The driver begins to suspect that here, right now, on this highway with a lunatic stranger, is where he is supposed to be, and that his and Paula’s fate, intertwined as they are, could be no other. Paula’s death is no longer the senseless, brutal act of a subhuman. It is her, it’s who she is, and the driver, because he loves her, honors her fate. But what of the fate of the man who brought her to her destiny: the love-scorned killer, who might have plotted this entire chain of events from a prison cell on the San Francisco Bay?

The driver, because he is the link between the two –Paula and her murderer- and this makes him certain in what he has to do. Every mile that brings him closer is not only an accomplice, not just a means to an end, but reassurance that he can do nothing else. The cacti nod their agreement, with arms raised in capitulation, and the boulder-formed mountains give assent in their very sturdiness. The phrase, “I can do no wrong,” sticks in the driver’s mind as if he were able to have read it off a billboard, and now can’t shake the colorful lettering of the phrase from his mind.

The driver spies the hitchhiker with a grimacing face, entertaining himself by bobbing up and down in his seat.

“An’ how does he fit into all this?” The thought is worrying. Not only does the hitchhiker appear to be dead weight, but also a liability. “Was stupid ta pick him up.” Then the driver realizes that it happened just as assuredly as everything else has so far. That, in itself, is to be the hitchhiker’s reason for being there; nothing more.

The driver feels the juxtaposition, really a battle, of exhilaration and dread. They spin within him like the sides of a flipped coin. It flops in his stomach, and there’s a wrenching down to his testicles. Facing his fate feels like a freedom that makes him sick. It washes over a sense of loss that threatens to take him with it.

Freedom and loss, exhilaration and dread: these are the pairings where one side cannot fully cancel out the other; nor can the driver escape every wonderful, torturous second squeezed from their combination. All he can do is floor the accelerator. The lights of Las Vegas jump up before reaching out to suck in the pickup, and its happenstance travelers.