Strange Highways

inexplicable sense of loss as heavy as the world itself.
     According to the radiant dial of his watch, it was three-thirty in the morning. He had been asleep less than three hours.
     Darkness still pressed against the window, and endless skeins of rain unraveled through the night.
     He got up from the bed and went to the corner desk where he had left the half-finished bottle of Jack Daniel's. One more nip wouldn't hurt. He needed something to make it through to the dawn.
     As Joey uncapped the whiskey, he was gripped by a peculiar urge to go to the window. He felt drawn as if by a magnetic force, but he resisted. Crazily, he was afraid that he might see the dead woman on the far side of the rain-washed glass, levitating one story above the ground: blond hair tangled and wet, empty eye sockets darker than the night, in a transparent gown, arms extended, wordlessly imploring him to fling up the window and plunge into the storm with her.
     He became convinced that she was floating out there like a ghost. He dared not even glance toward the window or risk catching sight of it from the corner of his eye. If he saw her peripherally, even that minimal eye contact would be an invitation for her to come into his room. Like a vampire, she could tap at the window and plead to be let in, but she could not cross his threshold unless invited.
     Edging back to the bed with the bottle in his hand, he kept his face averted from that framed rectangle of night.
     He wondered if he was just unusually drunk or if he might be losing his mind.
     To his surprise, he screwed the cap back on the bottle without taking a drink.

    3

IN THE MORNING, THE RAIN STOPPED FALLING, BUT THE SKY REMAINED low and threatening.
     Joey didn't have a hangover. He knew how to pace his drinking to minimize the painful results. And every day he took a megadose of vitamin-B complex to replace what had been destroyed by alcohol; extreme vitamin-B deficiency was the primary cause of hangovers. He knew all the tricks. His drinking was methodical and well organized; he approached it as though it were his profession.
     He found the makings of breakfast in the kitchen: a piece of stale coffee cake, half a glass of orange juice.
     After showering, he put on his only suit, a white shirt, and a dark red tie. He hadn't worn the suit in five years, and it hung loosely on him. The collar of the shirt was a size too large. He looked like a fifteen-year-old boy dressed in his father's clothes.
     Perhaps because the endless intake of booze accelerated his metabolism, Joey burned off all that he ate and drank, and invariably he closed each December a pound lighter than he'd begun the previous January. In another hundred and sixty years, he would finally waste away into thin air.
     At ten o'clock he went to the Devokowski Funeral Home on Main Street. It was closed, but he was admitted by Mr. Devokowski because he was expected.
     Louis Devokowski had been Asherville's mortician for thirty-five years. He was not sallow and thin and stoop shouldered, as comic books and movies portrayed men of his trade, but stocky and ruddy faced, with dark hair untouched by gray - as though working with the dead was a prescription for long life and vitality.
     "Joey."
     "Mr. Devokowski."
     "I'm so sorry."
     "Me too."
     "Half the town came to the viewing last night."
     Joey said nothing.
     "Everyone loved your father."
     Joey didn't trust himself to speak.
     Devokowski said, "I'll take you to him."
     The front viewing room was a hushed space with burgundy carpet, burgundy drapes, beige walls, and subdued lighting. Arrangements of roses loomed in the shadows, and the air was sweet with their scent.
     The casket was a handsome bronze model with polished-copper trim and handles. By phone, Joey had instructed Mr. Devokowski to provide the best. That was how P.J. would want it - and it would be his money paying for it.
     Joey approached the bier with the hesitancy of a man in a dream who expects to peer into the coffin and see himself.
     But it was Dan Shannon who rested in peace, in a dark-blue suit on a bed of cream-colored satin. The past twenty years had not been kind to him. He looked beaten by time, shrunken by care, and glad to be gone.
     Mr. Devokowski had retreated from the