“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.”