One night while pulling out of the parking lot at City College, she sees a quick flash of headlights in her rearview mirror. For a second she thinks the van is Denny’s, but this one is light blue, and when it passes, she sees no writing on the side. Up front, a man leans back casually as he drives. She catches a glimpse of him, hair unfashionably short, seat tilted back, cigarette dangling from his lips, and then he’s gone.

The next week she sees him again at one of the other colleges. Once more it’s late because she’s spent the evening tutoring students from her afternoon English class. She watches his eyes in her rearview mirror all the way home. When she changes lanes, so does he; they dance together across the nearly empty highway. When she exits, he’s close behind, but three blocks from her apartment he pulls ahead and disappears around the corner. His license plate reads ZIP, but she keeps forgetting what the three numbers are.

When she sees him on a Tuesday afternoon, she gets a better look. “He has a very long nose,” she tells us in a whisper. “Of course, you know about men with long noses.”

We look at each other for clues.

“They have long penises, too,” she says.

Late one warm night in May, he stays on her tail, changing lanes when she does, getting on and off the freeway when she does. When she stops for gas, so does he, but instead of getting out of his van, he waves a thick, stubby hand to the attendant sitting behind the flickering light in the window of the gas station. The attendant gets up and strolls out to lean on the open window of the van before filling the tank and washing the windshield.

Ilka rolls her eyes to the side to watch without seeming to as she cleans her own windshield, so she doesn’t see much. His fingers do look short, which she thinks contradicts the mythology of the nose. After paying the cashier in her booth beside the gas pumps, where she sits with candy bars and cigarette packages stacked up to her ears, Ilka drives away with the mysterious van close behind.