Strange Highways

now you're stuck in the Twilight Zone?" she asked scornfully,
     "No, of course not."
     "Then who?"
     "Maybe it was just ... just an anomaly of physics. A random fold in time. An energy wave. Inexplicable and meaningless. I don't know. How the hell could I know?"
     "Oh. I see. Just some mechanical breakdown in the great cosmic machinery," she said sarcastically, letting go of his hand.
     "Seems to make more sense than God."
     "So we're not in the Twilight Zone, huh? Now we're aboard the starship Enterprise with Captain Kirk, assaulted by energy waves, catapulted into time warps."
     He didn't reply.
     She said, "You remember Star Trek ? Anyone still remember it up there in 1995?"
     "Remember? Hell, I think maybe it's a bigger industry than General Motors."
     "Let's bring a little cool Vulcan logic to the problem, okay? If this amazing thing that happened to you is meaningless and random, then why didn't you get folded back in time to some boring day when you were eight years old and had the puking flu? Or why not to some night a month ago, when you were just sitting in your trailer out in Vegas, half drunk, watching old Road Runner cartoons or something? You think some random anomaly of physics would just by purest chance bring you back to the most important night of your life, this night of all nights, to the very moment it all went wrong beyond any hope of recovery?"
     Just listening to her had calmed him, although his spirits had not been lifted. At least he was able to pick up the spilled shells and reload his shotgun.
     "Maybe," she said, "you're living this night again not because there's something you have to do , not to save lives and bring down P.J. and be a hero. Maybe you're living this night again only so you'll have one last chance to believe."
     "In what?"
     "In a world with meaning, in life with some greater purpose."
     At times she seemed able to read his mind. More than anything, Joey wanted to believe in something again - as he had when he'd been an altar boy, so many years ago. But he vacillated between hope and despair. He remembered how filled with wonder he'd been a short while ago when he'd realized that he was twenty again, how grateful he had been to something-someone for this second chance. But already it was easier to believe in the Twilight Zone or in a fluke of quantum mechanics than in God.
     "Believe," he said. "That's what P.J. wanted me to do. Just believe in him, believe in his innocence, without one shred of proof. And I did. I believed in him. And look where that got me."
     "Maybe it wasn't believing in P.J. that ruined your life."
     "It sure didn't help," he said sourly.
     "Maybe the main problem was that you didn't believe in anything else."
     "I was an altar boy once," he said. "But then I grew up. I got an education."
     "Having gone to college a little, you've surely heard the word ,sophomoric,'" Celeste suggested. "It describes the kind of thinking you're still indulging in."
     "You're really wise, huh? You know it all?"
     "Nope. I'm not wise at all, not me. But my dad says - admitting you don't know everything is the beginning of wisdom."
     "Your dad the jerkwater high-school principal - suddenly he's a famous philosopher?"
     "Now you're just being mean," she said.
     After a while, he said, "Sorry."
     "Don't forget the sign I was given. My blood on your fingertips. How can I not believe? More important, how can you not believe after that? You called it a 'sign' yourself."
     "I wasn't thinking. I was all ... emotional. When you take time to think about it, apply just a little of that cool Vulcan logic you mentioned-"
     "If you think hard enough about anything , you won't be able to believe in it. If you saw a bird fly across the sky - the moment it's out of sight, there's no way to prove it existed. How do you even know Paris exists - have you ever been there?"
     "Other people have seen Paris. I believe them."
     "Other people have seen God."
     "Not the way they've seen Paris."
     "There are a lot of ways to see," she said. "And maybe neither your eyes nor a Kodak is the best way."
     "How can anyone believe in any god so cruel that he'd let three people die like that, three innocent people?"
     "If death