Red Zone Son

Chapter 29

Wilson’s shout woke him up. Solomon was on his feet at once, stumbling into the chaos. Or maybe the chaos was stumbling into him. A beclouded moon hung overhead while several bodies closed in on him, their faces lost in the darkness. His own body knew what to do, though, and that was good, because his mind was even now not all there. It was a blur of faces, some snarling, others desperate, but none truly clear. He hit something, someone, and they went down with a thud. The taste of blood filled his mouth, and he wasn’t sure if it was his or theirs.

The world shifted, and he was running, ragged shoes scraping against the pavement. Wilson’s hand touched his shoulder. “Keep moving! Don’t look back!” he urged. The clouds had passed on so the moonlight was casting eerie silhouettes of the towering structures that surrounded them, but they kept running, running from the darkness, running from the blurred faces –

***

The abandoned dog park was so much worse of a place to sleep. There was nothing to cover them from the rain or wind. Solomon’s hair, which was longer than it had ever been in his life, was even filthier now, as was Wilson’s. But Wilson didn’t seem to care about any of that. He was far more focused on how Solomon had started to mess up his confessions.

For a while now Wilson had been letting him come up with confessions on his own, making Solomon recite them to him during the daytime until he was happy that Solomon would pass muster that evening, and then in the night after the confession circle met, reviewing how Solomon could’ve done better. One day when Solomon started to recite for Wilson a confession on how he’d been closeting his religious beliefs on sexuality, Wilson stopped him and told him it was incredibly dangerous to compare what he was going through with what an LGBTQIA+ person went through.

“They’re going to say it’s the suffering of the marginalized that matters, how dare you act like you can even compare your experiences.” Wilson gave him another look, the same look he’d been giving Solomon since they’d arrived at the re-education camp. “Your problem is that there has never been a gap between what you say and what you mean. You are going to have to get better at bullshit.”

Wilson, certainly, was good at bullshit. He didn’t seem affected at all by either the lectures or his confessions. He always had plenty to say at the latter, maybe because there were so many more things you could confess to if you were White.

To be honest, Solomon didn’t know how he did it. The kinds of things they said about White people, the kinds of rules they had for White people, he didn’t know why a single White person would stay in the blue zone.

He asked Wilson about it later, about why White people stayed in the blue zone at all, and Wilson laughed. “What else? Join the racists? This is all blue zone White people have, that they’re better than the White person who is a bigoted Christian. If being better means they have to confess endlessly about how they shouldn’t be allowed to speak unless it’s to amplify minority voices and how they haven’t sufficiently used their White privilege to teach other White people about the barriers to success for people of color, well, that’s the price you pay to be better. At least you’re not your Republican brother!”

Solomon’s nerves twisted into a knot as Wilson’s words cut through the night air. He stole a glance at the rusted metal rail fence behind him, its remnants barely holding together, and wondered if anyone near the dog park had overheard. At the same time, his jaw tightened. He remembered one of the lectures talked about how White people did something called White denial when they refused to acknowledge the full extent of the historical harms done to Black people. The red zone did that. Solomon had lived with it his entire life although he hadn’t had the words for it until he’d come to the blue zone. It was White people trying to be the good guys, no matter the cost to the nation, a nation they all used to be part of.

From what Wilson was saying, it sounded as if the blue zone was the exact same: White people trying to be the good guys except through politics instead of race. Again, no matter the cost to the nation.

One thing Solomon would admit: it had been useful learning these new terms. He was able to name realities he’d experienced all his life but had never been able to put a finger on before. He wished that the blue zone wouldn’t teach it in such an absolutely terrible way though. Treating everyone who thought differently about any part of it as the enemy.

***

Solomon was so glad the baseball field where his confession circle met wasn’t shadowed by any apartment towers nearby. The sunlight made it warm enough to get through without shivering. Still, he didn’t think he and Wilson could stay in the dog park at night for very much longer.

Oh, there was a new White woman in their confession circle today. She was sitting with her back to the backstop. They were on the home plate today which meant wet sand was going to get into the lining of his jeans through the fraying threads on his knees. The woman was heavyset, wearing glasses, middle-aged. Solomon could tell she was fresh off a truck. Her bewildered face mirrored exactly how he’d felt when he’d first come to the camp.

They were supposed to be discussing the lecture from earlier that morning, but Solomon hadn’t been able to keep track of what the bot search agent had said about all the different types of gender identities and all the ways they were systematically oppressed. Most of the time it didn’t matter though. Everyone else was always scrambling to get added to the stack because they wanted a chance to speak, to show off how much of their re-education they’d already internalized in the hopes of reducing their camp sentence. So Solomon almost never had to go.

And if he had wanted to go, he’d get bumped up to near the top of the list. He remembered in some lecture the bot search agent had explained it to them. The progressive stack is a method used to prioritize marginalized voices and perspectives in discussions or events; it involves giving those who are typically underrepresented or oppressed a chance to speak before others, creating a more inclusive and equitable platform. It amounted to Solomon speaking before Wilson, and a gay person speaking before Solomon. Although he wasn’t sure how the stack-keeper would decide between a White gay person and him. Did gayness count more than race?

Solomon was still trying to puzzle things out when the stack-keeper’s voice broke through his thoughts. “What did you think?” he asked.

The man’s eyes were locked on Solomon, waiting for a response. Uh oh. Maybe Solomon had gone too many days without speaking up, and the stack-keeper had noticed. The man wasn’t a counselor, but he had the authority to lead the confession group. Ignoring him would be stupid.

Panic set in as Solomon tried to recall the lecture. What were the terms again? Genderqueer, agender, bigender, genderfluid… The definitions were a blur. Somewhere in the distance, someone was crying. He could hear counselors shouting, the hum of chanted confessions. Did the noise ever stop? The sharp crunch of a rifle butt hitting someone’s face nearby made him freeze for a moment, but he managed to fight his urge to flinch.

Then, a loud burst of weeping came from directly across the circle. The new woman, the White one, had started sobbing uncontrollably. But she wasn’t just incoherently crying. She was repeating the words, over and over again, in a moan, “I have always been an anti-racist. I have always been an anti-racist. I have always been an anti-racist.”

Her anguished confusion was unbearable. Solomon closed his eyes, but Wilson jabbed him in the side with his elbow so he opened them again and stared at his worn out civilian sneakers that he hadn’t taken off in months. He didn’t know why he felt so ashamed. He hadn’t done anything to her. Why was she so loud? Stupid fat White bitch.

“I have always been an anti-racist. I have always been an anti-racist. I have always been an anti-racist. I have always been an anti-racist –”

“Shut up,” someone else in the circle hissed. “A counselor is coming this way. Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up!”

“I have always been an anti-racist. I have always been an anti-racist. I have always been an anti-racist –”

Solomon sensed a different prisoner rising to his feet as the counselor approached. “I’d like to make a report that this White woman is weaponizing her tears in order to…uh… she’s, uh, weaponizing her tears.”

Someone was shouting, someone was sobbing, but the sounds were growing muffled, as if he were hearing them through a thick layer of cotton. The lines of the towers around him were losing their sharpness again. Beneath his feet the sand felt unsolid, as if it could dissolve into nothingness at any moment. He didn’t know for how long he sat there, and it was only when Wilson touched his arm that he realized he had to move.

“Hey,” Solomon heard Wilson say. “Hey. Solomon. Jesus Christ, not this again. Solomon!”

He looked at Wilson. He listened to Wilson tell him to hold out the tray so they could pour cornmeal mush onto it. He did so.

He went back to listening to Wilson’s voice telling him what to say for his confessions, telling him where to go, telling him what to do. He never in his wildest dreams thought he’d ever think of Wilson’s voice as a lifeline, but that was what it is. Solomon was drowning in a torrent of noise, and Wilson’s voice was the only thing there to hold on to –