Voight-Kampff

At first I liked the test because I couldn’t tell what made the questions like each other. It’s sexy to be led to someone else’s revelation, so I was pretty disappointed when I got there on my own: just empathy and violence, like everything else is. I already know what kind of person I am, I could have told the guy as he was setting up the screens, but I chickened out at the last second. Each time I breathed a wash of golden pixels, each time I spoke it scrolled out icy ’80s Tandy blue. One question was about my mother. I’ll tell you about my mother: when I was 20 I couldn't afford a bicycle, so she went to the bike guy and picked one out for me—a vintage Raleigh, orange. She rode it around the field behind his house to test the brakes, then put it in her car and drove it all the way to Montreal, where the ceiling in my terrible apartment was buckling in slow, beautiful waves. It was like sleeping underneath a dream about the ocean that could kill you in real life, but it had always been that way: the only thing connecting any room to any other was the fact that we could pass between them. When we moved in we’d found the bathroom door hidden underneath a pile of shattered mirrors in the backyard, and once my mom went home that’s where I locked and never rode the gift she’d brought me. I was scared. What else is new? I’d go down, stare into the shards, see myself thrown into traffic, sidewalk singing in my knees, hot chrome between my teeth, etc. That pupil doesn’t dilate, I tried to tell the guy as he adjusted his big leather pedal, it’s a whole thing, but he kept trying to make it work. I wanted to ask him whether he thought that whole story was about guilt or clarity or debt, whether he thought that in a sense we were both working toward the same ultimate goal. I wanted to explain that in the ’90s it was hard to touch a person without failing just a little, that just as some things live inside you without showing on the surface there are memories you bear the sign of on your body without ever having seen in full, but he didn’t want to hear it. He was busy with his work.