Strange Highways

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