REPLIKANT

After the death of my partner in 1985, I lay in bed for half a year, could hardly get up, and had nightmares every night. Now I will turn them into something new and beautiful.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe... Attack Ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time to die.”

The last words of replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) in BLADE RUNNER. He could not expand his lifespan.

Back in 1984 I remember seeing this film in the cinema for the first time with my new lover who was very tall and very blond and had an uncanny resemblance to the replicant, Roy Batty. He adored the movie and watched it often. A year later when he turned 25 years old, he discovered the first small signs of ageing on his body that made him panic, he could not accept the reality of ageing, and his behaviour began to change to the extreme. He died that same year in a mysterious car accident in Spain while we were vacationing together. There were 5 dead and 3 seriously injured­, and my lover was the driver. Maybe he himself had a set lifespan, like the replicant, and perhaps he unconsciously knew it. By coincidence or premonition I was not in the car that morning.

I was frozen for months, in my nightmares he would haunt me, sometimes following me slowly down a lonely country road, sitting in the wrecked car of an old white Mercedes-Benz, and then he would ask me to get in. Or I found the wreck in a ditch, hearing his desperate calls for help, but I suspected he was just trying to lure me in, taking me to the intermediate realm where he had been trapped since the accident. In my dreams, this in-between world looked like Blade Runner, Paris Texas, or Blood Simple movie sets, and I began to enjoy meeting him there. In the winter I met a new man and those dreams stopped immediately.