THE BLADE RUNNER AMENDMENT (14 page)

Light-penetrated mist coated the distance with the impression that something dwelt in there. A recent memory. On the flat surface of the buildings that towered above the trees, the thin veil partially revealed a pink poppy mirage, insignia-like. A phantom, it signified a heroin state of mind, the construct of an empathy of some weeks before when he’d spoken to a girl – a real girl – lotus-posed on the sidewalk. Scanty black satin rode high on the tattooed flesh of the crossed slim legs, and the scarred map of a chemically abused oriental face hid as much as it revealed so that the damage and what underlay it confused each other.

She was begging and he would have passed on had not her meditative posture drawn him. He squatted and they talked and he saw the needle track along her inner arm. Finally he had sat in a manner similar to her. He had offered her a refuge but she had refused. Had said that she had always wanted to be a junkie – “a drug addict” to use her words.

Here in the park he didn’t feel any closer to the girl than he did then, but theirs had been his last meaningful conversation with a female, and now he was in the same outside world. Chloé would never know any of this. With a warmth that suggested she might, however, be his confidante, he said,

“All right then. Let’s go to your place.”

Difficult to determine the house’s exact size from the street view, as it rose above a stand of trees that mounted the higher ground where it stood and alone must have added some substantial dollars to its high value. The upper floor appeared to be an observatory with rounded steel encasement fashioned to repel meteor strikes, certainly any notions of economy. Virgil and Chloé climbed on foot a switchback driveway that would have caused Humphrey much use of his brakes as he bicycled down it and onto the street with no gate there to hinder his passage into traffic. Unique among the rich and famous, the appearance of accessibility had not threatened him. Humphrey liked to come and go with little fuss and a wave of the hand, a manner that garnered the respect that left him alone and private. Other than his place of residence, he had led a low-key lifestyle and expected simple politeness in return. He had wished for nothing more in the way of social interaction than what finding him at work on the grounds or tinkering with his bicycle would require.

The most gated, protected habitation would not have saved him from whomever on the street. Once Chloé had gotten them inside, Virgil calculated that they had no more than forty-eight hours before they had to move on and hide where else might be least expected.

The clean gentle curves of the Italian-designed furniture rewarded his anticipation. Their elegance added further lustre to the bicycle-riding, ever solicitous Humphrey in black jeans and turtleneck. A single Taylor work hung in the large reception room. Humphrey had managed to snare one of the few paintings ever placed on the open market – the bulk of the collection in public galleries in accord with the painter’s wishes. That piece alone must have been a few hundred million at today’s valuation. Virgil didn’t know much about art – he determinedly removed himself from its conversations. Bafflegab from his last encounter – “With a rigorous attention to form, [the artist] distills from these references a paradoxical coexistence of emancipatory promises and logics of control that run through and between them” – had produced a permanent logjam in his synapses. The universal appreciation of this particular artist didn’t arise from a degree in art-speak although his paintings offered endless material for the exercise of the intellect. More immediately, the combination of the Italian furniture’s suggestion of flight and the depiction of man’s creative depths on the large canvas showed two visions in harmony. Virgil’s heart lightened before the many grace notes of Humphrey’s sensibility broadly and prominently displayed.

A speck of dust would have shown on the brightly polished floor and its absence told him that the cleaning staff might still be employed. If so, Virgil would have to explain himself to them. What authority could he fabricate other than an impression of belonging there? Richly grained light beneath his feet affected him as though he had been standing on water or in the sky while feeling anything but transcendent. He had no worries for Chloé, whose complacent demeanour allowed for a generous interpretation. At least he was not in the company of a shifty character. The immaculate appearance of the place decided him against the likelihood of a run-in for now.

Virgil looked away from the humanoid and allowed the air alone to convey what he was about to speak, while sensing that it might coagulate from his choice of words. In order to avoid repercussions in her adjustments to him, he didn’t want to appear confrontational. He was endeavouring to have her be as benignly human as possible in her attunement with their circumstances and himself.

“Chloé, I would like you to contribute proactively to the question of why Humphrey Martinfield sent you to me. That is, if you could offer whatever thoughts and advice that might occur to you as we proceed, and that would include matters of our personal safety. And don’t be shy to ask, if I can add to your knowledge or help your understanding as we move forward.”

Whimsical phrases meant to test her limits and establish a bond of sorts.

“I shall begin work on your request immediately, Virgil. You can count on me not to be shy, as you put it.”

That should do for now and it pleased and encouraged him that he might view her as an unfolding mystery that was, for all that, transparent as an opening flower. If nothing else, he needed the feeling of support however fragile and unsure it might be that he sought from an advance in their relationship, all the while realizing himself to be little more than a cliff-climber who is inserting his own hand-holds to complete an ascent. Yes, he desperately wanted a companion in this perilous enterprise.

When he turned his head towards her, their eyes did meet – not a human moment, appearances to the contrary. She must simply still be attending to him and, tirelessly as it were, registering his image. At the same time, he knew she wouldn’t fail him within the limits of her capacities and he would suffer no betrayals due to his own foibles of character. Here the horizons were unclouded as far as Humphrey’s engineering skills extended. Virgil’s gaze fell over the rough cut of her hair, and he returned her steady appraisal with a slight nod, as a human does when entering into an understanding or concluding an agreement. She nodded back and he experienced a moment of humanoid empathy or kinship.

“Well, that’s settled.”

His words spoke for both of them, but what value had his speech for her? After a second’s delay, she concurred.

“Yes, that’s settled.”

He resisted an impulse to put his arm about her.

And then, “I do have a suggestion,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Humphrey’s bedroom would be the place to go.”

Nothing in her face suggested the kind of invite – what was it, a week ago now? – he had recently had and accepted from a ‘working’ model on the staircase to his grandmother’s apartment. Rather, she was conveying her best judgment for how best to proceed and, in the manner of many a female, gave the appearance of not realizing how suggestive innocence might be – oceans more irresistible than a lascivious look.

“Whatever you say,” he responded evenly.

She led the way.

As he followed her to the staircase’s upward arc, he speculated that it had been exactly this suggestive rear end that the original Japanese designers had been working towards when they developed the first ‘responsive buttocks’. Chloé’s posterior was certainly state of the art: the best of human and humanoid. One would have believed she had feeling there in that subtle thrust and expansion. Self-respect kept his hands idle. Once arrived at their imminent destination, who knows: it would be up to him alone. In order to avoid complications he had kept himself in check so far with the simple thought of not knowing exactly what she was. The mere fact of his wariness itself argued for him to keep his distance and not to play the Pavlovian dog. Still, if he didn’t stop thinking, he would truly wind himself up to the only release possible.

Virgil found gratification in conducting himself as one not overly driven by the dominant part of his nature. His other interests required everything about himself to be in its own good time. A lot had been happening recently that he needed to get a hold on: Humphrey’s death, Chloé’s appearance, his trip to Washington – what was that all about including Tom’s chill disposition? – and then Molly bludgeoned into complete disrepair with the consequence of his present flight. Wouldn’t an episode with Chloé jeopardize a solution to this disruptive series of events, rendering him even less objective and informed than he already was? Intense as it might be, an artificial tryst commonly ended at the best of times in a period of dullness that approached a kind of atrophy, a condition worse than being jaded, inadequate for gauging what might be his relationship to everything else, certainly at this worst of times.

There was no avoiding the movement beneath the short silk skirt that continually advertised hidden perfection above those simulated, milk-fed legs.

“Why the bedroom?” he asked as they proceeded to mount the stairs.

“That’s where secrets are usually kept.”

He decided not to seek a clearer reason behind her clearly enunciated answer. The words floated down to him and her thin dress twitched as she climbed and he allowed her the command that she naturally possessed without consciousness of it.

The staircase hugged the wall and led to an equally wide corridor with protective railing whose express purpose in the cinematic part of Humphrey’s mind must have been for the levering of villains to the main floor below. The passage had room enough for a horse to canter along it, bowl them over as it pursued the scent of hayfields – Virgil recalled the last conversation with his friend. Humphrey’s bedroom was at the very end. Other doors led to guest rooms wherein Virgil’s fantasy state of mind visualized skies and bottomless abysses with men hovering in black bowler hats with green apples in front of their faces. He opened and closed one of these doors without comment. In one sense, fantasies exist and existence is an absolute. They penetrate everything, spreading out from the core of the mind in dream light from the sun that one is. Was there something in the air up here, odourless and invisible that he’d breathed in? Humphrey may have forgotten to push a button after predisposing himself to sleep. Or the cleaning staff had been playing around.

Was he responding to – what exactly? He didn’t want to say Chloé, not without proof, who was leading him on imperturbably. Would he have to admit that he was no more than a character in some mad tale of his or another’s generating, and would he even get to Humphrey’s bedroom door?

In all sweetness Chloé had begun to toss commentary over her shoulder, giving him the guided tour, and he focused on spun-gold, rough-cut hair. How she knew that Humphrey had never invited him to the upper level of the house was beyond him. If this was her idea of being proactive, it suited him to a T.

“Here the artist has expressed himself on the subject of the human posterior and presented various instances of it exposed and in a condition of pristine cleanliness in the course of daily activities. He has kept the rest of the figure clothed. His reference is to works in a similar but soiled vein by Dali, Salvador – early twentieth century – in a refutation of where, in one of many instances, it all began to go so wrong with the art world. The most gorgeous frames set off Dali’s work. It was still shit. The aesthetics of this intellectual movement began with the aesthetics of excrement. One need do no more than reference the contemporary exhibition of Duchamp’s urinal.

“Some attribute the emergence of this eventual tide of refuse to the unresolved traumas of world-wide killing fields that led to an inability to bring to bear an appropriate artistic response. It is a powerful argument and more so if seen within the notion that true genius is a rare commodity. A century later, the
Musée des Beaux Arts
in Montreal has in its permanent collection a janitor’s floor-cleaning gear – bucket, mop, detergent. Its curators cannot have made the acquisition with the slightest idea of its irony.”

“Trust Humphrey to carry on rear-end battles with the art of the twentieth century. – Pun intended by the way.” Virgil was relishing this rebuttal of the too little assailed, so-called prerogatives of the artist.

At his interruption, Chloé cut off her spiel and turned to look quizzically at him. What meaning should she attribute to his words? Enjoying the moment’s sense of connection, Virgil returned the look and, to preserve the illusion of intimacy, he responded to what he thought would be her inevitable query.

“It’s mostly a joke. Let’s not engage in an involved discussion of the pitfalls of twentieth century painting if you don’t mind!” How pleasant it was that she wouldn’t mind.

“It’s not easy to tie you down. It must be because you are human.”

Did her shadow of a smile show the operation of a mental faculty, as it felt, and was she then conscious? No. And he liked it that way. The last thing he wanted was for her to be personal about herself and not adjusting to him. Unlike a human, she could be what he attributed to her. As for her little smile that had arisen out of their brief repartee, it made him feel tender, protective and pleasantly delusional.

Shaped like a waterlily the slab of thick polished granite that was Humphrey’s hologram tablet rivalled the size of his bed. Virgil had never seen anything like it other than what provided for kitchen islands, but these were inevitably square-hewn, and he circled it gingerly, drawing his hand along the rough edge.