"Dating the Android" by Quentin Crisp

A VAST, dark, sweeping downpour, and I sat at the side of a thoroughfare opening itself directly to the black, roiling sky. I watched the tiny tremoring pulse in the back of my hand in remote fascination and exhaled smoke from my nose. I had sat like that for some hours. The fat beads of rain seemed consistently to miss my cigarette. Or, when they hit, they would just skim the side or make the sombre orange singe hiss and dim a little. The cigarette?s mysterious immunity to the elements was novel and comforting to me. It was like having a companion. At last a raindrop put an end to this tiny miracle, falling precisely on the glowing tip, rendering it soggy, turning it in an instant from the glow of an engine to dark and bitter ash.

I flicked the sodden remains, already bursting at the paper seam, into the grime-swilling stream of the gutter. It plunged with a small, fragile fleet of litter through the bars of a drain into its dripping oubliette of cosy loneliness. A cocktail of neon spangled the dreg-thick water, hovering constantly at the edge before the plunge into the splashing underworld. The liquid colours reminded me of music spilling from the momentarily opened door of an all night café or club. Strangely touched by the contemplation of this zinging palette, I stripped off my heavy, soaking shirt, through which my realistic torso was beginning to show, and slung it into the dirty carnival of raindrops. I reached my arms up to the clouds whose drenching arms reached down to me. I wanted to be as open as those zinging neon ripples with their silent, liquid fireworks. I wanted to be washed away as completely as that litter.

The world is free and one cannot account for any other?s motives. So while my own behaviour was not in the least mysterious to me, the solitary figure that began to approach through the downpour seemed to me enigmatic, her behaviour opaque. Of course, a human might have had any number of reasons to be taking that route at that hour, but generally they would have been taking that route despite the rain, and so would have shown signs of hurry. This girl did not. Her pace was so leisurely it seemed aimless, and yet there was a certain lackadaisical confidence about her. From her appearance I could tell her general type straight away. She was one of those feminine dreamers who collect things, whether those things are minerals or thoughts in diaries or little fetishes. She probably managed to find meaning in mere decoration and accessorising, as long as those decorations and accessories were in strict accordance with her fey and girlish tastes.

In all honesty, I have often felt a remote but exquisite intrigue concerning her type. I am impressed by the seeming ability to derive warmth and love from a sticker of a favourite character. It is essentially the ability to personify any inanimate objects to which her taste is drawn. I deduced this quality mainly from her dress and make up. She wore a purple top hat with a yellow band around it, in which was stuck a plastic sunflower. On her face were holographic stickers of stars, moons and planets that created the illusion of a strange, opalescent solar system gyrating out from within her cheeks to orbit beyond the thin wisps of hair that shadowed her features. Her plastic top was full of the coagulated, glowing colours of a lava-lamp. Flower rings were settled on every finger, and she wore a pair of purple plastic jeans. All very retro and dandified.

It was obvious she had noticed me, and I made no great attempt to hide the fact I had noticed her. I was not surprised when she stopped a few feet in front of me, but I was interested. I have named her general type, it is true, but that does not mean I credited her with no individuality whatever. On the contrary, there seemed in her movements and her quirky, mellow expression something as alluring and ripely unique as the situation itself. She was almost imperceptibly hesitant in speaking.

?Would you like to sleep with me??


The city seems an ideal environment for the nurturing of all variety of hustlers. Everyone seems to have worked up a style of patter, and since one cannot be sure whether the object of their act is merely to impress, or something more pernicious, it is best to be on guard against their prestidigitations. Even I, it must be confessed, have made at least a nod towards the adoption of an ?angle.? In this lady, however, there was just enough of a nervous squirm about her throat for it to strike me this was the furthest thing I had seen from an act in a long while.

There seemed no point in answering other than honestly and openly.

?Yes. I would.?

?Well ? OK I think it?s bound to happen ? not that I don?t reserve the right to change my mind, I mean, God, we hardly know each other ? but I think we ought to go on a date somewhere first anyway. K? What d?you say??

?Yes. I would like to.?

?Well, I?ve got a blank space in my diary right about now, and you look like you have time on your hands. Come on, I?ll take you somewhere.?

I rose to my feet.

?Where are you going to take me??

?If we go south-west through the tenement towers and the derelict industrial sector we come to one of my favourite places in the whole city.?

?Which is??

?Archadeon, the old merchant quarter.?

?Yes. I believe I?ve passed through once or twice.?

The city is a sprawling and dangerous fascination. It is full of time slips and anachronisms, the clash of different rhythms. Strangely, a great part of the fascination is the teeming soullessness of the bubble buildings that have been assembled in a swarm over layers of the old city, like one more geological layer burying a thousand more elegant civilisations. There is a fascination, also, in vulgarity on such scale, and in such a merciless destruction of the past, as if the new buildings were the churning metal jaws of a rubbish collection flyer. However, perhaps even this fascination would extinguish if it weren?t for those few hallucinatory vestiges of the past that remain. I call them hallucinatory ? at first glance the city seems devoid of all traces of the past, there seems no room left to keep it anywhere. And yet the past exists, springing up in the barren maze of metal and plastic like a ghost that can no longer be suppressed, or like something precious that can no longer have physical existence in this world, but is stored holographically on the tiniest of discs.

So we trailed through the rain on our first, impromtu date. We passed the great, burnt-out engines of the old factories that almost seemed to smoulder and sizzle blackly. They were home now to the lawless, the penniless and the feral. About them were monolithic piles of clinker like places of heathen sacrifice, charred and rusty towers that must have looked magnificent in the amber glory of a setting sun.

We ambled down a slope clustered with poky hovels, dark and hollow under the lashing of the storm, and turned into a street of dingy eateries, flags and awnings flapping roughly in the wind. It was at the bottom of this street that there stood the dusty iron arch we were to step under. Beyond it was a chaotic, branching stairway, and to either side a great, grey congeries of the architecturally bizarre; domes, battlements, minarets. Above the arch was antique lettering: ?Archadeon Shopping Park.?

When we walked beneath it I realised that the shopping park was protected by the canopy of a dark field. The air was the same as the outside air, but the rain was deflected and the wind greatly diminished. Also, the view of the outside world was shut out entirely by a darkness like that of a black hole, making the whole park seem to exist in some abstract realm devoid of all background, a place neither inside nor outside. My naked torso dripped in the sudden stillness. Archadeon was a well-preserved example of the kind of automated bazaar that was at one time fashionable throughout the city. Even in its heyday it must have had something of the attraction of a museum, the way the mannequins and stalls were displayed being much like the exhibits of a museum. Now it seemed more like a museum than a bazaar. The automated bazaars were designed to provide the sale of goods at any time of the day or night without employing human staff. More than that, they were meant as places of general entertainment and relaxation. The mannequins that modelled the clothes were also the sales assistants and security staff.

The stairways curved like those the chorus lines, all feathered and sequinned, might be seen stepping down in leggy synchronicity in those earliest musical films. And true to this effect, the irregularly tiered and terraced market spread all about in what must have once been a most glamorous hilarity of stalls, counters, displays and booths. That hilarity was now blanched and dusty. There were great hanging gardens of coloured lights, canopies and parasols. Mannequins sat round tables in weird alfresco tableaux. All manner of souvenirs from a fragile past were piled together as if they had accumulated as naturally as the dust itself.

We reached a plateau, where I felt almost as if we had become display items ourselves, and there the girl stopped before a mannequin that stood atop a cylindrical podium. The mannequin wore clothes so diaphanous they looked as if they had somehow been sprayed onto the air about her. She was also encrusted with old jewellery. Her hair was elaborately dressed with decorative pins and combs, and her pallid face was made up in colours both stark and sentimental, now faded pastel, as if in accord with some ritual or theatrical tradition. Around the podium was a display of jewellery similar to that which she was wearing.

I suppose our continued presence must have triggered some sensor that surrounded her, because suddenly she started into movement. She began to dance and trill in the most exquisite contralto voice. She twirled like a ballerina in a music box, and, indeed, it seemed plain she had been modelled largely on just such an article. By her own movements she created the illusion that the podium itself was spinning. Also, although it seemed unlikely that the technology for natural movement was unknown at the time of her manufacture, there was a stylised clockwork quality to her motion. In fact, this effect was most beautifully realised, creating a strange, rippling grace that might have been lacking in smoother movements, and even suggesting an alluring mix of modesty and coquetry. I listened to the words of her song and was charmed by their quaintness, like an old perfume, now a little musty. I had not heard such anachronistic language for a long time.


Skyscraping city,
Musical pretty,
Heartbreaking ####ty,
Lostandfoundish, cornerfully,
Fairystagelight
Lit down on this
Little me.
Window dressing corner bit of
Tinselry.
Bituva, iznit, flibbertigibbet,
Flighty free.
Tillgirling all of this iznit lully
Jewellery.
Forget-me-not trinkets,
Bituva iznit irony.
Like a pearl in a shell,
If sir fancies I will sell,
For his fluffheart, I can tell.
Boxes with hearts in, lockets, lovestrings,
Fingerings, silly things, flummery.
Off you wingit,
I stay and singit,
A cagebird iznit, nightingale,
Poppet, just maybe.
Love things, trinkets,
Lostandfoundish, love is, iznit
N?est ce pas, two bit,
Such a snuffit quick
Little bird of a winged
Little poor thing
Gone like a chime
And dead in a wink.
Sneeze and snuffit
Dear heart?s face will
Fade all puddly
And amnese.
Lost and found
And pawned around,
Come back, iznit, to the axis,
Little me.
In my corner, poor girl, mousme,
Selling seashell smiles for free, well,
If sir likes it, cheap and cheery,
Pawned around and duty free.
Let me, go on, be the main spring,
Rippling dimples, winkery.
Your filigree fingering
My heartstrings? fine digitry.
Pickitup, why not, little something,
Go on, join in, commerce, iznit,
But and sell and circulation,
Traffic, trade and currency.
Toss a penny in me well
Of hiznhers n wish and then
Please come again, sir, to my corner,
For I am a fountain,
Nameless,
Of remembery.

The song had a most eccentric and attractive melody, as if a bird had learnt to compose tunes other than those taught it by nature and heredity. For the duration of the song I was fixed by a strange fascination which rendered everything else an empty blur. There was something unique in this curiosity, suggesting whole lost worlds of which she was the only remaining fragment. Then her song cane to an end, and she ceased dancing with a soft mechanical jolt.

I have lived long and I can remember a time when the idea of progress as a sort of linear movement was just going out of currency. This mannequin seemed the very spirit of all that has happened since. Technology continues, but there are no more changes of actual type of progress, no more quantum leaps. The dystopic vision of science fiction romances has proved to be in the nature of a self-fulfilling prophecy. People began to think of the future in those terms, and so turned their eyes and their feet in that direction. The science fiction writer invented the likes of me long before the scientist proper ever did. But now speculative fiction is an utterly obsolete genre. Instead we may come across antiques like this, where a superior technology, strives through that very superiority, to capture the charms of a more primitive age. All that is left in this world is the stultification of endless permutation.

?Hmmm. That?s the first time I?ve heard her sing that song,? said the girl.

The shop droid clicked silently back into motion, with an unsettling air of sudden wakefulness.

?Scuzefingers, begging your privacy, miznmister, is there anything that takes your fancy? Please, not to hold back.?

?Yes. That ring on your right swiveldigit.?

?This, iznit, miz??

?Uh-huh, that?s the one. How much??

?I?m ashamed to say I must have fifteen dollar. I Know, it?s terrible!?

?No, no, that?s really quite scrummy.?

The girl slipped off one of her rings and added the new ring to her floral knuckle-duster. At once the budded petals of this new ring began to open as if breathing, and a roseate flush came into their delicate violet, like the subtle colours of a hydrangea.

?Oh, how wonderlush! I thought so. It?s a mood ring. Don?t you want to know what my mood is now? Well, I?ll tell you anyway ? it?s lush! See, the petals are open. That?s how I fell this evening. It really is.?

I smiled. My eyes turned back to the shop droid. She obviously had a basic personality grafted onto an infrastructure of ritual and subservience. Yet, looking at that painted face it was easy to imagine how the sparks of consciousness had first ignited in an android?s circuitry. I could not help wondering what might be dormant behind her eyes. I even felt an almost embarrassing sort of fellow feeling. But perhaps that was no different to the kind of personification I?d already mentally had the girl tagged down for. The girl paid the droid, who took the chips and inserted them with an air of great dignity in her cleavage. They disappeared with a whirring noise, obviously to be stored in some internal coin box. The girl giggled.

?That does me every time. Can?t say they didn?t have a sense of humour.?

?The product of a more civilised age,? I ventured.

?Yes. Just so.?

?And a crueller.?

?What do you mean??

?Crueller, but, if you?ll forgive the expression, perhaps more human. When sophisticated androids were first developed humans realised that they could have slaves again without ethical dilemmas, and this gave way to a restoration of all sorts of ritual and hierarchical fetishism. Of course, once androids developed consciousness the ethical confusion returned, and society returned to decadence and a kind of squeamish inhumanity.?

?Wow! You?ve read a lot of history??

?Read a little. Lived a lot more.?

I regarded the shop droid once more in admiration. That age, like many similar ages, had produced real wonders of art and architecture by dint of its rigid structure and disciplined hierarchy, through pretension and vainglory, if you like. It often seems to me that culture and heritage are intrinsically cruel things, like the art that tortures the bonsai tree into shape, for instance. Before me now was a matchless example of those exquisite, tortuous arts.

?Well, how about finding you a shirt now? There must be something neat in all this lot.?

So we left the shop droid once more to her musty solitude.

?I wonder who owns this place now?? I mused aloud. ?They can?t be making much money. But then, I don?t suppose it costs a great deal to run the place. There?s only a certain kind of person who comes here, I imagine. Most of the clothes are over a century out of fashion. You know, at the time you probably would not have been allowed to wear a jacket like that one of you weren?t part of the right social stratum.?

?Well, let?s get you that one now!?

I listened to my own historical commentary as the girl purchased the jacket from another droid, this one an obsequious male. It is odd, when I do volunteer speech all of myself, how dry it sounds in my ears. I wonder who it is speaking. Is that non-descript, self-conscious and superfluous person really myself? But perhaps that is what expression is like, isn?t it? It is always a little mistranslated. There is always this discrepancy between the expression and the dormant, unlived ideal, whether that expression is through words or actions. It makes me feel, to use an awkward expression, which is therefore, perhaps, fitting, terribly uncool. Perhaps that is why I talk so little.

I donned the elaborate jacket and the girl took me through the wondering stillness of the great mall to a tiny bar. We were served by a cocktail waiter who I would hardly even dignify with the name, ?android.? ?Robot,? is a fitting enough appellation. Most girls of her type are hypersensitive to the ideologically unsound, and would never have dreamt of taking me to a place like this, but this girl was different. Actually, I was disarmed by such naivete, and felt fairly comfortable, if bemused. So our conversation finally began in earnest with belated introductions, the ad-lib nature of our whole acquaintance launching into a quirky juggling act of dialogue. I learnt that the girl was called, ?Lolique,? or, ?Lolly,? for short.

?You?re a doll, than?? I asked flatly.

?I don?t really like that word. In fact, I bloody hate that word.?

?I apologise. Nonetheless, you fit the definition, don?t you? How did you know I?m an android??

?Oh, come on! How many humans spend their free time stripping off in the gutter, looking up at the sky ? in the middle of a rainstorm??

She laughed. I reached for my cigarettes, but I must have thrown them away too, by accident. She produced her own packet, slid out one for me and one for her.

?I see. That obvious? So, tell me, why do you like androids, then??

?Well,? she began, inhaling, ?You?re very frank, straightforward, completely untouched by social embarrassment, and, kind of, I don?t know, innocent. I can just be myself with you, without all that so-called ?human? bull####. For instance, I would never have dreamt of picking up a human in the same way I picked you up. I just wouldn?t. It?s not just that I?d be scared of ending up naked and dead on some rubbish heap. There?s a whole different set of rules and responses that come into play.?

?Many people are suspicious of ? um ? androphiles.?

?God! Don?t I know it! They call me, ?Dolly-Lolly.? Until I kick them in the crotch, that is. But that?s just the sort of thing I hate about humans.?

I am not charming or witty, so I?m rather afraid my conversation must be as dry as a meal of biscuits. However, Lolly showed no signs of becoming bored of my company. Quite the reverse. Lolly was not quite right about androids knowing no embarrassment, but it is true to an extent. Perhaps for this reason, even if I thought a remark inane or irrelevant, I would make it straightaway, artificially even, since I knew that the object now was to talk. Maybe this was enough for Lolly. In any case, we ordered many drinks and smoked most of Lolly?s cigarettes. While I can enjoy the taste of drink, the effects of alcohol are one pleasure denied me as an android. Similarly, while I can enjoy the sensuality of smoking, it has no ill effects upon me. So I watched in perfect, crystal sobriety as Lolly became tipsy, smoked with calm complacency and, as it were became relaxed, not drunk, on the atmosphere. Lolly, in fact, was sufficiently intoxicated to start asking the broadest, crudest, most wondered about and most avoided of personal questions. And I, for my part, was sufficiently relaxed not to be in the least fazed.

?So what?s it really like to be an android??

She leaned slackly to the side, musing, with her cheek in the palm of her hand and her elbow on the bar. Her eyes fixed on mine firmly for the first time in a manner that was utterly comfortable. I smiled slightly.

?I don?t know. What?s it like to be human??

?I don?t know. How am I s?posed to answer something like that??

I shrugged my QED

?Come on, you can do better than that. I really want to know. For instance, just for instance,? she reached out and pinched my hand between her thumb and first two fingers, applying a little pressure, ?What does that feel like??

?It feels like something solid and blunt, but soft, pressing hard against my skin. I?m afraid that words presume shared experience, so I can?t really convey to you an alien experience, if, indeed, I have any.?

?What kinds of women do you like??


?All kinds.?

?Am I your type??

?Yes. Of course.?

?Okay?? biting her lip and thinking. ?What kinds of music do you like??

?All kinds.?

?That?s a cop out.?

?No, it?s absolutely true. I like all kinds of music.?

?What about favourites??

?I like them all equally.?

?What, Mozart equal to the Plastibabes? Bach equal to Bikini Zen Warp Flash? I prefer Blake No one myself, you know, but??

?Contrary to popular belief, all androids aren?t addicted to the perfect mathematics of the classics. That?s utter nonsense. The Plastibabes are quite as great as Mozart.?

?And you say it with such a straight face.?

?Of course. Look, you know the holotrack where they?re dancing against a background like picture interference ? ?We?re the nanosex/ That infiltrates your atoms/ We?re the variable X/ With X-ray specs/ At now and forever?s intersection?? You know the one. It?s a perfect example of what I mean. But then almost everything is. You see, all these things, music, art, words, pictures, everything ? they all contain the basic DNA of the universe. You could clone the whole universe from a Plastibabe song as easily as from Mozart. There is no great and no trivial. After all, in eternity all things are non-existent in duration, and all equally miraculous. I?m interested in everything!?Everything!?

I raised my glass to my mouth and swallowed the green intoxicant with the last word as my mouth curled wearily at the edge. I felt the terrible drunkenness of personality that comes on me when I get drunk on the company of others. The drunkenness that forces me into a kind of affected underacting.

Sex always seems impossible. Yet from time to time, for reasons perfectly inscrutable to me, it comes and searches me out and tries me on for size. If I ever felt the need to search it out in turn, if I wanted a reliable source, I would not have the first notion of where to go or what to do.

I really have little inclination to describe how that evening ended. The enjoyment of sex is necessarily based on exaggeration and fantasy, and I?m afraid that I would get carried away and tell lies. On the other hand, a totally objective account would be perverse. Nudity is always such an anti-climax. But I suppose I may as well tell you, to satisfy your vulgar curiosity about androids and dolls.

She had a small, cluttered apartment about two or three sectors away, a part of the city I did not know very well. She had been holding my hand until we walked through the door. Then she turned and kissed me. I responded woodenly. Such actions, sexual actions, always seem to me to belie everything the person has said previously, somehow, to be an utter contradiction, a betrayal, and that as if it were all natural and understood. I tend to wonder who is the real person, the one who speaks or the one who ####s.

She lit some scented candles and turned out the lights. Outside neon flashed with the lonely rhythm of a streetwalker?s flickering thought, flyers passed. Subdued by distance their light and motion gave me the prickling sense that I?ve come to dwell in so much lately, that outside and inside are one and the same. I undressed. I am not particularly shy about my body. I feel? detached from it.

The halos of the candles made the sheets glossy and the darkness around a needling, furry mass. The bed became a lily pad of light floating in a pond of glinting darkness. I knelt slowly with one knee on the sinking mattress and reached out over the awkward space between us. Sex between virtual strangers, casual sex, as I believe it has been called, is supposed to set the pulse thrilling with a perfect, hot fulfilment. Some myth made out of envy, bitterness and disappointment has it that the feeling of power that comes with the disregard of restraint and dutiful tenderness is the kick, is the dirty secret of all existence, a cosmic sniggering up the sleeve. No doubt this myth is a great comfort to those who have never experienced such sex. In comforting defeat and self-hatred they get off on what can never be theirs. And since all myths are reputedly based on some seed of truth, and since my own experience is limited, I cannot negative that myth. However, this is just to say that my sad and particular tenderness lies not in any masturbatory boastfulness, but in telling of Lolly?s chafing imperfections.

We kissed again. I touched her breasts, knowing this is what is expected, and also because I wanted to, but without instinct or spontaneity. Then I helped her undress. A woman?s body always feels different than one expects. It is as if a mistake has been made in creation. Imagining the body one imagines certain ideal feelings. Those feelings are always lacking in the reality. Where the ideal comes from, or more importantly, where the difference between the ideal and the reality comes from, is a mystery. Yet men continue to talk about women as if they were the ideal and not the reality, reluctant, understandably, to let the ideal go. When they touch the body again they must remember, as I always do, this curious, unaccountable difference.

It is in bewilderment and a slow exploring of this difference, then, that I always begin, not in ecstasy. This time was the same. I often wonder if half the pleasure of real sex comes from curiosity over this difference. So my artificial body, uninvited into the world by nature, here to no natural purpose, again and purposelessly met a living, natural body. There was no inevitability to the act. I was like a probe sent out into the alien environment of space. I did what I thought was expected of me. I considered my moves. Lolly?s body seemed in a state of incredible and constant change, like the body of an octopus, shrinking and swelling. I guessed this was something to do with the ever-burning fuse of mortality, which is passion, energy and decay all in one. I felt the intense sadness of having that mortal energy for a pillow again, that tragic energy, as I kissed her flat stomach. I made no sound, continued silently as a burglar with work to do. Along with the majority of androids I am unable to come. There was nothing for me but to wallow in a lake of sensuality until one of us was sated. This is its own pleasure, but there is never a point of natural ending, a point of satisfaction, I feel always as if I am building up to something that never happens. When I stop it is simply because, knowing there is no peak to reach, I have begun to feel it is as good a time as any to stop. After many lulls and swells this is what happened.


I sat apart, feeling a little cold and looking down at my moon-lacquered stomach. Lolly lay on her back, smoking an embracing veil around herself. Lolly thought that androids experience no embarrassment, but the following is an example of the strange, piercing embarrassment that sometimes visits me like a ray of blinding light through a chink in a wall.

?You know, that?s probably the best I?ve ever experienced. No, not probably. I?m sure it is.?

My head dropped in shame. I could not believe her. I thought she must be lying, yet something else told me this was naïve, and that she really was telling the truth. What could I possibly have done? I did not understand. Was it perhaps my silence, into which she could project any image of me she wished? Was it a sort of ultimate anonymity, fit to be well used?

?Why?? I asked, quietly.

?There?s just something about you.?

And she blew out the smoke again as if it were the womb of our intimacy. I regarded my slackened, twitching genitals.

I had no address to give Lolique, but she insisted she wanted to see me again. She may as well have formed a sentimental attachment to something she found glittering in a rubbish bin, merely because it was nameless and ownerless and fit to be thrown away. What can you say to such a person? They are incorrigible. They are not seeking a healthy relationship. I did not refuse her. I was, anyway, intrigued by the situation. We arranged to meet again. The rendezvous was stored in my memory like an alarm call, as if utterly forgotten until the appropriate time. I returned to the city where I live the bleak, romantic life of any other piece of windswept trash. It has been such a long time since I have had any home other then my manufactured body. Although I feel heat and cold, it is never unendurable. I need no shelter, no sustenance. So I am able to see the city more objectively than any human, always sectioning things according to the weaknesses allotted them in the struggle to survive. I can see the city as something with no inside and outside, no public and private, as a constant interchange of strangers? lives with no real government, akin to the circulation of money that makes the guts turn cold with its grand tour of poverty, crookedness, sleaze, abandonment. Shaking with nerves on the landing of a slum tenement while the whole world seems to spin around you. That is the winding, gritty beauty of the city. It is difficult to appreciate such beauty when you are the victim of its terror, but I know ? objectively ?the city is beautiful; dirty and beautiful.

My position as an android has freed me to live almost completely as a witness rather than a protagonist. It is a privilege, if a lonely one. I can stand all night like a streetlight, listening to the groggy noises the city makes in its sleep, watching the shadows creep across it like stubble growing on a face, the dirt like sleep in tired eyes, and feeling the homeless air on my skin. I become like the air myself, like god, the ultimate voyeur. I see into the little compartments that people call their private lives. I?m sure I have become invisible to many. Unlike god, however, I am restricted by my personality, such as it is, and so this voyeurism does not constitute my perfect fulfilment. If I get tired of life on the streets I can usually find part time work and a cheap place to sleep. I can watch the warm, bright screens in a bar and listen to the voices of strangers as I clean up the spilt drink. Beyond that, however, life occasionally presents one with actual situations, actual opportunities for involvement in one thing or another, even if those situations soon slip undone like badly tied knots. And on those occasions I sometimes feel the vain urge to step out of my invisibility and participate.

I kept my rendezvous with Lolly and another was made. And another. Inside and outside. The two were mixing more and more. Lolly?s apartment became like the living room of the city, and I, an unpaying lodger, would drop in and make the place untidy. I came and went quite as I pleased. Following both my natural inclinations and my premonition that my silence had been the source of my success on that first evening, I said very little. What I did say often consisted if little other than flat, inflectionless non-sequiturs. I did everything deliberately, like a poor actor. My success, apparently, continued and waxed.

It is obvious to the point of absurdity that we could not progress far in this manner. The distance I lavished on our relationship that seemed to me my only advantage and attraction was also an obstacle to that attraction being fulfilled. Our complex and absorbing roles of symbiotic non-communication formed a perfect, self-contained world, deeply attractive in many ways, but unfortunately unable to maintain itself over time.


As if to demonstrate that anything is possible and that life can be endlessly novel, Lolly invited me out to the Grand Hotel Restaurant. It was a languid enough night for such luxury. The stars were blue, and seemed puffed up somehow by the city?s warm airs. I was once again under the enervating influence of the only drug I had ever found to affect my senses ? the drug of being a perplexing foreign body in the emotional world of another person; one that something must be made of, or done with. We were spending the night on Lolly?s purse. I thought of the soft, velvety pouch, the gold lips snipped ornately shut, the treasure-like contents of chips. Money seemed to me a very feminine thing. It was as if she could open up her purse, dip in her slender fingers, and pull out all the sensual wonder of the night to give me to taste and to wear, stars instead of coins in its silky mouth.

The Grand Hotel Restaurant stands like a battered Disney castle in the Penthouse Quarter, where fur coats and jewellery are reflected in dirty puddles, all the lights are gold and perfume spikes the air. It is not really a hotel at all, although the interior is designed as a cross between a hotel and a palace. The Grand Hotel Restaurant is always open and guests may drift in as they might drift in to a deserted building to shelter, the great difference being you would never expect such comforts and pleasures from a deserted building.

There are many wide, carpeted staircases in the Restaurant, and many lifts. The guests may choose to settle where they wish. The staff must then approach them and cater for their needs, whatever they might be. It is a restaurant, of course, so those needs are primarily food and drink, but they may extend to massage, conversation, music, almost anything, for a fee. Generally, though, the staff is renowned for being so unobtrusive that it is as if you have been served by invisible hands. It was a place that reeked of expensiveness, and I heard the tinging of an antique till with every step I took up the cascade of stairs. This really was a lady of eclectic tastes and habits.

Lolly found a room that she seemed to think suitable and we entered through tall double doors. The room seemed an immense hall first of all, but when we seated it became intimate, as if we needed all that space after all, to let the atmosphere between us expand fully. One side of the hall was a convex bay of windows overlooking the city. We sat facing each other at the great, floating chandelier table, which glowed with a soft, central light.

I like to talk sometimes, but just for the sound of words and the feel of them in my mouth; just for the pleasure of talk. I do not like to talk philosophy and try to define things that cannot be defined. In such conversations misunderstanding is the only possible outcome on both sides. I especially dislike talking about myself, with all the imprecision that involves. Still, I will talk about myself if I am asked to, and remind myself that all my words are erroneous the moment they are uttered. A conversation was now fast approaching, one of a kind that occurs only on rare occasions in the outspread palm of eternity. But there is all the time in the cosmos, and time unfolds, and they do occur; the kind of conversation in which there is something like confrontation, or truth, perhaps, that heartbreaking old dead end. I could feel it coming. I looked out on the cold loneliness of the crystalline city, the buildings myriad as the petals of an unfolding chrysanthemum. I breathed in deeply, shivered a little with a kind of vertiginous serenity.

?The city is beautiful,? I offered.

?It?s very lonely,? said Lolly, sipping on her drink.

?That?s what I meant.?

Lolly tapped a cigarette on the surface of the table nervously and looked across at me in something like irritation.

?I?ve got to ask you something.?

?Anything!?

?Do you think there is a difference between androids and humans??

?Of course.?

?What??

?It?s very obvious really, although people seem to think it?s some great mystery. The difference is love. There is really no such thing as love, of course, but it?s a paradox ? humans need to believe in this lie in order to survive. I suppose it?s the basic need for immortality. Someone long ago sanctified this desperate, fearful need with the word, ?love.? They hoped this would set the seal on their immortality. It was an act of magic, an illusion. Androids, on the other hand, being unable to reproduce, have no such need to sanctify under any name. We have a very different relationship with death. We are more intimate with it. We came out of darkness directly, not via biological life, just as a light might be flicked on. And we may be flicked off again just as easily. To the android life and death are one, consciousness is not so personal a thing. It can be switched on and off.?

I felt as if I had delivered a cruel and triumphant blow, like a defendant whose case has been going badly who stands up to deliver a speech which suddenly overturns all previous evidence. Lolly had fallen on the defensive.

?But different androids would give different answers, wouldn?t they??

?Yes. But you are asking me.?

?So that?s your opinion, not a universal truth.?

?Of course.?

?Then, if you?re an individual, how can you pretend to be so indifferent to everything? It?s not because you?re an android ? it?s just you! You?re scared of who you are! You don?t want to know, so you just keep telling yourself you?re an android. It?s your excuse for everything. You think you?re contented, but you?re not. You?re in the depths of despair. You dare not believe that you?re the same as us humans, because then you?d have to ask who you are. And you don?t know!?

I felt no need to respond to this. It was obvious Lolly was the one with something to prove. Mistaken until proved correct. Then, for an instant, and for reasons I cannot identify, there kindled within me the genuine urge to ask a question, an urge that might be called curiosity.

?Tell me truthfully,? I said, ?Why do you like androids??

Of course, I had asked the question before, but only in a cursory fashion. I had not asked the question in my own mind, and suddenly I felt as if it was I who was the fool and the dupe for not having even wondered before.

She looked up between damp, pretty lashes, bit her lip, and considered. She hadn?t expected the question, and she seemed now to consider it freshly and earnestly, as if we were both sitting outside of the situation, analysing it.

?Most people?s souls are hard to reach because there?s such a tangle of environment and upbringing in the way. With androids the soul is pure, but helpless, as if it is preserved in a can. I feel like reaching in and trying to pull it out, to save it. Even androids die. Don?t you want to grasp this life while you have it? Don?t you want your existence to be confirmed? Your soul to be known??

There seemed no answer to these last questions, so I began to speak at random, as one might consult an oracle such as the I Ching. Whatever I said, it seemed to me, would be of equal relevance to such redundant questions.

?Please look ? the city is a bubble. It is a floating world. The humans may let us continue in liberty, or they may decide to dismantle us all, or put us to work in mines. We may resist or we may not. And if we resist, we may prevail, or not. Nothing is certain. I don?t understand this insistence of yours on trying to force something to happen. It?s like wrestling with air.?

?Don?t you believe in anything??

?I believe in the ultimate mystery of consciousness.?

There was a pause.

?Really? Good! That?s good! So, if you believe in mystery, how would you feel if I told you I loved you??

?It would be pleasing, perhaps, but it would not be true. You can?t love me, however much you might want to. There is no bond of need.?

She was silent. I watched her face, noticed a minute, thoughtful blinking. Something like laughter began to shrug and bubble at the corners of her lips. All her movements had become slight and lucid, like the quickest, tiniest of ripples on the surface of a pond.

?I love you.? The words winked finally to the surface, as if that was all that was left to say, a self-contained absurdity about to burst at any moment.

There was no particular need for me to hesitate in my reply. It was like cutting through water. There was no resistance.

?I?ll tell you why you can never love me ? because any of the things you say to me you could be saying to any other android. How many androids have you been with? What is the longest you have ever been with any of them??

Tears began to roll down her face. It was clear I could do as I pleased. It was most especially clear to me, because I realised I really did not care what happened at all. So I watched, and waited. She seemed to break down by degrees, almost as if my passivity allowed it all, and soon she was sobbing.

I looked away now. I could still hear her crying and blowing her nose, but it was a little out of focus, a background to the cityscape.

?I?m going home.?

She was standing next to me. I looked up into her reddened eyes.

?Here?s some money for the meal and door charge.?

She placed some chips from her purse on the table.

Then, after a sort of hiccup, she said, as if a thought had suddenly occurred to her, as if she had stumbled upon something obvious, a loophole that could undo the whole conversation, rewind to before it began, ?Can I see you again??

I looked out at the city.

?OK.?

I did not look up at her again. She was gone. There was only stillness.

I turned my eyes away from the city and down to my own hands. I watched the tiny, tremoring pulses in their veins in remote satisfaction.

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