THE BLADE RUNNER AMENDMENT (3 page)

Her grandson would definitely not understand the reference, but she could hope he would feel sympathy with her for something lost. That possibly had been in a parallel universe. It was supposed to be. The thought made her smile. Virgil, completely unaware of his grandmother’s cosmological reflections, wouldn’t have been surprised by them – in the air as it were – staples in the everyday matrix of speculation, theoretical physics’ contemporary updates of the philosophies of consolation. Different kinds of heaven, that is all.

Isn’t this heaven, if you handle things properly?went another thought between them that remained unuttered.

She lapsed into silence, overwhelmed by unarticulated metaphysics. It hadn’t been what she wanted to say in answer to him but had been the easiest to bring ashore with her grappling hook. The question arose, why had she thought of
Bonnie and Clyde
, the film, of all things? There had to be a reason. Certainly not the excitement of the iconic shoot-outs that she had revisited sufficiently. Those outlaws of romance had opposed their lives to the way of the world that had no place for bursting passion – although Bonnie’s written expression did find a shelf to rest upon. Their incurred bullet holes – countless numbers of them – somehow excused the bloody incivilities.

If some old coot sported the same charisma as that Clyde Barrow/Warren Beatty, she toiled at convincing herself, she’d find the gumption on a dare – yes, a dare, that’s how he operated, him and his charisma! – to join up and sport a flower in her Faye Dunaway hair. What a delicious hoot and the look on their faces! Worth every minute in jail, every bullet-riddled hole in her body, and in poor, lovely Clyde’s with that swaggering suit and grin of his. Oh that overpowering illegal feeling!

“Yes, I enjoyed that film. It keeps coming back to me.”

She kept her tone mischievous in the hope of sharing her drift, but she couldn’t outright say, not to her grandson, what such indulgences brought to her mind.

Virgil didn’t. Get her drift, that is, but he was glad to sense something in the air, and that she was more than someone struggling within a shell and knocking at calcified walls.

That film was a long time ago – the nineteen-sixties – and he had seen some clips of it, upon an evening. He looked at his grandmother and also smiled but immediately regretted it when he made a connection between her relative impecuniousness and the movie’s attraction. She managed on social security, that was all – no one robbed banks anymore; adamant and candy-toned, she managed to get by, blanketing him with reassurances so that he hadn’t to scale down himself and drink instant coffee as she contentedly did. This last preference of hers was ‘convenient’ to use her descriptive – now there was a word that stubbornly never seemed to go completely out of fashion as ‘virtue’ had. “I like mine with sugar. It makes no difference and there’s no fuss,” she would end.

Famously, a Canadian author likewise once answered to the question of his own taste with the dismissive, “I drink instant.”

Already Virgil was measuring out the length of time he had been here and would have to continue – unrolling his visit as from a bolt of cloth whose cut he would like not to appear niggardly; in the process, he would be sizing up the frail and elderly figure that was his blood and bone. Although he wasn’t sentimental, her print dress and ribbed cardigan, her wool-fringed slip-ons were also related to him, impregnated with her physical characteristics as they were.

He didn’t want to tire her, the elderly being susceptible to a waning of energy especially with their relatives, but sometimes not so with their daily contacts whether these be repair-persons, doctors and nurses, caretakers in general who become an extension of themselves – energy sources and replacements for their own diminished states.

Did that female humanoid continue to be on the stairway, backside against the refrigerator? She solicited passively but unmistakably with all of the temptation of a coke machine to a thirsty gullet. As for the two men, they faded, strangled in their own time loop or dragged away with the fridge. He relished the fact that he had nothing to do with their miserable, democratic lives, their lack of a recent shower, their presence of a gut. What squirmed in there?

“I brought you these.”

Lamely he stood up, at half-crouch, to offer the bunch of flowers that he’d chosen to hold onto for the momentary spectacle of it – he enjoyed serving in an ornamental role if it would add to the general atmosphere but the effect had begun to stale. He extended for obligatory inspection and gratifying murmurs of appreciation the item that he now looked to be rid of.

He had chosen them from a sidewalk array, with a smile to acknowledge the seller’s prideful appreciate-me-I-am-a-human attitude. These multihued petals that bled at the end of slight green cylinders once fully supportive of them bore a watercolorist’s inspiration to any man’s eye.

“Here!” their voices mouthed in faded tones.

His clenched fist is hot and they had, like poor country cousins severed in afternoon heat, swiftly bedraggled – swooned in this geriatric flat, their necks submissive in the manner but not the strength of swans.

Should he try some aspirin for what remained of their vitality to suck up? Drop acetylsalicylic acid into the metal pitcher that had never been thrown out despite its dull hue and battered surface she directed him to? No, he followed her instructions and shortened them, with a pair of scissors, into a self-supporting posy of sorts that could draw water up stumpy stems and behave themselves tightly packed. Images of Chinese babies came to mind buried up to their necks in huge vases of sand – one baby per vase – in order for their farming parents to toil undisturbed in the fields: daycare in the Orient, whose added benefits – a submissive, non-rebellious citizenry – were obvious and incalculable not only for the family but also for the state. What prevented the sprouts’ more efficient storage cheek by jowl in a single container like this one?

However much he wished to share his thought, discretion prevailed and he avoided a possible response that would be a stain on her aged sweetness – itself a pressed and stoic flower that had come to life when he opened the diseased book cover of her door. To him, she had been two-dimensional until then, residing on the outer and encircling membrane of his universe. Once he left, she would be back in that space again. That her daily lot from the look of it was bearable gave him a sense of security.

He went to the fridge and appraised its contents until satisfied by their nutritional balance, and then lingered on his feet. He would be back in a few days. Anything she wanted?

“No.”

“Call if you do.”

He stayed not much longer – a few seconds. Although he knew what the visit was about, he sought reassurance as he measured its value.

“I’m going to go, Grandmama.”

“All right, dear.”

She never said, “Must you?” and he was grateful for it and for her bright permission with its note of fortitude. His liberator freed him from self-imprisonment, responding to the faint thrum of yearning in his feathered breast. Her eyes shifted toward him.

“Come again!”

A final plaintive call then, much the same as she would make to a neighbour or social worker. And why not? Why should he be pained at his lack of status, for what was he after all, so little here, an absentee guardian with postulations of continued presence after moving on?

It left a mark on him, this goodbye, the room’s claw evident. He backed out in awkward disengagement, shutting the door with undue care. It would have been a calamity to have it close too hard. He took the one last chance to give her something of himself.

“Bye Grandmama.”

The humanoid was still there. As foreseen, the fridge and its movers had gone. She had not. He must have let out a heat flash.

“You’re not real, are you?”

One could, after all, say anything.

He was the one who had passed by earlier. She – the humanoid – had waited the prescribed time, and had been about to depart, find sunlight; she would have to respond with low intensity for now – it wouldn’t do to crash during the transaction with all the undesirable repercussions. He had no other reason, had he, to address her?

“How real do you want me to be?”

She parted her moist lips, shook her platinum hair, looked him boldly in the eye before shamelessly lowering a focused gaze. Her breasts swelled and he simply mumbled, “Real real.” Like a schoolboy.

If he were to go by her apparent continued presence on these stairs, the movers had not indulged. She wouldn’t have discriminated. No, they had gone about their business and Virgil was a little regretful that he hadn’t this excuse to do the same. He had little choice but to follow his biological drive, if it wasn’t to dominate him for the rest of the day. She was an older, familiar model and there would be little reason to linger – he could move on more easily than if she had been recent and exotic and all over him. The lopsided smile of her broad lips sold him.

“It’s not too far…” One allurement after another. Broken sentences do the job better than complete statements.

Would H. Miller have been in a quandary had he to choose between a crippled Parisian whore and a semi-articulate humanoid?

He decided to preempt her self-designation of ‘Jewel,’ ‘Amber,’ ‘Venus’ or even ‘New York’.

“I’ll call you Emily.”

“As you wish.”

“Let’s go, then, Emily.”

“May I see your card…?”

“Virgil.”

She waited. He flashed his Am Ex at her.

“Thank you, Virgil. You have five minutes to begin. Please follow me.”

She straightened her lopsided grin. Her mouth parted onto the cutting edges of glistening white teeth that cropped a sliver of darkness. After giving him a moment to stare at the possibilities, she turned and looked for the room.

“This way.”

There is no place for cynicism toward a machine. It doesn’t pretend. Rather he should direct such an attitude at himself should he fail to remember that she is an artefact programmed to manifest human intentions. She is a construct whose faults are not her own. Virgil reminded himself that he had gladly paid a lump sum not to have a certain individual in his presence. The company of an outdated humanoid was preferable.

“What are your thoughts?”

Silly question.

The striped walls promoted to action but he held back a moment. Emily, the humanoid, has seated herself on the bed, its queen-size an expansive setting for her neat self-arrangement. It is over-cushioned at the head. A large unwashed window faced them with blinds dragged high. No need for privacy: advertisements for the stores at street level made up the extended opposite facade. He didn’t bother to read the pitches, but allowed them to register upon some blank screen of his consciousness. In this foundering neighbourhood, they could serve as a means of demolition should they knife down and wedge away at the no longer viable mortar –commercial intervention descending storm-like out of the sky. Just the disruptive thing to set everything on a new path to the same place. With one wall sheared, this room would stand out, painted and furnished with a licentious intent, he and his hook-up on the exposed stage.

On the still-standing walls hung enlargements of couples immodest in public – the famous historical photos: the clench in the middle of the road at the hockey riot in Vancouver, the kiss that celebrated the declaration of peace in New York City; and then there were those that featured public exposure on park benches, car sex on one surface. Subtle. From the touchingly discreet to greater incentives for arousal.

“That’s more like it.”

It was a room whose inducements drew him to act.

“Don’t be left out. Join in the fun!” These words floated from her while his eyes strayed over the retro design and the old camera shots of romance. What had inspired this particular set-up? He must be in the hands of a small-time operator in possession of a fine arts degree who financed his coffee-drinking afternoons by means of this leased unit – her look wouldn’t have been part of a major brand, would it?

On the grounds that there is no life without life, he mouthed, “You’re gorgeous. Most gorgeous.”

“Let me begin!”

The fine, soft silicon hands moved over his clothing, but her show of urgency could do no more than produce excitation in him, and so he pulled off his shirt himself and dropped onto the bed, not caring what a fifty-year-old sight was his out of shape flesh, and relieved that he needn’t be bothered by self-consciousness. He addressed the manufactured portals to pleasure undisturbed.

The fantasy played out and, when it had ended, he didn’t feel soiled for he hadn’t taken advantage of anyone. Sated he was – sated and empty.

Her humanoid skin had been sufficiently soft but little different from that of human beings who were strangers and rented it out. He had pushed one of the legs beyond what would have seemed to be its extreme but it had accommodated without breaking off – in the heat of the moment, he had resisted the urge out of self-respect and with an eye to the financial liability.

No, she wasn’t a person whom he had soiled in the absence of further good intentions. He indulged the guilt-free luxury of ignoring her while she lay back gathering in what little light sloughed her way through the dirty sheet of window glass. Once sufficiently recovered, she would go to the bathroom and perform the protocols of hygiene according to regulations, and insert a fresh vagina. Or otherwise not be able to operate. He took his time putting on his clothes.