How much farther does the driver have to go? He made it to Michigan as planned, though it took a little longer than he originally estimated. Judging from the deathly-rattle somewhere beneath its hood, he’s not even sure his pickup, the closest he has to a friend, can make it much further.

The Driver has no home to return to; no family to console him and tell him everything is going to be all right; no job; only fifty-six dollars left in his pocket; and worst of all, no one with which to share his loneliness. He can’t bear to bring Paula’s smile to mind. The way it would break at mere strangers, and invest them with unquestioning trust, never failed to warn him. Now, the driver would rather shiver. He figures he doesn’t deserve its redeeming radiance.

The thought of her name, however, brings with it a wholly different kind of warmth: the burn of failure. It eats through the fog of exhaustion like a parasite and intensifies as he reads, or recognizes, the first letters printed on that white envelope, lying on the passenger floor. He won’t throw it out, the driver knows that much. Bound up in the hasty scrawl –a broken “P” and a jumbled “au”- is the sole remnant of the woman he loved and the man who took her away. It doesn’t seem so strange, when he considers it, that the two should stay with him; both in memory -however tortured and mixed- and in the form of a pale rectangle lit up by a fading moon.

The headlights find a sign and drag it out from the night. It reads:

“Now Leaving Dearborn: Drive Safely.” It’s going to be a long ride, no matter where he goes.

“We can’t go no further. There’s nowhere left ta go. So juss get.” That comes out more pleading, more regretful, than the driver intended. The hitchhiker just hangs his head. His gun follows suit. He remembers the night he killed Paula as if it were tonight: the calm, expectant look on her face; his shock and subsequent apprehension at being caught so off guard by her acquiescence; and then finally the fatal shot, planned over countless nights in a cell, yet wholly unintended when it came.

As for the driver, it’s not clear whether the hitchhiker had been plotting to kill him all along. He had originally planned to kill Paula’s fiancé, if he happened to be home at the time. He wasn’t, so he let his sights travel the highways north and east, to Paula’s father in Michigan. Karl Warshansky -an unremarkable immigrant turned crusader for justice, in his proudly worn work-shirts, certainly deserves it. Paula wouldn’t have testified in the first place if it weren’t for him. Caring for the welfare of some nobody Mexican: it would make the hitchhiker laugh if it wasn’t so detestable. The sentence to be meted out on this unknown fiancé, however, remained an open question mark.

Now, the indefinite face of Paula’s husband-to-be –the hitchhiker had always imagined it to be ugly in a Slavic kind of way, maybe because Paula herself was half-Polish, though of an understated beauty- is filled out by the very American features of the driver. The moon’s glow reemerges and finds a smooth patch of the driver’s forehead. It follows the ridge of his nose: an uninterrupted line down to his upper lip, taught and rich with stubble. The driver’s eyes are hidden in shadow, but if they were visible, the hitchhiker would see that they’re lost. It’s not only the days without sleep that have sunk them inward and lent them a dead man’s abyss. The driver’s eyes have grown blind with his failure, having given up on ever seeking satisfaction.

The hitchhiker can stare all he wants, it’s not going to solve this impasse. There’s not much to stare at for long. The driver climbs back into his pickup. The engine has been running all along, but it only detaches itself from the hum of a night alive with uncertainty once the driver releases the clutch. The pickup rolls out of the driveway and the hitchhiker follows it with a full turn of his head. His body follows, as the car tears off down the road.

That doesn’t explain why the driver is so shocked to see that his gun has been raised, and now points at the hitchhiker’s chest. He did it without thinking, maybe as a reaction to the hitchhiker drawing his. Neither of them seems particularly enthused to have two barrels separating them where several hours ago there was only a worn gear shaft and staid silence.

Face to face with Paula’s murderer: how many times has the driver dreamt of this moment since he first found the body, her blood drained from a wound five years in the making? He wants to pull the trigger. He wants nothing more than to watch this savage’s body fall to the well-maintained lawn, one piece at a time in meaty strips of gore.

He can’t pull the trigger because that will leave him completely alone. He’s alone now, to be sure, but the hitchhiker provides that kind of solidarity in loneliness that can only be enjoyed by two men who have nothing left in this world, except maybe their own, tortured companionship.

The driver loved Paula. There’s no other way he can express the devotion that burnt him up so completely; for which he was willing to drive to the end of every highway, even if that meant the end of himself as well. This is the end, and Paula’s murderer, the hitchhiker, is as much a part of it as is the driver or his late fiancée.

He wants to pull the trigger –for her, for them- but he doesn’t want to do it first. He waits for the click of the hitchhiker’s hammer. It never comes. A cloud shrouds the moon like a mortician covering a corpse’s pale face. It becomes so dark that eyes open or closed, living or dying: it’s all indiscernible. It’s all the same chilling wait. The driver waits. The hitchhikers waits, breaths, points. There’s absolutely no sound.

“Get outta here.”

The hitchhiker doesn’t stir.

“I said ‘get’!” In another beat, and sadder, “Fine, I’ll get.”

The driver floats to his pickup. The hitchhiker follows and the driver can’t help but be reminded of an abandoned puppy, begging not to be left behind.

The hitchhiker doesn’t move for a very long time. Standing perfectly still on a cold winter night, one can actually feel the darkness creep over one’s skin as it lurches imperceptibly towards morning. That’s what the driver feels right now, except it stings like a line of fire ants winding their way up his neck. The extreme edge of exhaustion can be so disorientating –like the body hasn’t waited for sleep before slipping into a dream- that the driver wonders if he had somehow mistakenly ingested more of that Indian drug. He feels the hazy lurching of its first few moments, same as he did that night –how long ago?- in McCook, Nebraska. The driver’s thoughts, breathing, heartbeat, slow to a halt, as if swallowed in sludge. The hitchhiker becomes not so much a figure submerged in shadow, but a thought suspended in time.

That’s why it comes as a relief when the hitchhiker takes a step forward, then another; because it causes everything to catch up in real time. It doesn’t take many before they are within arm’s reach. They both tense up.

The driver’s nausea, so persistent up until now, congeals into audacity. He can feel it harden every bone, starting with the base of his spine and working its way up. The driver’s back grows rigid and it has the effect of making the driver seem even taller than the man before him. They are both equals, however, due to the freezing steel each holds in his hand.

The hitchhiker stares. In the recesses of shadow, it means very little. His breathing remains tired but steady. The shots of vapor spouted from each man’s nostrils meet somewhere in between them, before rising up in a tangle: the breath of two stranger’s commingling and caught in the faint moonlight.

“You ain’t gonna stop me.” A flat voice travels on the hitchhiker’s breath.

“You gonna shoot?”

“F’at’s what it takes.”

“Watcha waitin fer, then?” With this taunt, the driver realizes that while he was driving the two thousand three hundred and thirty six miles -fighting crippling exhaustion and the loneliness of a highway with only two modes, straight and flat- to stand at this spot tonight, all of it was just waiting; waiting for this moment. Now that it’s arrived, his task is so certain that it might as well have been written down ahead of time.