THE BLADE RUNNER AMENDMENT by Paul Xylinides Read Free Book Online

swathes of the parading concourse abounded in similarities of dress and expression. He could drown in these mirrored groupings.
    The brownstone regained – polished to a rosy streetlight hue – he reentered his apartment at back. Above its walled little garden that was another room en plein air , the limitless sky after its sequences of blue and white would be arching in star-fogged black. Often, depending upon the time of day, either the moon or the sun would brazenly be looking down at him, or be spy-like with face roughly hidden or femininely obscured behind veils of heavy and light cloud. He didn’t go to look this evening; it sufficed that he knew a sky to be there for him. Molly awaited with her disarmingly absolute patience, the sound of the door when he came home having alerted her.
    The overly familiar smile caused him again to wonder, was it time for an update?
    He had become very used to this expression and the sight of it mostly pleased him. Its designers had taken a dozen or so mouths and made composites from famous Hollywood beauties of the silver screen, choosing in the end an amalgam of Julie Christie’s heartbreaking lips in David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago , the insouciant Marilyn Monroe in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot , and others he could not recall. He’d dug up these films and approved.
    Molly’s smile made him feel part of a scene in which they were both performers. As well, they had given her the violet eyes of Elizabeth Taylor. These captivated him and habitually looked down after they appraised. He was never sure how she would do her hair, leaving that laissez-faire program alone as a little extra illusion of her independence.
    His meal was real enough. She had promptly brought it to him having first set up the two candles – a ritual that he again reminded himself to end, since it made him feel more alone than otherwise. He let it go, succumbing to the delicate atmosphere that was the world of these soft flames still and bright as closed tulips in a full moon’s radiance. Yes, in a distracted fairy moment, he might even feel himself to be out in his garden. Sufficiently seduced, he tackled his food – a baked potato, salmon, broccoli – and engaged in talk once Molly took a place at the table. He would say whatever was on his mind, although some things wouldn’t have been there had he a human being opposite him. He allowed a pause and she typically began as programmed.
    “How was your day, Virgil?” So spoke his hominid better half.
    It amused him no end. The inquiry came couched in Molly’s warmly curious tones that seemed always to sound appropriate whatever his state of mind. He could answer or not as he wished. Not having to tailor his response to the tastes and shortcomings of a self-concerned being, he could be himself and he could characterize his day as it really had been. Without fail, the engagement would be reassuring and objective. It might be clinical but it wouldn’t threaten; it would follow his lead. Ignoring the subject of his dear grandmother, he went straight to the problematic heart of his recent expenditure of time and made it both confessional and belligerent.
    “I spent half an hour with one of your colleagues, as it happens.”
    “As it happens, Virgil?”
    “Yes, I ran into her against a fridge,” – he allowed himself a snort of laughter – “and one thing led to another.”
    “Intimacy, Virgil?”
    “I’m afraid so, Molly.”
    “Afraid, Virgil?”
    “It’s a manner of speaking…there’s always a moral component.”
    “You mean when being intimate with a humanoid?”
    “Not exactly. It’s the act in itself,” he said. “Probably, its moral origins are primitive. Just the way humans are made, I suppose. Mustn’t let anything get between us and our God. Blame it on the priests or, if not, perhaps ultimately its consequences are real and in the moral nature of things. Something spiritual to do with our evolutionary path and where it must