My god, she thought. Had it been happening to him, too? She tilted her head and examined his brown eyes. It was him, the one she had been seeking now for months, like a rare and splendid color glimpsed at dawn never replicated throughout the rest of the day. “I'm sorry,” she said. Her pulse pounded in her ears. “I promise that I haven't been running away."
"Then, come on,” he said and towed her out the door before she could even grab her purse.
* * * *
They used his keys and ID to get through the employees’ entrance at the rear of the zoo. The bored security guard smiled and waved them past. Just as she had dreamed, moonlight made everything silver and mysterious: fences and the sleepy-eyed dun pony in the petting zoo, barns, even the stagnant old turtle pond. Bats flitted overhead, black against the deep blue night sky, and wind rustled through the treetops. The air was deliciously cool.
She and Barry toured the drowsing water buffalo, the giraffes, the okapi, the zebras. He tucked her arm over his, so that their strides kept time with each other. With every moment, Barry seemed more solid, more really there with her. But it had been like that before, and in the end, she was always left at the mercy of all the other less desirable Barrys who crowded him out.
"This is lovely,” she said as they paused at the elk paddock. The lead bull's eyes glittered with reflected starlight. “But it won't last. It never does. I just don't think the universe wants us to be together.” They walked on to the next exhibit.
"Forget the universe,” he said and turned her to face him in front of the mouse deer enclosure. The little animals had clustered into a wary pint-sized herd at the far end. “What do you want?"
"I want—” Sadee, the dog, dashed by again in her mind, equally alive and dead. Carina and her wildly colored hair wavered in and out of existence. Melinda and Carl bought a new condo and simultaneously filed for divorce. She struggled to focus. “I want—only to see the beauty in the world, the good things, whatever will make us happiest."
"Then we'll have to chart our course carefully,” he said. “Keep our eyes on the prize and all that.” He tucked a lock of her flyaway hair behind her ear.
Then he faded, and balding Insurance-Barry stood before her. As always, the corners of his mouth turned down.
She pushed them up with her fingers, squinting hard, picturing the headful of silver hair with all her might. “I have a puppy,” she said desperately, “Sadee's puppy, conceived on the day I found her. She didn't run in front of a car. She lived!"
That other terrible scenario, the one with the bloody carcass, faded until it was only a faint shadow, the echo of something tragic that might have happened, but, in the end, had not.
The night rippled, then his silver hair again gleamed in the moonlight. He seemed astonishingly, heartbreakingly, real. “I'm almost as good as a puppy,” he said helpfully, eyebrows quirked in that familiar appealing way.
"Almost.” The breath caught in her chest. Her arms stole around his neck, and she leaned in so close, she felt his heart beating under her cheek.
"And I'm already housebroken,” he said into her hair. “Let's not forget that."
The multitude of other possible Barrys pressed in, as though she were surrounded by a crowd of insistent ghosts. I will not see you! she told them. You all belong somewhere else! Go away!
One by one, then, they faded like smoke on the wind. This Barry felt suddenly anchored, as though he were here to stay. Let those other Allys, who were undoubtedly all skinnier, younger, funnier, smarter, and more sophisticated, pursue their own versions of Barry, she thought.
She tilted her head back and gazed up at the glittering, cut-glass stars, holding on with all her might. This one, universe, was hers.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Films by Kathi Maio
WAITING ON A SHIP CALLED TOMORROW
No matter what their literary orientation, fiction writers of all stripes often turn their hands to Science Fiction at least once. Sometimes they are just “slumming” in popular formulas. (A disastrous proposition, that, since it disrespects not only their potential audience, but even their own work.) Sometimes the themes they want to explore are just better suited to the speculative realm. And sometimes they have a hankering to send a wake-up call by relating a cautionary tale of the near or distant future.
When Margaret Atwood, the well-known poet and “literary” novelist of Canada, published The Handmaid's Tale in 1985, it was quite obviously a fictional warning. (And her novel about a fundamentalist Christian totalitarian state being established in the U.S. seems even more timely now than it was twenty years ago.) At a time when toxic contamination has left much of the (white, elite) population sterile, women capable of reproduction are labeled “handmaids” and are relegated to breeding servitude in the households of the owning class.
Atwood's narrative, as told in the voice of a handmaid called Offred, is compelling, and her message clear. Sadly, when it came time to try to translate her story to the screen, much of the power of the novel was lost. The 1990 film, directed by Volker Schlndorff, is earnest enough, but oddly uninvolving, despite a screenplay by Harold Pinter and performances by the likes of Natasha Richardson, Robert Duvall, and Faye Dunaway.
The opposite is the case with mystery novelist P. D. James's experiment in the speculative, The Children of Men (1993). James (aka Baroness James of Holland Park) is renowned as a detective novelist—and rightly so. But she seems quite ill at ease dabbling in a science fiction plot. Like Atwood's earlier novel, the themes of The Children of Men involve widespread infertility, totalitarian regimes, and class/cultural domination. But James's viewpoint about these issues is harder to fathom.
The year is 2021. When a religious (Christian) and political dissident named Julian is the first woman to become pregnant after more than twenty years of global infertility, it is up to an emotionally withdrawn Oxford don named Theo Faron, who just happens to be the cousin of Britain's semi-benign dictator, the Warden of England, to protect her.
The voice of James's novel is strangely outdated. Phrases like “crenellated heart” and “lugubrious cook” appear on the same page. Unbelievable for 2021, perhaps. (Looking forward now, I suspect that the move toward abbreviated text-messaging lingo will be so complete in fifteen years that no “word” over six letters long will even exist.) Still, since the novel's hero is a fifty-year-old scholar of Victorian history and literature, the language he uses seems odd yet appropriate.
James has other touches in her narrative that seem creepily right, too. The genteel childless developing an unhealthy fascination for artificial doll babies and household pets is one example. Broken porcelain dolls are buried in consecrated ground, and bonneted kittens must endure christenings. And then there is the Quietus, a ceremony of mass suicide—or is it murder?—designed for sickly elderly that an aging population can no longer support.
Despite the many evocative plot bits and narrative touches, The Children of Men, never really comes together as a novel, however. Part of the problem is that the characters never interact in ways that seem credible—so that by the time a blatantly away-in-the-manger birth occurs, with Theo and Julian murmuring “Oh, my darling” at one another, it is hard not to guffaw.
One wonders, too, whether James doesn't have an unconscious admiration for some of the very things (like an anti-immigrant uber-Thatcherite dictatorial government) that she seems to be criticizing. Certainly, an almost fundamentalist Church of England religiosity seems to be cited as the cure for infertility as well as general futuristic malaise.
In the end, The Children of Men, as a novel, fails to satisfy. And with the almost certain decreasing returns audiences of Science Fiction endure when a novel or story is adapted to the screen, how could one expect anything but disaster from a cinematic retelling of James's novel? Well, they say keep your expectations low and you won't be disappointed. But in this case, you could set your expectations as high as you like, and you will likely still be underestimat
ing the movie of The Children of Men.
Point one (two and three) in its favor is that the film of The Children of Men is directed by the exceedingly gifted Mexican filmmaker, Alfonso Cuarn. Among the art house set, Cuarn is previously best known for his road movie, Y Tu Mam Tambin (2001), while sf fans will remember Cuarn as the helmer behind the best of the Harry Potter films, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004). And I personally became a fan when I experienced the magic realism of his adaptation of the Frances Hodgson Burnett kiddie-classic A Little Princess in 1995.
Clearly, this is a filmmaker capable of turning his talents to just about any text or genre. And he was a brilliant choice to bring a little hard-nosed hopefulness and breathtaking action to P. D. James's dreary and pious novel.
When Cuarn took on the project, the first thing he did was toss the half dozen or so screenplays that had been written since the James novel was optioned. With HBO telepic veteran Timothy J. Sexton, Cuarn then fashioned (with additional writing credits going to David Arata, Mark Fergus, and Hawk Ostby) a screenplay that launched from the basic locale and plot root of the James novel. That is, humans have been incapable of reproduction for almost twenty years, and this loss of a societal future has only exacerbated global devolvement into chaos and racial/class conflict, even in Jolly Olde England. But then Cuarn and Sexton take that story in a much different and totally riveting direction.
In Cuarn's London, which proclaims itself the last outpost of civilization, it is 2027 (six years later than James's date). Our anti-hero, Theo Faron (Clive Owen), is a soul-dead bureaucrat living in a garbage-strewn city where thugs attack commuter trains, immigrants of all nationalities and types are rounded up and shipped to detention camps at will, and coffee shops are bombed on a regular basis. The world is gray and hopeless. However, the rich, as always, reap what spoils exist—whether it is saving priceless artworks for their personal enjoyment, or parading exotic (and I mean really exotic) pets through the last green parks.
For most people, there is no art that hasn't been graffitied over, and only the bleakest future. Pandemics and strife deplete the remaining population. The last baby born on earth, a young man of eighteen from Buenos Aires, has just been murdered in a brawl outside a bar. That death has only deepened the collective despair. Is it any wonder then that the oft-advertised suicide kit, Quietus, is a bestseller?
Once upon a time, Theo would have agitated for social justice in the remaining days. Now, he just comforts himself with booze and cigarettes, until an old lover, Julian (Julianne Moore) has him kidnapped for a chat. A revolutionary leading a pro-immigrant group called the Fishes, Julian challenges Theo to get transit papers from his cousin (Danny Huston), the Minister of Arts, to help the group transport a woman to the coast.
Theo is reluctantly willing to call in the familial favor for money. But he becomes drawn into the plot on a very personal level only when both government forces and traitorous revolutionaries express their intention to kill him.
Guess our hero wants to live, after all. Especially when he meets the young woman needing transport. She is a young black woman named Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) who is large with child. Unsure who the father is, this new Eve is certain of one thing: She wants to give her baby a fighting chance at a future. To do this, she hopes to rendezvous with a ship called Tomorrow, sent to the coast of Britain to meet her by The Human Project, a group of great scientists and philosophers who still work to save humanity.
Is The Human Project real, or simply a myth suitable only as a punch line to bad jokes? Theo isn't sure. But Kee herself is a miracle he wouldn't have believed, so he devotes himself to getting her where she needs to go.
Kee and Theo's hegira is a harrowing journey, to be sure. And director Cuarn makes sure his audience is completely immersed in the action and the violence. To this end, he worked with long-time cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and a very hardworking handheld camera operator named George Richmond, to shoot much of the movie in amazingly intricate wide-lens extended shots that go on forever through bombardments and gunfire, leaving the audience (as well, no doubt, as the actors) breathless and exhausted.
This is what an “adventure” movie is supposed to do, folks. Not just assault your senses with sights and sounds, but actually pull you into the plot on the most visceral level possible. This is action that is more than a spectacle. It is an emotional experience. And I truly cannot remember a film that has ever done it so well.
The Children of Men is a wild ride of a very serious movie. Because of the pace, some of the motivations and subplots are never explicated in the clearest way possible. But since we are experiencing the plot pretty much in real time with Theo, the sometimes confusing story shorthanding wasn't just forgivable. It was actually right.
Cuarn's 2027 is, of course, a commentary on society today: on the willing suspension of civil liberty in the face of terror; on our growing distrust of the “other"; on the poisoning of our planet to the point where it can no longer sustain us and our children. All pretty bleak stuff. But somehow, amidst all the decay and violence, Cuarn never really abandons hope. And he encourages us to feel the same.
The character of Theo is essential to this transformative journey from comfortable despair to courageous struggle. Fortunately, Clive Owen is up to the task. The supporting cast also does fine work, including Michael Caine, as (once again) the most likable character in the movie—an aged hippie pot farmer named Jasper, who has a good heart and a talent for farting on cue. Caine provides much of the comic relief in the film, but the movie includes many other surprisingly funny moments, like the frightening scene in which Theo tries to make his getaway in a car that won't start, pushing it through a muddy, rutted farm path, with murderous thugs in hot pursuit. The scene is both heart-pounding and hilarious.
Dear Reader, what can I say? You do not want to miss this movie. If at all possible, see it in a movie house, on a large screen, with surround-sound. The photography is desolate but gorgeous, and the action is as exciting as you are ever likely to witness. Experiencing it in all its big, full-frame glory is definitely the way to go. Still, if you have no opportunity to see The Children of Men in a theater, do not despair. (Alfonso Cuarn is, after all, the enemy of hopeless negativity). This is one movie that will have a lasting impact even if you are forced to watch it on a ten-inch black and white Zenith.
[Back to Table of Contents]
The Great White Bed by Don Webb
In Don Webb's new story collection, When They Came, Bruce Sterling is quoted as saying, “Don Webb is a genius. He's not widely appreciated. There are some things mankind was not meant to know.” Perhaps humanity was not meant to know the things alluded to in this new story. Or maybe it's more frightening if we were meant to know these things....
* * * *
I wanted to write about the bed because I thought it would be therapeutic. For pretty obvious reasons I never got over that summer, and I know there's a mental part to go along with the physical part. I don't write about the book. And see, I'm already there. I can't make myself think about what I need to think about. The room. The bedroom. I can start with that. It smelled of geraniums. My grandmother had loved them and it had become my job to keep them alive after she died. She grew them in coffee cans, and when they got too root-bound she would put them in plastic buckets that she got working at the cleaners. Clay pots were an extravagance. There were five of the big light blue buckets on a special shelf built across the windows in the bedroom, so the bedroom always had a green smell.
It was hot too. There were two swamp coolers that cooled the house down. One in the living room at the front of the house, one in the den in the back. Neither supplied much cool air to the place where I slept. I remember the first thing that Grandpa had asked when I moved in with him that summer was if I wanted to sleep with him. I thought that was creepy and I said I'd sleep in the guest bedroom, where Granny did her sewing. It was so hot that I never turned down the big white thick bedspread on the bed
and lay on the sheets. I just lay on top of it. I didn't want anything over my body. At home I slept on a twin bed; the king size bed seemed the biggest thing in the world to me.
I was thirteen. Next year would be junior high.
I helped Grandpa out. I cooked his meals, did his laundry, cut the grass. In retrospect it was a big job for someone my age, but I came from a family of workers. I didn't do a good job with the laundry and my food repertoire relied heavily on Spam baked in the oven covered with ketchup.
My friends were rich kids, mainly in camp or hanging out at the private swimming pool. These days I know they weren't rich, but they seemed rich to me. I amused myself with TV, watching old black and white comedies in syndication. I remember that summer had a good dose of The Dick Van Dyke Show mixed up with the strangeness. Cable TV was new to Doublesign that year. We got twenty-eight stations. Grandpa would get up early and wake me up. He had been a farmer, before they moved to town. Kids are not supposed to see the dawn in summer, no matter what anyone says. He liked cereal for breakfast. He really liked one called Team, I don't think they make it anymore. He would make coffee and I would pour the cereal. Afterward he would go off to read the paper and I would do the dishes. If I had any yard work to do I would do it in the mornings before it got too hot. I trimmed the hedge, cut the grass, weeded out the dandelions. Early on I had tried to keep a little garden going. I had planted some tomatoes and cucumbers. But one day Grandpa weeded them all out of the bed where I had planted them. His mind was going, but no one in the family would say so. When I tried to stop him he hit me with his cane and said I was stupid. Like I say, even without the weirdness, it was a big job.
Noon would come around and Mom would join us for lunch, which I had made. She worked downtown, a mysterious place full of much activity. She would eat my ketchup-covered Spam and canned green beans and visit with her dad. Sometimes he would ask her things like “How come I haven't seen you in a month?” even though she came every day. In the afternoons he would forget that we had eaten lunch and ask me when the hell I was going to fix it. He took a nap about three, and I know this will sound strange, but I started napping too. Summer was long and boring and it was easy to doze off. I would lay down in the green smell on the huge white bed and snooze.
FSF Magazine, May 2007 Page 12