The Passenger

Randolph Bradley — Randy — works a fast-food counter in rural Louisiana. He is quiet to the point of near-invisibility: absorbs whatever happens to him, doesn't push back, doesn't complain, exists in a permanent mode of preemptive retreat. He is due a promotion to manager. Nobody seems eager to give it to him. His co-workers bully him openly, in the casual way you do when someone has never once pushed back.

One day his co-worker Benson witnesses this, and something in him snaps. He produces a gun and shoots everyone in the building except Randy, who stands there unhurt and thoroughly unsure of what he just survived. What follows is not an escape. Benson tells Randy he is fixable — that he's been watching him and can see what Randy himself has walled off — and then places him in the passenger seat and drives.

Randy's compliance is less Stockholm syndrome than something like permission. He does not fight. He does not run. He does not call for help. Benson has named a thing Randy already knows is there, has been building his entire life around, and some part of Randy wants to see where this goes.

Benson's methods are violent and chaotic and not without a logic. He forces Randy to confront his ex-girlfriend Lisa, who names the thing she could never get past in their relationship: Randy's emotional absence, the way he was never quite there. Randy, in return, explains where it started — a childhood incident in which he flung an eraser in frustration and put his second-grade teacher Mrs. Beard's eye out. The accident, and the shame that crystallized around it, constructed the belief Randy has lived inside ever since: that his feelings are dangerous, that expressing them hurts people, that the safest thing to do is feel nothing and want nothing.

Benson beats Mrs. Beard's address out of her former vice principal. Along the way he shoots a diner waitress. The police are in pursuit. The arc of the road trip is narrowing.

Randy reaches Mrs. Beard. She does not hate him; has spent no particular energy hating him; the years Randy lost to guilt were not a debt she was holding. They make something close to peace. Randy uses her phone to call the police. Benson finds out, shoots Randy in the shoulder, and then walks outside to meet the officers waiting there, choosing suicide by cop. His road was always ending here. Randy was the only part of it that wasn't his.