Elgin’s nightmares also bring to the surface his deepest anxiety: the fear that he’ll end up where he started—back in Yonkers, poor and desperate with no way out. It’s in the moments after he wakes that he realizes how present that fear is in his everyday life. The nightmares call that fear forward like a word that has been on the tip of his tongue. He’s waiting, he realizes, for the other shoe to drop, for the life that he’s built to suddenly evaporate.
