My headlights gut the darkness, tearing open the perfect pitch black of an altiplano night as I scream down the two-lane highway. The needle is buried past an obscene number on my speedometer, a daylight-only number, not that I remember the exact math. Above a certain speed you close on an object faster than you can react to it, a phenomenon known as overdriving your headlights.

I’m living that phenomenon now. Moths and bats flash through my shallow field of illumination, barely registering on my ocular nerves before they’re gone already. I try to react to them, even just by twitching, but it’s completely useless. At this speed there’s no time for thought or reflexes or anything but the vaguest categorization of the visual stimuli flying past you.

This is the core of existence, life as lived by permission of the fates and chance and all the other names we give to the tenuous favor of randomness. I left the rationality of reaction somewhere back at 60 or 70 MPH, and now I’ve shed my animal reflexes too. There’s only right place right time, no matter whether it’s a primordial muck on this third rock from the sun, or being born white in the United States, or screaming down a highway devoid of mule deer.

Then I ease off the gas, and turn down the Mexican death metal pumping out of the speakers, and redouble my concentration on the arc of headlights in front of me.

I had a close call a couple years ago. I was redlining my beater Explorer beneath an August moon, trying to make Chihuahua City before dawn. The drive was jarring but uneventful until I got to the mountains, when I rounded a curve and suddenly found an elderly campesino and his three scrawny cows in my headlights. He was leading them across the road single file — rustling them maybe, I don’t know — and I barely had time to yank my steering wheel toward the gap between the second and third cows, more an act of instinct than deliberation. I thought I made the gap, but suddenly the truck shuddered and the third cow’s head spun away. For a moment it lingered in my peripheral vision, broken-necked and eyes rolling wildly. Then I was past the impact and they vanished into the dark behind me.

Back then I was convinced this was real happiness. Driving anywhere on the fucking map I want to go. Changing vistas like changing clothes. Surviving on $5 a day and a shower a week. Life was beguiling here, beyond the reach of phones and paychecks and commitments, beyond all the shit that chains us to a place, to ourselves. In America I was just another American, but crossing the border transformed me into an expatriate. Something exotic. My own personal cargo cult. Life stopped in the pueblos and rooms I entered, curious faces tracking me, people sucking up in traditional hospitality, muchachitas flirting onto the fast-track to American citizenship. And I was always in control, emotionally distant, rootless and uninvested.

In my peripheral vision — pinpricks of sodium light and the glint of corrugated aluminum. A ranch stranded somewhere in the altiplano. Thousands of acres, hundreds of cattle.

Memories tug at my tear ducts. I know what it’s like, growing up in drivethru country. The empty sky for a best friend. Being part of a family business that’s all business and no family. And the straitjacket of agrarian life, where every day — every goddamn day — is the same ritual. Get up before the buttcrack of dawn to do chores, ride the bus five hundred years to school and back, do more chores. Wash rinse and repeat for 18 years.

No wonder I came out of Worth County like a bullet from a gun. Anybody got in my way, tried to stop me, I would’ve killed them. And bullets don’t look back.

Watching Concepcion crawl into sight on the horizon, a glowing haze of lights, I have to admit to myself that this itinerant bliss can’t last forever. Eventually you finish your Ph.D. or quit trying. Graduate funding runs out, assuming you had any to begin with. The student loans roll into five digits, then six. A stony-faced committee expels you, if it comes to that. Maybe you wind up like your professors, overworked and chasing tenure and publishing-or-perishing and nostalgic about their carefree days in grad school, when all they had to worry about was starving to death. Or maybe you morph into just another suit or skirt, punching a cubicle clock somewhere, trading your soul for a paycheck and health insurance, living for the end of the day and the weekends and those two precious weeks of vacation, forever and ever amen.

All the career advice I hear, it’s always the same. You gotta feel passion. Find what you love and keep doing it. Follow your heart and pursue your dreams and whatever the fuck high school guidance counselors say nowadays. Except I feel zilch passion for jumping through the hoops of flaming bullshit called academia. I don’t even feel passionate about avoiding the real world and its job market anymore. I go through the Ph.D. motions, say the right careerist words on cue, but I can’t back up the sentiments. Reach through the words on my curriculum vitae and you’ll get a handful of nothing.

The only thing I feel passionate about isn’t a thing at all. It’s a person. Nooshin. When I think about the future, I don’t really care if I wind up barricaded in the ivory towers, or running in a corporate hamster wheel, or scratching dirt back in Iowa. Just as long as I wind up somewhere with her.

Pulling off the highway, my headlights swoosh over Concepcion. The pueblo is a glorified truckstop that decorates the altiplano like a hairy mole. I mix with still-rumbling traffic on the main drag. The only lodging is this shitty falling-apart flophouse of a hotel — really a trucker’s motel, since the empty lot out back is crammed with semi-trailers. Moths flitter beneath the sickly light of massive overhanging eaves. An old sandbag of a hooker is motionless at a picnic table, watching me pull a U-turn in the street and ease the Explorer against the curb.

Inside the first thing I notice is the hotel’s decor — or what’s beneath it, more like. The cheap plywood paneling and generations of paint can’t obscure the sleek lines of Art Deco architecture. Coved moldings still curve around the ceiling, and the boarded-up fireplace is shouldered with round stone. This place was probably something else back in the 1930s, when some star-crossed local figured Concepcion was going to be the Next Big Thing.

Behind the front desk is a sleeved-out Mexican in a Los Angeles Lakers jersey. The cheap tattoos running from his wrists to his shoulders could mean anything. Maybe he’s an ex-con. Maybe he’s an ex-truck driver. When I get closer it smells like he bathes in tequila and tobacco. A hand rises in a stop sign. “Hey. You there. Hey!” But I keep going past him to the stairwell. His footsteps don’t follow me.

Friday night in this shithole is quieter than you’d think. Some drunken laughter drifts through the closed doors, and I can hear the solitary bang-bang-banging of a headboard against a concrete wall, but otherwise it’s funereal. Most of the clientele is still blowing their weekly paychecks in the trucker bars that line this blighted strip of Concepcion.

Halfway down the hallway I make a fist and rap insistently on a door. #9. The metallic numeral has been painted over so many times it’s sinking out of sight. “Nooshin, it’s me. I’m back.”

Behind the door, silence. Then the creak of tired bedsprings and a sudden rush of sockfeet. Locks unlock, chains unchain. A sliver of her face appears — a slash of unplucked eyebrow, the dark orb of her right eye, a steep carmel-colored cheekbone. “Nick!” The door flings open and she’s standing there, willowy and disheveled and most of all beautiful, those plush lips smiling in welcome, a wild halo of inky tresses spilling down her shoulders and obscuring the GAP logo on her pink hoodie, jeans hanging from her bony hips, white-and-pink-and-red striped socks on her feet.

We hurl together like magnets, a lingering hug. She feels unbearably poignant in my arms, all ribs and scrawn, heartbeats flickering against my chest. I’m filled with tenderness. The post-Aldama fight that separated us this morning is fading fast, a bad memory dimming into a forgotten one.

Somewhere down the hall a door creaks open. Nooshin immediately breaks away and peeks around me. “Finally! Omigod, I need to pee SO BAD,” she giggles in relief, skipping down the hallway toward the communal bathroom. “Be right back!”

“I’ll get your stuff packed up,” I call after her, and turn to confront a hotel room like a jail cell. The ceiling and walls are bare cracking plaster, stained and streaked with dirt and occasionally defaced with graffiti. The floor is gray linoleum tile, synonymous with elementary schools and mental wards. The only furniture is a double bed. Its mattress visibly sags, worn into oatmeal by age and poundings.

Even here Nooshin is impeccably neat. Her Nikes wait beneath the bed like slippers. The laptop and its big PROPERTY OF UCLA sticker are recharging in a corner, with the carrying case aligned next to it. A plastic bag of dirty clothes hangs from the doorknob.

The only thing out of place is her backpack, unzipped and leaking things onto the bedspread. I immediately notice her favorite purple swirly pen…but not the secret notebook she hides from me. I grope madly to the bottom of her backpack, searching for it, dreadfully curious what she wrote about me after our fight. Is she still rhapsodizing about my icy blue eyes and drawing our initials in girlish cupid hearts? Or am I an asshole now, like Saman only worse?

I find the notebook and flip from the back cover forward, looking for her most recent outpouring of furtive emotion — and stare in bafflement at two columns of words. Names, actually:

Finn
Afshar
Sebastian
Simon
Teymour
Carsten
Namdar
Will
Sepehr
Iraj
 Yasmin
Danika
Laleh
Noelle
Fila
Mina
Chloe
Cai-

The last three letters tail off in mid-scribble, interrupted by my arrival. She meant to write “Caitlin”, maybe.

The hallway echoes with the dull whoosh of a toilet flushing.

Hurriedly I close the notebook and try to recreate its positioning in the backpack. Jammed next to some hiphuggers. A few items strewn on top, like her bottle of shampoo. And that hairbinder. No wait, not that hairbinder. I think it was the tortoiseshell one. And finally the Tampax box. I definitely remember finding that on top. We bought a whole armload last month in Sinaloa, at the brand spanking new Pemex in the town with the weird calendrical name, El Veinticinco de Enero or something like that.

I turn the featherlight box in my hand, examining its muted blue-and-pink shape. It hasn’t been opened. Yet.

Out in the hallway the bathroom door creaks opens. Barely-audible sockfeet are approaching.

I jam the box of tampons into her backpack and bound off the bed, racing the muted footfalls, trying to reach the laptop recharging in the corner before she arrives in the doorway.