THE BLADE RUNNER AMENDMENT (2 page)

“I see.”

“Is there anything else, Virgil?”

“No, thank you, Molly.”

Without having to be asked, his casually dressed humanoid proceeded with a measure of grace to collect and take away the breakfast things, leaving Virgil to ruminate beneath his silence-drenched oak leaves.

Here he was, salacious on a staircase – so much for the fruits of self-discipline. Perhaps it was just too easy to practice restraint in the context of the familiar Molly, whereas this curvaceous street model, backed against a refrigerator, provoked. The beefy moving men with tattoos on their arms – as he noticed in conjunction with the slabs of their faces – were manhandling it up or down he couldn’t tell, for they appeared either stuck or resting – some workers chose the oddest places and times to break off. The flowers in his hand he bore effetely before him – alien to his fellow men with a fridge to the belly – intended for his grandmother, that is, the flowers not, he presumed, the fridge, although what did he know of destinations at this moment? She ailed with the years in her one-room walk-up on the top floor of this brownstone nest that was lasting romantically forever for the rats and was a stop-off for those persons who no longer have any apparent use beyond sentimental value with their predestined fate in sight.

In contrast to their deteriorating shelters, however, these individuals do want to go on; and so Virgil eased past the obtrusions with a civil nod to the flesh and lard transporters that met with a greater paralysis in the already unforthcoming features – they couldn’t identify with such a being as he, these devolved sons of Hercules. The flowers crushed for a moment against the rent model’s chest, she, of course, meriting no acknowledgment as he bore away his own aroused stamen in addition to the wilting
cadeau
.

“Drooping posy, rearrange itself!” he mouthed in addition to his shake.

He retained the instant of their eyes meeting above the blindly disconsolate, meadow-lovely flowers, hers an absorbing classic blue that recorded his focused look. He might have ignored her had not those men been inches away with their emasculating sweat smears – not that he cared a fig, having done his time, they stuck in theirs and a completely different city about them than they imagined from their living rooms. No matter. She would have no opinions other than commercial on the subject of his inquiring look, certainly not palpitating sentience as she added and placed him on the list of her priorities.

He had edged past a final visual of the moving-men’s porcine noses. Cousins or brothers, their possessors must be, denizens of the same block, the same neighbourhood, definitely the same gene pool, their great-great grandfathers arrived on the same vomit-full, rat-soup ship. They were the social issue of horizontal mobility. Still not rare to see such specimens what with heavy appliances requiring delivery.

Her look – the product of many minds and many porn stars – remained with him.

At the top of the staircase, holding on to a railing like a dinosaur’s bone, he paused, took a breath of the wall-exhaled air that included the output of what crawled beneath, and he stared at the stubbornly clinging plaster, the cracks, the separation of mouldings, the meandering flat surfaces. Leakages hidden for decades within the structural confines had caused ecosystems sufficient unto themselves to come into existence complete with microflora and centipede-like creatures that couldn’t survive elsewhere. Before he made a move to the door he recalled its surface: a patina of disease.

Of what is that humanoid thinking? Dimly the question looked to come to his rescue, but he knocked, didn’t wait, and tried the handle. In he went, transitioning – momentary Kafka metamorphosis – clutching his flowers and smiling subterfuge.

Nothing, of course. Is she thinking. It is with that thought we approach each other.

He was of two minds as to his gran’ mama’s habits – this unlocked door. The city was passive – not pacified – but didn’t they carry cash in these neighbourhoods still? He couldn’t decide whether it was her trusting nature or golden-age obstinacy. She was going to live in the world that she wanted and so be it if it collided with another! He wouldn’t engage her on the subject again. Not to hear her answer: ‘the world is what you make it’. Fair enough. Something to live by. Difficult to refute as far as it went and impossible when backed by willingness to bear the consequences.

The old were stubborn, unable to adjust and adjust again while they fabricate their positions out of whole cloth. Their tents easily blow away and, when the first pegs come loose, howling ensues. Nonetheless, left to the open weather, the old survive awhile at least, and their sheer stubbornness morphs into self-congratulatory pride as the wind and the sun and the rain beat against them. At some point, all become Lears on the heath, trust betrayed, aware of their own betrayals. He was running away with himself before the question of her unlocked door and his guilt that he didn’t do more that made little sense such as carry her off and swaddle her with care.

No matter. There she was. A reality that denied all his perspectives, more there than he can comprehend, a being that he doesn’t understand for all their familial years. Their acquaintance renewed in a moment of sparkling shallowness. However strong and deep the relationship, ‘acquaintance’ often best defined that fresh experience of each other.

“Hello, Granny!”

They shared the moment differently. Its swiftly flattening wake. She looked up as though she had been fishing and, having caught him in some unknowable depths, now drew him to her. His being there was somehow due to her efforts and not his, to go by the flash in her speculative eye.

“That’s you Virgil!”

Question, statement, welcome – she wrapped her words in the soft tissue paper of surprise and pleasure, a common standby available to anyone for their use. Her eyes’ porcelain finish locked onto him; he worked his way across the surface of the gelatinous world they produced. Some inner rain attempted to soften and clarify them so that he might be enfolded there. He felt himself to be both alien and intimate as family members can be to each other.

All life is strange to the old and they render it up in the same manner to the young, strange and remarkable, everyday miraculous. Miraculous. They look at the young and at each other with delight. The closeness of their persons jarred both Virgil and his grandmother.

He imagined her to be knotted with her surroundings, communing with the immersive memories of electronically imaged photos; if not, then the paled yellow walls and the shadow-darkened curtains of the same colour, or the furniture as alive in their way as she – suspended together in the pigment glow from poetically rearranged molecules originally sourced from insects. The wonderment that he was there settled on and pressed him more strongly than gravity’s draw into a barely remarked chair near her. It provided the comfort of something stuffed with dust.

“Gran’ mama!” came the call from yearning depths. The unspoken sentiment it articulated intrigued him at his age. In addition, he could not put words to its meaning. Setting this issue aside, he would do what he could in the circumstances. Why not embarrass himself with a presumptuous question since he had no taste right now for light banter, not with the investments he had made – the upholstery he sat on, the unspeakable staircase he had climbed?

“What are you remembering, Gran’ mama?”

Their blood ties allowed him to claim that she had been in a state of revery and conferred on him the right to refer to it without unduly seeming to patronize her. He had left a kiss on the soft parchment of her brow; the memory of the spot remained tactile. The years it contained had imprinted themselves both on his lips and upon the sequence of time that his retreating to this chair had provided. On the last it had performed an erasure and, in palimpsest form, it remained.

A dark sort of sentiment would have had him turning down offers of food and drink, but he had no need – she was not that kind of a grandmother. What an ill-equipped person he felt himself to be – incapable of unlocking the storehouse of this life, and so he was glad of his question, observant on an outcropping he deemed tenable.

Once again he noted, as on all his visits, the absence of images on her photo screens. Did she resort to her electronic storage when alone, to its tens of thousands of memories: a tessellated river of places and faces flowing by and long passed into the ocean? He considered again whether she was economizing on electricity or had yielded to a species of indifference.

From this particular look-out on dust-filled chair like the segment of a decaying bridge, more horrific vistas of inquiry than the traditional meditative expanses opened up: how she would die was one. What would be the scope of the physical event? He asserted to himself that his morbidity arose from the high accumulation of her years; otherwise, frail and tentative in manner, she was healthy and did seem, as goes the bloom of human illusion, not to be subject to an immediate last breath. She was in the mode of a dependable fixture that kept on with its task – ticking off the pleasures of the moment in a form of mechanistic wilfulness.

Such thoughts could not help but raise the spectre of a Raskolnikov. Virgil, like a Russian novelist or, more to the point, well-read prick could entertain anything for he endorsed none of it. Thankfully, a fantasy gladdened him whereby she might before the ineluctable end perhaps ineluctably and painlessly float away, just as in a sense she will when he ends his visit – he does wish the best for her – whether or not she is truly hanging on to that aura of permanence. What an autumnal leaf she makes!

Her bones must be spare. When it came to empathy, he would not have them brittle. Her skin, to go by her forehead against his lips and his hand now on her wrist, shifted tissue thin and barely clung to her substratum. Yes, from the feel of them, the bones had to be brittle. And the rest of her seemed more suggested than real. He knew not what to make of this body of his distant beginnings, itself a single link on an endless chain.

She would not waste away much more. Something internal would fail; he saw it not without a sense of consolation that took on a life of its own: her eyes would close as in sleep and already she would be gone – perhaps as he closed the door – before anyone who might be present could realize it. He would like to be that person and not the one descending the stairs; it seemed a privilege, a mark of distinction and honour bestowed that he could carry with him. Another’s death could be redemptive. Further, he would like to be her in that moment; he mused that he would like to be her as she now was – he was willing enough – their lives exchanged. He felt she would enjoy his. It was not that he was particularly discontented with himself, but he would like to be her as he perceived her to be and realize the rest of what he did not know. It could be everything. Further still, he would like to be, say, in India or with a strong wind at his back while sitting here.

Perhaps, with a change of perspective, he already was in flight – what did he feel that moved him forward?

Anything, any power at all. It would prove something, wouldn’t it, to be both here and there? Wouldn’t it – to be in and out of his body – once he’d returned to himself? Yes, it was not a matter of changing places – he had to continue to be here after all.

“What am I remembering?”

Such a question from him! Most of her memories were like pocket change that she handed out to herself from one needy moment to the next. Still, they came from a purse that never seemed to empty and someone of significance wanted to know. It was her grandson, wasn’t it? Looking splendid too, he would be a suitable depository as most human beings eventually presented to her when it came to passing on the unutterable significance of life gone by. She couldn’t rightly answer, however, when she was put to the task like this, most states of remembrance being more like an ocean swim than having looked through a hedgerow as a child and later sharing that snapshot of whatever.

Usually, people delivered their memories as in overstuffed plastic bags whose contents slosh about and burst through the transparent wrapping or like beribboned gifts that they carefully unwrap for their listener making certain that absolutely everything is there. The experience of these memories when they are on their own is quite different for their effect is immediate like chocolate in one’s mouth – or that famous Proust cake. Only, since they are not actually in one’s mouth and easily spat out, she didn’t quite know how to retrieve and express what had most recently been sustaining her all alone – as always – like this.

Much of her memory issued in sorrow for what had passed forever and was somehow still alive. She floated solitary within these four walls in strained light and got at one end of things or the other with the passing current of the day. This he should know, surely, even if he was presumptuous and inquisitive. Would he like to hear what amounted to a confession of incapacity? She wasn’t about to say ‘not much’ to his question since she enjoyed vistas, did she not? Prevarication of a sort would get one from here to there especially when here is unfailingly there or some such nonsense.

“
Bonnie and Clyde
!” It was a partial truth at best. “That Clyde Barrow,” she explained to his raised eyes as though she had only to convince a part of him.

“Warren Beatty, you wouldn’t know him. He was smart-alecky and resourceful, a charm for the eye so that even the men in the audience liked him. Should have run for president.”