Parable of the Talents

any­thing foolish. Behave yourself!' And he went.

I sighed, and began to clear away the breakfast things.

'So he really is a doctor,' Marcus said.

I paused and looked at him. 'Yes, and he and I really are married,' I said. 'And I'm really pregnant. Did you think we were telling you lies?'

'... no. I don't know.' He paused. 'You can't change everything in your life all at once. You just can't'

'You can,' I said. 'We both have. It hurts. It's terrible. But you can do it'

He reached for the plate I was about to take, and scav­enged a few crumbs of Acorn bread from it 'It tastes like Mama's,' he said, and he looked up at me. 'I didn't believe it was you at first Yesterday in that godforsaken shanty-town, I saw you, and I thought I had finally lost my mind. I remember, I thought, 'Good. Now I'm crazy. Now nothing matters. Maybe I'll see Mama, too. Maybe I'm dead' But I could still feel the weight of the collar around my neck, so I knew I wasn't dead. Just crazy.'

'Then you knew me,' I said. 'And you looked away be­fore Cougar could see that you knew me. I saw you.'

He swallowed. Nodded. A long time later, he shut his eyes and leaned his face into his hand. 'If you still want me to,' he said, 'I'll tell you what happened.'

I managed not to sigh with relief. 'Thank you.'

'I mean, you've got to tell me things, too. Like how you wound up here. And how you wound up married to a man older than Dad.'

'He's a year younger than Dad. And when we had both lost almost everything else and everyone else, we found each other. Laugh if you want to, but we were damned lucky.'

'I'm not laughing. I found good people too, at first. Or rather, they found me.'

I sat down opposite him, and waited. For a time, he stared at the wall, at nothing, at the past

'Everything was burning on that last night,' he said. His voice was low and even. 'There was so much shooting………Hordes of bald, painted people, mostly kids, had rammed their damned truck through our gate. They were every­where. And they had their fun with Ben and Greg and Mama and me. In all the confusion, Lauren, we didn't even know you were gone until we had almost reached the gate. Then a blue-painted guy grabbed Ben—-just snatched him and tried to run off with him. I was too small to do any good fighting him one-on-one, but I was fast. I ran after him and tackled him. I might not have been able to bring him down by my­self, but Mama jumped on him too. We dragged him down, and when he fell, he hit his head on the concrete and he dropped Ben. Mama grabbed Ben and I grabbed Greg. Greg had hurt his foot—stepped on a rock and twisted it—while we were running.

'This time, we made it out through the wrecked gate. I didn't know where we were going. I was just following Mama, and we were both looking around for you.' He paused. 'What happened to you?'

'I saw someone get shot,' I said, remembering, shudder­ing with the memory. 'I shared the pain of the gunshot, got caught up in the death. Then when I could get up, I found a gun. I took it from the hand of someone who was dead. That was good because a moment later, one of the paints grabbed me, and I had to shoot him. I shared his death, and in the confusion of that, I lost track of you guys and of time. When I could, I ran out of the gate and spent the rest of the night a few blocks north of our neighborhood huddling in some­one's half-burned garage. The next day I came back looking for you. That's when I found Harry and Zahra. We were all pretty beaten up. Zahra told me you guys were dead.'

Marcus shook his head. 'I wish we had been with you. Then we could have been just 'beaten up.' Everything went wrong for us. Just as we went through the gate another group of paints arrived.'

He paused. 'You know, I met some paints later. Most of them killed themselves off, with their drugs, or with their drug-induced love of fire. But there are still a few around. Anyway... I was collared with some a few months ago. They said their whole deal was to help the poor by killing off the rich and letting the poor take their stuff.  If you lived in a place where the houses weren't falling down, and espe­cially if you had a wall around your neighborhood or your house, that meant you were rich. The crazy thing was, a lot of the paint kids really were rich. One of the girls I met, her family had more money than our whole neighborhood put together. She had pretty much given up everything for the paints, but in the end her friends betrayed her. One day while she was spaced out on something, they sold her to be col­lared because she was still young and cute, and they needed money for drugs. But she still thought she'd done some good. We couldn't convince her. We figured the drugs had wiped out her mind.''

'She had to believe in something,' I said. 'And after all, what did she have left?'