Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,137

recorder. At least our notebooks had a lot of memory and I could code them to erase the scenarios if someone else tried to get into them. Or I thought I could.

I wrote about having different parents—parents who cared about me and didn’t wish always that I were another person, the sainted Kamaria. I didn’t know at this time that I was adopted. All I had was the usual child’s suspicion that I might be, and that somewhere, somehow, I might have beautiful, powerful “real” parents who would come for me someday.

I wrote about having four brothers and three sisters. The idea of eight children appealed to me. I didn’t think you could be lonely in such a big family. My brothers and sisters and I had huge parties on holidays and birthdays and we were always having adventures, and I had a handsome boyfriend who was crazy about me, and the girls at school were all jealous.

Instead of living in shabby, patched-together old Seattle with its missile-strike scars, we lived in a big corporate town. We were important and had plenty of money. We spent our time speeding around in fast cars or making flashy scientific discoveries in laboratories or catching gangs of spies, embezzlers, and saboteurs. Since this was a Mask, I could live the adventures as any of my brothers or sisters or as either of our parents. That meant I could “experience” being a boy or an adult. But since it wasn’t like a real Dreamask experience, I had no sensation guidance beyond research and my imagination. I watched other people, tried to make myself feel what it might be like to drive a car or fire a gun or be an older brother who worked in the South Pacific as a deep-sea miner or an older sister who was an architect in Antarctica or a father who was CEO of a major corporation or a mother who was a molecular biologist. The father was a big, godlike man who was rich and smart and…not there most of the time. I had the hardest time being him. Research didn’t help much. He was more of a shell than the others. What should a father be like inside, in his thoughts and feelings? I wasn’t sure. Not like Madison, for sure. Like the fathers of my occasional friends? I saw my friends’ fathers now and then, but I didn’t know them. Like the minister, maybe—stern and sure of himself and usually surrounded by a lot of deferential men and smiling women, some of whom were rumored to sleep with him even though they had husbands and he had a wife. But how did he feel? What did he believe? What did he want? What scared him?

I read a lot. I watched people and I eavesdropped. I got a lot of the ideas from kids whose parents let them have nonreligious Masks and books—bad books, we called them. In short, I tried to do what my biological mother hated, but couldn’t help doing. I tried to feel what other people felt and know them—really know them.

It was all nonsense, of course. Harmless nonsense. But when I was caught at it, it was suddenly all but criminal.

There was a theft in my Christian American History class. Someone stole a small personal phone that the teacher had left on her desk. We were all searched and our belongings collected and thoroughly examined. Someone examined my notebook too thoroughly, in spite of my self-destruct codes, and found my scenario.

I had to attend special religion classes for delinquents and get counseling. I had to confess my sins before our local church. I had to memorize a dozen or so more chapters of the Bible. While I was working off my punishment, I began to hear whispers that I was, indeed, adopted, and that I was the daughter not of rich, important, beautiful people but of the worst heathen devils—murderers, thieves, and perverters of God’s word. The kids started it. There were plenty of kids around who were known to be adopted, so it was commonplace to ridicule them and make up lies about how evil their real parents were. And if you weren’t adopted, and someone got mad at you, they might call you a heathen bastard whether you were or not.

So first the kids started in on me, then the adults, some of whom knew that I was adopted, began to talk. “Well, after all, think about what kind of woman