THE BLADE RUNNER AMENDMENT Page 2

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.”

  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.”

  3


  Descent and Interlude

  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.