I Want to Believe

by Pa Rock

It's around 9:30 on Saturday night and I have just returned from a visit with two old friends in the blowing snows of West Virginia. West Virginia in winter is so much more preferable to Arizona in summer. It saddens me deeply to be back at home.

My friends, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, are aging - just as I am. The years have added a few pounds, especially on Fox, and both are showing tread marks of too much fast driving along life's ragged edge. Beneath their aging exteriors, however, they are basically much as they always have been. Fox waltzes through the unexplained dancing with enigmas, while Scully tromps along as his eternal skeptic.

They're married now, or at least co-habitating, and they have had a child, Billy, who has died. Maybe others knew of these events, but they were never brought to my attention.

And they met a retired pedophile priest in the snows of West Virginia, a sad man whom Dana characterized (angrily, to his face) as having "buggered thirty-seven altar boys." The priest was blessed with psychic abilities, or he was a con man who was connected to murders and monstrous medical experiments. Fox wanted to believe that the man was a psychic. Dana wanted to believe that his entreaty for her to persevere was an article of faith from God that would help her to save a young boy's life.

I wanted to believe that I would leave the theatre and step into a snow storm.