"They did that They threw us into the fire. I was the only one who was conscious. I was maybe the only one alive, but I couldn't stop them. Somehow, though, once they threw me in, I got up and ran out. I just ran, panicked out of my mind, blind with smoke and pain, not human anymore. I should have died.
"Later, I wished I had died. Later, all I wanted to do was die."
Marcus stopped and sat silent for several seconds.
"Someone must have helped you," I said when I thought the silence had gone on long enough. "You were only 14."
"I was only 14," he agreed. After another silence, he went on. "I think I must have fallen down in the Balter yard. I was on fire. I didn't think about rolling on the ground to put the fire out, but I must have done it. I was just scrambling around in panic and pain, and the fire did go off. Then all I could do was lie there. I must have passed out at some point. When I woke up—I have a clear memory of this—I was on a big wooden wagon on top of a lot of scorched clothes and some pots and pans and junk. I could see the sidewalk passing under me—broken concrete, weeds growing in the holes and cracks, and I could see the backs of a man and woman walking ahead, leaning forward, pulling the wagon with rope harnesses. Then I passed out again.
"A pair of scavengers, picking over the bones of our neighborhood had found me groaning—although I don't remember groaning or being found—and they had loaded me onto their salvage wagon. They were a middle-aged couple named Duran, believe it or not. Maybe they were distant relatives or something. It's a pretty common name, though."
I nodded. Not unusual at all, but the only Duran I happened to know was my stepmother. Duran was her maiden name. Well, if these Durans had saved my brother's life five years ago when he couldn't have lived without their help, I was more than willing to be related to them.
"They had had an 11-year old daughter kidnapped from them the year before they found me," Marcus said. "They never found her, never found out what happened to her, but I can guess. You could sell a pretty little girl for a lot then. Just like now. I've heard people say things are getting better. Maybe so, but I haven't noticed. Anyway, the Durans were handsome people. Their daughter could have been really pretty."
He sighed. "The kid's name was Caridad. They said I looked enough like her to be her brother. The woman said that. Inez was her name. She was the one who insisted on collecting what was left of me and taking it home to nurse back to health.
"I'm surprised I even looked human when she found me. My face wasn't too bad—blood and bruises from falling down a few times. But the rest of me was a hell of a mess.
"There was no way these people could afford a doctor— not even for themselves. So Inez herself worked on me. She worked so hard to save me—like a second mother. The man thought I would die. He thought it was stupid to waste time, effort, and valuable resources on me. But he loved her, so he let her have her way.
"These people were a lot poorer than we used to be, but they did what they could with what they had. For me that meant soap and water, aspirin and aloe vera. Why I didn't die of 20 infections I don't know. I goddamn sure wanted to die. I'll tell you, I'd rather blow my own brains out than go through that again."
I shook my head. I had no medical training beyond first aid, and I doubt that I'd be much good administering that, but I'd lived with Bankole long enough to know how nasty burns could be. "No complications at all?" I demanded.
Marcus shook his head. "I don't know, really. Most of the time I was in so much pain I didn't know what was going on. How could I tell a complication from the general run of misery?"
I shook my head, and wondered what Bankole would say when I told him. Soap and water and aspirin and aloe vera. Well, a little humility would be good for him. To Marcus, I said, "What happened to the Durans?"
"Dead," he whispered. "At least I guess they're dead. So many died. I never found their bodies, though, and I tried. I did try."
Long silence.
"Marcus?" I reached over and put my hand on his.
He pulled away and put his hands to his face. I heard him sigh behind them. Then he began to talk again. "Four years after our neighborhood burned, the city of Robledo decided to clean itself up. The Durans and I were squatters. We shared a big, abandoned stucco house with five other families. That meant we were part of the trash that the new mayor, the city council, and the business community wanted to sweep out. It seemed to them that all the trouble of the past few years was our fault—poor people's fault, I mean. Homeless people's fault. Squatters' fault. So they sent an army of cops to drive out everyone who couldn't prove they had a right to be where they were. You had to have rent receipts, a deed, utility receipts, something. At first, there was a hell of a business in fake paper. I wrote some of it myself—not for sale, but for the Durans and their friends. Most people couldn't read or write or at least not in English, so they needed help. I saw that some of them were paying hard currency for crap, so I started writing—rent receipts, mostly. In the end, it was all for nothing. Between them, the city and the county owned most of the rotting buildings in our area, and the cops knew we didn't belong there, no matter what papers we had. They drove us all out—poor squatters, drug dealers, junkies, crazies, gangs, whores, you name it."
"Where were you living?" I asked. "What part of town?"
"Valley Street," Marcus said. "Old factory buildings, parking structures, ancient houses and stores, all packed with people."
"And vacant lots full of weeds and trash where people dump inconvenient dead bodies," I continued for him.
''That's the area, yes. The Durans were poor. They worked all the time, but sometimes they didn't even get enough to eat—especially sharing with me. When I was well enough, I worked with them. We cleaned, repaired, and sold anything we could salvage. We took whatever jobs we could get—cleaning, assembling, constructing, repairing. They never lasted long. There were a lot of people like us and not so many jobs, so wages were terrible. Just food and water sometimes, or some old clothes or shoes or something. They'd even pay you in American money if they thought they could get away with palming it off on you. Hard currency if they gave a damn about treating you right. Most didn't. Also, hard currency if they were a little bit afraid of you or of your friends.
"In spite of all our efforts, there was no way we could afford to rent even a shabby little apartment or house. We lived on Valley Street because we couldn't do any better. With all that, though, it probably wasn't as bad as you think. People looked after one another there, except for the worst junkies and thugs. Everyone knew who they were. I did reading and writing for people even before the fake-paper craze. They paid me what they could. And... I helped some of them hold church on Sundays. There was an old carport behind the house we lived in. It projected from a garage where three families lived, but as it happened, no one lived under the carport. We met for church there and I would preach and teach as best I could. They let me do it. They came to hear me even though I was a kid. I taught them songs and everything. They said I had a gift, a calling. The truth was, thanks to Dad, I knew more about the Bible than any of them, and more about real church."
He paused, looked at me. "I liked it, you know? I prayed with them, helped them any way I could. Their lives were so terrible. There wasn't much I could do, but I did what I could. It was important to them that I had recovered from burns and gunshots. A lot of them had seen me back when I looked like vomit They thought if I could recover from that, God must have something in mind for me.
"The Durans were proud of me. They gave me their name. I was Marcos Duran. That's who I was during my four years with them. That's who I still am. I found a real home there.
"Then the cops came and drove us into the street Behind them came demolition crews to push down the houses, blow up the buildings, and destroy everything we had been forced to leave behind. People were dragged or driven into the street without all kinds of things—spare clothing, money, pictures, personal papers Some people who couldn'
t speak English were even driven out without relatives who had managed to hide or who were too sick or disabled to run. The cops dragged some of these out and put them in trucks. They didn't find them all. I sent them to get seven that I knew of, and they brought them out
"But everything was chaos. People kept trying to run back to get their things, and the cops kept stopping them—or trying to. Some of the cops were in armored personnel carriers. The ones on foot had full body armor, masks, shields, automatic rifles, gas, whips, clubs, you name it, but still, some people tried to stop them, or at least to hurt them. The people threw rocks, bottles, even precious cans of food.
"Then someone fired three shots, and one of the cops went down. I don't know whether he was wounded or he tripped, but there were the shots, and he fell. And that was that. Everything went to hell.
"The cops started shooting. People ran, screamed, shot back if they had guns. I got separated from the Durans. I started looking for them even before the shooting stopped. No one shot me this time, but I didn't find the Durans. I never found them. I tried for days. I looked at as many dead bodies as I could before they were collected. I did everything I could think of, but they were gone. After a while, I knew they must be dead, and I was alone again."
Marcus sat still, staring into space. "I loved them," he said, his voice soft and filled with pain. "And I loved being Marcos Duran—the little preacher. People trusted me, respected me.... It was a good life. Most of them were good people—just poor. They deserved so much better than they got." He shook his head.
"I didn't know what to do," he continued after a moment. "I hung around the Valley Street area for two more weeks, saw all the buildings go down and the rubble carried away. I stole food where I could, avoided the cops, and kept looking for the Durans. I'd said they were dead, and on some level, I believed they were, but I couldn't stop looking.
"But there was nothing. No one." He hesitated. "No, that's not quite right. Some people from my poor, half-assed church came back to see what was left. I met three families of them. They all asked me to stay with them. They had relatives squatting in other hovels, overcrowded like you wouldn't believe, but they figured they could take in one more. I had nothing, but they wanted me. I should have gone with them. I probably would have set up another church outside of town, gotten married, and raised a family—Dad all over again. I would have been okay. Poor, but okay. Poor doesn't matter as much if you can make a place for yourself and be respected. I know that now, but I didn't then.
"I was 18. 1 figured it was time for me to be a man, get out on my own. I figured there was nothing for me in southern California. It was a place where you could only be poor unless you were born rich or you were a really successful crook. I thought that meant I had to go north. There was always a river of people walking north on the freeway. I thought they must know something. I talked to people about Alaska, Canada, Washington, Oregon ... I never intended to stay in California."
"Neither did I," I said.
"You walked up?"
"I did. So did Bankole, Harry, Zahra A lot of us did."
"Nobody bothered you?"
"A lot of people bothered us. Harry, Zahra, and I survived because we stuck together and one of us always kept watch. We started out with my one gun. We gathered more people and more guns along the way. I lost count of the number of times we were nearly killed. One of us was killed. There may be an easy way to get here, but we didn't find it."
"Neither did I. But why did you come here? I mean, why didn't you keep going to Oregon or someplace?"
"Bankole owns this land," I said. "By the time we got near here, well, he and I wanted to stay together, but I also wanted... I wanted to keep the rest of the group together. I was building a community—a group of families and single people who were still human."
"You walk the roads for a while, and you wonder if anyone is still human."
"Yeah."
"The people you brought here—they built this place?"
I nodded. "There was nothing here when we got here but the ashes of a house, the bones of Bankole's relatives, some untended crops and trees, and a well. There were only 13 of us then. There are 66 of us now—67 with you."
"You just let people come here and stay? What if they rob you, cheat you, kill you? What if they're crazy?"
"Give me some credit, Marc."
His face changed in an odd way. "You. You personally." He paused. "I thought at first this was Bankole's place, that he'd taken you in."
"I told you, this is his land."
"But it's your place."
"It's our place. I've shaped it, but it doesn't belong to me. I've invited people to come here and build lives for themselves, to join us." I hesitated, wondering how much he still believed in religion as our father had taught it to us. When he was little, he always seemed to take Dad's religion as real, as obvious, as a given. But what did he believe now that he had suffered the destruction of two homes and the loss of two families, then endured prostitution and slavery? He still had not talked about that last part of his story. Had his religion given him hope, or had it withered and fallen away when his God did not rescue him? Back in Robledo, he had run a simple outdoor church, had been serious about it. But where was he now? I made myself continue. "And I've given them a belief system to help them deal with the world as it is and the world as it can be—as people like them can make it."
"You mean you're their preacher?" he asked.
I nodded. "We don't call it that, but yes."
He looked surprised, then gave a short bark of laughter. "Religion is in our genes," he said. "It must be. Either that or Dad did a hell of a job on us."
"We call our system Earthseed," I said. "My actual tide is 'Shaper.'"
He stared at me for several seconds, saying nothing. He still looked surprised, and now confused. "Earthseed?" he said at last. "My god, I've heard of you guys. You're that cult!"
"So we've been called."
"There was a politician. He was running for the state senate, I think. He won. He was a Jarret supporter. He was making a speech in Arcata when I was up there, and he was listing devil-worshiping cults. He named Earthseed as one of them. I'd never heard of it, but I remember because he was going on about how the name actually referred to the devil, the seed deep in the earth and growing like a poisonous fungus to spread its evil to more and more people."
"Oh, Marc...."
"I didn't make it up. He really said that."
I drew a deep breath. "We don't worship the devil. In fact, we don't worship anyone. And we are Earthseed. Human beings are Earthseed. We have no devils. But we're so small that I'm surprised your politician had ever heard of us. And I wish he hadn't Such lies!"
He shrugged. "It was just politics. You know those guys will say anything. But why would you stop being a Christian? Why would you make up a new religion?"
"I didn't make it up. It was something I had been thinking about since I was 12. It was—is—a collection of truths. It isn't the whole truth. It isn't the only truth. It's just one collection of thoughts that are true. I could never say anything about it at home. I never wanted to hurt Dad. But his way didn't work for me. I wanted it to. I would have been a lot more comfortable if it had. But it didn't. Earthseed does."
"But you made Earthseed up. Or if you didn't make it up, you read it or heard about it somewhere."
I had heard this many times before. It seemed to be one of the things that every new potential member said. I even kept a simple teaching tool near at hand to deal with it. I got up and went to a bookshelf where a beautiful piece of rose quartz that Bankole had given me acted as a bookend for the few books I kept here in the house and not in the library section of the school.
"Look at this," I said, "and tell me something." 1 put the rock in his hands. "If I were to analyze this stone and find out exactly what it's made of, would that mean I made it up?"
"That's not a good comparison, Lauren. T
he rock exists. Earthseed didn't exist until you made it up."
"All the truths of Earthseed existed somewhere before I found them and put them together. They were in the patterns of history, in science, philosophy, religion, or literature. I didn't make any of them up."
"You just put them together."
"Yes."
"Then you did make Earthseed up the same way you would have made a novel up if you wrote one. You wouldn't have to find anything brand-new for your characters to do or be in a novel. I don't think you could if you wanted to."
"Except that by definition, a novel is fiction. Don't call Earthseed fiction. You don't know anything about it except the lies told by an opportunistic politician." I took down a copy of The First Book of the Living and handed it to him. "Come and talk to me after you've read this."
"You wrote this?"
"Yes."
"And you believe in it?"
"I believe it. I wouldn't teach people that things were true if I didn't believe them."
"Back in Robledo, I remember you were always writing. Keith used to sneak into your room and read your diary. Or at least he said he did."
I thought about that for a moment. "I don't think he ever read my journal," I said. "I mean, I know I was always chasing him out of my room. I chased you out, too, plenty of times. But I think if Keith had read my journal, he wouldn't have been able to resist using it against me. Besides, Keith never read anything unless he had to."
"Yeah." He paused, gazing down at the table. "It's weird to think I'm older now than he ever got to be. He still seems older and bigger when I think about him. He was such a goddamn asshole." He shook his head. "I think I really hated him, you know, the way he was always making trouble for everybody, beating the rest of us up—except you. He was afraid of you because you were so much bigger. And Mama... she loved him more than she loved all of us put together."
"It wasn't that bad, Marc."
He looked up at me, solemn-eyed. "It was, though. She wasn't your mother, so maybe you didn't feel it the way I did, but it was that bad and then some."
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