Mac Slater Coolhunter 2

by Tristan Bancks

  'I feel, like, almost dead without my cell phone. I get angry at my mom when she takes it away from me. It's like taping my mouth so I can't speak.' A seven-year-old girl eating breakfast at Starbucks.

  'I watch Nick Jr. on my phone on my way to school,' said a six-year-old kid waiting at the bus stop with his dad. 'And sometimes, on my way home, I watch MTV. I like Madonna. She's old, but hot.'

  Every now and then I'd check my phone for UnSneaks viewer numbers. Already over 50,000. People were going nuts for them.

  Melody's phone was still off.

  As we cruised the city we discovered a thumb-wrestling trend, too. Tons of kids with little homemade wrestling character thumb puppets playing Thumb Puppet Smackdown.

  'We have a tournament running with around sixty wrestlers. I'm coming fourth,' said a kid with flame-red hair as he wrestled his friend outside a subway station. 'Ohhhhhhhhhh. Doctor Death crushes Toilet Head with a facebuster,' he screamed as his thumb mashed the other guy into the palm of his hand, tearing the character's head off.

  'Hey, no fair. Illegal move!'

  I got down, at eye level with the wrestlers, and filmed a few rounds. I could imagine this going up on the Coolhunters site and dudes in offices thumb-wrestling at the water cooler. And you could totally thumb-wrestle in class and not get caught.

  Another New York thing we discovered was the Caffeine Fiends – kids everywhere drinking coffee.

  'I have a Honey-Soy MochaLatteFrappuccino topped with whipped cream,' said an eight-year-old girl named Bridget with sticky-outty pigtails.

  'Is that, like, decaf?' said Paul, looking up from his phone screen.

  'No, caf,' she said. 'I one hundred percent could not stay awake at school if I had decaf.'

  Her mum looked on and shrugged her shoulders. 'Kids,' she said.

  Where Paul and I came from you didn't start drinking coffee in primary school. Matter of fact, I only knew about three people who drank coffee at my high school. Was I a pathetic small-town kook or were these kids weird?

  On the flipside of the Caffeine Fiends were the Sleepers.

  'My folks are chronic,' said a girl with messy blonde hair who we found stand-up-sleeping at a bus stop on 32nd Street. 'My mom and dad drink, like, nineteen cups of coffee a day and they get, like, four hours' sleep a night, max, so they can spend more time trying to take over the world. But I sleep anywhere I can. It totally annoys them and I love it. They say I'm lazy but I'm just being a person.'

  'How much sleep do you get a day?' I asked her.

  'About fourteen hours if I can. But some of it's just to mess with my parents' heads.'

  Once we'd been alerted to them, we discovered Sleepers everywhere. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them. Asleep on buses, in the park, serving at hot dog stands. I'm pretty sure I saw a courier ride past on a bike with his eyes closed.

  In Central Park after school we found about nine high-school Sleepers curled up on the grass.

  'We sleep just about anywhere we can,' said a girl named Nicki, about fifteen. She was jawing on a big yellow dummy hanging from the side of her mouth. 'There are Sleeper groups everywhere. We have sister cells in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and sometimes we just get together and sleep in one big group.'

  'Sleep is so rock 'n' roll right now,' said a twenty-year-old music video director we found sleeping on a bus with a copy of Rolling Stone over his face. 'Sleep is the new awake. By the end of this year they're gonna be sleepin' in malls in Oklahoma. I just shot a music video with a major rap act – whose name I can't mention – where he's asleep the whole way through. Kids are gonna break out in a rash over it.'

  Then it just became ridiculous. Suddenly it seemed like almost nobody in New York was awake. Businesswomen, artists, old ladies, cab drivers waiting for a fare, homeless people on benches, a bunch of firefighters in deck chairs in the garage of a fire station, a judge wearing his wig on the steps of a courthouse. It made me wonder, was New York the city that never wakes?

  And here's something weird ... People in New York pay for sleep. We took a ride up the Empire State Building to check this place called MetroNaps where you pay to go to sleep for twenty minutes in an energy pod – a white, shiny spaceship for one.

  'Sleep is my religion,' said a guy in a suit coming out of there.

  We were done filming by about three that afternoon and realised we hadn't stopped for lunch. Paul grabbed a hot dog and I got a Notdog (vego version) from a guy with a cart on the corner of Central Park. We wanted them stacked high with sauerkraut, onions, sauce, mustard, whatever they could throw at us, but the dude told us that toppings were so Chicago. 'The quintessential New York dog,' he told us, 'is very simple. Maybe a little kraut, some brown mustard, but they don't need either. Sometimes you just savour the dog in a bun. That's it.' So we sat on the front of a fountain, ate the best hot/not dogs in the world and watched New York go by.

  'I can't believe this place will still be here tomorrow afternoon but we won't,' I said. Our flight was due out at nine the next morning.

  That's when my phone beeped. I felt sick already. I wrapped my dog and picked up the phone. I knew it was going to be Melody.

  'i saw my sneaks on yr site. u lied 2 me. u betta run. joe knows about it. if he finds u youre gone.'

  I exited the message, flicked to Dawg Finder and clicked on Melody's icon. It was flashing up in Inweird. On 209th Street. I pressed delete and it asked me if I wanted to delete this dawg permanently. I thought about it for a long moment and decided there was no way I could have Gatt finding us. I hit 'yes' and her icon disappeared. My map was empty.

  28

  Me Vs NY

  We walked silently back from the subway station to the hotel. I packed my bag while Paul played soccer on the big screen. Dad slept. We ordered food up to the room and I sat on the floor next to the piano and looked down to the traffic below while I ate. All I could think about was Melody's text, wondering why I did what I did. At about 10:30 I started blogging on my phone.

  hey. i'm depressed. if I hadn't uploaded those sneaks we would have lost our jobs but I'd still have a friend. now I've got a job but no friend. if I –

  But I gave up. My thumbs refused to type any more. I stared out the window for a little longer, over towards what I thought might be Broadway. I was slapped by an idea. I put my plate in the sink and went upstairs.

  Paul was lying on his bed in embarrassing purple pyjamas, reading.

  I sat on my bed and started pulling on a shoe.

  'What're you doing?' Paul asked.

  'What's it look like?'

  'Well, it looks like you're going somewhere but that can't be right because you don't have anywhere to go.'

  I pulled my other shoe on.

  'What're you doing, Mac?' he asked.

  I looked up at him. 'I'm going to shoot the test.'

  'What?'

  'I'm shooting it.'

  'Are you dumb?' he asked me.

  'They won't even know we're there,' I said. 'We're going guerilla.'

  'We?'

  'If you don't want to come, I'll do it alone. But if they make history tonight I don't want to be tucked up in bed,' I said, standing. 'I want to be ringside.'

  'You have a death wish, don't you? Melody told us Gatt's after us. Why did you even put the stupid sneakers up in the first place?'

  'We were gone either way,' I said. 'We didn't put something up, we lost our job. We put it up, we lost a friend. That's just the way it was.'

  'There's no way I'm coming,' Paul said.

  I pulled my jumper on. 'Melody and Gatt hate us,' I said. 'Apart from the UnSneaks we've way under-delivered for Speed and Tony and my bet is we'll be back begging for our jobs scraping fat off the hotplate next week. I came here to do something big but New York has sucked for us. This is our last chance to make it unsuck.'

  He knew I was right. Our life was a toilet right now. I delivered the final flush.

  'If they run a perpetual motion vehicle the length of the city
with no fuel whatsoever, it'll be the biggest thing since the wheel. That's what you said!'

  'Maybe,' he replied.

  I started walking towards the stairs. 'You coming to save the world?'

  'Settle down, fart-tank. You're not Ben Affleck.'

  'Fart-tank? I asked.

  'Melody's gonna kill you if she catches you.'

  'Yeah, she might,' I said.

  'And Gatt?'

  'I don't even want to think about him,' I said. 'But if he doesn't realise how important it is to tell people about this, then he's an idiot. C'mon, let's be scary and see what happens. You know you want to.'

  He looked at me for a long moment.

  'I'm not coming,' he said.

  I wasn't gonna stand around all night and plead. I was sick of him standing in my way.

  'My phone's full from today,' I said. 'Can I use yours?'

  'Whatever, dude.'

  I chucked my phone on to the bed and grabbed Paul's off the dresser. I got to the top of the stairs and looked back. Paul was pretending not to notice that I was going so I went downstairs and poked my dad in the hunk of white belly sticking out of his shirt.

  'Oi,' I said.

  He growled and turned over. The man was a built like a bear and he slept like one, too. No one in history had ever woken my Dad mid-sleep but that was another world-first that had to happen tonight.

  'Dad!' I said, louder.

  'Lemmealone.'

  'No,' I said. 'I'm going out and you've got to come with me.'

  He swore.

  I grabbed an arm and heaved him up into a seated position, nearly pulling my shoulder out of its socket. The dude must've weighed over a hundred kilos. His eyes were still closed, mouth open, pasty tongue hanging out.

  'DAD!' I shouted.

  'Huh?' He smacked his chops and half-woke. 'What?'

  'I've got to go out and shoot something and I need you.'

  'Yooberight,' he said.

  'No, I won't be right,' I said. 'It's New York. At night.'

  'Yooavagoodtime,' he said. 'Don'tbelate.'

  Then his eyes closed again, his head tilted back, his breathing went all snorty and he started to collapse on to me. I tried to prise myself out from under him.

  Most of the time it's good having cruisy parents. This wasn't one of those times. Sometimes you just want your dad to worry about you or be there for you or something.

  I pulled my arm out, stood up, gave him one last shove, tweaked his nose quite hard and then headed for the door.

  It was me versus New York.

  I pressed the lift button and waited. I looked through the clear glass doors into the lift shaft and down to the lobby, twenty-four floors below. It was deserted. I checked back down the hall. Everything was dead quiet. I wondered what I was doing.

  The lift arrived and I stepped inside. I went to press the 'G' button and I heard a door bang. I poked my head out of the lift. There was a figure coming towards me from the end of the hall. It was Paul. I grinned as he arrived. He shook his head.

  'If we make it home alive, remind me not to hang out with you anymore,' he said.

  29

  Broadway

  'Broadway is a rebel, a renegade,' Joe Gatt said in a loud voice to the assembled crowd of Hivers, standing in the rain. 'While every other major street in this city is stuck on the grid, Broadway follows its own path, going with its gut rather than someone else's plan. It's not just a street. It's an attitude. It was a major route for Native Americans and tonight we're going to test our creativity and ingenuity and ride it, Inwood to Battery Park. May I introduce ... Perpetual.'

  They clapped, cheered, whistled.

  Joe Gatt spun the rotor at the back of the machine. It was parked on the edge of the road, pointing downtown.

  Nothing happened.

  He spun it again. Nothing.

  'Great,' Paul said. 'This is going to be fun.'

  It was dark, cold and drizzling. Paul and I were crouched behind a dumpster outside a Dominican supermarket called Rodrigo's. I could feel the adrenaline in my gut. Sometimes you've got to do the wrong thing to do the right thing, and I'd convinced Paul that this was the right thing. I just wasn't so sure I'd convinced myself.

  On the way uptown I'd texted Speed and he'd agreed to give us till 3 a.m. to upload our piece. 'Not a second later.' It was make or break time.

  Gatt and the machine were standing about thirty metres from us, surrounded by the four or five Swarm members. They started buzzing around the cart, preparing it under the yellow glow of the street lamps. I could make out Heath, Dan and Melody. And the Japanese-looking girl who I'd seen working with Gatt. There was an older guy there, too. He had a thin white beard. Maybe forty-something years old. Someone's dad, I figured. Dan's? The cellulosic fuel guy? He was standing by a dark blue van.

  It was 11:53 p.m. In less than ten hours' time I'd be on a plane somewhere over America. But right now we were at the top of Manhattan island, right near Baker Field, the last few hundred metres of Broadway before it sweeps over into the Bronx. A cab drove by, spraying water and splashing Perpetual.

  'Sonofa ...' I heard Gatt say.

  My eyes were fixed on Melody. Yesterday we'd had that moment at The Hive when I felt like I wanted to lean over and ... whatever. But now it felt like I'd never speak to her again. Our job tonight was to get the footage and stay alive. That was it.

  'Keep your head down, man,' Paul said. 'I bet that dude does Tai Chi or something and he's gonna use it on us.'

  'We're pigs,' I mumbled, not meaning to say it out loud.

  'What?' Paul asked, wiping his camera screen.

  I didn't reply. Rain bucketed. We were getting soaked and the camera phone was having trouble dealing with the low light and moisture.

  'Every time I wipe the lens it just fogs up again,' he said, rubbing it on his soaking-wet top.

  Just then a cheer went up amongst the swarm. I looked around the edge of the bin in time to catch Gatt climbing into the driver's seat and slamming the door. I so wished it was me riding that puppy.

  Then it moved. Slowly at first but it began to pick up speed. There was no revving of engines. No sound at all really. Just the swoosh of tires on wet road. By the time it moved past us it must've been doing twenty k's an hour, soundlessly.

  A second later I spied a cab and I scurried out and flagged it down, trying to stay out of view. As the cab slowed, I heard a sharp 'Hey!' It was Melody and it wasn't a 'Hey, so good to see you'. It was more of a 'Hey, you scum-sucking animals'. She and Heath ran towards us as the cab pulled over. Paul and I piled in and slammed our doors. I was in front. Paul in back.

  'Go, go, go,' I said to the driver and he pulled out, just as Melody and Heath got to the back of the car. Heath slammed a hand on the boot but we were gone.

  'Where are you wanting to go? And why the hurry?' the driver asked in a heavy Indian accent. Or maybe it was Pakistani? He looked like he was about eighty.

  'Straight ahead,' I said. 'Stay on Broadway.' Perpetual had disappeared into the rain and haze. Behind us I saw Heath, Melody and the others jump into the back of the van and the older dude got into the driver's seat.

  'Support vehicle,' I said to Paul.

  'Yeah. Awesome,' he said, no expression.

  'Just stay behind this wacky car thing up ahead if you can, buddy,' I said to the driver. Paul and I peeled off wet jackets and jumpers.

  'You know Melody's gonna call Gatt and tell him we're here,' Paul said.

  'Well, we better be invisible,' I said.

  Paul clicked his tongue.

  Rain pummelled the roof, melding with a funky Indian track on the stereo.

  'Windows are foggy. Very hot breath,' the driver said, smiling and turning on the A/C.

  'I like the music. My mum listens to this stuff. Whereabouts are you from?' I asked.

  'Yes, very good music,' he said with a big smile. He had the whitest teeth I'd ever seen in my life. 'I am from Bangladesh. Next to India. But been in N
ew York sixteen years. Very good city. You can call me Bruce. Like Bruce Willis, yes?' Another big, white grin.

  'Cool, Bruce,' I said. 'I'm Mac. He's Paul.'

  As Perpetual approached the intersection ahead the light turned from red to green. Same on the next intersection. And the next.

  Paul was sitting in the middle of the back seat, filming what he could.

  'Not too fast, please,' I said. The last thing I wanted was to be seen by Gatt. But then we also didn't want to get caught by the support van, which was only about a hundred metres behind us.

  'I can't get a picture,' Paul said. 'Rain's too heavy. We're gonna have to speed up to pass it, get out, get a shot of it going by, then chase it again.'

  The driver put his foot down and overtook Gatt. Paul and I scooched low as we went by.

  'Why are you tailing these dudes?' he asked. It sounded funny hearing an eighty-year-old Bangladeshi guy say 'dudes'. 'Are you spies?' he asked with a smile.

  I liked the sound of that.

  'Almost,' I said. 'We're coolhunters.'

  He looked puzzled.

  'It means we sell people out,' Paul explained from the back. 'We lie to people, get close to them, then we film things we shouldn't film – their secrets – and put them on the internet to entertain people.'

  'Shut up, man,' I said to him. I wasn't in the mood for the truth.

  The driver looked confused. 'Doesn't sound very good.'

  'We're not really s'posed to do that,' I said. 'We just got ourselves mixed up in some stuff. That car thing behind us is a perpetual motion machine. It runs on no fuel.'

  'No fuel?'

  'No fuel,' I said. 'First test drive ever, anywhere in the world, tonight. We're filming it.'

  'No fuel?' he said again, then gave a big white-toother. 'Where am I getting one of these? Save the world, no?'

  'So they say,' I said. 'This is good here. Could you just pull in to this street on the right? We'll jump out.'