Strange Highways (34 page)

The girl’s breathing had grown shallower and less rhythmic. Her face was gray, and drops of perspiration were strung like bright beads across her forehead. Standing over her, Ollie realized that she was dying, and he was frightened.

He folded his arms so his long-fingered hands were hidden in his armpits. The fleshy pads of his fingertips were excessively moist. Dimly, he was aware that his hands could perform more useful tricks than locating silverware buried in mounds of garbage, but he did not want to admit to their capabilities: That way lay danger ….

He retrieved a gallon of wine from the rickety cardboard clothes cupboard and drank straight from the jug. It tasted like water.

He knew that he was not going to find release in wine—not with the girl lying on his bed. Not with his hands trembling as they were.

He put the wine away.

Ollie despised using his hands for anything but earning wine money, but now he had no choice. Other, more basic motivations drove him to act. The girl was beautiful. The smooth clear lines of her face were so symmetrical that even the hue of sickness could not much detract from them. Like a delicate web, her beauty caught him, held him. He followed his hands to the bed as if he were a blind man feeling for obstacles in a strange room.

For his hands to perform properly, he needed to undress her. She wore no underclothes. Her breasts were small, firm, high; her waist was too small, and the bones in her hips were sharp, though even malnutrition hardly detracted from the sublime beauty of her legs. Ollie appreciated her only as an objet d’art, not as a source of physical gratification. He was a man ignorant of women. Until now, he had lived in a sexless world, driven there by hands that any lover would instantly have recognized as more than ordinary.

He placed his hands at her temples, smoothed her hair, and traced his fleshy fingertips across her forehead, cheeks, jawline, chin. He felt the pulse at her neck, gently pressed her breasts, stomach, and legs, seeking the cause of her illness. In a moment he knew: She had overdosed. He also perceived a truth that he did not want to believe: The overdose had been intentional.

His hands ached.

He touched her again, moved his open palms in lazy circles until he was not sure where his hands ended and her fair skin began, until they seemed to have melted together. They might have been two clouds of smoke, blending into one.

Half an hour later, she was no longer comatose, merely sleeping.

Gently, he turned her onto her stomach and worked his hands along her back, shoulders, buttocks, thighs, finishing what he had begun. He traced her spinal cord, massaged her scalp, blanked from his mind all appreciation of her form, the better to let the power seep out of him and into her.

Fifteen minutes later, he had not only remedied her current condition but had permanently cured her of her desire for drugs. If she even thought of shooting up again, she would become violently ill. He had seen to that. With his hands.

Then he leaned back in his chair and slept.

He bolted out of his chair an hour later, pursued by nightmares that he could not identify. He went quickly to the door, found it still locked, and peered through the curtains. He had expected to see someone lurking there, but he found only the night. No one had seen him use his hands.

The girl was still asleep.

As he pulled the sheets over her, he realized that he didn’t even know her name. In her purse, he found identification: Annie Grice, twenty-six, unmarried. Nothing more, no address or relatives’ names.

He lifted a glass-bead necklace but received no images from those small smooth spheres. He decided that the necklace was a recent purchase, imbued with none of her aura, and he put it aside.

In her well-worn wallet, he discovered a wealth of impressions, a fiercely compressed picture of the last several years of Annie’s life: her first cocaine purchase, first use, subsequent dependence; her first time with skag, dependence, addiction; theft to maintain the habit; jobs in less reputable bars, hustling drinks; prostitution that she called something else to satisfy her troubled conscience; prostitution that she called prostitution; finally, irrevocably, a disassociation from life and society, a solidified loneliness that welcomed the release of death.

He put down the wallet.

He was drenched with perspiration.

He wanted wine but knew that it would not give him surcease. Not this time.

Besides, his curiosity had not been fully satisfied. How had Annie Grice become the woman that the seven-year-old wallet testified she was?

He found an old ring—family heirloom?—in her purse, held it, and let the images push into him. At first they did not concern Annie. When he saw that he was sensing back to the earliest history of the ring, to previous owners of it, he let his mind slide forward in time until Annie appeared. She was seven; the orphanage official had just given her what few artifacts remained of her heritage after a fire had destroyed her home and parents six months before. After that, her life was a string of depressing events: She was shy and became the target of malicious playmates; her bashfulness compounded her loneliness and kept her friendless through her formative years; her first love affair was a disaster that left her afraid of human contact more than ever before; with no money for college, she went from one clerking job to another, unhappy, confined, alone; in time, she tried to overcome her timidity with a brash aggressiveness, which achieved nothing but the acquaintance of a morally bankrupt young man named Benny, with whom she lived for a year and with whom she first snorted coke; after that, her addiction—a desperate attempt to escape from loneliness and lovelessness—followed the relentless pattern that Ollie had seen when sensing the images that permeated her tattered wallet.

He dropped the ring and got his jug of wine. He drank until he mercifully escaped the depression that was not really his but Annie’s. He slept.

The girl woke him. She sat up in bed, stared at him where he slumped against the wall, and cried out in alarm.

Ollie got up and swayed toward her, blinking stupidly, sleepily, drunkenly.

“What am I doing here?” she demanded, clearly frightened. “What did you do to me?”

Ollie said nothing. Silence was his savior. He found it quite impossible to speak to anyone. He may have been mute, or he may have been afraid of words. His hands were trembling, moist, and pink. He shook his head and smiled nervously, hoping that she understood that he wanted only to help her.

Apparently she grasped the innocence of his intentions, for she looked less frightened. Frowning, she pulled the sheets to her neck to cover her nakedness. “I’m not dead, even though I overdosed.”

Ollie smiled, nodded, and wiped his hands on his shirt.

Her eyes widened with an awful terror as she inspected her needle-tracked arms. Hers was a terror of life, a fear of existence. Despairing that her attempt at suicide had failed, she began to sob and wail, head thrown back, hair a golden frame about her white face.

He reached her quickly, touched her, and put her to sleep. Sobered, he went to the door, peered out at the early morning light that touched the shabby concrete steps, and closed the curtains again, satisfied that her cries had not alerted anyone.

In the bathroom, he splashed cold water on his face and wondered what to do next. He even considered carrying her back to the alleyway where he’d found her, to abandon her to her own devices. But he could not do that. He didn’t know why he couldn’t, and he didn’t attempt to reason it out—because he was afraid of the answer that he might discover.

Drying his face on a filthy hand towel, Ollie realized that he was a sorry sight. He bathed, shaved, and dressed in clean clothes. He still looked like a vagrant, but a vagrant by choice rather than chance. A disillusioned artist, perhaps. Or, as in certain old movies, a rich man escaping from the boring responsibilities of wealth and position.

He was surprised by this fanciful turn of thought. He considered himself a man of routine and restricted vision.

Unsettled, he turned from his reflection in the bathroom mirror and went into the main room to check on the girl. Sleeping, she was serene, pure. He would let her sleep a while yet.

Three hours later, after cleaning the two small rooms, Ollie changed her sheets while she slept. Even while admitting the impossibility of the notion, he toyed with the prospect of keeping her asleep and tending to her for years, as if he were a nurse and she were his comatose patient. He would be happy doing that—perhaps happier than he had ever been in his life to date.

But now he was hungry, and he knew that she would be hungry, too, when she woke. He left the apartment, locking the door behind him. Two blocks away, at a small grocery, he bought more food in one order than he had ever done before.

“Thirty-eight dollars, twelve cents,” the cashier said. He did not conceal his disdain. Clearly, he felt that Ollie could not pay.

Ollie raised a hand, touched his forehead, and stared hard at the cashier.

The cashier blinked, smiled tentatively, and folded his hand over empty air. “Out of forty dollars,” he said. He carefully placed the nonexistent currency in the cash register, handed Ollie the proper change, and bagged the food.

On his way home, Ollie was uneasy, because he had never before used his power to cheat anyone. If the girl hadn’t come along, he would have finished his previous night’s work at the garbage bins, perhaps completing another set of flatware, and would have gone on to other tasks like sensing out dropped coins in subway stations, earning a buck here and there. Therefore, the responsibility for this deceit was not entirely his. Nevertheless, dark portents of judgmental disaster plagued him.

At home he prepared dinner-stew, salad, fresh fruit—and woke Annie. She regarded him strangely as he pointed at the laden table. He sensed her blooming terror, a red flower. He swept his hand to take in the cleaned and ordered room, and he smiled encouragingly.

The girl sat up, propelled into her nightmare again—the cruel nightmare of being alive—and she shrieked in misery.

Ollie raised his hands imploringly, tried to speak, couldn’t.

Blood rushed to her face as she sucked a deeper breath and tried to pull herself out of the bed.

He was forced to lay hands on her and put her to sleep again.

Tucking her in, he knew that he had been naive to imagine that she would be a different girl, with fewer fears and more composure, simply because he had bathed himself, shaved, cleaned the apartment, and cooked dinner. She would be different only if he helped her, which would take time, hard work—and sacrifice.

He threw the food away. He was no longer hungry.

Throughout the long night, he sat by the bed, elbows propped on his knees, his head held between his hands. The tips of his fingers seemed to merge with his temples while his palms lay against his cheeks. He sensed into her, sensed her despair, her hope, her dreams, her ambition, her limitations, her joys, her hard-won knowledge, her persistent misconceptions, and her moments of intellectual surety. He dwelt in the center of her soul—which was, by turns, beautifully in bloom and withered.

In the morning he used the bathroom, drank two glasses of water, and helped her to drink even while keeping her more than half asleep. Then he settled into the chiaroscuro world of her mind and remained there, except for brief rest periods, all through that day and night, diligently searching, learning, and making cautious adjustments to her psyche.

He never wondered why he made this expenditure of time, energy, and emotion, perhaps because he didn’t dare risk the realization that his ultimate motive was loneliness. He merged with her, touched her, changed her, and gave no consideration to the consequences. By dawn of the next day, he was done.

Once more he partially awakened her and made her drink to keep from dehydrating; then he put her into deep sleep and lay beside her on the bed. He took her hand in his. Exhausted, he slept, dreaming that he floated in a vast ocean, a mere speck, about to be consumed by something prehistoric swimming in the gloom below him. Curiously, the dream did not frighten him. He had expected to be swallowed up by one thing or another all his troubled life.

Twelve hours later, Ollie woke, showered, shaved, dressed, and prepared another dinner. When he woke the girl, she sat straight up again, bewildered. But she did not scream. She said, “Where am I?”

Ollie worked his dry lips, instantly unsure of himself again, but finally he managed to sweep his hand around to indicate the room that by now must be at least somewhat familiar to her.

She appeared curious, ill at ease, but no longer possessed by that crippling fear of life itself. He had cured her of that.

She said, “Yeah, you’ve got a cozy place. But—how’d I get here?”

He licked his lips, searched for words, found none, pointed at himself, and smiled.

“Can’t you speak?” she asked. “Are you mute?”

He thought a moment, opted for the out that she had offered, and nodded.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She examined her bruised arm, staring at the hundreds of needle marks, doubtlessly remembering the overdose that she had carefully prepared and booted into her bloodstream.

Ollie cleared his throat and pointed to the table.

She instructed him to turn his back. She got out of the bed, stripped off the top sheet, and twisted it about herself as though it were a toga. As she sat at the table, she grinned at him. “I’m starving.”

Such a waif. She charmed him.

He grinned back at her. What could have been the worst moment had passed without much strain. He put the food on the table and made a disparaging gesture to indicate his lack of culinary finesse.

“Everything looks delicious,” she assured him. She reached for the main serving dish and began to heap food onto her plate. She did not speak again until she had finished eating.

She tried to help with the dishes, although she soon tired and had to retreat to the bed. When he had finished and sat in the straight-backed chair beside her, she said, “What do you do?”