THE BLADE RUNNER AMENDMENT (7 page)

He listened to the headlines, in no mood to hear the stories behind them. Once she’d gone through a list of possible engagements in the near future: birthdays, anniversaries, seminars, he asked her to sit and be quiet. Nothing immediate called for his attention. She had chosen a polka-dotted frock to begin the day, circles of yellow on a white ground, making respectable and domestic the soft lustre of polished-looking skin. He finished his fortifying breakfast while ignoring her sleep mode.

“Molly…”

Violet eyes opened to him. He wiped his mouth.

“Just off to the hospital. Have a look in on that fellow – Humphrey Martinfield – last night.”

He wouldn’t check with the hospital. Just go. He consciously deceived himself that the extra effort would make up for the desultory response. Besides he needed to get out no matter what. His apprehension of the world had undergone a slight adjustment to a reduced degree of stability. This in turn should normalize imperceptibly if he were go by his previous experiences. He remained unsure as to whether to view them as moral lapses or slight personal controversies ephemeral in nature.

He usually preferred keeping his comings and goings vaguely mysterious – not that Molly at all apprehended them in this or any other manner – and not have to explain himself further, so that he could move easily on his energy’s currents. She needed no more than sketched information for future reference purposes.

He was at the front door when the bell rang. The sound of it threw him back upon himself. Two men in well-worn suits – obviously their work clothes – nodded appraisingly and introduced themselves with a show of badges as required since they were city detectives. They were very human city detectives.

“Virgil Woolf?”

“Yes, what can I do for you?”

There was nothing for it but to invite them in rather than show himself obstreperous and have them interview him on his doorstep. Molly, whom the detectives ignored after a brief assessment that was more than a glance, kept to the couch, her expression blank, while the humans took seats at the dining table.

“Shut her down, Mr. Woolf!”

The one who gave this order slid his gaze across the table and picked up some of the light buried in the polish. Virgil felt the man could arrange to flay his cheek with the look he flicked at him should he choose.

“This won’t take long.”

On this considerate note, Virgil commanded Molly to ‘sleep’. Once a milky void obscured her pupils, the more authoritative of the detectives with the insidious threat of age arrayed in his grizzled visage eyed him and posed rather than asked the questions. He did not think them up in the moment but drew them from some much-thumbed, long-memorized manual perhaps of his own composition.

His junior partner’s metallically smooth facial planes – aluminum before it’s crumpled – didn’t remain completely composed. They flushed with heat as from a close shave; he self-consciously made notes in a small pad – an activity that fascinated Virgil, who watched the fingers stab a ball point pen at the lined page. He wished he could take a look at the painfully produced handiwork.

The intent focus of another human being on the performance of a task will sometimes make it irresistible not to connect to the energies involved and receive a charge from them. They draw out the same kind of human force from the observer in a steady fascinated flow, but the older detective dragged Virgil’s gaze away with his own drawing power. This is what an electron feels like caught between two charges.

Still, the spectacle of a public servant forced to carry on the old arcane methods continued to divert some of his attention. Besides his own efforts, the act of putting pen to paper was not completely lost then, but wretchedly preserved, and it appropriately enough survived in the rendering of accounts. Molly, recently, when he had wished some detail or other clarified that he had come across in an historical novel, had brought up for him an image of the accomplished penmanship that recorded a sixteenth-century household’s everyday bills. Exact flourishes adorned the perfectly executed letters and words that embroidered the script’s unerringly straight and evenly spaced statements detailing the cost of a haberdasher’s workmanship.

The detective required him to establish the nature of his relationship with Humphrey Martinfield, apparently including its innocence. Once Virgil had accomplished this feat to his interrogator’s cloudy satisfaction, it became incumbent upon him to prove his utter helplessness in the way of fingering any particular enemies his friend might have. That Humphrey had been on a bicycle during his call to Virgil should clarify matters, shouldn’t it, as to how Virgil could hardly be anything other than ignorant of the facts or did he reason too subtly? He had no knowledge of a depth of animosity that some entity would culpably fit into this peaceful scenario. If the deplorable event hadn’t, in its execution, been an accident, could it have arisen out of the generalized antipathy that flourished in some quarters towards Humphrey’s work and therefore his person? Virgil was trying to be helpful but, as with the detective, he had more questions than answers. In truth, he entertained an utter vacuity on the subject of Humphrey’s specific enemies should he have any.

Perhaps he did spend too much time with Molly. Although he had no answers, he found himself like his humanoid looking to provide them.

His memory of the previous evening couldn’t be more fresh, but he knew he had nothing to offer. The apartment’s daylight seemed more relevant. It required a ten thousand year plus eight minute journey from the centre of the sun to arrive on the streets of New York City where it went a long way to repelling most dark forces. It deserved respect. Virgil’s mind continued its travels to what lay beneath his feet: the core of the earth and its tumultuous nuclear-hot depths similar to those of the solar orb. There was a burning whose light never erased the darkness of evening. If there is a stage for the crime, will the villains not come? Apparently not to him – he drew a blank.

“I can only speak generally and so there is really no point.”

“Let us be the judge of that, Mr. Woolf.”

“You mean his line of work?”

The eyes of the grizzled elder flickered once at the intrusive quickness of his junior partner whose hovering ballpoint looked to record the fruits of the question.

The primitive recording method continued to fascinate Virgil, but he pouted nonetheless over his response.

“There is always opposition to the new.”

He had intended to say more but, as is sometimes the case, a sweeping statement will cause one’s point of view to deflate. Besides, it was patently ridiculous to point at the moral outrage of the religious institutions whose reasoned bluster had always been just that. No, this was definitely a police matter and he couldn’t be expected to solve it.

“I can think of no one in particular.”

It is curious not to be master of one’s facial expressions, unlike Molly, say, or actors on the job. His tics and rearrangements could embarrass him, exposing aspects of his character that he wouldn’t have otherwise owned to and certainly not called upon. Their apparent independence of him – his inability to control them – was surprising and disconcerting. After all, wasn’t he disciplined? He shouldn’t be subject to these uncontrollable self-betrayals, these reflex exhibitions of murky inner workings. Being true to himself wasn’t a syndrome – not Tourette’s – but it led to displays of quivering contorted flesh. How vulnerable and exposed was he now with his reflexive pout – the cause of all this present self-analysis! – before the detectives who would be unable to let anything of the sort escape their attention? In the end, it meant little, as the natural wave of their suspicion retreated – long-jaded they must be by the frailties of the innocent and the guilty alike. Nicely, his pout vanished and his sense of self-betrayal faded.

“What is your acquaintance with Mr. Martinfield?”

“We are…sort of friends, not acquaintances exactly, more than that. We can call on each other. It’s never been a matter of a vacation or a movie together. I’m trying to be exact – there isn’t a word for it. No, I guess we’re friends.”

Both detectives stared at him, the one wedded to his hovering ballpoint pen that had taken on an increased air of alertness.

“Yes, we’re friends.”

Perhaps his difficulty came because he felt closer to Molly. He would have to sort that out but, meanwhile, he urged his decision upon them and watched the pen duly record the information, although no advance of note had been made that he could tell and he felt his interrogators to be of the same mind.

What was this need of his for exactitude? He recoiled from an inaccurate rendering of his sense of things. A degree away from the unvarnished truth threatened to violate his consciousness, or was it his conscience? Ill-chosen diction that fouled a statement drained the words of substance. He was most fully alive and present when completely on top of things – obvious enough, he supposed, and yet all this thinking about a simple friendship! What else could it be? Molly would be more efficient. – “Here is what the data means.”

Still the question remained as to how he would evaluate his relationship with Humphrey. If friendly, were they friends? A great deal of sympathy flowed between them, but would they sacrifice for each other when, in the main, their dealings were congenial, leading the one to defer to the other, and no more? Even their most amicable get-togethers involved some hail-fellow-well-met business or other that had never ventured upon more intimate, confessional terrain.

What had the latest call been about? It said something that he hadn’t thought on it since. To be a sounding board for his friend’s ideas despite or because of his own stubborn loyalty to long-outdated technology –as evidenced by his stubborn clinging to Molly’s charms – undeniably flattered him. Humphrey always took Virgil’s idiosyncrasy as a compliment to past achievements, and an opportunity to express one design regret. – “It was a good thing to be able to replace their parts – I miss that.” As to his role in making humanoids accepted, he credited the notion of ‘inevitability’ in tones of self-effacement. Possibly he was embarrassed. Humphrey knew how much others had contributed to the ‘take-over’, as some despondents termed it.

Inevitability aside, the world could have been quite different – quite as it always had been – and its present polished, exemplary state, as transcendent as any consumer could possibly wish it to be, was due to individuals like Humphrey Martinfield. He was a visionary with style whose products shaped everyday lives and lifted them to states of being that they would never otherwise and so easily have known – both natural and supernal at once. It was the ‘inevitability’ that proved to be the problem since some didn’t see it that way. For them, Humphrey was the ‘cause’.

“I imagine you are here because you believe what happened to Humphrey was intentional.”

Their orders for the day could have tasked the detectives with simply tying up loose ends, but their stubborn body language said different. Or was he perceiving normal work-related tension? Could there possibly be anything in them uninfluenced by daily servings of police duty? An image of the roots of his oak tree just feet away came to him. How much were they a product of the ground that they grasped no matter that they reached for the sky? Not even the detectives’ intimacy with their wives could alter what they daily clung to for survival, or did they manage to shuck their working hours, along with their holsters, once across the threshold? Virgil wanted to ask them about baseball, what season tickets they held, but resisted the folly although he himself would have found it fertile ground for…for what? Would he get to know them by these simple exchanges heaved across an impenetrable barrier? Get to know his fellows. It should have been a simple matter.

“The car deliberately swerved to hit him.”

“We have witnesses.”

The offer of this information absolved and cleansed him. For a moment they were at par with each other.

“Road rage?”

He remembered an incident in his own past. Similar items in the local news.

The two sets of eyes examined him with cold grey doubt. They were alive and they grudged him any warmth. Vacation time would be in order but how and where accomplish it? They would have to change their suits, their eyes, their skin.

A deep breath and he fashioned a question. Eyes like theirs – pebbles in viscous fluid – could take anything and, besides, he was safe in his innocence and wouldn’t go down easily.

“No leads then?”

A dismissive something lurked in those suits and brushed this aside.

“And so no one you can think of who would be concerned in such an incident?”

The feeling of suspension in space must be natural to these two and it was incumbent upon him to be comfortable as well.

“No. No one in particular, that is.”

He flayed about for what might be a solid contribution.

“There are a lot of crazy people out there. Of course, I don’t have to tell you.”

In regards to Humphrey, there was plenty to support his statement, but he had to clarify it.

“By ‘out there’, I don’t mean on the street. He is a leader in his field, a trail-blazer, one who tends to stand out, and there’s a lot of opposition to his work.”

The light floated in from the little garden unawares of the severe refracting process it would meet in this room.