by Tim Maughan
And then Scott is pulling his arm down, grabbing his hand and holding it tight, and dragging him through the crowd toward the subway entrance.
* * *
Two days later Rush stands in line at Starbucks on Fulton. He’s waiting to place his order, absentmindedly scrolling through timelines and blinking through hacker rumor forums, trying to piece together who shut Times Square down, when somebody barges in front of him and grabs his arm.
“Rush? Hey, it’s Rush, right? I got that right, yeah?”
Rush pushes his spex up onto his head, the excitable face in front of him coming into focus. “Um, yeah, it’s—”
“Brad! Brad, man! We met at the party the other night!”
“Oh yeah, sure. Of course. How you—”
“Oh, man. I’m so pleased to see you. I was hoping I was going to bump into you, man. I owe you big.” It is clear that Brad is fucking hyped about something. Hyped and loud. “You changed my life. Thank you!”
Brad is aware that the other customers in the line are backing away from them. “I—”
“The protests, man! Prescience! Black Lives Matter!”
“You—you went to the protests?”
“Ah shit, no, no. I didn’t go. Can’t do crowds. But after the party I went home. Stuck on the news, checked my feeds. Shit was crazy. And I started looking into Prescience, the company?”
“Okay…”
“Man.” Brad pauses, takes a breath, tries to calm himself but fails. “The next day when the markets opened their stock tanked. I mean it completely fucking flatlined. It was fucking amazing.”
“I’m not sure I—”
“I made a fucking killing, bro. A fucking killing.”
Rush doesn’t get it, but right now he’s still trying to process the words falling out of Brad’s mouth quickly enough, like he’s on some archaic transatlantic delay. “You made a killing off of stock flatlining?”
“Yeah, man. Soon as the market opened I was ready. Had the algorithms primed and all set to go. Within twenty seconds they’d cleaned up the market of Prescience stock. I had cornered that shit. I had them in every exchange from here to Jersey, picking them up quick and stealthy before my interest meant they could start to rally.”
“Okay…”
“And then, nine twenty-seven. BOOM.” Brad claps his hands together. It feels like everyone in the store jumps, then turns to look at them. “In comes Google.”
“Google?”
“Yeah, man, Google. The Goog, dude. See, because of you giving me that lead I’d read up. I knew Google had been eyeing a hostile for the last year. And I knew if shit went bad they’d be there to pick up the pieces. And BOOM. In they came.”
“Oh.” Rush’s brain catches up and his heart starts to sink.
“I made so much fucking money, man.”
“Right.” Rush feels sick.
“And it’s all down to you.”
“Okay.” Rush wants to actually throw up.
“The thing is, Rush, if I’m really honest?” Suddenly Brad seems serene, and Rush is legitimately unsure if that is better or worse. “It ain’t even about the money. I was about ready to quit. I was about ready to get off the street and find something else to do with my life. I was bored shitless. But then you gave me this … you gave me a lead. And I followed the lead! And it was such a fucking thrill! I am fucking born again, man!”
And then Brad hugs him. A big locker-room bro hug that squeezes the air from his lungs, and makes it very clear that, yes, Brad does work out.
“Thank you, bro, thank you. Look, I’m sorry but I gotta go. Meeting. But thank you, man. You saved my life. Thank you.”
And with that Brad is gone, as quickly as he appeared, leaving Rush alone to deflect the judging gazes of every other customer in Starbucks, and dreaming that he could just shut it all down. Turn it all off.
8. AFTER
Tyrone stares down at his tattered Nikes as they carry him along the Croft. He’s not sure the shoes will make it to winter, which worries him. Finding this pair was a chore, months of scavenging every shop from Cabot up to Whiteladies, while his bare feet became encased in an immovable cake of scabs, blood, dead skin, and concrete dust. He’d even snuck into Clifton—three times—past the magistrates and the Land Army patrols, because someone, some wasteman, had fed him some bullshit about how Clifton got all the good shit. Clifton, the fortified neighborhood up on the hill whose residents had somehow managed to hold on to enough scraps of their wealth and privilege even after the crash had come, even after the rest of Bristol had struggled and burned. He’d been fed some lie about how they had these special operatives that come down here and buy up anything of any value, secretly, as soon as it comes off the gypsy vans from the landfills. And that they’ve got secret maps for the docks at Avonmouth that show where there are still containers with stuff in them, whole containers half the size of houses full of pristine treasures from China—brand-new fresh kicks, unblemished, sealed in cardboard boxes, lovingly hand-wrapped in tissue paper. Shirts, socks, jeans—all new. Devices with the peel-off protective films still stuck to their lenses, screens, and surfaces. Unused tech, uninfected, hibernating in warm nests woven from bubble-wrapping and polystyrene beads. Brand-new stormsuits still sealed in plastic wrappers that release a heady aroma of synthetic cotton and chemical cleanliness when you tear them open. Detergent fresh. It’s not a smell Tyrone can remember, but he tries to imagine it, sometimes.
Containers with stuff still in them. Tyrone snorts to himself, sucks his teeth. He went up to Avonmouth once, years back, with a crew from his old ends. All kids, hungry but dumb, believing the hype. Nearly killed himself scaling a twelve-foot chain-link fence for nothing. Nothing. Not a thing. Nothing in those containers but tramps and criminals sheltering from the winds that rolled in from the Bristol Channel. And they’d looked for hours, for a whole day, man—fuck, it’s big up there. They’d got lost more than once in there, in the endless maze of streets and alleyways formed by the spaces between the containers—padding around aimlessly, staring at cliff walls that towered into the sky and blocked the sun, smothering them in cold shadow, walls built from uniformly sized giant bricks—all twenty feet long, ten feet high—but every color of the spectrum, symbols and logos sprayed on their faces. Not like down here, where all the walls are painted with constantly shifting color, cartoon energies, and explosions of love and anger—no, Tyrone was used to that, knew that, recognized it. Down here it’s background noise: the desperate, frustrated, barely controlled outpourings of people, of humans, splattered onto walls in paint born from crushed plants and rocks. But it was different up there in the container streets, it was like everything meant something. Of course, Tyrone knows the shit on the walls down here is meant to mean something too—pause too long on the Croft or down in Bemmie and invariably one of the old heads will snag you, running a hand through their geriatric beards or scratching at the flabby skin under their threadbare Adidas while they point at the walls and tell you the stories of the artists, the stories of rebellion and passion, of protest and rivalry, of riots and turf war. Human meanings; unreliable, fragile, and malleable.
But not on the containers. Tyrone couldn’t tell what the symbols meant. There were words—hell, there were individual letters—he didn’t understand, didn’t even recognize, but he knew that they all meant something. Something solid, something firm. He knew they meant order, organization—something official, important. Something planned. Not mad outpourings, not passionate human splatter, but something with a sense of purpose, something with a system. Rational sequences of letters in hard, bold white fonts that always looked the same, reliable. Stars—always stars, some lone, some clustered—white stars on blue squares. Globes, maps, rectangles of white banded with colors and filled with shapes that he knew, from some fading school memory of stained, broken-spine books, were flags. As he walked past the walls he held his hand out, dragging it across the surface, enjoying the thrill of touching something alien,
something that had allegedly traveled so far it seemed like a lie. Occasionally as he did so his fingernails would snag at the neat edge of a giant letter or precision-painted white star, and to his slight distress it would flake away; little sharp shards of metallic paint sticking to his clammy hands and spiraling to the ground, lost. It distressed him because he had assumed they were permanent, immovable—he’d assumed that unlike the berry-painted murals of Bristol, they didn’t wash away in the rain, let alone when a kid just touched them—but they’d been here for years, he realized; decades, even, in all sorts of weather, and had survived. Even so, he withdrew his hand just in case, not wanting to inflict more damage, out of respect for the machines that had painted them. He couldn’t be completely sure machines had put that paint there, of course, but in his heart he knew they had, because it spoke to him. And it’s only ever the art the machines make that speaks to Tyrone.
But anyway, yeah, it’s fucking big up there, man. Walking round there was long. They got lost more than once, and the last time they were so disoriented that they climbed up four stories of container wall to see where they were. It was pretty impressive up there; the city grid of the container maze stretching out in front of them all the way to the sea, and beyond that, touching the horizon, the huge, slowly looping tri-bladed propellers of the offshore wind farm disappearing into the mist. The rest of his crew got excited when they saw all that—for some it was the first time they’d seen the sea—and they wouldn’t stop joking about going to the beach, swimming, diving off cliffs; bragging about which girls from the ’hood they were going to take down there to show off their bikinis. Kids’ stuff. Not Tyrone, though, right then he knew they were wasting their time: as soon as he saw those windmills out at sea he knew all the stories of security and patrols up here were—well, they weren’t bullshit exactly, but if there were feds or army up here it wasn’t to protect these empty crates, it was to make sure nobody stopped those giant arms from spinning, or messed with the little stream of electricity trickling down into the city. Apart from that, this place was dead. He should have guessed that when they first broke in, and the only things watching them were forgotten, guano-spattered CCTV cameras, webs of broken-lens cataracts filling their dead eyes. Nobody protected anywhere unless there was something valuable inside, which was why you could just walk up to all those huge stores in Eastville, just walk straight in with nobody stopping you, the Tescos and the IKEA up there—some of them bigger than the whole Croft inside—you could just walk in there and see nothing but bare walls, empty shelves, everything stripped of anything that could be eaten or digested or burned or worn, anything that could keep you warm. Empty shop floors with just the useless metal and plastic left behind, the ground submerged under a couple of feet of water in the places where you could look up and see the sky because the roof tiles had been taken. Nobody protected that shit anymore.
Not up in Clifton, though—that’s why he’d sneaked in those three times, even though each time he’d got his ass kicked back out again pretty much straightaway. In fact, with each beating he took from a Clifton magistrate or some pissed-up LA grunt it made him more convinced there was good stuff in there. Had to be, it was Clifton, for fuck’s sake. But each covert incursion got him no closer to some new shoes, just a fresh shower of bruises, more chipped teeth, another mouthful of blood. Eventually he packed it in and looked elsewhere, and then of course he stumbled across these kicks—the Nikes—in the back bedroom of some terrace house he and Ozone had jacked in Lawrence Hill, his old ends. Right around the corner from home. Sod’s law, as College would say. They were two sizes too big for him, so they rubbed like fuck until he padded them out with some old bits of foam cut out of a car seat, but they were fucking Nikes, barely worn. They looked like they were less than a decade old when he first found them, swear down.
Not now, though, that had been two years ago this summer, and now they looked old and fucked. Proper fucked. Split to all shit. One of Mary’s believers had brought in some glue for her as a gift; transparent, hard-core stringy gloop in a little tube—a rare and valuable find indeed. She’d let him use some of it, and he’d managed to fix them up a bit—but that was a few months ago now, and he hadn’t seen that tube around for a while. Most likely Mary had given it to College—he’d come into the store every so often and root around in the piles of donated crap, seeing if there was anything he needed to help keep the important stuff running—the tank, the panels, the stuff that kept the Croft running. And of course Mary gave it to him, anything he needed, no questions asked. Presumably Grids told her she had to, and Grids rarely told her to do anything she didn’t want to, but she seemed more than happy to give College whatever he wanted. She seemed, to Tyrone at least, like she couldn’t get rid of all that shit quickly enough.
* * *
Tyrone ingests beats from the other side of the chicken wire, pushed along the spiraling cable that snakes through diamond spaces to the headphones that sit heavily on his head. Vinyl spins in front of him, just inches away from his hands but forever out of his touch behind the protective mesh, bass flowing from vibrations on rare wax that he can’t afford. He watches the stylus head rise and fall, tracing the contours of hypnotic spin as the tune ends; stolen, rearranged syllables and reverb-drenched snare hits dying away in decades-old waves of echo and distortion.
He takes the headphones off, hangs them on the nail that protrudes from the wood that frames the chicken wire, turns, and looks around the record shop. It’s an odd sensation, when you first step in here—the feeling that you’ve stepped into a prison, a cage. The shop floor itself is tiny and compressed yet empty, unfilled. Step through the front door and you’re in the empty chicken-wire cage, just you and any other punters that have wandered in, with nothing to do but stare out of your prison at the treats that line the walls behind: the dead, neglected devices propped up on shelves, the ancient music machines adorned with knobs and sliders, their once-pristine faceplates potted with scratches and finger smears, and of course the records—walls of vinyl, carefully cataloged and filed. Once, when Tyrone was still a little kid, they used to be out on display, arranged in racks facing you, so you could flip through them with your fingertips, so you could scan through each section quickly to see if anything new had arrived, or to be horrified that something you wanted had gone, something you’d craved for months and had saved for, selling off your ration coupons and any shit you could find to get your hands on a few pennies you’d hide away until you had enough to maybe, possibly, one day walk in there with your head held high and your pocket full of shrapnel you could swap for music.
Mike sees him hang the phones up, works his way around to him on the other side of the wire, stepping over boxes of unsorted compact discs and squeezing past protruding shelves laden with dusty cassettes.
“Any good?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll take the lot. Stick ’em on my tab.”
Mike smiles, gently and sympathetically. “Sorry, Ty.”
In long, painful silence Tyrone watches him take the record from the turntable, fingers gently touching only the razor sharpness of its edge before balancing it, with an archivist’s care, on one hand—the tip of his middle finger in the center hole, his thumb still only touching the edge, as he gently drops it into the waxy white paper of the inner sleeve, which, after rotating it 90 degrees so the disc won’t roll out, he in turn slides into the plain black card outer. Slowly he turns, scanning the walls of record spines, navigating the complex patterns with some secret geographer’s knowledge, before nodding and slipping it into its rightful place, and Tyrone feels his heart drop as he watches it disappear, lost among the obscurity, and he realizes it’ll probably be the last time he’ll ever see it until inevitably that next man drops it at that next party.
“You shouldn’t be listening to this shit anyway, Ty. Y’know? It’s depressing.”
Tyrone sucks teeth, his standard annoyed/defensive reaction. “Here we go. This again. Always this.”
“Yeah, well. I’m fucking right. This ain’t your music. Jesus, a lot of the stuff you reach for is so old it ain’t even my music.”
“Bet you don’t say that to the Loco crew when they come in here and drop money on those jukebox sevens.”
Mike shakes his head. “C’mon. Loco are all a lot older than you. Jesus, Shaka must be nearly seventy. Old wizard will never die. The rum has pickled his soul, he says.” They both laugh.
Tyrone studies Mike. The old head ain’t that young himself, easily pushing forty. That’s getting on, around these codes. And he’s got a point. A lot of the stuff Tyrone plays, that he obsesses over, was released before even Mike was old enough to go out raving.
“Well, I don’t exactly know what my alternative is.”
“Make your own. Like we did.”
Tyrone screwfaces him. “On what, exactly?”
Mike shrugs. “I dunno. Improvise.”
“Improvise? Improvise. Okay.” Tyrone points at ancient matte-black Japanese electronics gathering dust on a shelf behind Mike’s head. “That’s easy for you to say when you’re charging six months’ rent for a poxy TR-8.”
“It doesn’t have to be, y’know, electronic stuff.”
“Oh, what? You want me to learn the ukulele now?”
“It doesn’t have to—”
Mike is interrupted by a disembodied voice from under the shop’s counter. He recognizes it instantly. “You still got that old Akai 950, Ty?”
“Yeah. I still got it. Piece of shit.”
College’s head ascends into view, a mess of dreadlocks and unkempt beard. He hauls up a box of old glasses—all colors and shapes and states of repair, more than a few with cracked or even missing lenses—and dumps it on the counter in front of him, continuing to rummage through it as he speaks. “Ain’t it working? That a nice bit of kit, man. Classic machine.”
