And what's with teaching a little boy that you have unconditional love for him by encouraging him to trash your house and smear you with condiments? Although this scene is one of the more dramatic moments in the movie, I can't say that I found it particularly believable. As Gerrold's novel aptly illustrates, troubled children find defiance and destruction very easy, indeed. (It's self-control and a concerned empathy for others and their property with which they often struggle.) The final big emotional climax was also more overwrought than it needed to be, replete with dark shadows, flashing helicopter lights, and a somewhat labored string-ridden score.
As wonderful as it is to see a movie (any movie!) about the growing love between an adult and child as they struggle to make a family and forge a parent-child bond, I must admit that Martian Child often felt like it had been made for Lifetime Television or as one of the better holiday installments of the Hallmark Hall of Fame. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, as the Seinfeld cast might have said.) The film didn't always have the substance and/or entertainment value that we would expect in a feature film, despite the lovely performances by Bobby Coleman and John Cusack.
But as my lead rant would suggest, my biggest disappointment is the film's cowardice in not bringing David's gayness into the story. You might ask, Gentle Reader, why it matters whether they portray David as gay. To that, my first response is, if it doesn't matter, why not allow him to be what he is?
Moreover, don't we need to see gay characters in stories that aren't about their homosexuality, but simply about their humanity? Don't gay characters deserve to be fully visible, wholly sympathetic, and the stars of their own life stories?
Do we need to rewrite them as straight and then bring in Amanda Peet to play the dead wife's best friend turned bohemian love interest? Believe me, Amanda Peet is a very agreeable film presence, and her Harlie (there's one inside joke, anyway!) isn't objectionable in any way. Except that she's a beard.
I've heard that David Gerrold is generally pleased with the adaptation of his fictionalized memoir. And in an entry I spotted in his blog, he seems unfazed by the change, observing that “straight men can be just as good at being dads as gay men.” Good point. The thing is everyone knows that straight men can be good fathers. (Just think of all the heartwarming straight single dads you've seen in the culture, from oldies like Andy Griffith to Steve Carell's recent devoted papa and lovelorn widower in Dan in Real Life.) But does everyone also know that gay men can be phenomenal, loving dads?
I'd like to think so, but I live in the bluest state, Massachusetts—the only one that allows gay people to actually marry. And I can testify that even in Massachusetts there are plenty of people who have very rigid definitions of family and marriage, and who still too easily confuse homosexuality with pedophilia. These are the people who need to see positive images of a gay father and his son.
Still, I grant you, if John Cusack's David had been depicted as gay those people wouldn't have gone near the movie. But other people, including gay people still hungry to see themselves portrayed as positive loving parents, or as the brave space heroes in an episode of Star Trek, those people would have gone to see the movie and would have rejoiced.
The same week that I went to see the screening of Martian Child, J. K. Rowling made the offhand admission at a speaking gig that she always thought Dumbledore was gay. I was happy to hear it. I was less happy to hear that fine upstanding citizen groups thereafter demanded—not for the first time—that the Potter books be pulled from library shelves. Nor did I enjoy hearing Bill O'Reilly blast Rowling for being a “provocateur” performing an “indoctrination thing” aimed at the public. He was, it appears, outraged that she might be inciting the public toward feelings of “tolerance” and “parity."
Parity! Tolerance! That does sound dangerous! I only wish Martian Child could have delivered that kind of a truth-telling “indoctrination thing” to the multiplex.
[Back to Table of Contents]
The Second Descent by Richard Paul Russo
For Sirus
Richard Paul Russo has published half a dozen stories in our pages over the past twenty years, including “Watching Lear Dream” (July 1999) and “Tropical Nights at the Natatorium” (Sept. 2003). His novels include Subterranean Gallery, Ship of Fools, and three hardboiled SF novels, Destroying Angel, Carlucci's Edge, and Carlucci's Heart. He's currently working on a sequel to Ship of Fools, but he found time to write this dark and phantasmagoric new story.
A cold dense fog lay heavy on the mountain that morning. Rafael stood in the snow outside his tent and searched for the summit, which was only three or four hundred meters above them, but he could see nothing through the diffuse gray fog that hissed and crystallized into particles of ice, a kind of snowy mistfall.
Morning rituals would soon be underway: lighting the stove, melting snow for water, eating nutrition bars, taking down and packing the tents and sleeping bags and other equipment. For now, though, Rafael relished the few moments of quiet before the others awakened.
They had numbered seven, but were now only four—three were lost the day the summit had been reached. Fortunately, the priest was one of the four survivors, for it was quite possible he would again be needed.
Rafael turned toward the mist-shrouded east and regarded the two barely visible, roughly heaped mounds of snow, the three makeshift crosses. Mina had never been found, but they couldn't search any longer. Too much altitude, and no more oxygen. They needed to start down the mountain today.
Within the hour, the second descent would begin.
* * * *
Rafael remembers almost nothing of the first descent. Hazy images and vague feelings. Several deaths. Iliana says she remembers every detail ... and wishes she could forget every single one. She refuses to talk about it. Rafael thinks she may be lying, that she doesn't remember any more than he does.
* * * *
He doesn't understand why they're engaged in a second descent, or how it's even possible. As far as he knows, they only climbed the mountain once. He thinks that if he could remember the first descent, he would understand everything.
As they started down, Rafael glanced back at what they were leaving behind: used oxygen bottles, shredded plastic of various colors, broken tent skeletons, a tattered prayer wheel and other detritus, much of it from previous summit attempts; two bodies and three crosses. Not the first bodies to be left behind on this mountain, nor would they be the last.
The morning was uneventful. The sun broke through the mist and they strapped on their polarized goggles. They roped up to cross the Bernoulli Ice Field, a smooth and gently curved expanse that steepened and fell away on either side. A steady and deliberate pace, not technically difficult, but tedious. They completed the crossing by early afternoon, then stopped for a meal and rest before starting down the jagged stretch of crumbling rock and ice that would occupy the rest of their day and eventually bring them to a sheltered plateau.
Hardly anyone spoke as they ate. Rafael sat next to Iliana, who soon got up and sat by herself twenty meters from the others. Yusuf took her place and said, “It is not personal with her.” A ragged wound on the lean Egyptian's cheek was dark around the edges, and had shown no sign of healing over the past week.
"I know,” Rafael answered, although he didn't. For him, everything was personal, while for Yusuf nothing ever seemed to be. He looked into Yusuf's shining brown eyes and imagined he saw distances greater than either of them had ever traveled, and a thousand dead souls still on their final journeys. Rafael turned away.
* * * *
Rafael isn't completely certain he reached the summit. He doesn't know if his uncertainty and confusion are a result of oxygen deprivation or of something else. He knows that some did not even make the attempt, and for those who did make the final push, everyone was on their own—each awakened as he or she could, each melted snow and drank and ate or not as they chose, each left at whatever time they could manage.
Near the to
p, every step seemed impossibly difficult, and often minutes passed between each one. While still climbing he saw Yusuf stumble past him on his way back down, a lopsided grin of success frozen onto his face.
Rafael stopped climbing at some point, and after a few minutes of standing and swaying on top of the world, nearly falling toward the distant curving horizon of stunning white ice and clouds and blue sky and black rock, he started back down. But he still isn't certain it was the summit, isn't certain that it was anything more than the highest point he was capable of climbing.
On his own staggering return to high camp he passed Mina, who was still working her way up around the col, and he remembers thinking there wasn't much light left, and she was too far from the summit. He'd been incapable of saying or doing anything other than continuing down. He left her behind and never saw her again.
* * * *
Two nights later, Rafael stood with Iliana and Father Dominic on an icy ledge and searched for the lights of Kuma-Shan on the mountain below them. The night was cold and clear, but there were no signs of the city: no flickering orange of the torch-lit towers, no shining reflections of the palace's adamantine dome, no arcing trails of air vehicles.
"We should be able to see it by now,” the priest said.
Iliana snorted. “What does it matter? We'll never enter the city, we'll never even reach the gates."
The priest shrugged. He dug around in his parka and came up with a cigarette and lighter. He lit the cigarette and coughed, and Iliana just shook her head.
"Did we see it on the first descent?” Rafael asked. He can't remember, can't remember if they should have seen it.
Father Dominic continued smoking, giving no indication he'd heard the question. Iliana looked at Rafael, her gaze steady, eyes lit by the stars and the glow of the priest's cigarette. “You know better than to ask that,” she told him.
No I don't, Rafael thought, but he didn't say it.
* * * *
Rafael has a wife and a six-year-old daughter back home, though he isn't always certain of that. Their names are Kiyoko and Leila, but their faces are vague in his memory, he has difficulty recalling their images in much detail. He hasn't seen them in months, hasn't had any contact with them in all that time. At times he wonders if they're still waiting for him, and at other times he feels certain that they will wait the rest of their lives, even if he never returns.
* * * *
"Who were you talking to up on the ridge?” Iliana asked. A frown of concern tightened her forehead.
"Yusuf,” Rafael answered, confused. “Who else could it have been?"
The frown changed to a hard and steady gaze. “Yusuf is dead."
Her words made no sense to him. “Dead?"
"Dead. You don't remember? He died on the first descent. Dropped into a crevasse when we weren't roped up. All we were able to recover was his ice axe."
Rafael sat on the edge of a black boulder. Her words rang true, and a brief, sharp image rose before him, a narrow jagged opening and blue ice turning darker until it finally became black.
"You're using his ice axe now,” Iliana added. “You lost yours."
Rafael looked down at the ice axe hanging from his belt and gripped it with his gloved hand. There was nothing unusual in its feel; he'd expected some strange warmth, or an electric shock, or perhaps Yusuf appearing before him once more. He looked up at Iliana.
"But you were talking to Yusuf,” she said.
"Yes."
She nodded. “Let's go. We need to reach Camp Seven and the cache before dark."
* * * *
The next night they looked down on the lights of Kuma-Shan, knowing that none of them would ever walk through any of the city's arched and torch-lit gates, never walk along the streets of painted stone with open metal vehicles hovering in the air along with the pulsing dragon lamps and the sparkling crimson message streamers. The smells of grilling spiced meats and mulled wine and tendriling incense wafted within those walls, denied to them as was the warmth of hearth fires and heated beds and the company of men and women who seemed to come from other times—the future and the past—as well as from other places. The city itself appeared to have materialized from some other reality.
Perhaps none of that was true, perhaps the stories told on the mountain were fabrications or fevered imaginings or simply the confused perceptions of those miraculous few who had somehow gained entrance and survived their evictions. Yet what little they could see from their vantage point—the colored lights moving through the air in beautiful complex patterns, the water spray at the tops of enormous fountains, the candle-lit windows—gave every indication that the stories were accurate, that Kuma-Shan was everything it was fabled to be.
Iliana turned away from the lights and trudged toward the tents, leaving Rafael and the priest alone.
"Can't we try to enter?” Rafael asked.
"We can try,” answered the priest, “and we will try.” He glanced at the glowing tip of his cigarette. “But we won't succeed. We won't get within hailing distance of the gates."
"Why not?"
"Ask Yusuf—he knows."
"Iliana says Yusuf is dead."
Father Dominic nodded. “So he is. Which is why he knows."
* * * *
In that other life, the one he leads when he is not on this mountain or some other, Rafael is a labor lawyer. He represents unions negotiating contracts or making strike decisions, workers with grievances. The satisfaction he derives from his work—from aiding those who too often have been exploited when they did not have the support of unions or attorneys or even their fellow workers—more than makes up for the substantially lower income he earns. As a corporate attorney, he could easily make two or three times as much money.
When at the end of a long day he comes home to the small house in the working class neighborhood, waves to his neighbors, climbs the porch and enters his home, then kisses and hugs his wife and daughter, he realizes he has all he needs and more, and appreciates how fortunate he truly is.
* * * *
A snowstorm raged for two days, confining them to their tents with its howling winds and ice that nearly buried them. Rafael still shared the tent with Yusuf, but didn't speak to him now. When the storm finally ceased and the climbers dug their way out of the tents, the early morning sun shone brilliantly across the fresh snow with blinding silver and blue incandescence. Squinting against the glare, they found that Kuma-Shan now stood above them on the mountain.
The city took on a different appearance in the daylight, but was no less inviting. The sun reflected off stained glass, bright multicolored banners snapped in the breeze, and the gleaming metal of satellite dishes rotated in slow, changing patterns atop the stone towers.
Kuma-Shan appeared to be no more than a half day's climb around a jagged serac and along a wide series of ledges. They all agreed to put the descent on hold and make for the city.
Everything went smoothly until they traversed one section of a ledge where the overhanging rock hid the city from view. When they emerged into the open and looked at Kuma-Shan, the city was farther away from them than it had been in the morning when they'd started.
They tried once more. They resumed their climb, doing everything they could to keep the city in sight, getting steadily closer to its gates, but at midafternoon they were forced once again to scramble across a stretch of loose rock beneath a dark outcropping that blocked their view of the city. When they saw Kuma-Shan again, it was, if anything, even farther up the mountain from them than ever.
They didn't even need to discuss the matter. By mutual silent agreement, the three climbers turned around and headed back down the mountain.
* * * *
Rafael sits in a green plastic chair and watches his family in the backyard garden. A clear day, late spring, sun high and hot. In baggy shorts and hiking boots and a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, Kiyoko stands with a claw tool in her right hand, contemplating the bed she has just fini
shed weeding. Columbines in sprays of blue and white, yellow and white, and purple and white frame her. The sun casts her shadow across the ragged stone wall.
On the small patch of grass, Leila squats beside a large potted cala, focused intently on a shiny blue-black beetle scuttling across the dirt. Cyrus—sixty-five pounds of golden lab and pit bull—lies at Rafael's feet, across his feet and against his shins as though holding him in place; the dog's eyes are closed and he sighs loudly, an almost human sound. Rafael raises a cold bottle of beer to his mouth and drinks deeply, sets it on the stump beside him. He is as content as he has ever been.
* * * *
That night, in the tent, Rafael asked Yusuf, “Why is it that we can't ever reach Kuma-Shan?"
Rafael could just make out Yusuf's eyes in the moonlight that filtered through the nylon dome. Eyes that stared at him with a surprising intensity.
"Why do you ask me?” Yusuf said.
"Father Dominic said I should."
"The priest.” A slight shake of the head. “Why does he think I would know?"
"Because...” Rafael began. He stopped. Was it possible that Yusuf didn't know he was dead? What would happen if Rafael told him?
"I don't know,” Rafael finally said. “He seemed to think you knew more about it than anyone else."
"Why?” Yusuf asked again, his gaze even more intense.
Rafael couldn't answer.
* * * *
"How can you keep going up into those damn mountains?” Kiyoko asks.
This isn't the first time she's asked that question, but Rafael senses a pointed anguish in her voice, a certain desperate pleading. He is leaving the next morning, and they lie side by side in bed, the window open, the unusually warm air humid and oppressive.
FSF, March 2008 Page 15
