“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.
“There you go, man. Sorted. They should all work now when you take them in.”
“The cans?” The guy doesn’t look like he understands what Rush is saying.
“Yeah, the cans. I reset them all. They’ll work now. They’re yours.”
“Yeah, okay.” The guy looks at him like he’s mad, talks to him like he’s a child. “Thanks, man, thanks for that.”
The next stop is Canal, and Rush helps the guy get his cart off the train before jumping back on. He waves at him, smiling, as the doors close. The guy waves back, shaking his head like he still thinks Rush is crazy.
Rush laughs to himself, smiles, and steadies himself against the lurch of the train as it pulls away by grasping a nearby pole with his unprotected, naked hand.
Frank gets to the recycling place just as they’re loading the last of the machines onto the back of the truck.
“What the fuck are you doing? Where you going with the machines?”
One of the laborers, some Mexican-looking guy, turns to face him. “No more machines, old man. They out of service now.”
“Out of service? Here, too? When you bringing them back?”
“Never. We ain’t never bringing them back. That’s it, man. New system, no need for these old machines. They redundant.”
“But I just brought these all the way over from Brooklyn… How am I going to get my money for them? I need some cash! There’s like two hundred bucks here!”
“No cash,” the guy says, as he jumps up onto the truck’s front platform, where its cab should be. “No cash for recycling, just credit. You gotta get the app now.”
“This doesn’t make any fucking sense,” says Frank.
“You gotta keep up, man, gotta get smart,” the guy shouts down from the truck as it starts to drive itself away. “The city is changing.”
Frank watches the truck roll past him, watches it pull out onto Canal Street. Looks over at his cart. He walks over to it and starts to push it away.
“Fuck you,” he says, to anyone that can hear. “Fuck you and your changing city.”
3. AFTER
This guy comes and sits next to her, the feet of the plastic chair squealing against the floor as he pulls it out from under the table. She’d mentally tagged him a couple of times already, as she’d scanned the crowd in the café, his eyes fixed on hers, his gaze never backing down when she met it.
Now he’s leaning in, as if he knows her, with some unjustified familiarity, uninvited intimacy. Rotten-egg breath and matted beard hair barely hiding inflamed, peeling skin.
“You getting weird looks, girl?” he says.
“Only from you.” She fixes him with a stare, and again his gaze stays firm, unwavering. A half smile breaks out across his face as he studies her.
“You think you can walk around a place like this without being recognized? You’re the buzz of the services. Everyone’s talking about you.”
She breaks his gaze, scans the café again. Here and there a pair of eyes catch hers, but unlike his they look away the instant she meets them. Disheveled figures hunched over Formica tables. Ripped coats bleeding filling from elbows, cloaks improvised from stained blankets. This used to be a Costa Coffee, she remembers. She stares at the repeating coffee bean motif engraved in the walls, like ancient hieroglyphs that get harder to decipher as time passes. There are kids alive today that have never seen a coffee bean, she thinks, probably never will.
Magor Services. They used to stop here on trips into Wales, when Claire would force them to take a break from the city for a few days. Flash back to cappuccinos and Kit-Kats, panini and impossibly pure water wrapped in plastic bottles. Rush and College leaning over laptops, unable to let go. There used to be a McDonald’s here, too, she thinks. Maybe a KFC. Some noodle place. A WHSmith selling print magazines that she never saw anybody buy. Back then this place had a purpose, a little node of brands and consumption for when travelers on the M4 needed a break, back when the supply chains still flowed and before the motorways were deserted.
She turns back to the guy. “I think you’ve got the wrong person.”
“Have I?” He reaches into a pocket, retrieves a ball of paper. Unravels it, places it in front of her, attempts to flatten it out with mud-stained fingers. A badly photocopied face stares back at her, smeared and stretched out of proportion, but still too familiar.
“They’re everywhere,” he says. “All over the place. Every wall between here and the border. It’s a wonder the LA’s got that much ink and paper. And they’re using so much of it on your face. They must really want to find you.”
The face is young, and she had shorter hair then. It’s a head shot rather than a mug shot, posed rather than forced; staring off into the distance, into some lost future, rather than directly into the camera. It used to be her, that image. Her on social media, her on artist profiles, her in high-end print magazines that she never saw anybody buy. She wonders where they found it.
WANTED, the text above the image reads. Below it, ANIKA BERNHARDT. WANTED FOR TERRORISM AND CRIMES AGAINST THE COALITION. CASH AND RATIONS REWARD FOR ANY INFORMATION LEADING TO HER ARREST.
She sighs, choking back panic. Takes a breath. Picks up the chipped mug of lukewarm mint tea and downs the dregs. Pushes the sheet of paper back across the table to the guy.
“I think you’ve got the wrong person,” she repeats. She stands up to leave.
He shoots a hand up, grabs her arm just below the elbow. Holds it, too tight.
“Get your fucking hands off me,” she tells him, calmly.
“I just thought you’d want to know, LA patrol just turned up. Parked up out on the slip road there. Only one guy got out and he headed straight in here. Probably a piss break.”
She looks out of the café’s grease-smeared windows, squinting. She can just make it out. Land Rover, camouflage colors.