The driver suddenly wearies, not just at the return of his murderous suspicions of the hitchhiker, but at everything: the whole trip –to Michigan, and they’ve only made it so far to Nebraska!- and what it stands for. He’s sick of missing Paula and being caught, stuck, in this scenic but never-ending no-man’s land between where her life left off and his….

The driver doesn’t know what’s to become of his, but he doubts whether any of it -no matter what he does or fails to do, no matter how many other lives he manages to drag down with his- could ever honor what he lost, back there, over one-thousand, five hundred miles ago. This thought, or jumble of half-thoughts, is depressing enough; but to be forced to play nanny to this dysfunctional cretin as well, is too much for waking consciousness to take. He passes out and would have collapsed onto the table if the chair wasn’t just a few more inches away.

Waking again: he’s gone, she’s gone, and the door swing wide open to douse the room in the crispness of morning, along with its first drops of light. Assuming the two have run off together, the driver should be thrilled, or at least relieved, as long as they haven’t taken the pickup with them. He’s oddly neutral, spent, completely uncaring: as long as the car is still there.

Walking out onto the front balcony to begin his third day in the same change of clothes, he scans the parking lot. Right where he left it waits his trusty, latter-day steed, of metal and chrome. Its scruffy windows giving off their own distorted interpretation of the pre-light of dawn, the driver doesn’t know if he’s ever seen anything more beautiful that wasn’t in a human.

With the hitchhiker gone, he can decide whether to carry on or to head back. It embarrasses him to think that he had to wait for that man to disappear before he could face such a decision. Then he suspects that he may have continued traveling precisely because of the hitchhiker. Trying to escape a passenger simply by driving faster; when he puts it like that, the driver knows it doesn’t make any sense. Yet when he gazes once again at his pickup, it takes on a completely different shade of animal in the absence of the hitchhiker. The driver dreads the emotion threatening to breach his surface, even though no one is around to witness it, and it is doubtful whether he can stop himself, when a noise causes that and every other emotion he’s ever had to grind to a halt.