* * *
William nudged me and pointed to one line toward the back of the slim book he was reading. It quoted a POW as saying that on the morning of Hitler’s birthday, April 20th, they had sewn swastikas out of purple material and hung them about the barracks. Then I found in one of the letters written after the war that there had been a period of time when the prisoners had not been fed enough. And I thought of Catherine making doughnuts for the men. We sat there for over an hour looking through the materials, and then Phyllis came back and said, “My husband is retired, and he’d like to take you out to the barracks—well, what’s left of them—if you care to see where they were. Out by the airport.”
William’s face shone with appreciation. “Oh, that’d be great,” he said. She texted on her cellphone and then said to us, “He’ll be here in ten minutes,” so we collected our things and went back to the front desk. On the front desk was a pile of my books. “Do you mind signing these for the library?” Phyllis asked. And I said, Of course I will, but I was amazed that she knew who I was （I am invisible as I have said） but I stood there and did that.
* * *
—
Phyllis’s husband was a man named Ralph, and he was as pleasant as his wife was. He also had the colorless hair that used to be blond and he wore khakis—the right length—and a red T-shirt, and we went with him in his jeep. As he drove us toward the airport he spoke to William mostly—William was sitting up front and I was in the backseat—and the sun was shining, and he drove us for about fifteen minutes and then showed us the tower that was still standing, a guard tower, it was not very high, and then he drove into a dirt road area and let the car idle for a minute and showed us all that remained of the barracks where, at some points, more than a thousand POWs had lived. There was only a concrete corner left.
* * *
—
A weird thing happened to me then. I am not exactly sure how to make this sound believable, but I will just say what happened:
I looked at the concrete that was left and there were green leaves that came down over it, and the sun shone and made the green leaves glint in the sun, and then I felt a sort of a lurch in my head, and everything that Ralph was saying was something that I knew he would be saying. What I mean is that right before a word came from his mouth, I knew what the word would be. They were not important words, only about how the place had been constructed and what they had used for insulation. Except in my head it was a woman’s voice that had already told me exactly what he was telling me. I was really thrown. I thought: Is this déjà vu? And I knew it was not. It was lasting longer than that, and it was a very strange moment. Or many moments.
* * *
—
When Ralph dropped us off back at our car we all shook hands and William and I thanked him, and then we got into the car and I told William what had happened, and he looked at me for a while, his face searching. “I don’t get it,” he said.
“I don’t either.”
“But was it like a vision?” he asked. I have had a few visions in the past （my mother had visions as well）， and even William, a scientist, knew this about me and believed what I had told him.
“No,” I said. “It was only what it was.” Then I said, “It was a bit like I had slipped between universes for a moment. Only it was longer than a moment.”
He seemed to absorb this, and shook his head. “Okay, Lucy,” he said, and he started the car.
* * *
My mother’s visions:
A woman who was a client of hers—my mother took in sewing and alterations—was going in for gallbladder surgery, and the night before she went in my mother dreamed that the woman had cancer. The next morning, my mother was weeping by our old washing machine, and I asked, What is wrong?, and she told me this woman was going to be “filled with it”—and the woman was. The woman died ten weeks later.
A man in our town killed himself, and my mother had predicted that he would a few weeks earlier. “I saw it,” she said one day. And then he did; he shot himself in a field. He was a deacon of the Congregational church and he was a nice man, I remember him smiling at me when we went to the church on Thanksgivings for their free meal.
A boy went missing when I was very small, and my mother said he had fallen down a well. She said she saw it in a vision. My father told her she should tell the police, and she said, “Are you crazy? They’ll think I’m crazy! Do we need that?” She said, “Do we need people thinking that in this town?” But then the boy was discovered down the well and she didn’t have to tell anyone. Only we knew. He lived.