The road as life

He will chaperone me in getting a lift. I have tacitly accepted, somehow. With words, but without language.
For a while, no luck. Why would there be. Who are these strangers anyway surfacing ahead in the sunlit clarity, a dark skinned foreigner with an unexceptional-looking older man? Probably a double act. The local there to lull you into a sense of security, which is when the foreigner will rob you. Which is why we wait a while.
Then a bus bumbles toward us and as it nears, he parts his lips. “Albania” he utters to me: an intimation of, why not get in? In my indecision the bus passes or I let it pass, adamant I will get to Albania without having to fork out. I’ve got this far without money.
Eventually he flags down a car, a white beetle. The driver will take us to a border town seventy kms away.? We get in, my acquaintance gesturing with a tilt of the head, the usher of a hand. My backpack and I at the back, he in the passenger seat. At the front, the reassuring patter of two locals exchanging pleasantries. Not needing (or indeed able) to add anything, I slip into the role I love, the role of the silent passenger, my attention shifting from the generic - the hayfields and female-clad advertising hoardings - to the specific: ridges, crags(?), brown hills blazing in the midday sun. Except not having the geological vocabulary, it becomes a silent screenplay. Tall yellowed rock surfaces and ash-like mounds with distorted faces, is how I’d describe it in Lonely Planet. If I could get away with it. Something like the surface of the moon, a country moon maybe, for through the dust and light and the sporadic bursts of heat, are intimations of lushness. The American south I haven’t seen. I think of yesterday’s journey from Sarajevo, the mountains, lakes, the canyon that kept on going, images - yesterday’s, today’s - that gain a dream-like quality through my lack of sleep. My seventieth day on the road.
When something else, a thought, takes over. It comes about as casually as the things outside, a flicker somewhere between the rolling images that grows to close me in from left and right, so that all I can do is look ahead, and all I can watch is the grey strip unravelling. Watching it from behind these two figures, who encroach on my eye line because they are closer and hence larger than the road; two shadowy presences directing my destiny, because the sun has suddenly dimmed. Finally he turns behind, puts it into words, asking (I think): how did I end up here?