Edwin Sees the World

Edwin swerved around the Arc de Triomphe, wheels screeching and leaving thick black lines on the famous roundabout. He squeezed his car between a tour bus and a delivery truck, shooting out onto the Champs Elysées. Shit, my footage is gonna be crap, he muttered to himself as he pressed his foot to the floorboard.

The Champs Elysées was a zoo. Edwin dodged Parisians with Prada purses and tourists in Tom Ford turtlenecks. He weaved in and out of the stream of sleek cars cruising down the avenue. He glanced in the rearview mirror and caught a glimpse of flashing lights rounding the Arc de Triomphe. Shit. Shit. I’m too old for this. But a grin flashed across his face.

This wasn’t at all what Edwin expected when he traded his office chair for this car three months ago. Edwin had spent most of the last 38 years in a small cubicle. For exactly 10,000 days of Edwin Harbor’s life, he had studiously worked on melding the shape of his office chair to meet the contours of his rump. Each morning, Edwin woke up at 6:45, shaved his lean face, combed two dollops of gel through his hair, brushed his teeth for two minutes, fried a Grade A egg, poured a cup of black coffee, got in his Chevrolet, drove twelve blocks, parked in spot 118, climbed seven flights of stairs, nodded to the receptionist, walked to Section D, Row 3, and entered Cubicle G. He set his briefcase down, straightened his slacks, and lowered himself into his swivel chair. And then he spent the next eight hours attached to that swivel chair, inputting numbers for the Fremont Department of Data.

His cubicle was smack in the middle of the office, so he only got a glimpse of the outside world when he peaked out the window near the water cooler. But on Edwin’s computer, he saw all of Fremont. He entered data for weddings, funerals, proms, and fundraisers. He knew how many brown-haired boys had been born in Cabrillo. He saw how many girls had graduated in each grade. He could tell you how many stop signs had been issued in each year and how many crosswalks had been painted and worn down and repainted since he started. Every day, Edwin saw life etched across the screen of his computer.

Every day, Edwin plugged away. He entered case codes and tax IDs and Social Security digits and mile times and speed limits and cheese prices and stadium capacities and football scores and valedictorian grades and zip codes and school records and pool hours and TV stations and crime rates and employee PINs and race bibs and router numbers and seconds and minutes and hours and days and weeks and months and years and he had been doing this for eons and he was recording other people’s lives but where was his own and how would he count his own passage of time and how could he do this job even another second?

He couldn’t.

So on March 10, 2020, Edward Harbor he shoved his office chair against the wall of his cubicle, knocking papers to the ground in a flurry. He looked around the office to see the reaction of his colleagues. No one noticed. So he shoved it against the wall once more for good measure and picked up his briefcase. For the last time, he exited Cubicle G, Row 3, Section D. He nodded to the receptionist, sprinted down seven flights of stairs, and broke out into the sunlit parking lot. And then he kept running. He ripped off his tie as he turned the corner and sprinted into the world. His leather shoes hit the pavement over and over as he ran and ran and ran. And when he finally needed to breathe, Edwin looked up to a sign tacked to the pole next to him. Google Street View Drivers needed.

Two days later, Edwin was cruising around Fremont in his very own Google Street View car. 

Where do you want to go? We need images for every street in the country, the manager had explained. Um. Everywhere. The manager raised an eyebrow. Edwin straightened his back. Yeah. Everywhere.

Edwin saw the Black Hills of South Dakota, the rolling plains of Nebraska, the dancing streets of Nashville. He saw sunrises followed by sunsets followed by yet more breathtaking streaks across the sky. He rolled through deserts and circled canyons. He cruised across mountains, around lakes, through valleys. He saw fireworks bursting across the Washington Mall and watched the lights twinkle on across the New York skyline. He drove day and night, stopping only to nap in the back or grab some food, unwilling to waste a minute of time that could be spent seeing the world. Each time Edwin turned on his engine, a new piece of the planet stretched out in front of him.

When Edwin had worked for the Department of Data, he listened to each second tick by on the clock on his desk. Now, he began to track time by the shade of the tan on his left arm and the miles on his odometer. Google had never seen a driver like him before, and he had no intentions of stopping his relentless quest to map the world. When Edwin had covered every expressway, dirt road, main street, and alleyway of the United States, hitting the tip of Florida, he dialed up a cruise line and rolled his car onto the back of the ship.

Google started to call him. You can’t do Europe. We have other people for that. Come back please, and bring the car. Edwin chucked his phone and ditched his GPS. He was just getting started. When the Alps and Himalayas lay ahead of him, how could he stop? Today he had the Parisian police at his back, but after his months of driving, no one had learned to navigate a steering wheel like Edwin Harbor. He pressed his foot to the gas, blew a kiss to the officers, and kept driving. He had more world to see.