“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 ops.”
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.”