The desert went on so long that the fear of running out of gas kept us from talking. Barbara’s hand was on my hand, and my hand was on the gear shift, though it wasn’t necessary. The road was smooth, but we were fixated on the idea that if an animal ran out, we might have to downshift, a safer option than braking. We were convinced that at the first sign of trouble, our lives would be in danger, and both of us were imagining, on our own, the car stopped, our holding each other through the night. Every ten minutes a car would approach, and we concentrated on the white headlights.

Her hand was frequently on mine. The lightness of it, the cold sweat … Then, when she’d return her hand to her lap or raise it to her mouth, to chew her nails, the back of my hand was wet.

We reached a pass where there were houses and then we saw, emerging before us, a coast alight with human life. It took a while to figure out what this apparition was; then we realized it was a twin highway through the desert, which, according to the map, had to be the Israeli road along the opposite shore, drawn close now, separated only by a strip of land. The two roads would join at the gulf. That mirror gaze, between the cars over there and us, was comforting after that black darkness.

We stopped at a checkpoint for entering Aqaba’s special economic zone. When we rolled down our windows to show our documents to a soldier, we felt the nighttime chill. The wind on our faces, the joy of brilliant streetlights. After customs, there were still streetlights; city palms, groomed, lined the road.

Now we faced the city’s complicated ring road and its unlit intersections. Sometimes a reflector shone off the large stone barricade of a construction zone, but nearly all the barricades were dark; we drove cautiously to avoid them, exhausted from this new stress and feeling like we’d never reach our hotel.

Before getting to the resort area, just outside the city, along the coast, we almost collided with a semitruck. Two major roads, ours and the truck’s, seemed to be merging in an elongated X that was difficult to navigate in the dark: my first thought was that there had to be a ramp and the semi was about to go by above, on some unlit overpass.

The semi was like a hallucination: high headlights from an angle I’d never seen before while driving. Like a joust, it seemed to be charging our left side. I slammed on the brakes, certain we were about to die, but our giant opponent braked and let us go, with a blare of its baritone horn.

Our hearts were in our throats, but soon we were laughing, our fear dissolving, also because we caught sight of the resort, its proportions comically grand, immersed in clouds of blue and purple light, and divided into all these various sumptuous shapes, from cottage to Corbusier house to airplane hangar.