Maybe nothing happened on that train. Probably nothing did, and there is no way to tell. I would need some sort of corroboration before I could even begin to entertain it as a serious possibility.

It seemed like a trick of the mind. Then I remembered that hypnosis session. and I thought to myself that the real trick of the mind might be happening now. My memories were so spontaneous. and seemed so vividly real. Not the faintest suggestion was made that I regress to age twelve. And vet... I now remembered that row of' soldiers sleeping on those tables just as well as I remembered the drawing room of the train we were on.

To protect my sanity. I had to believe that this was a comprehensible thing. If it was contact, then it must be proceeding somewhat along lines I could understand. They've been here for a while. Fine. Lately, because I moved to an isolated area, they found me. That I could at least entertain. But I could not accept the notion that they were so totally involved in my life.

I found a photograph of myself during the spring of my twelfth year, which showed me to the uniform of St. Anthony's School in San Antonio. Here was a child so clean he seemed to have been polished along with the brass crossed rifles on the collars of his uniform. The picture is inscribed: "For my dear father with love. Whitty."

The neatness was a total deception. It couldn't have lasted more than the precise amount of time it took to snap the picture. At twelve I was usually involved in mischief of' one sort or another. I was rarely clean. I was rarely even still.

I looked into the child's eves. He did not look haunted to me, that boy just flirting with puberty. In May of that year my younger brother had been born. and the house was consequently in upheaval. only some of it pleasant. I spent much time in my room reading.

That summer I read Life on the Mississippi and it was also the summer of my discover, of'

Kafka. One afternoon I found my mother reading The Metamorphosis. After that I read The Trial. I'd go down to the San Antonio Public Library on the bus and, sit in the big reading room under the fan and read Kafka until the librarian started getting uneasy, then I'd shift to Robert Benchley for the balance of the afternoon.

My smiling face hid a person full of conflicts, trying to cope with the sudden presence of an infant to an established home and discovering under the sheets at night that the sins the older boys whispered about were real, and were they ever sins!