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Deckard stopped the car by a run-down pitstop on some unnamed road. They’d been driving with the window down all night. K enjoyed the quiet hums of the night, even when the air was still.
“I’ll be back,” Deckard said, slinging his coat on his shoulder, “Gotta fill her up.”
“Don’t forget the skittles, Rick,” Anna said with a smirk, and Deckard raised his hand as an affirmative.
In the rearview mirror, he saw Ana look out the window toward the west. Out here, there was nothing but a vast stretch of land. Even the pitstop was long abandoned. K often wondered why it was that between the quiet stillness of the country roads, and the neon drone of LA, so many people had chosem to flock to the latter. Why a simple life—that he often witnessed in these parts, that he hadn’t been able to fathom before now—was not enough. Anna was smiling without thinking again. She loved the world in a way not even he could imagine.
Ana met his eyes and said, “You’ll take a walk with me, won’t you?”
“Well, okay,” K said. He was wearing a black jacket and sweatpants, the clothes of a civilian—they had a raided an abandoned mall back in Pasadena. The centrepiece at the middle of the building had been a tall fountain, covered with dust. He had watched over Ana while she fumbled at the control panel at the side, but it was no use—wherever the water came from must have long rusted.
He came out of the old Chevy and found her waiting outside the door.
“What are you thinking about,” she asked him as she linked arms with him. The cold of the night seemed to catch up with them. It always descended rapidly—one moment they were craning their heads to catch the wind, and the next they were holding each other for warmth.
“How cold it gets,” K said, “The weather is strange outside of LA, isn’t it?”
“Well I wouldn’t have much of a comparison,” Ana said with a chuckle, “but it’s growing on me.” She looked at the cloud-obscured moon, and even now K marvelled at the way the celestial bodies shone. The smog out here was thin enough they even saw the stars some days. Last time they saw the stars, Deckard had told them that in Canada, where they were headed for refuge, they might see northern lights.
Before this year, he had only ever seen the moon through the neon screens. He had memories of it, of course, but those memories didn’t belong to him. Perhaps it was Ana’s. He would have to ask one of these days, but he didn’t like to talk about what he remembered, what he didn’t, didn’t want to think too deeply about his artificial past. Sometimes, just before he fell asleep he would re-examine all which he knew about himself—his dead parents, his childhood home in Portland with the barb wire fence, his birthdays, his years as a child at school—knowing that none of it was him, that he wasn’t real at all. This wasn’t a new habit. He had done this all his life.
There were also the years of the police force, the cold eyes, the grey halls, the muttered insults, the rain—so much rain. The touches—harsh and hidden.
His knew that was real. His life began with bare knees on the concrete floors, the sharp smell of antiseptic as they hosed him off. He had told this to Deckard one of the nights Ana had fallen asleep early, and Deckard had said, ‘That’s strange, K. Replicants aren’t supposed to remember the first days. It’s like how with humans, they never remember the first years of their lives.’ He hadn’t known what to make of the fact. That he was different, perhaps, not in the way he wanted nor expected, that he was broken, somehow.
Ana leaned against his shoulder. “Is that really what you think about when you get quiet? The weather?”
He didn’t know what to say, only stayed very still so he wouldn’t disturb her.
There was something disconcerting about the way she and Deckard touched him sometimes. It was good. There was never anything cruel about it, not like the way the others touched him at the police department. There was certainty in its kindness that was disconnected to what he knew from experience. In the beginning, when they first set out for the North together, he expected derision when they reached for him, and every time he was proven wrong there was a feeling in his stomach like he was in free fall.
Suddenly, Ana pointed to a dark shadow on the desert. Its rectangular figure was very still, save for what looked like a piece of fabric fluttering in the wind. “Come on. Let’s go see. I wonder what’s over there.”
Before he could say a word, she was leaving. Back at the pitstop, Deckard was hauling two red cans of gas above his shoulders. He saw K watching as he set the cans down next to the car.
“Well don’t let me keep you,” Deckard said.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t call her back to be safe?” K asked.
“There’s no one in these parts. We’ve been driving all day without seeing another soul.” Deckard patted him on the shoulder. “Besides, even if there was trouble, I know you’ll keep her safe.”
K reflected in those words yet again as he looked at Deckard’s hand. He had once believed that to be the sole reason he was taken along, but he has realized by now, that it couldn’t be the case. The burden of bringing him—a fugitive replicant—would outweigh any benefit he might bring for them with his capabilities. He still did not fully understand why they chose him. He still did not know how to confront them, how to ask for an answer to this question. “Of course, Officer,” he said in the end and followed after Ana.
“It’s Rick,” Deckard called after him, “One of these days you’ll call me Rick, son.”
For a brief moment, K paused in his tracks. Then he continued as though he heard nothing, but of course Deckard would have noticed. It wasn’t the first time he had been called ‘son,’ but it surprised him nonetheless. Conversely, he did not know how to bring himself to call Deckard by anything else other than his title. Doing so signified a distance closed in their relationship, and he didn’t know how to make of that. Did he deserve the privilege? What had he done at all to be—
“K,” Ana called with a wave. She wasn’t very far out yet. She had been standing here, watching the nighttime sky. Waiting for him, it occurred to him. Ana wrapped her grey cardigan around her body tightly as the wind shook her curls from the bun. K took off his jacket and wrapped it around her. She held it tentatively. “But aren’t you cold?”
“We don’t get cold,” K said gently.
She gave him an obviously look. “You are ridiculous. You were just talking about the awful weather—“
“I didn’t say it was awful. I like it. It keeps you awake.” He looked down. “It makes you feel like you’re real.”
Ana watched him, then took his hand into hers. “You are real, K. All of us are real.” She gave him a small smile. He squeezed her hand, but didn’t believe her. He didn’t even believe that she believed her. There was something fundamentally different about the two of them. Something fundamentally different about him and Deckard. K was the lesser, and they had to be aware of it too, even if they never acted upon it, never took advantage of him.
The two of them walked into the desert, toward that dark silhouette in the distance. The ground beneath them loosened to windswept sand. But in every stretch of the horizon, the air was clear. There was no way someone could get lost here like you could in the LA ruins. Somewhere in the distant, a tin can rattled. There was a distinct asphalt smell to the summer air, a marked different from the dank mildew of his LA apartment, where it was perpetually raining.
Half way to their destination, Ana turned back and waved to Deckard. He was bent down on one knee, fueling the car. Despite her frantic movements, he never noticed the two of them. She didn’t seem to care.
-
Closer, they saw more clearly the black monument upon the sand. The torn edge of a cargo cover flapped in the wind. It was the carcass of an old truck, metal rusted and scattered, black vinyl on the bumper crusted grey under a harsh sun. It might have belonged to the junkyards, but it was too old—too valuable to be left alone to decay in peace.
“What do you think they were trying to do? The people who drove it here?” Ana asked, leading her head on his shoulder.
Ana was doing the thing where she was asking him to invent history again. Many times he had told her he was a poor storyteller, but perhaps she could see through his deflections, to the fear at the heart of the matter—that he didn’t want to say anything untrue, lest he be admonished for it. She was trying to show him it was okay. He knew this. He knew this but it was still difficult.
“Running away,” he offered.
“Where from? Where to?” Her eyes lit up at these sorts of things, seeds of false memories, blossoming within her.
“They’re running away from LA,” K said. “Like us. They used to live further west from here. A nice house. That’s where they were headed.”
“What kind of house, K? What was it like?”
“Tall fences. Padlocked gates. A garden in the back. If they ever arrived there, it would be waiting for them, the same as the day they left.” He strained on—in truth there were only ever two homes he could picture. Vividly, his squat apartment, and more distantly, a family home in the suburbs, red bricked, a leaning oak tree in the front yard.
Ana kept urging. “Why the lock? The town must have been deserted long before they abandoned it.”
K didn’t know the answer. He couldn’t keep up with it any longer. He kept silent and waited.
“Well I suppose they simply liked it better that way.” At last Ana sighed with her full chest and smiled. “That wasn’t so terrible was it?”
He didn’t know how to draw from that same well of joy, the amusement in her voice, not a mockery of him, but a delight in the act of invention, even a small one. “Sure, Ana,” he said.
After a pause, Ana said, “I don’t think I’ve ever asked you K, but did you see the world much before we left? LAPD must have taken you to all sorts of places.”
He was wrenched from the house with tall fences and thrown to the dank drizzle of rain. K thought of the cases he had worked in his years. The many rooms he had set foot in. Red blots on white marble. The countless lives he had taken—back then it had been so easy to do as he was told, to do anything at all. Obey and he would be rewarded in his bonuses, in his rare day offs he would spend talking to Joi. He never disobeyed—he never disobeyed, and yet he was still punished for imperfect jobs. He could only imagine the ways they would have punished him if he ever tried.
“K?” Ana said, sounding worried.
He knew he had spent too much time thinking. It was a poor habit from a life lived in solitude. “It was never about seeing the world. It was just a job,” K said to her and tried to smile, but of course she could see through him. He was a poor actor—truth was, he was poor at most things outside of his job. “I had my own place. A good place. That’s where I spent most of my time when I wasn’t at duty. It was—” He searched for a ward to describe his own life, and failed for find it. “It was safe, there.”
Ana’s smile grew sad. “No where seems to be safe for us anymore.”
“Yeah.” He paused. “But strangely I used to be frightened of many more things.”
“What things?”
He thought of those nights in flashes. Bright, cold hands. Pale white light. Bare skin. Used skin. The sting of cold water. How it felt afterward, just standing there in the dark, unwilling to reveal himself to the world. Joi talking him to sleep. Questions he could not ask brewing inside him—questions he forgot in the morning.
“Just things,” he said, and shivered.
Ana took his hand in hers. His hands, dwarfing hers. “Will you tell me, one day?” She asked ever so gently.
He thought of the days ahead. How despite the gravity of their situation, with every passing day, he was growing used to this peace. At the same time, he was quietly waiting for all this to be ripped from him, for the world and its cruelties to do the sensible thing. For his life to make sense again.
One day, if he ever arrived there, he would tell her all these things. One day.
“Okay,” K said as they began to walk away.