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.