Parable of the Talents

us, does it?'

'I don't know,' I said.

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We are roughly 250 inmates, and, by my most recent count, 20 guards. Just think: if we could all move at the same time, 10 orl2 people per guard, we might be able to... to....

We might be able to die like Teresa. Just one 'teacher' could, with one finger, send us all sprawling and writhing on the ground. We might be able to die, every one of us, with­out doing much more than startling our guards.

sunday, december 18, 2033

Now I have been raped.

It happened twice. Once on Monday, and again yesterday. It is my Christmas gift from Christian America.

sunday, december 25, 2033

I need to write about what has been happening to me. I don't want to, but I need to.

To be a sharer is to feel the pleasure and the pain—the ap­parent pleasure and the apparent pain—of other people. There have been times when I've felt the pleasure of one of our 'teachers' when he lashed someone. The first time it happened—or rather, the first time I understood what was happening, I threw up.

When someone cries out in pain, I'm careful not to look. If I happen to see someone double up, so far I've been able to lean against a wall or a tool or a friend or a tree. Somehow, though, it never occurred to me that I had to protect myself from the pleasures of our 'teachers.'

There are a few men here, though, a few 'teachers,' who lash us until they have orgasms. Our screams and convul­sions and pleas and sobs are what these men need to feel sexually satisfied. I know of three who seem to need to lash someone to get sexual pleasure. Most often, they lash a woman, then rape her. Sometimes the lashing is enough for them. I don't want to know this as clearly as I do know it, but I can't help myself. These men feast on our pain—and they call us parasites.

Rape is done with a pretense of secrecy. After all, these men come to the camp and do a tour of duty. Then at least some of them must go home to their wives and kids. Except for Rev­erend Joel Locke and his three top assistants, who work here full time, the men who come here still live in the real world. They rape, but they pretend they don't They say they're reli­gious, but power has corrupted even the best of them. I don't like to admit it, but some of them are, in a strange way, decent, ordinary men. I mean that they believe in what they are doing. They're not all sadists or psychopaths. Some of them seem truly to feel that collecting minor criminals in places like Camp Christian is right and necessary for the good of the country. They disapprove of the rape and the unnecessary lash­ings, but they do believe that we inmates are, somehow, ene­mies of the country. Their superiors have told them that parasites and heathens like us brought down 'America the mighty.' America was the strongest country on Earth, but people like us went whoring after foreign religions and re­fused to do our duty as citizens. We women lost all modesty and offered ourselves in the streets, and the men who should have controlled us became our pimps.

That's the short version of how evil we are and why we deserve to be in collars. The other side of this picture is how our hardworking, long-suffering 'teachers' are trying to 'help' us.

One of the men who has been after Jorge's sister Cristina specialized in this strange, self-pitying attitude. He talked to her about his wheelchair-bound wife, about his disrespectful children, about how poor they all are. She says she begged him to let her alone, and he threw her down and forced her. He said he was a loyal, hardworking Christian American, and he was entitled to some pleasure in his life. But when he had finished, he begged her to forgive him. Insanity.

My rape happened at the end of a very cold, rainy day. I had been given cooking duties. This meant I got to clean myself up, stay warm and dry, and, for once, get enough to eat I was feeling both grateful for this and ashamed of my gratitude. I worked with Natividad and two of the Gama women, Catarina and Joan, and at the end of the day, we were all taken away to the cabins and raped.

Of the four of us, only I was a sharer. Of the four of us, only I endured not only my own pain and humiliation, but the wild, intense pleasure of my rapist. There are no words to explain the twisted, schizoid ugliness of this.

We can't bathe often enough. We get no hot water and lit­tle soap unless we get kitchen duty. If we ask to be allowed to bathe, it's called vanity. Yet we are viewed with disgust and contempt if we stink. We are said to 'stink with sin.'

So be it.

I have decided to stink like a corpse. I have decided that I would rather get a disease from being filthy than go on at­tracting the attentions of these men. I will be filthy. I will stink. I will pay no attention to my hair or my clothing.

I must do this, or I will kill myself.