Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,130

stood frowning, staring at me, looking uncertain, surprised, 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 Chinese. 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 divert me, tempt me with meaningless comforts.

“Marc, if it’s possible, I will never set foot in that poisonous 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 reeducation 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. Before 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