Parable of the Talents (39 page)
We hadn't parted on the best of terms, after all. Per-haps it's also cruel to hint to him that one of our two youngest brothers might still be alive. Perhaps he'll know or guess that I wrote the note. But I had to use a name that would get his attention.
I must see him. If he won't do any-thing else, surely he'll help me find Larkin. He can't know what happened to us. I don't believe he would have joined CA if he knew it was made up of thieves, kidnappers, slavers, and murderers. He wanted to lead, to be important, to be respected, but he had been a slave prostitute himself. No matter how angry he was at me, he wouldn't wish me captivity and a collar. At least, I don't believe he would.
The truth is, I don't know what to believe.
An old man is letting me sleep in his garage tonight. I chopped weeds and cleared trash for him today. Now I'm content. I've spread some flat boards over the concrete and covered the boards with rags. In my sleepsack on top of these, I'm pretty comfortable. There's even a filthy old flush toilet and a sink with running water out here—a real luxury. I had a wash. Now I want to sleep, but all I can do, all I can think of is Marc in
that place,
Marc with
those people.
Maybe he was even there at the time of my first visit We might have seen each other and not known. What would he have done, I wonder, if he had recognized me?
? ? ?
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Beware:
All too often,
We say
What we hear others say.
We think
What we're told that we think.
We see
What we're permitted to see.
Worse!
We see what we're told that we
see.
Repetition and pride are the
keys to this.
To hear and to see
Even an obvious lie
Again
And again and again
May be to say it,
Almost by reflex
Then to defend it
Because we've said it
And at last to embrace it
Because we've defended it
And because we cannot admit
That we've embraced and
defended
An obvious lie.
Thus, without thought,
Without intent,
We make
Mere echoes
Of ourselves—
And we say
What we hear others say.
FROM
Warrior by Marcos Duran
I've always believed in the power of God, distant and pro-found. But more immediately, I believe in the power of reli-gion itself as a great mover of masses. I wonder if that's odd in the son of a Baptist minister. I think my father honestly believed that faith in God was enough. He lived as though he believed it But it didn't save him.
I began preaching when I was only a boy. I prayed for the sick and saw some of them healed under my hands. I was given timings of money and food by people who had not enough to eat themselves. People who were old enough to be my parents came to me for advice, reassurance, and com-fort.
I was able to help them. I knew the Bible. I had my own version of my father's quiet, caring, confident manner. I was only in my teens, but I found people interesting. I liked them and I understood how to reach them. I've always been a good mimic, and I'd had more education than most of the people I dealt with. Some Sundays in my Robledo slum church, I had as many as 200 people listening as I preached, taught, prayed, and passed the plate.
But when the city authorities decided that we were no more than trash to be swept out of our homes, my prayers had no power to stop them. The city authorities were stronger and richer. They had more and better guns. They had the power, the knowledge, and the discipline to bury us.
The governments, city, county, state, and federal plus the big rich companies were the sources of money, information, weapons—real physical power. But in post-Pox America, successful churches were only sources of influence. They offered people safe emotional catharsis, a sense of commu-nity, and ways to organize their desires, hopes, and fears into systems of ethics. Those things were important and neces-sary, but they weren't power. If this country was ever to be restored to greatness, it wasn't the little dollar-a-dozen preachers who would do it.
Andrew Steele Jarret understood this. When he created Christian America and then moved from the pulpit into pol-itics, when he pulled religion and government together and cemented the link with money from rich businessmen, he created what should have been an unstoppable drive to re-store the country. And he became my teacher.
************************************
What Uncle Marc had been through as a slave marked him, I'm sure, but I don't know how much. How can you know what a man would be like if he had grown up unmarked by horror? What did my mother's time as a beaten, robbed, raped slave do to her? She was always a woman of obsessive purpose and great physical courage. She had always been willing to sacrifice others to what she believed was right. She recognized that last characteristic in Uncle Marc, but I don't believe she ever saw it clearly in herself.
FROM
The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
MONDAY, MAY
14, 2035
I met with my brother earlier tonight
I spent the day helping my latest employer—a likable old guy full of stories of his adventures as a young man in the 1970s. He was a singer and guitar player, with a band. They traveled the world, played raucous music, and had wild sex with hundreds, maybe thousands, of eager young girls. Lies, I suppose.
We put in a vegetable garden and pruned some of the dead limbs from his fruit trees. I don't mean "we," of course. He said, "Well, how about we do this?" Or, "Do you think we can do that?" And he tried to help, and that was all right. He needed to feel useful, just as he needed someone to hear his outrageous stories. He told me he was 88 years old. His two sons are dead. His middle-aged granddaughter and his sev-eral young great-grandchildren live in Edmonton, Alberta, up in Canada. He was alone except for a neighbor lady who looked in now and then. And she was 74 herself.
He said I could stay as long as I wanted to if I would help him out in the house and outside. The house wasn't in good shape. It had been neglected for years. I couldn't have done all the repairs, of course, even if he could have afforded the needed materials. But I decided to stay for a few days to do what I could. I didn't dare stay long enough for him to begin to depend on me, but a few days.
I thought that would give me a base to work from while I got to know my brother again.
************************************
Marc was waiting near the long dinner line when I ar-rived.
He looked so handsome and at ease in his clean, styl-ish, casual clothing. He had worn a dark blue suit when he preached the night before, and he had managed, even as he told a couple of hundred thieves and winos how awful I was, to look startlingly beautiful.
"Marc," I said.
He jumped, then turned to stare at me. He had glanced in my direction, but it was obvious that he hadn't recognized me until I spoke to him. He had been encouraging a man in line ahead of me to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Sav-ior and let Jesus help with his drinking problem. It seemed mat the CA Center had a rigorous drying-out program, and Marc had been working hard to sell it.
"Let's take a walk around the corner and talk," I said, and before he could recover or answer, I turned and walked away, certain that he would follow. He did. We were well away from the line and well away from any listening ears when he caught up.
"Lauren!" he said. "My God, Lauren, is it you? What in hell are you—?"
I led him around the corner, out of sight of the line, and onto a dirty little side street that led to the bay. I went on sev-eral steps down that street, then stopped and turned and looked at him.
He stood frowning, staring at me, looking uncertain, sur-prised, almost angry. There was no shame or defensiveness about him. That was good. His reaction on seeing me would have been different, I'm sure, if he had known what his Camp Christian friends had been doing to me.
"I need your help," I said. "I need you to help me to find my daughter."
This made nothing at all clear to him, but it did shift him away from anger, which was what I wanted. "What?" he said.
"Your people have her. They took her. I don't. . . I don't believe that they've killed her. I don't know what they've done with her, but I suspect that one of them has adopted her.
I need you to help me find her."
"Lauren, what are you talking about? What are you doing here? Why are you trying to look like a man? How did you find me?"
"I heard you preach last night."
And again he was reduced to saying, "What?" This time he looked a little embarrassed, a little apprehensive.
"I've been coming here in the hope of finding out what CA does with the children it takes."
"But these people don't take children! I mean, they rescue orphans from the streets, but they don't—"
"And they 'rescue' the children of heathens, don't they?
Well, they 'rescued' my daughter Larkin and all the rest of the younger children of Acorn! They killed my Bankole! And Zahra! Zahra Moss Balter from Robledo! They killed her!
They put a collar around my neck and around the necks of my people. CA did that! And then those holy Christians worked us like slaves every day and used us like whores at night! That's what they did. That's what kind of people they are. Now I need your help to find my daughter!" All that came out in a rush, in a harsh, ugly whisper, my face up close to his, my emotions almost out of control. I hadn't meant to spit it all out at him that way. I needed him. I meant to tell him everything, but not like that.
He stared at me as though I were speaking to him in Chi-nese. He put his hand on my shoulder. "Lauren, come in.
Have some food, a bath, a clean bed. Come on in. We need to talk."
I stood still, not letting him move me. "Listen," I said in a more human voice. "Listen, I know I'm dumping a lot on you, Marc, and I'm sorry." I took a deep breath. "It's just that you're the only person I've felt that I could dump it on. I need your help. I'm desperate."
"Come on in." He wasn't quite humoring me. He seemed to be in denial, but not speaking of it. He was trying to di-vert me, tempt me with meaningless comforts.
"Marc, if it's possible, I will never set foot in that poi-sonous place again. Now that I've found you, I shouldn't have to."
"But these people will help you, Lauren. You're making some kind of mistake. I don't understand it, but you are. We would rather take in whole families than separate them. I've worked on the apartments that we're renovating to help get people off the streets. I know—"
Now he was humoring me. "Have you ever heard of a place called Camp Christian?" I asked, letting the harshness come back into my voice. He was silent for a moment, but I knew before he spoke that the answer to my question was
yes.
"I wouldn't have named it that," he said. "It's a reeduca-tion camp—one of the places where the worst people we handle are sent These are people who would go to prison if we didn't take them. Minor criminals, most of them— thieves, junkies, prostitutes, that kind of thing. We try to reach them, teach them skills and self-discipline, stop them from graduating to real prisons."
I listened, shaking my head. He was either a great actor or he believed what he was saying. "Camp Christian
was
a prison," I said. "For seventeen months it was a prison.
Be-fore that, it was Acorn. My people and I built Acorn with our own hands, then your Christian America took it, stole it from us, and turned it into a prison camp."
He just stood there, staring at me as though he didn't know what to believe or what to do.
"Back in September," I said, keeping my voice low and even. "Back in September of '33, they came with seven maggots, smashing through our thorn fence, picking off our watchers. I knew we couldn't fight a force like that. I sig-naled everyone to run like hell, scatter. You know we had drills—drills for fighting and drills for fading into the hills.
None of it mattered. They gassed us. Three people might have gotten away: the mute woman named May and the two little Noyer girls. I don't know. They were the only ones we never heard anything about. The rest of us were captured, collared, and used for work and for sex. Our younger chil-dren were taken away. No one would tell us where. My Bankole, Zahra Balter, Teresa Lin, and some others were killed. If we asked anything, we were punished with the col-lars. If we were caught talking at all, we were punished.
We slept on the floor or on shelves in the school. Your holy men took our houses. And they took us, too, when they felt like it. Listen!"
He had stopped looking at me and begun to look past me, looking over my right shoulder.
"They brought in street people and travelers and minor criminals and other mountain families, and they collared mem too," I said. "Marc! Do you hear me?'
"I don't believe you," he said at last. "I don't believe any of this!"
"Go and look at what's left of Acorn. Look for yourself. Go to one of the other so-called reeducation camps. I'll bet they're just as bad. Check them out."
He began to shake his head. “This is not true! I know these people! They wouldn't do what you're accusing them of."
"Maybe some of them wouldn't. But some of them did. All that we built they stole."
"I don't believe you," he said. But he did believe. "You're making some kind of mistake."
"Go and see for yourself," I repeated. "Be careful how you ask questions. I don't want you to get into trouble. These are dangerous, vicious people. Go and see."