Red Zone Son

Chapter 32

After that, Solomon stopped biting his hands at night. He didn’t know if he was completely back to himself, but he was better. He could tell Wilson was extremely relieved. He would say so, over and over. “You were losing it. For a while there, I thought you might lose it completely.”

“I think I might have, yeah,” Solomon replied. It still wasn’t great. No more fog meant he was now cognizant of all the threats they skirted on a daily basis. Even walking twice a day down the island to the morning lectures and evening confessions, which in the winter were finally also being held in the old gym several hundred feet south of the baseball field, was dangerous. Lining up to get rations in what used to be an elementary school building put them in contact with thieves. He couldn’t believe Wilson had carried him through all of it, for the past seven months, on his own.

It wasn’t just Solomon’s awareness that was returning. His curiosity was too. He wanted to learn from Wilson how he scavenged the camp, so he could pull his own weight instead of just sitting around waiting for him in the cold and the dark. And his sense of humor was coming back as well; it was even stronger than before. Maybe it was his new way of coping. At any rate, he spent a week straight ribbing Wilson, jokingly accusing him of thinking he was a White savior. “That’s the reason you put up with me going crazy for the last seven months! Confess that at the circle tonight!”

But Wilson was too blue-zone ingrained to be able to joke about race. He only ever responded with, “No, I did it because you’re under my command, so I’m responsible for your well-being. I would’ve done the exact same thing if your ass was White.” Solomon told him he was no fun, although that wasn’t really true. Wilson had quite a sense of humor, too, and it was coming up more these days, maybe now that Solomon was alert enough to actually respond to it.

Or maybe he was noticing it more because there wasn’t much to do in the wintertime other than starve and talk to each other. Lately it had been so cold that even in the daytime, unless they had to be out for a mandatory discussion or to eat, they’d stay huddled together in the stairwell under the blanket, relying on each other’s body heat to keep them from hypothermia. That was when they talked, and when Wilson answered his questions about the blue zone.

One of the first things Solomon wanted to know about was self-reporting. Wilson explained that almost nobody got arrested in the blue zones for hate speech, that instead you got social pressure to self-report. “They’ll pin a “due for re-education” bubble above your AR head, so everyone can see, and then they let everyone start to harass you to go self-report. You wake up in the morning, put your visor on, and you get flooded with all these people filling up your feed all night long yelling at you about it.”

“Why don’t you just not wear your visor?” he asked into the darkness. They were leaning against the wall of the stairway next to each other, the blanket over their laps. The covering was too small to cover both of them entirely while they were sitting up. “Are you required to, in the blue zone?”

“I don’t know what the rules are in every blue zone, but in mine you didn’t have to, but you also really couldn’t live a normal life without one. Like you couldn’t go to school. My school used AR visors for everything, interacting with historical figures, seeing detailed models of 3D organs… and money, yeah, you use visors to pay for everything, so even if you skipped school, if you wanted to buy anything, you’d have to put on your visor. And if the cashier or vendor or whoever saw that you had a re-education tag on you, they could refuse to sell to you. So eventually everyone caves and self-reports.”

“And they always say re-education is just for a few days?” Solomon asked. “What about the people who come back from the camps, don’t they let people know that that’s not true?”

“I didn’t dare,” Wilson replied. He shifted under the blanket. “All that would get me is pressure to self-report again for failing to have internalized any of my re-education. You can’t say anything negative about your experience in the camps. So nobody talks about it. If you know better, you act like you don’t. Because even if you share with only one other person, what if that person is an informant?”

“What’s the deal with informants? Don’t the blue zones have the technology to constantly surveil their citizens if they’re so worried about people saying something racist? Why are they relying on people spying on each other?”

“Because the point is not to regulate us, it’s to make us into true believers. Their ideal society is everyone holding everyone else accountable because we all just care that much. So people don’t tell each other what they really think. They keep it to themselves.”

Solomon tried to imagine that for a moment. If he were in this re-education camp by himself, unable to talk openly with anyone the way he did with Wilson, because he was afraid that whatever he said would end up getting reported on… he would feel so alone. In fact, he knew exactly how alone he’d feel, because that was how he’d felt growing up in the red zone.

Especially after Umma and Dad had disappeared. Before, he’d been able to talk to them at least about things the red zone normally considered seditious. But when it had been just Adah and him, it had been hard. Adah had been too young to dump all his thoughts on, and he hadn’t wanted to burden her, anyway. The point had been to minimize how much her life was going to suck, not lean on her to make his life better.

“Makes it hard to be real with anyone,” Solomon replied.

“Yeah, actually, it’s even worse than what I just said. They don’t even let themselves think too hard about what it is they really believe. They don’t just keep it to themselves, they keep it from themselves, too.”

It helped to hear that from Wilson. Because even though Solomon hadn’t hallucinated again since coming back, he still struggled sometimes not to take the lectures to heart. Like, did it mean there was something wrong with him that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t take seriously the notion that you could misgender someone? That he couldn’t figure out how it was his responsibility to make sure someone else’s feelings about themselves were validated? Should I be ashamed that I think this way? he would wonder.

If he’d been alone, he might have ended up concluding yes, just because it was hard not to let what he was hearing daily get to him. And without Wilson around, he would’ve kept his doubts to himself. Maybe he would have suppressed them entirely. Because Wilson was there, Solomon was instead able to confide in him.

Although it was interesting; while Wilson never refused to answer any of his questions, Solomon had noticed that for all his hatred of the blue zone he didn’t really have much to say when it came to his own opinions on the orthodoxy they were being taught. Wilson knew all the right answers, but Solomon wasn’t sure Wilson cared a whole lot about engaging with the material. He was beginning to think that to Wilson, the rules appeared more like obstacles to navigate, something to be well-versed in to exploit any loopholes, akin to a force of nature that he needed to work around, rather than something he took personally. It was less about “true or not” and more about whether it would harm him or not.

A few nights later, they were lying down back-to-back on a piece of cardboard Wilson had found, with the blanket tucked in all around them in an effort to keep as much of their body heat trapped inside it as possible. Thinking about a lecture from earlier that day, Solomon asked him what centering Whiteness was.

Wilson explained by analogy. “Let’s say you’re arguing with a girl you’re seeing, and she accuses you of being an asshole, and so you’re defending yourself, trying to point out all the ways you’re not an asshole, but does that work? No, she just gets angrier. Because you’re making it about yourself when you defend yourself. You’re supposed to make it about her and her feelings.”

“Maybe if she wants it to be about her feelings, and not about you, then she should make it about her feelings,” Solomon replied.

“Yeah, maybe, I don’t know, the point is, when White people are told they’re being racist, and they try to argue about all the ways they’re not racist, they’re centering themselves instead of focusing on the Other and what the Other is experiencing. I mean, there are other ways to center Whiteness, but that’s one of them.”

Interesting. It sounded kind of like what Dad had taught Solomon about marriage, about how in Ephesians 5 a husband was commanded to love his wife as he loved his own body, and how no one ever hated his own body but fed it and cared for it, just as Christ does the church. It was that high of a level of identification with someone else’s needs, someone else’s pain. But in the Bible that only applied to the relationship between one husband and one wife, it wasn’t men to women at large and it certainly wasn’t one racial group to another.

It was only then that Solomon was able to finally articulate to himself what he’d been puzzling over. The woke did have valuable things to say about some aspects of reality, but that didn’t mean they had any authority over him. Not like God did. The rules the woke made up weren’t the Bible. Solomon didn’t have to feel worthless because of his relative position in their hierarchies, because it wasn’t their hierarchies that gave him worth, it was God who gave him worth, by finding him worth dying for. And Solomon didn’t have to feel that he was a bigot for disagreeing with them, because it wasn’t their rules that mattered, but God’s law. He could decide who was in charge of his mind, and he didn’t have to pick the woke. They were trying to make it seem as if their way was the only way, the only choice, but they were wrong. It was just their way. It was just their choice. It didn’t have to be his. And it wasn’t his.

Solomon repeated the words to himself like a mantra, wearing them like a protective garb. Their rules for how cishet people should act are for their cishet people. Their rules for how Black people and Asian people should act are for their Black and Asian people. Their rules for how men should act are for their men. The woke have a lot of rules, and have a lot of people they’re in charge of, but they’re not in charge of me. God is.

These rules that they make up say something about them, and who they are, how good they are. They say nothing about me, and who I am, how good I am. They don’t have that kind of power.