The Creep

Sharon SY Lee

Bill’s face looks perpetually sunburned. His sagging cheeks are kissed with rosacea and a map’s worth of spider veins. His face turns redder at the sight of the pretty girl who walks towards the curb. He scrapes his thinning hair into place and flips down the sun visor to check his yellowing teeth for any traces of lunch. 

His car is old and reliable, just like him. Bill pulls up to the curb where his rideshare passenger stands waiting with one hand on her hip. He is prepared to explain that there’s no use in trying to sit in the backseat; the door is broken, but the girl–fresh-faced, maybe in her early twenties–slips into the passenger side without a single glance his way. She adjusts her skirt, which has ridden up a little, and Bill marvels at her exposed thighs, which are thick and brown and muscled, like a pony’s. She smells of clean linen–a nice smell, unlike some of his other passengers, who douse themselves in cologne or perfume.

“I’m Bill,” he says, smiling and trying to catch her eye, which is hunting for her seatbelt instead of fixed on him. It annoys Bill mightily when riders do not bother to look him in the eye, when they treat him like a chauffeur. Such a muted beginning usually means that the ride will be silent the whole way. This passenger might as well have requested one of those self-driving cars instead. 

He tries again. He will be acknowledged today. “I’m Bill.”

She is turned away from him, facing the window, but he catches the glint of white earbuds nestled in her dark hair. It dawns on Bill that the girl is on the phone. Some passengers have forgotten how to act around real, live people. Bill believes that at their core, people still crave the human touch. They want to see a friendly face; they want to engage in light chitchat. His wife, Helena, sometimes shakes her head at him and chides him for talking too much. Passengers have described him as “nice,” “friendly,” and “pleasant” in their anonymous feedback. People don’t really want to be picked up in an empty, self-driving car. Bill thinks it’s spooky to witness a driverless vehicle pull up to the curb. Like ordering a ghost to drive you around. Nevertheless, he knows that evidence points to the contrary: human-manned rideshare vehicles are being phased out all over the country. Someday soon, his job will be obsolete. 

The passenger continues her phone conversation, oblivious to Bill. “Can you believe it?” she says, then kicks off her sandals. Bill has big, bug eyes that give him a perpetually surprised look, but now his big, bug eyes narrow as he turns back to the steering wheel. The girl doesn’t even bother to apologize for her rudeness. She laughs towards her window. Her laugh is all wrong: raspy and low, as though she has been sucking on cigarettes for a long time. Someone who looks like her should have a sweet and gentle laugh. He’s encountered other girls who have sweet and gentle voices that rise barely above a whisper. For example, the pharmacy technician, Sarah, at the local drugstore where he picks up Helena’s medications. Sarah, with her long black hair, is the epitome of feminine grace. She used to avert her eyes demurely when asking for his first and last name and date of birth. He always joked with her about his age, how the years had crept up on him and accumulated without notice until he suddenly found himself old. He used to chitchat with Sarah, used to ask Sarah how things were going, how was her workload, how was her little girl. Sometimes, he asked a few more friendly questions, asked if she wanted to grab a coffee during her break, but if a line started to form behind him, he knew that he should let her get back to work. She had other customers to take care of. He used to think that she was kind and accommodating, that she came from a culture that respected its elders. Of course, this was before she had turned on him and had security escort him out of the drugstore.  Apparently, Sarah had felt uncomfortable in his presence. Uncomfortable! All Bill ever tries to do is make others around him feel seen and heard.

The girl lets out a long exhalation. Her chest looks firm, as though it can bounce back against any pressure. She says her goodbyes and sets her phone in her lap, right where the skirt hem ends and her thighs begin. Bill needs to increase his driver rating, which is hovering dangerously low at seven points, the minimum acceptable rating on the app’s 10-point scale. The app has already sent him several warnings, each more stern than the last. One more bad rating and his account will be suspended, and then what will he do with himself?

When Bill is nervous, he resorts to his old one-liners. “I’m Bill.” He pauses for effect. “As in, dollar bill.” He waits for her to smile, to chuckle, to join him in this shared moment. Instead, she stares at him blankly, so he laughs a little at his own joke.

“What did you say?” Her speaking voice is also raspy.

“Bill, like a hundred-dollar bill.” 

She smirks. “Who uses cash anymore?”

“Beg your pardon?”

She picks up her cellphone and waves it at him in mid-air. “There’s no need to use cash when you have a phone.” 

For Bill, the slow creep of time expands suddenly and turns into a chasm big enough to fall into. “When I was your age, we didn’t have cell phones.” 

“How did you talk to each other back then?”

“We had phones. They were just attached to the wall with a cord.” His own phone is mounted on the dashboard. The rideshare app shows the location of his car, which is still parked next to the curb. Sometimes he misses the simplicity of landlines. Bill rarely uses the apps that are downloaded onto his cell phone. They make him feel frustrated and angry, especially that mail pharmacy app. How bewildered Bill had felt when Sarah’s supervisor had downloaded the mail pharmacy app onto his phone for him. “It’s more convenient than coming in every week,” she had told him.

He reaches for the glove compartment. His upper torso hovers over the girl’s thighs as he takes out a tin. “Have some peppermints,” he says, unfastening the lid for her. 

She shakes her head.

“Just one?” he asks.

“I’m trying to eat clean.”

“They’re individually wrapped.”

“No, I mean I’m staying away from high-fructose corn syrup.”

“You’re thin. You look healthy.” 

“Shouldn’t we get going?”

“Come on, live a little! I insist!”

“Fine.” Instead of taking one, she grabs a handful of peppermints.

“Leave some for the other passengers,” he jokes, then quickly puts away the tin, lest she help herself to more. The peppermints were filched from Dr. Amiryan’s office last month. He himself hates peppermint candy, but that hadn’t stopped him from pouring the entire content of the receptionist’s candy bowl into Helena’s purse. Helena had hissed at him to put the peppermints back, but he had snapped back that her neurologist was too damn busy to chase them down for taking a bowl of candy. It had been his small act of defiance.

The girl pops one of the ill-gotten peppermints into her mouth and sucks vigorously with her rosebud mouth. “Can we get going now?” 

“Yes, ma’am.” One anonymous passenger wrote that Bill was “too chatty.” He disagrees, but he can understand that some people are just in a hurry to get where they want to go. Chatting is just how he endears himself to other people, women in particular. Bill starts up the car and pulls away from the curb and onto the street. Sometimes Helena complains in private that he doesn’t need to charm every woman he encounters. When this happens, Bill always reassures her of his love. He chides her not to be so insecure.

“So, do you use this app often?” he asks. 

“Sometimes.” 

“You have to be careful nowadays. Lots of scammers out there, lots of unscrupulous men. How old are you?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“You look young.”

“How old are you?”

He is still a vibrant seventy. He honks at a Tesla driver who has the gall to toss trash out of the window. “I’m an old man. Sometimes, I feel like I’m a hundred!” 

“You’re not that old.”

His chest lifts. “I feel young on the inside, but I’m a grandpa. How old do you think I am?”

“I don’t know. Eighty?”

He feels slightly miffed. He tries to recover. “You know, I have a granddaughter who is a little younger than you. If you ever need a ride, you could call me directly. Safer than accepting rides from other strangers.”

“Thanks for the offer.” She crosses her legs. 

“You can give me your number later. Call me anytime.”

“I’m okay.”

“My granddaughter is very pretty, just like you. Her mothers live in San Francisco and work in tech.” He likes to insert this information into conversations whenever he can. A type of code signaling to show that he’s an accepting, open kind of old guy who can raise a lesbian and welcome a daughter-in-law into the family. His daughter and Laila live in a sleek condo that relies on all types of smart devices: a refrigerator that orders groceries when food runs low, an oven that sends notifications when cooking is complete, and a robot vacuum cleaner that sweeps and mops daily. Unlike him, his daughter and her wife will never find themselves on the cusp of a very lean retirement. His daughter and Laila think that if they throw money at a problem, if they outsource the work of caring for Helena by placing her in a nursing home before her dementia becomes worse, the problem of caregiving is solved.

“They have great benefits at their companies,” he says. “Egg-freezing, for example.” 

“It’s a standard benefit nowadays.” 

It was this egg-freezing benefit that had produced his first and only grandchild. “You should freeze your eggs if you can,” he says. The surrounding cars speed up; his Honda struggles to keep up.

“What?”

“You should freeze your eggs while you’re young. Don’t wait too long.” 

“I don’t want kids.”

She is just a mere slip of a girl. “You might change your mind.”

“I’ve already considered the ethics of bringing a child into a dying Earth.” 

“You might wake up someday and find yourself too old to have one.”

“I’d rather not discuss my eggs with you.”

He drives along the highway on-ramp. He waits to weave his car in. “I didn’t mean any offense,” Bill puffs up with indignation. He is only trying to help. He holds his palms up for a brief moment, as if in surrender. He hates that his rating is tied to the whims of his passengers. An idiot passenger once wrote that he was “cringey” and “tone deaf.” He had forgotten that some women are touchy. Laila is one of these women. Every time he and Helena visit and stay in their sleek condo, which is not very often, he tries to draw Laila out of her introverted shell by making a big show of complimenting her dark beauty, her intelligence, and her articulate way of speaking. Once, as he stood over the kitchen counter, poring over the coffee machine user guide, he overheard his daughter in her bedroom, making muffled apologies to Laila on his behalf. Why was his daughter apologizing for him? He hadn’t done anything wrong. Bill thinks that, with both of them working from home, interacting with only each other and their many smart devices, it’s clear that they’ve forgotten how to talk with humans.

Dr. Amiryan seems to be one of these kinds of women, too. At their first meeting, Dr. Amiryan asked if they minded being recorded by AI. “It saves me time on taking notes,” the neurologist had explained. Helena agreed to it, but Bill had pushed back. “Why can’t you take notes yourself? Or ask a nurse to do it?” He had taken the time to practice pronouncing the doctor’s name correctly; the least she could do was listen to what they had to say. Whatever happened to simple common courtesy? Over the years, doctors have gone from scribbling notes on a pad of paper to tapping away on a screen. How can Bill be sure that this AI takes all the right notes? How can Bill be sure that this AI is even listening? 

He is so distracted that he fails to notice the red taillights of the car in front of him. Almost too late, he slams on the brakes. His right forearm shoots out in front of the girl in a protective gesture, where it bounces against her ripe chest. 

“Hey! What the hell!”

He gestures at the car in front of him, at the freeway traffic that seems to be slowing all around him. “People here just don’t know how to drive.” He can feel his already-red face reddening more. His forearm feels hot. 

“You did not just try to touch my chest.”

“The car in front of me braked.” His voice cracks. She has to know that. Why does she make him feel so defensive? He can feel his seven points flushing down the drain.

“Some might consider that assault and battery.”

“For Pete’s sake, it was an accident!”

He is sweating hard now. She’s got him by his figurative balls. How will he find another job at his age? His under-funded pension is a joke. Helena’s retirement, earned from decades of teaching sixth graders, can only do so much to keep them afloat. One more poor rating and his small trickle of post-retirement income will dry up, and he will have to accept money from his daughter and Laila. He’ll have to move up to San Francisco and into a nursing home with Helena. Last year, after her diagnosis, Bill toured the facility with Helena. The staff spoke so carefully to both of them, as if they were children, even though Helena was the one with dementia. The staff looked right through him, even as they were making eye contact. He knows that once he moves in, he will never be able to leave. He will have reached the end of the line.

The girl’s serious face holds for a beat, then cracks open with a wicked smile. “I’m just messing with you.” There is something vulgar about that smile. “You should keep your eyes on the freeway.” 

It dawns on Bill that she’s just toying with him! He sees now that she’s a calculating sort of girl, not nice at all! He feels a small rush of anger. “I was trying to keep you safe.”

In response, she unwraps another peppermint, pops it into her mouth, and begins crunching loudly.

At this point, he has no idea how this girl will rate him after he drops her off. It’s unfair, so unfair, how his livelihood and future depends on the opinions of strangers. One jerk of a passenger had the gall to call him a “creep” in one review. What do these people know about basic human decency? The traffic is moving at a brisk clip now. Teslas and Rivians speed past his Honda, then signal and merge effortlessly into his lane. A shiny Lucid cuts in front of him. $70,000 for a Lucid! He feels, as he often does, betrayed by the times. He tries to chase down the Lucid to show that he can’t be pushed around, but it has already darted too far away. He feels his window of goodwill closing rapidly. 

“You missed the exit,” the girl says. 

“Pardon?”

“You missed your exit.” She points at his mounted cellphone. 

This girl shouldn’t be telling him what to do. What does she know about driving? What does she know about anything? Bill grits his teeth. The peppermint smell is growing too pungent. He says, louder than he means to, “I’ve been living here for fifty years. If you want to get to your destination faster, you should listen to me instead of the phone.” 

“I’m just saying, you missed your exit.” 

Bill snaps, “I know the way better than any app. I’ve got a shortcut in mind.”

Bill’s car begins to accelerate. 

The girl crosses her arms across her chest. “I don’t care how I get there, as long as I get there.” 

Her tone feigns nonchalance, but Bill is not fooled. “If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t have said anything.” The sooner he brings her to her destination, the better. He doesn’t want to help her anymore. He doesn’t even want her phone number! 

“I didn’t mean any offense,” she says. 

He presses hard on the gas pedal. He can’t seem to stop. “You should be thankful that you have a rideshare app to use.” 

“Slow down a little.”

“You should be thankful that I’m giving you a ride to where you need to go.”

“I don’t need a lecture from you.” 

He can’t believe that he’s dealing with this kind of garbage. Who does she think she is? “You should respect your elders.”

“You should focus on driving safely.” Her sharp words slap the bruised flesh of his ego. She is going to tank his rating, no doubt about it. Clearly, she thinks she’s better than him!

He is driving too fast now, twenty miles per hour above the speed limit and climbing. His Honda starts shaking from the effort of keeping up with the pumping of his gas pedal. The girl is still wearing her stupid earbuds. He wants to see her scared. He wants to punish her. He wants to shake her out of her digitally induced smugness. He wants to dispense his own form of cosmic justice. He’s allowed this anger, isn’t he? He, who has been shuttling around passengers who couldn’t care less about how his day is going. He’s surrounded by too many uncaring women: Sarah, who would rather sic security on him than talk to him; Dr. Amiryan, who has no interest in hearing what he has to say; Laila, who complains about him behind his back. He’s a nice guy, but he’s been pushed too far now! 

“Slow down!” the girl screams at him. “Let me out!”

He smells peppermint and his own sweat. He is driving so fast; it feels as though he is not driving his car at all–no, the highway lane is simply galloping under his tires while his car stands still. He peers into the foreseeable, abysmal future. His rating plummets past seven points and the app drops him as a driver and he and Helena are forced to move into the nursing facility where the lights are automated and all the residents wear tiny monitoring devices, even the residents like him, the ones who are not yet afflicted with cognitive issues.

Pain on his cheek draws him back into the present. He screams bloody murder. The girl has sliced one long scratch into the side of his already red face. She follows this up with several vicious strikes to his right arm. Assault and battery! She is the one committing the assault and battery, not him! He is just an old man, a chatterbox, completely harmless!

His anger unspools. What is he doing? This is not like him! 

He slows the car down and exits to the side of the freeway. She ceases her attack and slumps in her seat. They are both breathing hard as the Honda’s wheels bump over the ground. Before the car can come to a full stop, the girl pushes the car door open and falls out of the passenger side and onto the dusty ground, still clutching her phone. 

He remembers his manners. He wonders how to recover from this situation. “Are you okay?” he asks. 

She snarls at him. Her eyes on him are full of hate. 

There’s nothing to be redeemed here. Under her glare, he feels himself grow feeble and insignificant, shrinking down, down, down until he ceases to exist at all. Along this empty stretch of the highway’s shoulder, nothing grows. 

It feels wrong, but he has to ask. He tries to make his next words sound gentle and reassuring. “Do you want a ride to your destination?”

She backs away from him, then turns around and runs in the opposite direction. If she runs away from him, how will she get to where she is going? He considers chasing her down, coaxing her back into his car so that he can do right by her, then rethinks this course of action. She will be fine. She has her cell phone.

He turns his blinker on, then speeds up to catch up with the flow of traffic. He looks in the rearview mirror one last time. Behind him, the girl is giving him the finger and shouting choice words in his direction. What a rude and uncivilized passenger! His right arm is already turning black and blue. The raised welt on his red face throbs with pain. Thank his lucky stars, he just barely escaped her attack. 

He maneuvers his car onto the highway. He takes a deep breath and combs his thinning hair back into place. He should pay the recent past no mind. If he picks up another passenger right now, he might be able to cancel her out, might just barely hold onto his seven points after all. 

A notification from the app tells him that a new passenger has requested a driver. He accepts the ride with rising good cheer. A new passenger, hopefully female, a nice woman to provide absolution and a good opinion of him to mitigate the girl’s insults. He glances at the passenger seat and sees that the girl has left one of her white earbuds behind. From this view, it looks like a loose peppermint. The earbud rolls back and forth in the empty seat, hypnotizing Bill’s big bug eyes. He wonders if he should snatch up the earbud and send it flying through the slit of the open window. He wonders if he could mail the earbud back to the girl. Something alters in his expression; a shadow moves across his face. 

His car drifts out of his lane–an angry honk to his left snaps his attention back towards his driving. Bill flips the steering wheel in the opposite direction. His car lurches in protest. For a moment, he is suspended between two different directions. He hears a telltale pop, followed by a sick reverberation. It looks like his old and reliable car is not so old and reliable after all. 

The app dings to tell him that he’s missed the exit that will take him to his waiting passenger, but there’s nothing he can do. He turns on his emergency lights and drives until he sees a safe opening, then steers towards the side of the empty freeway. He gets out of his car and examines the front right tire, which has deflated, just like his hopes. He wishes that he hadn’t removed his spare tire kit to improve his gas mileage. The passenger messages “where r u” and Bill tries to cancel the ride. He’s in too deep. He can’t cancel it. He swipes right and left and up and down. He tries to call the passenger, but no one picks up. No one picks up their phones these days! 

Maybe he can still salvage this day. All he needs is a new tire and a new passenger. He pulls up the information for AAA. The chatbot tells him to download the app to request service and track the progress of the tow driver. Another app! He tries, but it won’t download. It refuses to download! These apps will be the death of him. Does he consent to the AAA app to retrieve his location data? Yes or no? What the hell does that mean? Would he like to enable his GPS so that AAA can find him? If yes, please go to Settings > Location to turn location on or off. He tries to press on, thinks he’s pressed it, but he can’t be sure. The buttons are so small. Can’t they see that it’s an emergency?

A notification from the rideshare app–he opens the message with trepidation–informs him that he is too slow, that his latest passenger has already moved on to the next available driver. He sits down on the ground next to his car–nevermind the gravel–and breathes deeply.

As if to further mock him, his phone pulls up the mail pharmacy app. He wonders now if he could have been mistaken about Sarah all along, if her looking away from him was not out of demureness but in disgust. He wonders if Dr. Amiryan was offended when he demanded that she take notes herself. He wonders if Laila’s stiff smiles are not signs of social awkwardness at all but some deep-seated disapproval of him. He finds himself hating all of these women. He would like to erect a protective shield around himself; he would like to conjure up a safe world in which he can follow the path of pleasant conversation without the threat of hidden landmines. He sets the phone facedown on the gravel. With his red face cupped in his hands, he ponders how he has been brought this low, to this dead-end point of his life. 

After a time, the sound of tires on gravel interrupts his thoughts.. He looks up to find a sight for sore eyes–a tow truck! A white tow truck has pulled onto the side of the freeway where Bill still sits. Even though there is no one else around, he jumps to his feet and waves both arms frantically above his head. 

God bless AAA, he thinks.

He hurries towards the tow truck before it can drive off without him. The driver-side door opens, and Bill’s bug eyes widen: he’s surprised to see that the tow truck driver is a woman. She jumps smoothly onto the gravel in one well-practiced motion. She is a small, hard thing, swinging her black-gloved arms, stomping along in big black boots, and she is headed straight towards him. A short ponytail sprouts from the top of her head. The boxy jacket that she wears can’t completely obscure her figure.

On instinct, Bill scrapes his thinning hair into place. He runs his dry tongue over the front of his yellow teeth, as though he means to wipe them clean with his own saliva. His red face now wears a cheerful smile.

“Boy, am I glad to see you!” Bill calls to her.

When she stops in front of him, he sees that the top of her ponytail barely reaches his chin. He feels a hundred times better than he had before.

He holds his hand out for her to shake. “Call me Bill.” He pauses for effect. “As in, dollar bill.” In the split second before he laughs at his own joke, the whole world holds its breath as he waits for her to join in.

I approve of and thank you for all of the punctuation and grammar edits throughout this story.

This is great but it might be better placed earlier in the text. Right now Bill’s mind is racing with anger and speed. These three sentences slow down the moment too much.

Very astute observation. I will move them elsewhere.