Eyes Everywhere

Ed didn’t think it was possible to feel more alone than when he was driving the Google Street View car, the GSV as he called it, but just then he did. He was lying atop his hotel bed listening for signs of life but none came. Breakfast was going on just a few meters away in the small lobby of this roadside hotel in Lynchburg, Virginia. When a hotel lacks a restaurant, breakfast is a muted affair, and now Ed wondered if that was by design. Paper or styrofoam plates, plastic utensils, individually wrapped muffins and single portion boxes of cereal all made for monastic quiet. Since he began a year ago roaming America at three miles an hour, Ed had time to think. He asked himself if street names like Cherry Tree Lane, Snowy Owl Drive, and Apple Grove Road (which he went through five weeks prior in Silver Spring, Maryland) had any positive effect on residents? What about when a neighborhood had sidewalks -- they were supposed to encourage walking but Ed rarely saw anyone doing so. Now he wondered if forgettable breakfast spreads with disposable cutlery were meant to get you to checkout of a hotel faster. 

Feeling his stomach slowly lift and fall Ed could pretend he was the last person alive or that he was in outer space and there was a leak in the shuttle giving him just a handful of final breaths to savor. When driving the GSV there was less room in his head for play. There he felt an inordinate amount of stress for someone just twenty three years-old. On top of the ongoing loneliness and boredom, Ed felt that people stared at him as he drove, like he was the sole fish in an ambulant aquarium. 

The guy who trained Ed for the GSV had regaled him with exotic tales. Once, this guy said, he saw a beautiful Latina vaping on her balcony topless. “Definitely a stripper,” he said. He made being a Google Street View driver sound like driving a Mardi Gras float or piloting a drone through Aleppo. “Have your eyes everywhere, man. You never know what you’ll see,” he said shaking his head slowly, like some grizzled crime reporter that had covered too many murders. In the year Ed had been on the road, he had fine-tuned a fantasy where he ran into this guy and called BS on his GSV exploits. In the fantasy Ed pulls into the parking lot where the Google Street View cars are so he can return his. He sees the guy boasting to a new driver about glimpsing a sexy woman in the buff or perhaps an epic car crash where the vehicles went airborne. Ed then stops a few feet away and shouts, “Dude, stop. The job sucks.”

Ed could afford to have lazy mornings. You were supposed to be on the road from ten am to four pm in order to get images when the sun was directly overhead and not rising or setting so as not to affect the light in the shots. Ed was in a Whatsapp group with several drivers from his recruitment class -- his phone vibrated each morning with pictures and memes the drivers sent. The #GSVlife hashtag was frequently used, often accompanying shots of typically American roadside oddities like a four story-high donut. There was one “driver” who wasn’t in the Whatsapp group but whose pictures had made him a legend in the GSV universe. He drove a snowmobile for Google Street View through the back roads of Alaska and Canada and took selfies with giant moose and cloud-scraping mountains behind him. Ed felt jealous whenever any of the snowmobile driver’s pictures came into the chat because of his celebrity status. At the same time, Ed wondered what his loneliness was like. Did he talk to himself like Ed did? And did he too feel like he was driving an Uber of sorts that would never have any passengers? 

Almost all of the streets in Lynchburg needed updating as most of the images online were from 2007. Ed was scheduled to be there for four days with his route already planned for him by Trevor, the point person for North American GSV drivers at Google HQ. Ed had never met Trever though they corresponded via email and Slack a few times a day. In the brief for each city Trevor always noted points of interest including what he termed “selfie spots” along with well-reviewed budget restaurants. The exhaustive level of detail that Trevor included in his emails and briefs felt both considerate and impersonal -- Ed interpreted it to mean he should never have any cause to call Trevor on the phone. 

Lynchburg was gorgeous, especially now, the start of Fall. “The City of Seven Hills is known for breathtaking vistas of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the James River,” was how Trevor’s brief began. Ed was on his lunch break sitting on the hood of the GSV eating Chick-Fil-A on a tree-shaded street that offered some of the aforementioned vistas. He had the urge to send a picture to Trevor and tell him how pretty the place was but feared he would just get a rapid-fire one word reply with too many exclamations that felt fake. Nevertheless, Ed was happy. Taking in the view he felt a tingling inside. He couldn’t describe the emotion but the words romance and poetry popped into his head and felt apt. 

Inspired, Ed did what any other twenty-three year-old would do: he took a few dozen selfies. He didn’t look at the camera in any of them. Indeed his eyes were barely visible as he had on a flat brim baseball cap pulled down just over his eyebrows. In some pictures his head was bowed, looking at the ground, in others he was in profile, gazing across the James River. In a few he was smiling broadly or in mid-laugh looking at someone imaginary out of the shot. Ed updated each of his dating app and social media profiles with one of the new shots and also sent one to the drivers’ Whatsapp group with the hashtags #lynchburgva, #dirtysouth, and #GSVlife. The response from the drivers was instantaneous with all twelve giving their approval: there were six high five emojis, three applause emojis, two raised fist emojis (one was dark-skinned, the other light), and one driver wrote, “NOOICE!”

The urge to check his social feeds throughout the day in order to see the number of likes he was getting was strong, but Ed decided to tough it out until the work day was done. Each day on the road was followed by two to four tedious hours of editing and uploading images to Google Maps servers. The drivers had to spend extra time blurring the faces of anyone who was captured by GSV cameras. Every couple of days there was a message in the chat like, “So many damn faces!” Ed preferred the editing to the driving, though, because he didn’t feel like anyone was watching him and time flew. At night he would sip from a tall energy drink and sow together image after image for seamless street views. 

When Ed finally checked his social feeds he had to do a double-take: the photo he posted staring at the river had gotten one hundred and sixty one likes on Instagram. He’d never even broken one hundred before. On Facebook the likes were fewer but the comments legion, with friends and family praising him as some kind of modern explorer. When Ed checked his dating apps there were several matches but he was torn. Getting matches had become somewhat routine when he landed in a new city but few women messaged him back when he sent out feeler texts. A few months earlier he had purchased a PDF about meeting women online, “Text Game Mastery: Sleep with Hot Girls You Meet Online,” but it had yet to help. Ed had tweaked his dating profile bio countless times, an algorithm he was ever trying to perfect. At one point he used a line straight from the PDF, “Here for a good time, not a long time,” but it felt too cheesy so he scrapped it. By the time he arrived in Lynchburg he was shooting for self-deprecation and mystery: “I drive slower than your grandmama but get paid to do so. I can tell you the Google coordinates of absolutely anywhere on Earth and other stuff guaranteed not to turn you on. U of Oregon ‘18, now near you...in the slow lane.”  

In Lynchburg, Ed wouldn’t have to wonder if his matches would write. Mia, a twenty one year-old pre-med student with fair skin and long brown hair who had pictures of herself grooming a horse, playing rugby, and in a bikini at the beach, jumped into his DM’s. 

Mia: Are you the one in the Google car?? 

Ed: Haha yes...are you a stalker? 

Mia: OMG! We saw you drive past the restaurant I work at. Me and another waitress were gonna run out and jump in the air but you left already lol 

Ed: whoa i must be super handsome hahah ;) 

That last joke fell flat but the game was afoot. Ed and Mia pinged each other back and forth with Ed acting unmoved. With every message that Mia sent Ed would toss his phone on the bed and try, fruitlessly, to occupy himself with something else for a few minutes. The seduction manual had a chapter titled DON'T BE NEEDY! which said being too eager was the number one impediment to bedding women. It specifically advised that however long a woman took to write, you had to take longer writing back. If she took seven minutes to respond to you, then you had to take at least eight to respond back. At one point Mia didn’t respond for a whole forty three minutes during which time Ed checked his phone no less than nine times and wanted to punch holes in the wall. 

Mia: Sorry was giving my sister a bath. She’s bratty and doesn’t want to but then when she’s in the water she doesn’t want to leave!! lol. Do you want to talk on the phone?

Talking on the phone was something you should never ever do according to the PDF. “Only boyfriends talk on the phone,” it said, meaning doing so put a guy in the flowers and candy camp, long dates to nowhere with sex happening weeks if not months down the road. Despite his hunger for no-strings sex, Ed yearned to be a boyfriend. He had never been in a relationship and had fantasized during so many days on the road what it would be like to have a girlfriend he could talk to each evening. 

Ed: My phone is at like 2% lol. Better idea: let’s meet tomorrow for a drink. 

He stuck to the playbook and it worked. They made plans to meet the next evening. Mia signed off, and Ed, as much as thought he shouldn’t, did the same. 

Mia: See you tomorrow! Goodnight  

Ed: Yes indeed! Night 

The next day Ed felt like he was trying to cram for a final exam, calling every guy he knew that had had a one night stand and reading everything he could on seduction. While Ed hungered for intercourse, masturbating himself to sleep most nights to a handful of porn sites, he wanted to sleep with Mia more than anything in the hope that she would fall in love with him. The seduction material talked about the need to remain aloof and non-committal so as to minimize a woman’s clinginess after sex. Ed wanted the cling. Urban legends about overly jealous girlfriends who texted their boyfriends during bathroom breaks on dates sounded heavenly. He wanted to be wanted and to want someone back. He didn’t tell this to his buddies, though, he just asked them, “How do I nail this girl?” The consensus was that he had to find a cool bar close to the hotel, get some drinks in Mia and then have a good excuse for them to go to his hotel room. One seduction PDF said you had “to plant a seed” early in the date by mentioning a favorite movie so that later you could suggest viewing that film at your place. You could also say your phone was dead or that you were cold and wanted a sweater, basically anything to get the girl back to yours for sex. 

There were no cool bars close to Ed’s hotel, or any cool bars in Lynchburg that he could find. He almost pinged Trevor for help but knew Trevor merely used Google as his source. Mia messaged Ed in the afternoon to confirm their date, which irritated Ed. He barely slept the night before because, frankly, he was too keyed up with excitement. After they had said goodnight he went for a junk food run and then masturbated twice to porn sites before he finally fell asleep around three in the morning. Exhausted, he responded curtly, choosing the closest place within walking distance of the hotel, Shakers, a self-billed “family-style restaurant.” 

Mia answered enthusiastically. “I love their tater tots! Lol”

Before the date Ed did what the PDFs advised him: he downloaded a movie all women supposedly loved to his laptop, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.” He got a bottle of white wine and two tall boys of beer and put them in the mini-fridge. One friend said he should open the wine and drink some first otherwise the seduction would look too premeditated. He did so. Ed didn’t have any clothes he thought were cool enough for a date and that bothered the hell out of him. All of his clean shirts said “Google” somewhere on the front, so he decided to wear a jacket and keep it on for the duration of the date even though it was too warm for that. 

As Ed approached the restaurant he saw Mia waiting just outside and he wanted to cry at how much he loved her. She was petite, five foot two, and wearing a sleeveless top which struck him as incredibly cute. He wanted to lift her in the air and twirl her around like he had just returned home from war. All the seduction guides advised little to no touching before sex, especially early in the date, as signs of affection were the stuff of losers. Ed kept his arms at his sides and Mia responded in kind. 

As soon as they sat down it was like a starter pistol went off and small talk, what every male dating guru warned against, was the order of the date. Mia talked about school and her dream of becoming a veterinarian, she told Ed about her father having treatment for colorectal cancer which prompted her to take this semester off from school. When she asked Ed about his family he kept his answers vague. He tried infusing into the conversation what he could that had a hint of sex but it felt forced. At one point he blurted, “I get to watch my favorite movie tonight.” She asked him why he liked Vicky Cristina Barcelona but he’d never actually seen it so he mumbled a lie about having gone to Spain the summer prior and the movie “just takes me back.” Mia gave Ed questions he’d wanted someone to ask him for months, like if he got lonely driving the Google Street View. “Nah. I love it. I’m free.” He had read that you wanted to keep things positive on a date when asked questions about your job. 

Ed told Mia that driving a Google Street View car was a constant thrill with adventure around every corner. “You wanna have your eyes everywhere. You never know what you’ll see.” When she asked to hear some of the adventures his face went blank, his brain racing for something neither racy nor sophomoric like balcony boobs and giant donuts. His face went red but after a long moment he took a gamble on the truth. “Well, I met you.” Mia smiled wide and met Ed’s eyes with hers. “That’s really nice of you to say.”

As their plates were cleared and the check came around, to propose at night cap in his hotel room felt about as natural as asking if she wanted to fuck. So he asked instead if she wanted to see the Google Street View. He opened the passenger door for her like a gentleman and when doing so felt briefly about as good as he had all year. He turned the car on, showing her all of its bells and whistles. There was more small talk and she thanked him for a great evening and made him promise to keep in touch. Then they parted like two strangers who sat next to each on a flight -- full of feeling but knowing they’d never speak again. 

While driving to his next destination the following day it occurred to Ed that he could have kissed her, he could have held her hand even, or just touched it. He could have asked if he could kiss her. As each of these realizations hit him, Ed gripped the steering wheel hard and let out a string of curses. He put his hand on the passenger seat where Mia had sat briefly the night before and stroked it. He wanted to apologize for this burst of vulgarity. He could almost feel her sitting next to him. And he didn’t want her to hear him speak like that.