Red Zone Son

Chapter 30

Someone was speaking to him. Solomon felt Wilson’s knee nudging his leg. He tried to focus and slowly, too slowly, he realized it was one of the counselors, the one Wilson called his twin. Other than having his exact skin tone, Solomon didn’t think they looked anything alike, but they were about the same age. What was the counselor saying?

“The only real way to engage in politics,” Solomon heard, “is to point out something you disagree with. What’s something you disagree with from today’s lecture?”

Solomon didn’t need Wilson’s knee against his to immediately recognize that this was a trap. Unfortunately, he had no idea what the lecture was about. He didn’t even remember attending it. Wilson must have dragged him there in one of his fogs. “I… I didn’t disagree with anything.”

“You don’t really mean that,” Solomon was told. He watched as the counselor pulled out his tablet. He tried to breathe. Every single time something was added to his file, he was terrified they were going to realize that he was not who had originally been given the barcode in his wristband. “The point of re-education is to sincerely examine your implicit biases so you can be freed from them. You have to dwell with the discomfort. You can’t do that if you refuse to engage with the material.”

He was looking at Solomon. Wilson was too. Solomon had to say something. But what? He was trying to think, but he had nothing.

Then he heard Wilson. “Look, he clearly doesn’t know –”

The counselor was on Wilson at once. His powerful backhand connected with Wilson’s cheek with a resounding crack, violently knocking his gaunt face to the side. Out of the corner of Solomon’s eye he could see a red mark forming on Wilson’s skin. His eyes were still open and he was staring at the ground in front of him. The counselor ignored him, and turned back to Solomon. “What’s something you disagree with?”

If only Solomon’s mind would stay clear for ten minutes so he could have paid attention to the lecture. Now he was going to end up pissing the counselor off, and after that little demonstration, he really didn’t want to do that. “I think…” he started. “I thought…” But the only thing he could think of was the counselor finding something suspicious in his file and starting an investigation into his real background.

Then he heard Wilson speak up again. “He needs more time to –”

Before Wilson could finish his sentence, the counselor lashed out once more, this time using the butt of his rifle. The impact landed squarely on Wilson’s torso, causing him to double over, gasping for air. The force of the blow reverberated through the confession circle. Then the counselor was lifting his rifle and Solomon could hear the sickening thuds as it connected again, and again, and again. He sensed Wilson’s body trembling, could see his face contorting in agony, but he refused to cry out. Not once did he look in Solomon’s direction.

Finally the counselor was done beating Wilson. He didn’t skip a beat in turning back to Solomon. “What’s something you disagree with?”

Solomon was going to answer this time, with anything, if only to stop Wilson from trying to rescue him again and getting shot for his efforts. “I… I think we could be given more food.”

The counselor was staring at him. “What?”

“I think… I think we could focus better on the lectures if we were given more food.”

It was the wrong thing to say. He figured that out when the counselor brought his rifle to his shoulder, its muzzle end aimed at his face. Solomon held very still. “You think your comfort matters more than the lives of those more marginalized than you, is that it?”

For some reason, the rifle in his face helped unmuddy his mind a little. When he tried to think about what the counselor was saying, he was able to. Maybe the counselor was right. Solomon had taken the spot of the little girl in the truck, and she had been more marginalized than he, and he was glad that he was enjoying as a result the relative comforts of the re-education camp. “Yes,” he found himself saying. “Yes, I think that’s right.”

“What?”

“That’s my confession,” Solomon added hurriedly. “I care more about my comfort than the lives of those more marginalized than me.”

The counselor was silent for a moment. Then he raised his rifle. “It’ll be noted in your file that you admit to prioritizing the comfort of the privileged over the safety of the marginalized.” He glanced at Wilson who had pulled himself into a slightly hunched position. Thankfully, it was no more than a glance before he moved on from their circle to another one.

Later that night, in the dog park, Solomon turned to Wilson. “I’m sorry. I’ve been messing up.”

The left side of Wilson’s face was marked by an angry red welt. A series of bruises mapped a path along his collarbone, his arms, every visible part of his skin. “It’s fine,” he said. “I shouldn’t put you through a private criticism session every night too, it’s bad enough to go through it once.” Then, to Solomon’s surprise, he started laughing. “I can’t believe you said you needed more food. Your file is going to get so marked up. If you were a civilian you’d be screwed.”

Solomon couldn’t believe Wilson was actually laughing after getting the hell beaten out of him. He really could find humor in almost any situation. Seeing it gave Solomon a glimpse of how Wilson had to have survived the camps before – because he had definitely been to the camps before. He knew way too much about how to navigate the environment here to not have already experienced it.

“How long were you here last time?” Solomon asked.

Wilson looked out at a pile of old orange–red leaves blown by the wind into the base of the fence that surrounded the dog park. His gaze shifted to the barbed wire fence set a few feet into the water that surrounded the island that the re-education camp was placed on. “I’ve never been here before, not this exact re-education camp. I think it’d be harder for me if I were right back to my old one.”

“What happened?” Solomon asked. “How did you end up in the camps?”

“I don’t know, man, I made a joke but nobody took it as one, and I was told I should self-report for re-education for a few days because I’d committed a racist microaggression. So I self-reported, and ended up at a re-education camp like this one, but I didn’t realize that everyone has to confess, that that’s the point, so I refused to, because I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong enough to deserve this, and I kept refusing at every turn, kept saying I’d done nothing wrong, but that just convinced all the counselors that I was determined to hold on to my notions of White supremacy. All my refusal earned me a four-year sentence, so after I’d spent about a year at the re-education camp, I went to hard labor.”

“How old were you when you self-reported?”

Above his sunken cheeks, Wilson’s eyes were bright. “I was sixteen. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that my parents disowned me to save their own skins. ‘I don’t know how he ended up so racist, we did everything right.’ I didn’t get a single package, a single visit. I survived on my own without them. So when I got out, after a few years, I found that manifesto I sent to you and published it under my father’s name. My dad was so dumb he never changed his password. So he got executed. Then, after my mother self-reported, I robbed their home and used whatever they had to help me run to the red zone.”

“That’s who you killed to get out?” Solomon asked, remembering what Wilson had said the first time they’d met.

“Yep,” Wilson said. “And my mother’s probably dead, too. I’m sure she eventually got sent to a hard labor camp. There they give higher rations to women than to men, just like here, but the work quotas are exactly the same.”