by Tim Maughan
His cart is overfilled, more bags than he’s ever shifted at once. At least 160 bucks in there. It’s getting hard to push around, tricky to see where he’s going. Not that he minds, but others seem to get pissed with him easily when they’re standing in his way.
He’s just pulling a plastic Sprite bottle out of the buzzing can when who should show up but Max, pushing an empty cart. Empty!
“Hey, Max, your cart is empty!”
“Yeah, man, just emptied it.” Max looks happy. “Gonna go eat, man, get some food, ya hear me?”
“The machines working at Thrifty again?”
“Nah, man. Not Thrifty. Not Brooklyn. Everything in Brooklyn is fucked, man. None the machines in Brooklyn working.”
“Then where’d you take ’em, man?”
“Chinatown.”
Frank’s heart drops. “Chinatown, Manhattan?”
“Yeah, man, Chinatown, Manhattan. You know that place, just off Canal. You know that old place, man. Just over the bridge.”
“Yeah, I know that place. Fuck. The machines working there?”
“Yeah, man, the machines are working there just fine. Just like normal. Someone said they ain’t been updated yet or something? I dunno. But whatever’s made the machines in Brooklyn all fucked, it ain’t happened there yet, man.”
“Okay. Well. I guess I’m going to Chinatown tomorrow, then.” The place will be closed by the time he’d get there tonight, he’ll just have to talk nicely to the super in his building again, hope he lets him keep the cart in his lockup for one more night. He can’t keep it in his apartment when it’s full like this, it makes all the roaches come out. And then his sister and her kids start fucking going off. Like they don’t go off enough already as it is. It pisses him off when they’re always going off. Plus they’re just looking for another reason to kick him out on the street again.
“Okay, then. Chinatown, Manhattan. Tomorrow.” Frank sighs loudly. “I fucking hate Manhattan.”
* * *
Everyone at the party, apart from Rush, obviously, is super fucking white. That kind of Brooklyn white that he can’t really understand, where white people openly talk about their white things—their yoga and taxidermy classes, or growing organic cilantro (which he thinks is the same thing as coriander?) and how hard it is being a journalist because you’re expected to have thoughts and feelings on everything and that can just get to be too much sometimes, you know?—without any kind of apparent shame at all.
Their host is cosplaying as an 1890s London sex worker, and Rush can’t decide whether she thinks it’s funny, edgy, ironic, or all three. After a painful ten minutes talking with her he decides she probably hasn’t thought about it much at all, as on hearing his accent she launches into detailing her love for Empire-era “England,” despite him mentioning his Pakistani heritage at least twice.
Her apartment is full of shit. Mason jars and antique trinkets, perfume bottles and too many candleholders, like flea market trash excavated from a dead civilization’s landfill. What really creeps him out are the stuffed animals that inhabit the walls and shelves like cursed ghouls: twisted ravens and squirrels in top hats; dead cats with glass eyes sipping tea in waistcoats; a huge, once-elegant Komodo dragon reduced to a petrified, defeated corpse. It makes Rush’s skin crawl, this twee, whimsical celebration of death, like the ultimate flaunting of privilege for those to whom it is never more than a distant concern.
It baffles him, what brings these people to live in New York—a city filled with every culture, with every nation, a massive machine built from people and architecture, that gives birth to new cultures, new conflicts on every street corner, a city that every day fights with the future—what brings them here just to bed down in Brooklyn and create enclaves where they fetishize someone else’s past? To lock themselves away and surround themselves with their own kind? What brings them to cities at all, only to seemingly reject the exhilaration and machine chaos of urban life completely, obsessing instead over the faux authenticities of the organic and the artisanal? Wouldn’t they be better in the country, out in the wilds and swamps of the south, where they could kill and stuff whatever they like, and mount it on their walls, while they fixate over their homemade preserves and cross-stitch cushions, like some kind of post-Tumblr Amish sect?
Rush doesn’t get answers to any of this, because he’s too cowardly to bring it up in person. Instead he makes quiet small talk with some guy named Steve, who is apparently one of the east coast’s leading puppeteers.
“This your first time in New York?”
“Yeah. First time in the U.S., in fact.”
“Nice. How you finding it?”
“Oh, I love it, it’s great. So much energy. The architecture is just fantastic. Manhattan is beautiful.”
“Yes. Yes, I guess it is. You stop noticing it after a while.” Steve sips his wine delicately. Rush can’t decide how old he is; he could be fifty as easily as he could be thirty-five. Something artificial, sculpted about his appearance. “Where are you staying?”
“Park Slope.”
“Ah, of course—with Scott, right? Nice neighborhood.”
“Yeah … yeah. It is. It’s … kind of fancy. Not exactly the Brooklyn I was expecting.”
Steve looks puzzled. “I’m not sure I follow?”
“Well … I was saying to Scott, if I wanted to be surrounded by obnoxious white people I’d have stayed in England.”
Steve looks even more puzzled.
“I’m kidding,” Rush says.
Steve laughs politely, followed by an awkward pause. “This is your first time meeting Scott?”
“IRL? Yeah. Yeah, it is.”
“Excellent. You make a cute couple. How long have you been together online?”
“About four months now.”
“Oh, not long at all. Me and my wife remote-dated for nearly a year before we met.”
“Oh, really?” Rush feigns interest, it’s hardly unusual these days. It felt like most of his friends had remote-dated for at least six months before meeting. It was appallingly on trend. “Is she here tonight?”
“Huh? Ah, no. At home, looking after the kids.”
“Ah.”
“How long are you here for?”
“Just a week this time, sadly. I’m very tied up with a big project at home, means I can’t stay away for long.”
“That’s a shame. It’ll be tough going back. It always is after the first meeting, if it’s gone well.”
Rush looked across the room, to where Scott was laughing with a small group, unrestrained and unbridled by anger and cynicism. “Yeah. Yeah, it’ll be tough.”
* * *
On entering, all the guests had to put their spex in a bowl in the kitchen, which of course is an upturned jaguar skull. Rush is hovering around it, trying to resist pulling his out and venting, when this guy appears next to him. Slightly nerdier than everyone else at the party, awkward but with that sheen of smart-kid arrogance that makes Rush’s skin crawl even more than decorating your home with dead squirrels.
“You’re Rushdi Manaan, right?”
“Yeah. Sorry, have we met?”
“No, but I’m very familiar with your work.” He extends a hand. “Chris Mattis. I write for VICE.”
“Ah.” Shit.
“I heard you had a little trouble getting into the country this week?”
“Not a big one for small talk, huh, Chris?”
Chris smiles. “Pretty brave of you really, coming here.”
“To Crown Heights? Seems like a nice neighborhood.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Actually, no, Chris. Not sure I do.”
“Well, I’d have thought you’d be pretty high up Homeland Security’s stop lists, what with the Republic being attached to that Boeing e-mail leak last month. Rush-zero-zero, the legendary smart city hacker. And that’s without even taking into account how often your name has personally been attached to all those high-level Anon and Dronegods o
ps.”
It was the first time anyone had mentioned the Republic to him in days. “You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet, Chris. In fact, I hear some of the people that write for the Internet are completely full of shit.”
“You’ve got joint nationality, right? Joint British-Pakistani? That’s pretty brave in itself, leaving the country when the U.K. government is canceling British passports for joint-national activists left, right, and center.”
“Well, I like to live life on the edge. I feed off the danger and excitement.” Rush takes an exaggeratedly deep breath. “It keeps me alive.”
Someone walks into the party wearing a Marie Antoinette wig and carrying a cake.
Chris smiles again. “It really must. I’d love to sit down with you while you’re here, chat some things over with you.”
“Yeah. I bet you would. But this, right now, here at this party, this is off-the-record, right?”
“Of course, completely off-the-record.”
“Okay. Great. Just so that’s cleared up. Seeing as we’re off-the-record, can I tell you something quick now?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks. Thanks, Chris, I appreciate the chance to talk to you off-the-record, to let me give you my honest yet unquotable opinion on something.”
“Of course.”
“Thanks, thanks again. Off-the-record: I think you’re an insufferable little shit.”
Rush finishes his beer and drops the empty bottle into the kitchen’s recycling bin. It chimes and the city pays him six cents.
* * *
Frank fucking hates cops.
Now he’s got two of them busting his balls, ’cause he pushed the cart through the emergency exit at Seventh Avenue and all the fucking alarms went off. Like they always do. Just happened to be these two fucking cops standing around playing with their balls this time.
What the fuck else was he supposed to do? Can’t get a cart through a turnstile. Won’t fucking fit. Gotta go through the emergency exit. That’s what it’s there for. So that’s what he did. Problem now is that his cart is on one side of the barrier, and he’s on the other. And there’s two fucking cops and the closed exit between them.
“C’mon, officer—”
“You got money, go through the turnstile,” says fucking cop A.
“But that’s my cart, officer. That’s my cans.”
“No, they ain’t,” says fucking cop B, squinting at the cart through his fancy sunglasses. “Those cans don’t belong to you. They’ve all been redeemed already.”
“What you talking about? They’re my cans! Of course they’re my cans. I collected them.”
“Sorry, old man,” says fucking cop A, “these cans are already in the system as deposited. They ain’t worth shit to you now. They’re just trash.”
“I just notified MTA Cleaning and Removal,” says fucking cop B. “They’ll have a unit down here in eight minutes to take it away.”
Frank panics. “No! NO! NO! Fuck you! Nobody’s taking my cans! They’re my fucking—”
“Okay, okay, calm down, I SAID, CALM DOWN.” Fucking cop A puts a hand on Frank’s chest. “You want your cans, even though technically they ain’t your cans anymore, you go through the turnstile and get them. But from what I can see you ain’t got no subway credit, so unless you got cash to get back there and get a single-fare ticket, you ain’t getting your cans back.”
“Cleaning and Removal Unit ETA: seven minutes,” says fucking cop B.
Frank stares through the scuffed mesh of the emergency exit at his cart. It’s there, just there. Nearly two hundred bucks’ worth of cans. His cans. His eyes start to fill with tears.
Fucking cops.
* * *
Scott had jokingly told him not to get into trouble, it being his first day out in the big city on his own. He’d laughed. What did Scott think was going to happen?
Now he’s got some homeless-looking guy all up in his face pleading with him, while these two pissed-off-looking cops are eyeballing him from a few feet away.
“Please, man!” The homeless guy seems frantic. “Please! You gotta help me, I just gotta get through the turnstile, that’s all! They got my cans through there. Look! That’s my cart!”
He’s pointing at this big shopping trolley on the other side of the barrier, full of what looks like trash. Rush is having trouble keeping his eyes off the cops, though. He knows they’re watching him, both with their own eyes and those they wear for the city. He knows how quickly they could know exactly who he is, how little effort it would take them. Literally just the blink of an eye.
“I’m sorry, I got no cash…”
“Don’t want cash, just get me through the turnstile!”
“But—”
“Just hold my hand! C’mon, man! I gotta be quick, they gonna take my cans away in a few minutes!”
The homeless guy runs over to the turnstile, looks back at him, sad puppy eyes full of tears, holds out his hand. Black fingernails and peeling gray Band-Aids. “Please! Just hold my hand!”
Rush looks at him, glances over at the cops, one of whom still seems to be watching him.
“For fuck’s sake,” he whispers under his breath.
He walks over to the frantic guy, takes his hand. It’s warm, clammy, rough with cuts and calluses, sticky with trash residue.
He thinks back to the guy with the robot hand and no fingerprints, Scott’s little anti-bac gloves, cockroaches at Times Square.
They cross through the turnstiles together, hand in hand, like lost children. The city knows they’re together, and it gently chimes its awareness in Rush’s ear, flashing a double fare deduction across his spex.
The guy sprints ahead of him, gets to his shopping cart, starts fussing around it, checking it’s all there. Rush ends up helping him down the stairs to the platform with it—nearly dying twice—and onto a Q heading into Manhattan.
“What you got in this thing, man?”
“Cans,” the old guy says. He must be in his late forties at least, Rush guesses. “Mostly. Bottles as well. Both plastic and glass. Gotta take ’em to fucking Chinatown to be recycled.”
“Really? You can’t do that in Brooklyn?”
“Nah, all the machines are fucked in Brooklyn.”
“Machines?”
“Yeah. The depositing machines. They all fucked. Take your cans but don’t give you the money back. They’re fucked.”
Rush looks at him, looks at the cart. Blinking through menus in his periphery, he pulls up a home-brewed RFID-reading tool. Suddenly the cart is covered in hundreds of little labels, tiny floating tags, one for each can and bottle. Each has two numbers, twelve digits long, that he can’t understand but knows the city can. He guesses the first one is written on the can’s chip when it’s bought, the second when it’s tossed. Cross-reference those with the city’s database of NYC app users and bingo, instant tracking of every can bought from shop to being recycled. It’s elegantly simple, he has to agree, but hardly secure. The potential for abuse is huge.
“Hey, you know these cans can’t be recycled, right? What I mean is they won’t give you money for them. They’ve all already been deposited.”
The homeless guy shakes his head at him. “That’s what everybody keeps saying, but they wrong. They fucking wrong. These are my cans. I found ’em. I dug them outta the trash. I been doing this for fifteen years now, collecting cans, and I’ve never heard of this ‘they ain’t your cans’ bullshit. These are my cans.”
“Fifteen years?”
“Yes, sir. Been a canner for fifteen years now.”
“That’s how you make money? I mean your only way?”
“It is right now, yes, sir. Canning is my job. Full-time.”
“There a lot of people doing it? There a lot of canners out there?”
“Hell yeah, there’s hundreds of us. Thousands, maybe. City is full of ’em. Used to be a lot of people did it as a part-time thing, but more and more are going full-time, it seems
. Especially since there’s no work for cabbies now, y’know? I used to know a lot of cabbies that would just do a little canning on the side when work was slow and all, but now they gotta go full-time, they says. Say nobody wants anyone to drive a cab anymore. I ain’t worried, though.”
“You ain’t worried?”
“Nah, man, I ain’t worried. About the competition, I mean. I’m good. Best canner there is, no shit. Because I’m organized, understand? I’m organized. My whole cart is organized. I know where everything is in there, and how many there is of it. And fuck anyone that says otherwise. Plus there’s enough cans to go around.”
“Yeah?”
“Hell yeah! Canning is a growth industry. I been doing this fifteen years, and every year I seen more cans than before. There’s always going to be canning, as long as there’s people that want to drink. They’ll never stop that. Never take that away from me. They might not need cab drivers anymore, but they’ll always need canners.” He smiles, for the first time.
Rush isn’t sure what to say to him. He sighs and looks at the cart, and the hundreds of floating tags reappear. His heart sinks.
He knows he shouldn’t get involved, not here and now, but he can’t help it.
He rummages in his bag, pulls out a small wand-like thing, something he’d wired together himself from cheap Chinese-made components and duct tape. He pairs it with his spex. As discretely as possible he waves it slowly over the cart.
“Hey, man, what the fuck you doing?”
“Shhh, be quiet a sec.”
The first exploit he tries fails, but to his amusement the second one works straightaway. He tries not to laugh to himself. He passes the wand over the cart again. As he does so the labels change color, emptying themselves of numbers, resetting to their default, untagged state.
