Kenan steers his rideshare onto Canal Street, into the crazy of the final Saturday before the last day of Carnival. Traffic is backed up to the Gulf of Mexico, which makes sense as seven trillion people are crammed into the city limits, many of them partying on this very road. But as a native of the city, none of this shocks him. He’s had forty plus years of Mardi Gras chaos. Throngs of celebrants make him smile rather than anxious. It’s too bad he’s having a terrible night. He’s ashamed that he may go home with no food for Sameena and the baby.
Normally, every night in New Orleans is a good night for fares. As soon as he drops off a group of passengers, his cell phone lights up again with fresh requests. Kenan’s reminded of the time his grandfather, Abel, took him to fish on the bayou, despite gray rain clouds rolling in from the horizon. Don’t worry little one. That just makes the fish ready to feed us.
Grandaddy Abel was right. They didn’t need a rod and reel. They didn’t even need a net. The trout just jumped into the pirogue. Kenan never saw the old man quite so happy. You’re good luck, kiddo. Like a shiny penny.
Kenan’s life used to be different, easier. As an executive for the state’s largest hospital system, the money once slipped into his bank account like his fluffy childhood St. Bernard, Baron. Kenan would go to bed shivering and wake up in a sweat, the heavy white dog draped across his legs, a furry, dopey comforter. How he misses that mutt.
Now, Kenan’s phone flickers and chimes. Another ride request. Despite himself, his eyes always zip straight to the dollar amount. It’s a hefty fee. And while Kenan feels slightly dirty to be so excited about making $100, that doesn’t stop his hand from flying to the “accept” button. He can call it a night after a ride like that.
But he’s not fast enough and the fare disappears.
“Aw man!” Kenan bangs the dashboard. There’s no way he can go home if this keeps up. Sameena wouldn’t shame him for being empty-handed. He’s hard enough on himself. If he has to stay up till dawn, that’s what he’ll do. Same as he has for the past week.
Stuck at the light, surrounded by people dipping through gaps between vehicles, Kenan glances to the neutral ground at his left. No buses or streetcars run on nights like this. Instead, there are hordes of revelers dressed in sparkly dresses, green and purple hoodies, pink tutus. Harlequin ladies on stilts. Face-painted children in strollers. An elderly couple in golden silk pajamas dancing the Charleston under a police surveillance tower.
Kenan’s phone ripples. He hadn’t realized his hand was resting on the device. The screen activates. A penny-sized photo of Sameena appears then fills the view. His hand snaps back.
Part of him wants to answer. He wants to hear her voice. Knows that she’s just checking on him. But the baby was running a fever, and Sameena hasn’t slept well herself in over a month. She’s righteously cranky. And Kenan feels guilty that he can block all of that out of his mind while he cruises the streets. He rejects the call.
A hand smacks the driver’s side window, leaving a five-finger palm print. Against all reason, Kenan rolls down his window, absentmindedly reaching for the glove box where he stows his knife.
“What the hell!” he says, the cold, spiky night wind stinging his face.
A girl and a guy stand on the slightly elevated neutral ground curb. White, young, probably high, but not enough to be trouble. They wear normie clothes: sneakers, jeans and T-shirts. If it wasn’t for the colored beads around their necks, Kenan would think they teleported from a mall. He won’t need that knife.
“Sorry, my guy,” the man says. Mist jets from his mouth when he speaks. “Just trying to get to back to the homestead.”
“Airport, dude!” the girl says, shivering. Her jeans are cutoffs, her thighs blotchy red from the low temperature. Feeling for them, Kenan nods towards the back door and clicks off the rideshare light suctioned to his windshield.
They jump in, causing the minivan to rock like a ship. The cabin floods with the smell of beer, hair spray, weed, and a dozen other microscents, he can’t place. The girl sprawls across the guy’s lap, squealing playfully. “We won’t freeze to death after all,” she says.
Kenan steers the van across the median. The other side of Canal Street is equally crowded, but at least he’s facing the right way now.
“Didn’t mean to surprise you,” the man says. “We kept trying to get your attention, but you were—”
“Lip locked to your phone.” The girl laughs.
It suddenly occurs to Kenan that he doesn’t know how he’ll be paid. He’s not a cabbie. He’s never picked up a fare without using the phone. The van is low on gas. If he drives twenty miles out of the city and they don’t pay him, he’ll be stranded. But he trusts his gut. He has faith they will do the right thing.
Eventually, Kenan finds the onramp to the I-10. He guns the accelerator—one of life’s mundane pleasures—flying up a man-made hill like a god.
In the rearview mirror, the man strokes the girl’s hair. Kenan misses Sameena. He should have answered the phone. He wishes he was in their bed, massaging her soft shoulders, her tangy, musky scent filling his nose.
“You two have a nice day?” Kenan asks.
“The best!” the girl says.
“Yeah,” the man says. “This is the really perfect ending. No one else wanted to let us in.”
“Why not use the app?” Kenan asks, finally broaching the subject.
“We don’t have phones,” the guy says. Kenan glances over his shoulder. The minivan bumps across the road lane line but he course corrects. Who, in Beyonce’s America, doesn’t have a cell?
“Is that some kind of joke?” Kenan asks.
“No,” the girl says. “This was a lark. Dan and I.” She places a hand on the guy’s head. “This is Dan. Me Caroline. Our stupid email jobs are so boring. We wanted—no. We needed to do something crazy. So we hopped on a plane and came here this morning. We left our phones in the Midwest.”
“From?” Kenan asks.
“Kansas City,” Dan says. In the mirror, Dan smiles, his crooked eyetooth shadowed in the dark.
“Right above New Orleans on the map,” Caroline says.
Kenan admires all reckless youth. Wishes he could throw caution around like a ragdoll the way he used to. But he’s 49. Throwing anything usually means a pulled muscle.
In his wayward days, he was the careless sort. He’s had some therapy. Left that time behind. His therapist said, you should be proud. You do what you say you will do now. But he promised Sameena he would provide. He promised little Ghada he would provide, even though the baby doesn’t speak yet. He’s not looking like someone who keeps his word at the moment.
Caroline leans forward between the two front seats. “Can I ask you a personal question?”
“It depends,” Kenan says. He’s dealt with enough inebriated tourists to know better than to straightaway invite them all the way.
Caroline braces a hand on the armrest. With efficient motion, she shifts her body to the front passenger seat before Kenan can object.
“I was a gymnast,” she says, smirking.
But instead of asking a question, Caroline runs her palm along the crocheted dashboard cover Sameena made. It’s bright tropical colors. Not exactly Kenan’s style. But he cherishes it because she made it for him. He doesn’t like Caroline touching it.
“So pretty.” Caroline leans forward and rubs her cheek against the fabric. Kenan glances back to Dan as if for help.
“Do you like what you do?” Caroline asks.
Kenan holds his tongue instead of telling the girl to sit upright and stop smushing her skin on the textiles. He can’t let this ride go bad. “Nothing will work unless you work,” Kenan says.
“What’s that from?” Dan asks from the back seat.
Kenan’s mama always said that. She would come home after a long day working at the university cafeteria. She would pull off her hair net and her shoes and say that. She never liked her job as far as he could tell. And it wouldn’t be right to say she never complained. She complained plenty. But she always pointed out it was that job that got Kenan reduced tuition at Tulane University when the time came. Helped him become the first in the family to get a college degree.
“I’m only asking because we’re getting close to UBI,” Caroline says.
“What?” Kenan asks.
“Every job is being taken over by robots,” Caroline says. “Or haven’t you noticed?” She points out the window. Two lanes over there’s a white car. It’s speeding along with a bunch of equipment on the roof, antenna stalks and whirling cones.
Kenan gapes and almost rubs his eyes like a dupe trying to figure out a magic trick.
“There’s no one in the driver’s seat,” Kenan says. “Exactly,” Caroline says.
At the airport departure terminal, the couple stumbles out. Caroline kisses the hood and shimmies away. Dan walks around the front of the minivan and slaps a 100-dollar bill in Kenan’s hand.
“Hey, this is too much,” Kenan says, gripping the bill.
“No it’s not,” Dan says. “Because a robot would never say that.”
…
The next morning, Kenan sees those autonomous cars everywhere as he rides from the airport to the downtown hotels. He hasn’t had any requests by 11 a.m., which worries him. By then, he’d normally have done several rides. He decides to go to a reliable area.
At the hospital, the same one he used to work at, one of the robot cars sits behind him in the driveway. They are very clean, very new-looking vehicles. Angular and aggressively shaped. Like if the Klingons from Star Trek were taxi drivers. And it does feel alien to New Orleans with its front-facing license plate ending in 404. Locals don’t have double plates. He wonders who washes them and if they ever hurt themselves wiping the swoopy fenders. Kenan hasn’t washed his egg-shaped van in two weeks. He wonders if his vehicle looks shabby to others. Kenan waits for his phone to ping but before it does, the robocar’s headlights gleam. A man appears at the pickup point.
The robocar silently pulls out of its place behind Kenan. The fare, a doctor in scrubs—Kenan would guess an ER physician by the prominent veins in his neck and arms (those ER guys are usually obsessive fitness buffs)—raises his hand.
Kenan wonders what the robocar feels in a moment like that. If the robot sees the raised arm and gets a little tingle in its microchip brain. Or maybe it sees nothing but simply slides to the appointed spot like a metal shaving to a magnet.
Kenan acts with little thought. He switches his minivan into drive, then pounces into the lane, blocking the robot, which slams to a halt to avoid a collision.
Kenan drives to the ER doc and rolls down the passenger window.
“Where to?” Kenan asks.
The physician bends down to get a look at Kenan. “I, uh, requested one of the self-drivers.”
“I’m working a special today,” Kenan says, improvising. “Anywhere in town for ten ducats.”
The physician screws up his lips and glances toward the robocar. “They can’t beat that, I guess.”
Kenan chuckles and points a thumb toward the back seat. “You damn straight they can’t.”
…
On Monday, Lundi Gras Day, the day before Mardi Gras, Kenan waits in a pharmacy parking lot, shaving a piece of sugar cane with his yellow utility knife. He’s been sitting there for over an hour, peeling cane and sucking at the sweet marrow. He loves raw sugar cane—hard to get in the city. But he hasn’t tasted it at all, so distracted he is by the failures of the last few days.
For every ride he procures like that ER doc, he figures there are a half-dozen he misses. It’s not supposed to be this hard to earn a living.
A tractor pulls an empty Carnival float past. He knows from experience that it must be headed for its place at the start of one of the night parades. But Kenan is always skeeved out by floats without people on them.
His grandmother, Stella, was unique among all the grandmothers he’s ever heard of, real or fictional. She loved to freak people out. A real gothic type. When she visited his home, she’d call Kenan and his friends to gather at the foot of the blue recliner she liked. Then she’d delight in telling them a ghost story like that of the Mary Celeste. It didn’t matter whether it was sunny outside like today, Kenan and his friends screamed in terror at the dramatic parts. Grandma Stella laughed and laughed, kicking her slippered feet.
A request comes through. But several times he’s not fast enough to accept. This has happened too many times now. Starving, he decides to go home for sustenance before he makes another stand later.
In the kitchen, Sameena sets out the ingredients for one of her fantastic sandwiches on the kitchen counter. Their daughter, Ghada, all of six months old, is strapped to Sameena’s chest. Sameena had been out running errands. Kenan said he would make his own sandwich, but she insisted. Slapped his hand away when he reached for the breadbox.
Kenan is bemused at the thought of a robot, the kind with two arms and two legs, replacing this woman he loves.
A robot rocking its hips and humming to the smiling baby. A robot chopping fresh tomato and delicately placing relish atop marinated chicken to nourish him. A robot caring.
“You have this spacey way lately,” she says, scootching the plated sandwich toward him. She went so far as to spike a pickle to the bread with a toothpick and a sprinkle of amchur on the potato chips.
He invited her for a date two years ago and admitted that he couldn’t afford to take her somewhere nice. But she showed mercy, and they went to the Prytania Theater.
So after a viewing of a Korean film about a girl moving to New York to work as a playwright, Kenan and Sameena came here, to his place. She made him a sandwich because she’d heard American men loved these above all else. And, as she revealed, she’d learned how to make it pretty from a website called American Man Sandwich. She’d done the amchur, which made him belly laugh, as a concession to her native Pakistani cuisine. The next week, he made her kebab, poorly. But well enough that they kept coming back to each other for more.
He takes a huge bite from the sandwich, which Ghada reacts to by gurgling.
Sameena exits the kitchen and returns with a large swathe of textile. She spreads it across the end of the table while bouncing slightly to keep the baby calm.
“What do you think of this one?” Sameena asks. “Do you think someone will buy?” She’s a master of fabrics and sells them at the flea market on Freret Street. To this blue-gray cloth, she’s added images of faces blended to an almost cubist effect. Eyes and noses pointed in different directions. But not in a horrific way. This one, colored in yellows and browns, makes him think of a bustling street. Kenan always likes what she makes.
He nods and tries to swallow, but his mouth is dry, and he’s starting to feel unwell at the thought of those robocars.
“Are you alright?” she asks.
He smiles, but it’s a liar’s smile. “It’ll sell.” He drinks tea and sighs. “I think I need to find a new way to make money.”
Sameena sits in the chair next to him. “Why are you thinking this?”
Because it dawned on him when he took the first bite of the sandwich and all the taste receptors in his mouth lit up at the joy of bitter, savory and sweet, mustard, marinated chicken and relish, that he’s being followed.
It’s a hunch. Only a hunch. But it makes too much sense.
He knows that the robocars the company uses are the same make and model. But he’d caught a glimpse of the license plate a couple of times. His memory was average at best, but he made it a point to recall the last three numbers, which were easy to retain for obvious reasons: 404.
That particular car had started following him for days, he realized.
Sameena looks at him skeptically. “Do you think that you’re being paranoid?”
“No, San,” Kenan says. “I think it’s learning from me. The best routes. The busiest parts of town. The choice waiting spots. I’m training my replacement.”
And now, it’s lying in wait to steal his fares. His reflexes weren’t quick enough to accept the best requests in time. He was a regular John Henry, fated to lose no matter how hard he worked.
“I believe you,” she says, taking his hand. “You can find other work then.”
Kenan lowers his head. His chin on his hand, he squeezes his eyes shut. “What if it comes for my next job?”
Sameena slaps his back. He straightens up. “Then you get a job repairing them,” she says.
He stands up and kisses her forehead. Ghada bats at him like one of those cat statues with the waving paw. He kisses the baby’s forehead, too.
Kenan goes to the window and tries to part the thin blind slats. He uses too much force and the cheap plastic slat breaks. He curses under his breath.
“Language,” Sameena says, covering the baby’s ears. But outside, he finds what he fears. Parked across the street, in between two sets of garbage cans, waits RoboCar 404. It’s facing away from him, but that doesn’t matter. One of the most disturbing observations Kenan made was how fluidly it moved through the streets without hesitation. A human has to constantly turn one’s head to focus on what’s important in the vicinity. But the robot is covered in sensors that see all at once. Therefore, nothing is important to it.
“What is it?” Sameena asks. Kenan pulls up the blinds so that she could get a clean look.
“Oh my God,” she says. “Is that—”
Kenan nods. He goes to the door and throws it open. “What are you doing?” she asks.
“I don’t know.” And this is true. While he doesn’t like that their privacy is being invaded, what is he to do about it?
He trots over to the car, rubbing his bare arms against the afternoon chill. He’s never been this close to it before. The roof is transparent. Tiny blue lights blink in unexpected places, along the mirrors, along the dashboard, along that strange assembly of sensors on the roof. Steam flows from his nostrils. His heart punches the inside of his chest. Suddenly, he feels like the monkeys encountering that monolith in 2001. He now knows what it feels like to realize that you don’t matter. That some consciousness is plotting a future without you.
His foot hits a rock. He picks it up. The rock is hefty. He raises his hand. He can bring the stone down on 404 for this assault on his sense of wellbeing. But Kenan doesn’t even know where to strike.
…
Mardi Gras Day, Kenan leaves home before dawn. 404 trails behind him like a duckling. He considers slamming on the brakes to make the machine ram him. But the robot is so safe, such a good driver, he knows that would never work. Driving on the 610-Highway split, he recalls a video game from childhood where characters could drop bananas out the back of their cars to cause opponents to go careening off the road. Or a solution from one of his grandfather’s old VHS tapes. They used those to babysit Kenan back in the day. The rabbit’s solution to this situation would be to add eyelashes to Kenan’s minivan’s headlights and a pair of luscious lips to the grill in hopes of luring 404 into a trap.
But 404 has no soul. It doesn’t want anything, and it doesn’t make mistakes. It would drive around the banana. It would ignore the va-va-voom Looney Toons car.
Instead, Kenan decides to win on the merits. To get as many fares as he can. To do this with elan and aplomb.
But while he sometimes manages to accept a request before 404 does, he loses too often. And scrolling back through his rideshare account activity, the little app avatar, a raccoon with a moneybag, tells him that his earn rate is down 30%. This isn’t sustainable. They will starve.
…
Around 9:45, Kenan steers his minivan down St. Charles Avenue. It’s early and the sun has only just poked its head over the massive oak trees and through the overcast clouds. The crowd makes the Canal Street crowd look like a lonely book club.
But for all the untold tens of thousands of locals and tourists thronging the streets this morning, they intuitively know the rules. This is the in-between time. An hour ago, the avenue was impassable as the Zulu Krewe floats rumbled by. Rex, the King of Carnival, will come along soon. But for now, the roadway itself is just clear enough for first responders, delivery trucks and people like Kenan.
Kenan hasn’t had a request for 30 minutes. He’s starting to think he’s already cooked, that the robocar has found a way to be in 10 places at once, which isn’t farfetched. The others of its fleet are never far away. Kenan is a lonely sailor.
He decides to turn off St. Charles Avenue and head home. Perhaps just wait for things to pick up after the parades wrap.
The moment he clicks on his turn signal, Kenan sees it. Past the Tulane frat boys in their white and green striped sweaters. Past the brothers and sisters dancing to Frankie Beverly being played off the back of a deluxe motorcycle. Past tents obstructing the neutral ground that’s supposed to be open to all comers, the collection of electronic devices above a pearlescent car roof. 404.
People are partying around the robocar, drinking beers, waving handkerchiefs, wiggling their bodies. The robocar sits there like a dumb white rock. Kenan wants to ram the cursed thing.
He maneuvers his van down the avenue, across the treacherous median where teens toss discs over him, and back towards the stranded autonomous car. He parks parallel to it. He climbs out and inspects the robocar. All the light nodes flash red in a fluttery panicked rhythm.
Kenan can’t be sure, but he thinks the cacophony of humanity around them—the countless people proving that they live—are too much for 404. It’s had a breakdown.
He considers what the human thing to do would be. If this were his lost child, how might he treat it? He checks his phone, and despite the terrible signal, learns that 404’s home base is only a mile across town.
Kenan’s minivan has a trailer hitch and he has a cable. He could easily tow 404 to safety, away from the raucous crowd bumping up against its chassis and spilling liquids on sparkly paint. Towing it would be the neighborly thing to do. There might even be a reward in it. Good money for a good deed.
He wonders what John Henry would choose, if that drilling machine were at his mercy.
Kenan walks to the minivan, pops open the glove box. He rummages through. His fingers find the yellow utility knife. The blade is just long enough to flatten a tire, he figures.
When he palms the knife, Sameena’s face appears on the phone, dangling from the windshield. Through the back window, 404’s headlights gleam. He hits reject. He has work to do.
Contributor
Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of three New York Times Editor’s Choice books, including the national bestseller The American Daughters. His previous novels—The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You and We Cast a Shadow—were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and longlisted for the Story Prize.
