Sleep

He went swerving back and forth, from lane to lane. For the longest time, I couldn't tell if he was drunk or just a terrible driver, but finally he careened close to me and I could see he was falling asleep at the wheel. The poor man looked like he hadn't slept since Georgia. Now, I wasn't exactly feeling awake myself, having woken up hungover after not quite long enough tossing fitfully on the seats. But compared to this man, I had slept for a year on a featherbed where he'd had his eyes duct-taped open by a particularly ornery optometrist. His car swung from side to side, catching itself by the rumble strips only to boomerang back into the other lane. For fear of getting hit, I didn't want to pass him -- and besides, it was nice to follow a driver crazier than me. Finally, mercifully, he pulled over to the side of the road. In comparison to him I may have just downed enough coffee to give a moose a heart attack, but on the spectrum of humans who weren't about to die of exhaustion I was still pretty tired. I pulled up behind him -- he'd already collapsed forward onto the wheel.

The man in the car ahead of me and I woke up at around the same time, both sore and stiff from our brief naps in our cars. He started when he saw me -- he must have been out even before the car even came to a stop. Turns out he was a doctor off to California by way of a friend in Houston. But an invisible force hung over our conversation -- he seemed nervous to be talking to a white man on the eastern edge of Texas and though I had mentioned I was from California, he was eager to get back on the road. Though he quickly peeled away on a different road than me, that feeling of uneasiness stayed.