An Evening at Joe's (9 page)

"HEAVEN, THIS WAY... what the fuck... and who in the hell is that?" Behind a white iron gate, a rather paunchy man, dressed in white robes garnished with feathered wings, seems to be motioning to her. "Wait a minute... the sign says Heaven is over there. Then why is he, hey... hey you... wait a minute... I thought I was going to Heav... what the fuck, who's that?" She whips past the angel smiling and waving at her. . .

"Maybe next time darling... have a good life... again!" he says.

Try as she may she can't seem to slow down or make herself move towards that white iron gate she so desperately wants to enter. Her speed suddenly accelerates towards a secondary light, not white. She is starting to feel a tinge of anxiety creep into her cells. "I don't get it, and who are they?" Two people wave at her, a man and a woman. They are standing in front of a door with a sign on it that reads "IMMORTALS, KEEP RIGHT." "Boy, they both look familiar, isn't she, hey wait a fucking minute... is this a joke or what?"

The woman is dressed in a tight Betty Boop cocktail dress, her breasts bleed out from the top. She has short platinum blonde hair, big red lips and a large toothy smile. The man is bare chested, wearing tight black Eldridge Cleaver cock pants. His brown hair is in a pony tail with the prerequisite earring in place. "What the fuck... those are the two bozos from that dumb TV show I used to watch as a kid. What were their names? I think his was Duncan and hers was Amanda. That's it, Duncan and Amanda . . . what the hell are they doing here?" As she speeds by, they both smile and wave her on as if she is rounding third base on her way to home plate in the seventh game of the world series.

Her emotions seem to be turning to that of anger, even rage, as she whips by on her way to what looks like an EXIT sign. The sign is red and is above a dark brown hole. The closer she gets the worse she feels. Even the air has a hint of putrefied life in it. She can hear something in the distance, it seems to be the sounds of people yelling at each other. "Where the hell am I going now... Hell?" But it wasn't Hell, or was it? "God damn, I recognize those voices . . . that sounds like Captain Panzer screaming at Sergeant Paonessa again. What the fuck did he do this time?" Her speed is now in deceleration moving toward the brown hole, her stomach tingles and her ears whistle, her body feels heavy and constipated.

Without warning she is sucked in, the smell is unbearable, the pressure agonizing. She is being pushed down and down a long slimy tube that hugs her with its ribbed walls. She feels fear, pain, and all the complex emotions of an approaching event unknown. "Oh god this hurts, I can't breathe, I can't move... oh no NO Please!!!!!" Ear crushing decibels spew forth the pulsing sounds that punctuate her spiraling movements down towards the outflow. The apex is shattered with the reversing noisy suck of her birth, again.

Silence, calm, stillness, repose ripped by her desperate gasp for air. Chest heaving, the knotted cramped pain of rebirth line her under-skin to the tip of her tongue. The pungent moist odor of this atmosphere's air is the first sign of life she tastes. Her mind is blank, she knows what has happened, but cannot focus on the truth of her experience. Heavy eyelids cautiously unclose. The first image is of the night's deep blue ether holding the four moons of URR hostage. Such beauty only seems fitting after her recent purge....

"Lieutenant, Lieutenant, I've been searching for you since this morning. Are you alright, where have you been... Commander Ginsberg is mad as hell and needs to speak to you at once. It seems your squad's attack on quadrant 32-H has failed. Not only have the NOLLEB fled the planet intact, but the entire operation has gone over budget and I am personally getting flack from fleet Commanders Ginsberg and King at Gauttlemont headquarters."

"Slow down Corporal Hillman, slow down. Can't you see I feel like shit... what the hell happened to our men, what day is it for christsakes, where is everybody..."

"Lieutenant, don't you remember, your squad was hit by..."

"Oh god, Corporal, when I think of the fucking paperwork I could just... hold on, hold on... does the Commander know all the details of what happened here?"

"Not yet, Lieutenant, a final report is being compiled as we speak."

"Well then, Corporal, get me Master-Sergeant Abramowitz. He's been through enough of these episodes to give those shitheads at headquarters what they want. I'll be damned if I'm going to take the fall for this disaster. And besides, if we don't give them the kill numbers they want, our plans to spin this sequence off to a wider alien congregation are history. Captain Panzer put it best when he said, 'Boys, they'd better not fuck with my retirement,' and you know what, Corporal Hillman?"

"What, Lieutenant?"

"I agree one hundred percent with him... so get your ass in gear and get Master-Sergeant Abramowitz on the communicator before URR and the few of us left here become one with the cosmos. OR DO YOU THINK YOU CAN LIVE FOREVER...?"

 

ASSISTANT PROPS MASTER: Don Anderson

 

Props on a television series include anything on the set that's not nailed down or being worn by an actor. On a week's notice, the props department could he called upon to come up with anything from groceries for MacLeod's kitchen to an "antique" tea set for a Japanese flashback.

Don Anderson's eagerness to contribute "The Methos Chronicles" to this project is just one more example of how Highlander managed to capture the imagination of its entire crew. While the props department might not be the first place you would think to look for script ideas, on Highlander it seemed that everyone was putting their creativity to the test, imagining their own stories for the characters they came to know and love.

 

 

When I was born, the world was still new; the morning dew of life clung purposefully to tree branches and walls, in hopes of surviving the inevitability of the rising sun that would extinguish it for another day. We were far luckier than that. We not only survived, we flourished in our home in the desert. I was welcomed into a large, happy family that occupied the same oasis as my father's grandfather had, long ago. My people had lived there, without interruption, for much longer than that, but our oral history contained specifics for only the last 100 or so years.

Nothing about my childhood was in any way remarkable, compared to the others in my village, or for that matter, from my own siblings. I was the second son of three boys and two girls by a father who claimed vague relation to an extinct royal court and a mother who descended from a line of traders who had settled in the area when she was just a baby herself. I did not lack for attention or love from my parents or my extended family that populated the immediate environs. We lived gratefully together under the limited shade of the fig trees and palms that grew around our home, giving us resources to barter with the many traders who passed through our oasis with items that we desired which remained unavailable to us by other means. In this way we continued with our lives, joyously greeting each new day as another opportunity to improve our condition. When I consider my past from this present perspective, I realise that my entire world was contained in that place with those people, surrounded by a sense of belonging that I have never known since that time. My life has always been about surviving, in one way or another, but the meaning that it had to me then, with the people that I loved and admired, has shaded somewhat in the ensuing years of my existence. The perfect simplicity of that time and place has left me searching for a replacement that I can never find.

Our home was surrounded by an unforgiving desert, which is now called Egypt, that tolerated no mistakes by unprepared travelers. Attempting to ford its expanse without the proper provisions was a fool's errand: certain, parched death awaited those who made a single mistake while fording the cruel distance between oases. Many of the childhood lessons that I learned were centred around tales of the sand engulfing unwary caravans who had fatally misjudged the ferocity of the sun overhead, or the amount of water necessary to complete the journey between the sanctuaries of population. Nothing and no one lived for long outside the boundaries of the settlements that grew around those sources of liquid. Water is the most important substance in that land, the currency of life itself.

It so happened that when I reached my 28th birthday, our home was visited by a terrible calamity. My father was made aware that the well from which we drew our sustenance had dropped in level more than ever before. It had been low in the past, as the underground streams that fed it ebbed and flowed, but never had it sunk to such a desperate mark before. There was an assembly of all the people in our settlement, so that we could decide upon a course of action that would permit us to continue living without it.

We had to move from there, and soon, but where could we go? None of my family had known any other place except this one, only a few of our people had ventured beyond our immediate borders for long. We recounted the tales of other oases that we had heard from the traders who had rested here, and tried to decide which ones might be close enough for us to travel to. We also had to consider whether any of those potential destinations might be occupied by a clan that would be hostile to our arrival. That turned out to be the least of our immediate concerns.

 

 

When the Bedouin scouting party found me, I was certain that I had died, but they revived me with water from their gourds and carried me back to their camp. I was so disoriented that at first I could not understand what they were saying, but I gradually awakened and explained to them what had happened. As the caravan from our village followed the bearings to our new home that my father was taking from the sun, we saw a sandstorm forming in the distance. We became completely disoriented and lost track of each other when the maelstrom hit; the sky became darker than night as we were engulfed by the swirling sand. I crouched on the ground and huddled into a ball, protected by the cape that I wrapped around myself to shut out the insane sounds of the turbulence. It seemed to go on forever, because day was indistinguishable from night until it finally stopped and I emerged from my cover to find that I was alone. I struggled to find some trace of my family, but the landscape was completely different, having been dramatically reformed by the storm. It took two days before I came upon the realisation that I should continue following my father's directions to the oasis and hope that the others had done the same. With only a small amount of water left in my container, I knew that I had to begin moving again or I would perish in that unforgiving terrain.

I grew weaker and weaker, it was apparent that I wouldn't make it much further; I was seriously disoriented from my lack of food and water. The last thing I remember was thinking that if I could just take one more step, I would make it to safety....

 

 

These Bedouins were masters of riding camels across the parched land and I begged them to go out and look for my family, taking them some supplies and providing guidance back to this oasis. Four days later the riders returned to confirm my dreaded fears that none of my family had survived. While I sat there in shock, the Bedouin elders went away and discussed among themselves what they were to do, returning to offer me the safety of their camp. They taught me thgir ways of the desert, how to find water and food, and eventually they learned to accept me into their flock. We lived together for many years, until it became obvious that I was not growing older, The elders had me brought to their meeting tent, where one of the men from the original party who had found me was growing noticeably older. They passed their talking stick around and they debated what I could be, this man who didn't change appearance with the passage of time. They decided that I was either a god or a demon, both of which were unwanted in their home.

During a ceremony to honour the next full moon, I was forced to fight their best warrior to the death. That was the second time I died. When the sun rose the next morning and I had revived again, they tied my hands together and I was banished from the oasis. I was transported away by a small party, whose job it was to ensure that I was left far enough from their camp that I could not return. I was sent out into the vast solitude with no weapon and no water, left to die far from the only home that I knew. I watched them fade away in the distance as they made their way back. I was as terrified as they were. I had no way of knowing what I was, any more than they did; there was absolutely no frame of reference for these things that were happening to me. I stumbled upon a pile of bones and used them to rub apart the strands that bound my hands together in front of me so I could continue into the unknown, able at least to defend myself.