Paul Cameron.
My mother always loved him. She moved to Los Angeles and took the name of Mrs. Rose Cameron, wanting me to bear my father's name. For eighteen years after I was born, she posed as a widow. The role was never questioned.
It was the vision which forced her to tell me who I really was—and who my father was. It happened on a clear sunny afternoon. I was in the yard outside our small trailer. Having just graduated from high school, I was taking a week's vacation before hunting for a job. I was sitting on a canvas chair, idly enjoying the summer sun and thinking wistfully about my hopes of going to college, when it happened.
I saw him. A sandy-haired, middle-aged man with bent, rounded shoulders and a tired walk. Preoccupied, his eyes on the ground, he stepped off a curb and started across a street I had never seen in my life. I sat in the canvas chair, staring at the familiar setting of the crowded trailer court, and the picture of the sandy-haired man was superimposed on the reality before me, equally clear and vivid. When I saw the truck hurtling toward him, the illusion was so graphic that I cried out in alarm. The man looked up at the last moment of his life, soft gray eyes widening in blank surprise, without fear, as if he had not had time to bring his mind back from some distant point of reflection to this time and place of life and death. He had stepped out from behind a parked car. The truckdriver, seeing him too late, tried to swerve. There was a terrifyingly slow sequence of brakes screeching, rubber scraping off in black streaks on the pavement, big trailer lurching sideways—and the final sickening violence of impact, of smashed bones and flesh and blood.