She saw him from a long way off. A shape against the brown hills, thumb out, carrying nothing.

She had passed a hundred like him. You learn not to look. You look and then you have to decide and either way you carry it down the road.

But she slowed.

He was sunburned and his lips were cracked and he looked at her through the passenger window like a man looking up from deep water.

Where you headed, she said.

He didn’t answer.

Get in, she said.

He got in. He smelled like alkali and sweat. She pulled back onto the highway and for a long time neither of them spoke.

She had been someone once. A title and an office with a window. Then one day she had looked at her hands on the keyboard and seen them as if from very far away and not known whose hands they were.

She had not quit. She had just stopped going. After a while they stopped calling. That was the thing. You could just stop and the machinery would route around you like water around a stone.

She had been driving since. Not toward anything.

The man stared out the window.

You don’t have to tell me, she said. What you’re running from.

He was quiet. Then he said: I don’t think I was running. I was trying to hear myself think.

Did it work.

No.

No, she said. It doesn’t.

The sun lowered and the shadows of the hills stretched across the highway. She did not turn on the radio.

There’s a town in about an hour, she said. Or you can keep riding.

He looked at her.

Why’d you stop, he said.

She thought about it.

I saw you, she said. That’s all.

They passed the town. Neither mentioned it. The stars came out and she drove and he sat beside her and the night was very large and they were very small and that was alright.

Somewhere past midnight he slept. She looked over at him. A stranger. She did not know his name or what he had done. She knew only that he had been standing in the desert and she had stopped.

It wasn’t anything. It wouldn’t change anything.

But here was the road and his breathing and her hands on the wheel and the headlights making a small bright tunnel through the dark.

She drove on.