The night I drove the Mask around this past spring was suffocating, the way humid nights can be in the South, and I was behind on my rent. But that name, “the Mask,” came later, with the bloggers and talking heads and their giddy speculation about his identity. At the time, to me, he was just another rider with a mediocre rating, the last in that night’s long line of drunk students. Nothing more than money, my small cut of the gig economy.
I pulled up to the curb outside the bar and flashed my lights. He was holding a large bag at his side, one of those insulated cooler bags meant for trips to warehouse stores. He was well dressed, but his clothes were dirty, like he’d been in a fight in a dive-bar bathroom. He swung the bag into the backseat, sliding in behind it. Something smelled bad. Too many fine fraternity brothers had thrown up in my car over the years, to the point that I kept barf bags in the backseat, like an airliner, so I knew the smell of puke on clothing. This was worse, sharper, like the acidic tinge of rotting oranges.
“Riverside Apartments?” I said. He had requested six stops; this was the first.
YES, he said.
I froze. I felt his voice in my head and around me, echoing, like I was listening to multiple speakers playing the same sound milliseconds apart.
GO, he said.
I drove.
I glanced at him in the rearview as I neared Riverside, the student-condo complex by the fake lake next to the football stadium. His hair hung in front of his downcast face like the ribbons of a torn curtain.
I parked near the entrance. He shifted and eased open the door.
WAIT.
He extended an arm between the front seats. He clutched a wad of crumpled bills in a hand smeared with grime. The car’s overhead light, dim as it was, took half the color out of everything.
YOU.
I hesitated. “But you’re already paying through the app.”
FOR YOU.
I had to pull the money from his half-clenched fist. He didn’t have any fingernails.
He stared at the rearview, his face hidden in shadow. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the shadow hid an empty space, blank skin, where eyes should be.
He stepped out of the car and leaned toward my window, gripping the roof where the door was open. I heard the creak of stressed plastic and metal, felt the car shift as he applied pressure.
WAIT.
He took more money from his bag, held it where I could see it in the parking-lot light. I nodded, and he walked toward Riverside. I understood.
He’d given me at least a hundred dollars. I stuffed it in one of the empty backseat barf bags, then wiped my shaking hands on a drive-thru napkin. Who was this person? I brought up his passenger profile, but it was blank. Before, there’d been a name, a face. Or had I imagined that? I tried to close the app and restart it, but my phone froze on the list of destinations. Five to go. I could do the math. I waited.
He returned after ten minutes, walking quickly, the bag over his shoulder bouncing against his leg with new weight. I wondered what he’d taken, and from whom. When he got in the car, the smell returned with him, stronger. He reached forward again, passing me another handful of money.
GO.
And that was how the next few hours went. I drove; I waited; I bagged damp and crumpled bills. I didn’t ask questions. His bag grew bigger, distended. Every time he reached forward from the backseat his hands were dirtier, the grime thicker.
And the smell—god, the smell. When I was a kid, my brother and I found a run-down shed in the woods behind our grandfather’s house, on someone else’s rural Florida land. My brother, two years older, dared me to go inside. I pushed the door, then gagged, stumbling backward. Light cut through the doorway across the still form of a dead dog, its eyes open and covered in flies.
By the last stop, an apartment complex outside town adjacent to the river, I was living, fully, in that memory.
He heaved the bag into the footwell when he returned. It bulged like the stomach of an engorged animal.
DONE.
I kept my hands on the steering wheel, my eyes forward.
LOOK.
His voice was like an arena of voices. He opened the bag, and I turned around.
At first I couldn’t tell what was inside. The contents, nearly colorless in the weak light, glistened. But then I recognized in the amorphous red the metal wiring of braces around a full set of teeth, and the picture pieced together, the parts filled out into wholes. I vomited onto the floor.
YOU SEE.
He closed the bag and dragged it out of the car. He tapped at my window, leaving a smear on the glass, until I rolled it down. My legs had cramped with fear. He held out more money. I could see his face for the first time: the haggard, pockmarked face of a young man like me. The bright ball of the streetlight reflected like white suns in his eyes. I took the cash.
He lifted the bag and swept his hair back in a single motion. When he looked at me again he was someone else, the face, impossibly, a reflection of my own. I was looking at myself. When he smiled, it was my smile, replaced with blackened teeth.
He walked down the street toward the river, dragging the bag behind him. He paused, once, to wave at me. His face had changed again.
The next day, the apartment murders were all over the news: six sleeping students pulled apart in different ways, their missing fingers, missing eyes, missing teeth. Most of a week went by with nothing but rampant speculation, stories running wild, before the police got two tips. Each said they saw a man carrying a bag through an apartment building’s long hallway, and when he looked at them they said he changed his face, like he was taking off a mask.
It’s been two months, and the summer is quiet. I needed to keep driving, but I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t even get in the car. I sold it a few weeks ago. The bag of cash sits untouched in a box in my closet. I try not to think about it, but I have to spend it soon. I’m broke. I don’t leave my apartment much, and when I do, I avoid looking at people. I don’t want anyone to see me. I don’t want my face to be remembered, or recognized.
My brother called today, just to say hello. He asked how the driving life has been treating me, what with the slowdown of summer, the college town emptied of students who might never move back. Great, I said. Just great. It’s a good way, I told him, to fake a living.