Red Zone Son

Chapter 46

A surge of emotions overwhelmed Solomon, making it difficult to find the right words to say. “Manal,” he finally managed, even though he knew it wasn’t her real name.

“Solomon,” she whispered.

So she knew his real name. She had looked him up afterward. He couldn’t believe she was there, right in front of him, that she was looking at him. Especially with eyes that were brimming with concern and a flicker of something else that he couldn’t quite decipher. Then she took a step back. “I should let you get dressed.” She retreated back into the main room, and he could hear her speaking softly with the doctor. He pulled on the t-shirt and exercise shorts, and for a moment, he wasn’t thinking about Manal, it was such a relief to be done with his rags.

He opened the door when he was dressed. She stopped talking to the doctor at once and rejoined him inside the bedroom. Before he knew what was happening, she was embracing him. She had never done that the entire time they were undercover together. He hugged her back, her body against his the best feeling in the world. When she loosened her grip to look up at him, it was with tears in her eyes.

“Wilson’s stabilized,” she told him. “The doctor said that he’ll be OK. You did good. You brought him through.”

Suddenly, Solomon found himself gripping her arm. He couldn’t with his left hand, so it was just her right arm he was clutching. A shudder ran through him, and tears began to blur his vision. His palm felt damp against her skin. He tried to let go, to step back and compose himself, but his breath came in short, ragged gasps. It was as if his body was learning to breathe again after being submerged underwater for too long. Dizziness washed over him, and he found himself clinging to her for support instead. And as he held on to her, as he looked at her eyes filled with concern and understanding, he shuddered again. She shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t be working in the blue zone. It is not safe here.

“Please,” he whispered. “Go back to the red zone. Don’t do any more missions here.”

Manal closed her eyes briefly. “I’m not here undercover. I left that line of work. I told them to put me with the new diplomatic envoy. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get access to the kind of information I needed to find you unless I had official status.”

The fact that she’d come back to look for him made it even worse. Solomon let go of her arm and knelt at her feet, bowing his head. Her skirt was long, and it brushed up against his face. “Please go back,” he begged. “Your father is dead. There’s no way he survived the camps. Go back. Please.”

At that, she winced. “That bad?”

“Sam said I didn’t even see the worst of it,” he managed to reply.

Manal sank to the floor so that they were face to face. She was crying openly now. When she spoke, her words were bitter. “I should’ve begged you to accompany me back to the red zone. I should’ve said I was too scared to cross the border alone. I should’ve wept and clung to you.”

His own tears were slowing. Gently, Solomon took her hand. “I would’ve had a hard time believing that.”

It was a feeble attempt to make her laugh, and it didn’t work. The look on her face was scornful. “I wouldn’t have overdone it. I would’ve acted hesitant and unsure about being able to make it across the river alone and you would have tripped over yourself to find another way to take me back to the red zone. Instead, I gave you all the information you needed to go straight to the camps. God, I will never be that stupid again.”

Solomon could tell from the way she was saying it that this wasn’t the first time she had rethought their last conversation in Cabin D4. She’d repeated over and over again in her mind what she ought to have said to him, how she might have done things differently so that he’d gone with her instead.

“Please go back,” he whispered. “Please don’t put yourself at risk. You don’t know what’s waiting for you if you fail. And I found you online so easily, just by remembering your face. If there’s even a single photograph of you in someone’s shared cloud from when you were in the blue zone, they can pick up on the fact that you were here before, undercover.”

Manal’s hand tightened around his. “What else can I do, Solomon? You know that if the blue zone takes us over they will do to us what they’re doing to themselves. You just came back from a camp. You know how bad it is. You want to see Adah in one?”

At the sound of his sister’s name, Solomon closed his eyes and bowed his head. Fear stabbed through him at the very thought of Adah going through even a fraction of what he had just endured. He heard Manal’s next words distantly. “I visited her last fall, after you were reported missing in action. She told me about how you were drafted. I get it. I get that you never wanted to do this. And look, I don’t love every aspect of the red zone either. I know they will never make me a diplomat because I’m a woman, but I have to do this work anyway.”

Solomon opened his eyes. “You will die,” he whispered.

“If I die, I die,” she replied. “Death is not the end, and some risks are worth taking.” She put her other hand on his cheek, and he met her gaze. “Solomon, what other choice do we have? It’s either fight or die. There is no tower in the deep for us to run to. America is gone.”

She spoke with such conviction that for a moment Solomon wondered if she was right. Maybe Manal was exactly where she was supposed to be. Maybe he wanted her to play a role for him, safe at home, so that she would never have to go through what he’d just gone through, so that his own suffering would have meaning. But she was telling him that wasn’t the role God had called her to play, and in the end, he still believed that it was what God said and not what he said that mattered.

Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that the real problem was America’s conflict itself: her inter-zone hatred, her terrible divorce that left the nation’s children to bear the consequences, all while being told to stay resilient.

Suddenly he remembered a story Adah and he had been told of a time pre-Splintering, when he was very young, back when they had neighbors who were White liberals. Umma had been annoyed because every time they’d stepped into their backyard, the neighbors would start talking to them from their deck, which had been built high enough to see over the fence around their small city backyard. “I can’t even open the screen door without them trying to tell me what they’re eating later for dinner.”

Dad had jokingly told her to blast Black Christian rap whenever she went out and that their neighbors would never talk to them again. Umma had laughed and laughed, but then she’d gone and invited them out on a double date. “Jesus says to love our neighbors and they are our literal neighbors; if I have to talk to them all the time, we might as well become friends so I can at least enjoy it when it happens.”

And he remembered again how Dad told him that for a long time America had defined itself as anti-Black and then it had started to try to define itself as anti-racist, but that they didn’t have to frame things as a negative. They could define being an American not as someone who was red or blue but as someone who loved a fellow citizen across a political line. Whoever your neighbor is, don’t try to change his mind. Just love him. The best American is the one who best loves his politically opposite neighbor.

As the blue zone African woman had loved him…

Solomon tried to tell Manal this. She removed her hand from his face and listened intently, but shook her head after he was done. “It’s half a century too late for that. Go create a time machine and tell our ancestors to figure out how to get along, but we’re locked into this conflict now.”

She sighed, and when she spoke again, it was more to herself. “Maybe I’m more like Wilson than I like to admit. Although I never thought they should’ve chosen him to lead that mission. They really should not let White people work undercover in the blue zone. I’ve seen it happen so many times now, it drives them all crazy.” She reached to take Solomon’s other hand, his left hand, but it was unbandaged now, and he stiffened when she touched it. “You’re hurt,” she said, realizing.

“It’s fine,” he told her. He didn’t want her asking about the details because he thought she’d cry, so he tried to give her a bare-bones summary instead. “I had to break it to get out of the camp.”

It didn’t work. Solomon disentangled his right hand from hers to wipe her tears away with his thumb as she sobbed. Then the doctor knocked on the door, and they got to their feet. “I can’t come see you again,” Manal told him as the doctor looked at his hand. “But once you’re both fit to travel, I’ll arrange for you to discreetly cross back. It won’t be through militia channels, though, it’ll be through my own personal contacts.”

Solomon looked up at her and met her gaze. Even after everything she’d said, after everything he’d said, all he could feel was dread that this was the last time he would see her, that all that was waiting for her in a week, a month, a year, two years, ten, was a camp sentence. Maybe she was thinking the same thing because she was silent. Then she touched his arm. “Goodbye,” she whispered, and then she was out the door, she was gone.