I stood trembling beside the overturned canvas chair amid the familiar cluster of trailers and covered patios and cement walks and hotly glittering parked cars, and I knew that the echo of a final scream of pain had broken from my own lips. My mother was standing in the doorway of our trailer, her mouth open, one hand at her breast in fright, staring at me.
She ran down the steps. "Paul! My God, Paul, what happened?"
Slowly, dazedly, I looked around me. A couple of children were watching me in owlish wonder; a man had stopped some thirty yards away, staring at me over his shoulder; the woman in the next-door trailer was frozen at her window; even the birds were silent in the trees overhead. The whole world around me seemed to be arrested, waiting for me to come back to it.
My gaze shifted to my mother's face. I moved and the scene came alive again, like a motion picture that has been momentarily stopped and then resumes, the figures jumping into motion to complete the half-finished gesture, the interrupted phrase.
"I don't know," I said slowly. "I don't know."
I lit a cigarette and opened a can of beer and took a long cool drink, all the while trying to organize the confusion in my mind, trying to understand what had happened to me. My mother kept pressing me to explain what had made me cry out, and I had an impulse to assure her that it had just been a dream. It was several minutes before I felt capable of trying to put into words what I had seen. I still felt oddly detached, as if I had been away on a long trip and had only just got back so that I hadn't had time to unpack or re-orient myself to the old familiar setting.
I told her the story without softening its raw edges, quietly and dispassionately, trusting in a mother's willingness to believe that her son was neither a liar nor a madman. When I had finished I looked at her expectantly, even a little apprehensively. In the telling, the story had begun to sound fantastic. For the first time, I thought that maybe I had actually fallen asleep in the sun without realizing it and been awakened by the nightmare. But my mother's reaction was so startling that I forgot my doubts.
For several seconds, she stared at me in silence. Without warning her eyes filmed over and a tear spilled through her lashes to trickle down her cheek. In dumb fascination, I watched the slow progression of that single tear down her weathered skin.
She spoke in a strained whisper. "Would you describe him again?"
At first I didn't know what she meant. Then, puzzled, I described the man of the vision. I could see him very clearly. Sandy hair thinning over a high forehead. Soft gray eyes mirroring a compassionate intelligence. A thin, high-bridged nose. A wide, responsive mouth, curving slightly in a pensive smile. Stooped shoulders that made him look slighter and shorter than he was, though my impression was that he was taller than average.