Strange Highways

when our bodies are no longer of use to us? The human metamorphosis may just be a transformation of a higher order than that of the caterpillar.
     Slowly, with dread and yet hope, I walked through the house, out the back door, up the sloped yard to the cherry trees. I stood beneath the flowery boughs and opened my hand to reveal the blossoms that I had saved from yesterday.
     "Benny?" I said wonderingly.
     The blossomfall began again. From both trees, the pink and white petals dropped in profusion, spinning lazily to the grass, catching in my hair and on my clothes.
     I turned, breathless, gasping. "Benny? Benny?"
     In a minute the ground was covered with a white mantle, and again not one small bloom remained on the trees.
     I laughed. It was a nervous laugh that might degenerate into a mad cackle. I was not in control of myself.
     Not quite sure why I was speaking aloud, I said, "I'm scared. Oh, shit, am I scared."
     The blossoms began to drift up from the ground. Not just a few of them. All of them. They rose back toward the branches that had shed them only moments ago. It was a blizzard in reverse. The soft petals brushed against my face.
     I was laughing again, laughing uncontrollably, but my fear was fading rapidly, and this was good laughter.
     Within another minute, the trees were cloaked in pink and white as before, and all was still.
     I sensed that Benny was not within the tree. This phenomenon did not conform to pagan belief any more than it did to traditional Christianity. But he was somewhere . He was not gone forever. He was out there somewhere, and when my time came to go where he and Ellen had gone, I only needed to believe that they could be found, and then I would surely find them.
     The sound of an obsession cracking could probably be heard all the way to China.
     A scrap of writing by H. G. Wells came into my mind. I had long admired Wells's work, but nothing he had written had ever seemed so true as that which I recalled while standing under the cherry trees: "The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn."
     He had been writing about history, of course, and about the long future that awaited humanity, but those words seemed to apply as well to death and to the mysterious rebirth that followed it. A man might live a hundred years, yet his long life will be but the twilight of the dawn.
     "Benny," I said. "Oh, Benny."
     But no more blossoms fell, and through the years that followed I received no more signs. Nor did I need them.
     From that day forward, I knew that death was not the end and that I would be rejoined with Ellen and Benny on the other side.
     And what of God? Does He exist? I don't know. Although I have believed in an afterlife of some kind for ten years now, I have not become a churchgoer. But if, upon my death, I cross into that other plane and find Him waiting for me, I will not be entirely surprised, and I will return to His arms as gratefully and happily as I will return to Ellen's and to Benny's.

CHASE

    1

1971.
     Bruce Springsteen wasn't famous in 1971. Neither was Tom Cruise, a mere schoolboy. Julia Roberts haunted no young men's dreams. Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Arnold Schwarzenegger - their fortunes were as yet unmade.
     Richard Milhous Nixon was President of the United States. The war in Vietnam raged. In Wilmington, North Carolina, January was a time of violence against black citizens-arson, bombings, shootings. At the Attica Correctional Facility in New York State, the bloodiest prison riot in U.S. history claimed forty-three lives.
     The best-seller list of The New York Times included The Winds of War by Herman Wouk and Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins.
     The movies: The French Connection, A Clockwork Orange, Klute, Carnal Knowledge, The Last Picture Show.
     The music: Carole King, John Denver, John Lennon on his own, Led Zeppelin, Elton John just beginning.
     Cigarette sales in the United States topped five hundred and forty-seven billion . J. C. Penney died at the age of ninety-five. As many as five hundred thousand Soviet citizens perished in the Gulags during those twelve months - evidence of government restraint.
     It was a different time. A different world.
     The term "serial killer"