Archive for the ‘Edd Vick’ Category
The Greeter
Friday, July 17th, 2009
Welcome to Heaven, Mister Jones. Please don’t try to move around just yet. It can be disorienting at first, especially among those who were recently decapitated. Oh, dear, I shouldn’t have said that.
Yes, here’s your head, squarely on your shoulders. Like new, yes? I could add just a bit of blood on your robe for effect, if you like. We do that for martyrs, you know – stigmata in the hands, burned stumps, and the like – but now we’re pretty easygoing about it, even if you did lose your head in a bizarre sausage factory accident.
If you’ll come through here we’ll get your kitted out with wings and a halo. S’not required, but we do like to look authentic for those passing through: dreamers, trippers, and of course everybody who’s going to Hell. The Big Guy’s funny that way.
No, I doubt you’ll meet him. Excuse me, Him. He’s just buried under believers these days. You understand, even if we did reset the bar a few decades ago. Didn’t you hear? Only Episcopalians, Muslims, Zoroastrians, and the odd Catholic these days. They all want to be next to Him. I don’t think we’ve seen more than a divine pinkie for a century. Excuse me, Pinkie. Heh, my little joke.
You were an atheist? Well, that can’t be right. Maybe you had a deathbed conversion? Oh, yes, ‘sausage factory accident’. Hmm, maybe somebody converted you after you died, like those folks in Utah do. I wouldn’t worry your wobbly head about it; I mean, you are here now and that’s what matters.
An efficiency expert? No, I think I’d have heard if we’d ever had one of those here. Sounds unpleasant.
My job? Well, it’s soft of unofficial greeter. Nobody appointed me, if that’s what you’re asking. I mean, we tried that whole military organization, Archangels, Principalities, Powers, and so on. We just got a little more touchie-feelie the past couple thousand years.
No need to get snotty about it. You wouldn’t even be here if we were more efficient. I’d like to see you do better.
the emily dickinson hour
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
I’m studying the telltales on one of my hovering cameras when Daisy O’Neill touches me lightly on the forearm. “Will I get copies of what you’re recording?”
“The whole world will,” I say. It’s in the contract when you’re chosen by the Pastime Foundation to have your mind squirted back for a ridealong with some historical figure.
“Not just what you choose to release to the net,” says Daisy. “I’d like copies of all of your feeds.” She’s a cinematographer. A brilliant one, according to the Foundation nabobs.
I nod. “I’ll give you the online password.”
Technicians move about doing techie things. A switch here, a knob there, and Daisy’s ready to make the leap from her skull into a poet a century and a half gone.
There’s something about the elasticity of spacetime that means we can only rip it enough to send somebody back a few times a year, and only for about an hour. The Foundation awards trips to those it deems worthy. Recipients pick from a list of historical figures for whom we’ve found DNA.
Who did Daisy choose? Not Orson Welles, not Hitchcock, Griffith, or Godard. She speaks of ‘negative space’ in Dickinson’s poetry, of ‘slant rhymes’ and an obsession with death. “Did you know,” she says, “that every poem of hers contained a body, a bed, or a coffin?”
This scene will go into the final cut.
“I memorized all of them,” she says. “I try to convert them to images.” She looks away from me, and it is in that instant that the lead technician throws his final switch. Her body is turned off while Daisy’s mind wings its way back to some time between 1830 and 1886. We can fine-tune it no more; she will have her hour some time during Emily Dickinson’s life. May it not be when the poet is asleep or in her mother’s womb.
The techs bustle about, keeping Daisy’s body breathing, monitoring their esoteric equipment, never paying her more attention than any other machine in the room. Only I and my cameras are watching when her eyes open earlier than expected. She sits up, shedding monitor pads.
“Hello Daisy,” I say. “Welcome back.”
“Daisy?” She stares around at the machinery, the institutionally drab walls. “The daisy follows soft the sun.”