Chapter 26

Something was wrong with him.

When Solomon looked around the re-education camp the edges of the towers rising overhead seemed to blur together as if they were melting in the heat of a blazing sun neither they nor he could escape from. Even the sun looked different. Yellow sun, blue sky, white clouds, gray steel, brown mud, the colors were all faded, muted, lost in shadow. The faces of the other prisoners in his confession circle blended together when they spoke. He could understand them only every so often.

He could only hear Wilson clearly and he didn’t do anything unless he heard Wilson directing him to. Stand here, sit down, eat this, drink that, move up, don’t ever take your windbreaker off, not even once, because someone will steal it the second you put it down, and that piece of cloth is the only thing you will have between you and the cold when winter comes.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked Solomon more than once. “Come on, whatever this is, snap out of it.”

But Solomon didn’t know what it was and he didn’t know how.

I think Wilson is frustrated. I think he wants me to work with him on our escape. But Solomon kept slipping in and out of a fog that came and went without warning. Even when the fog left, he couldn’t 100% shake the effects off, as if he were looking at the path by the sky walkway they’d been sleeping under and it was rippling as if it were made of water but he knew it wasn’t but it looked like a slow-moving current of asphalt and if he stepped onto it he would sink down down down down –

It wasn’t made of water, though. Solomon knew it wasn’t. The river was made of water. The river that surrounded this island they were on. This island that was ⅛ of a mile wide and 1½ miles long with a path going around the perimeter and thirty large buildings that he thought used to be apartment towers filling up most of the space between. Bookended by a lighthouse at its north end and a park with statues of giant faces at its southernmost tip.

I think the statues are real. I don’t think they’re part of the fog.

One time, after it felt as if he’d been gone for a while, Wilson grabbed him by his arms and shook him, shouting at him to wake up. Solomon didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what to do. He looked at him, his mind blank, and then Wilson seemed to realize something. Maybe. At least after that he didn’t touch Solomon again, except to put scavenged mulberries in his hand to eat, or to guide him to wash where the rainwater had collected in the abandoned dog park.

And that wasn’t all he did for Solomon. Most of their time, Wilson spent preparing him for the daily confession circle.

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Solomon was there now, sitting near the sun-wilted second base of a former baseball field, alongside the other prisoners in his confession circle. Off to his right, the asphalt path that wound around the whole island gleamed black in the sun. On the other side of the path was the barbed wire fence, shining metal-bright. And on the other side of the barbed wire fence was the rush and the roar of the river.

Someone was saying something. There were a dozen of them in the circle. Or so he thought. It was hard to count when their faces and forms kept blurring into each other. Solomon was pretty sure it was the stack-keeper who was talking, though. He was an older Black man, one of the prisoners too, but he was supposed to lead them in their confessions while the counselors, that was what they called the guys with the guns, walked around from circle to circle to listen in and take notes on their tablets to add to everyone’s files.

Solomon kept clenching his fists whenever a counselor walked near. Seated to his right, Wilson muttered at him to knock it off. “Don’t be nervous. Just do your confession like you practiced this morning.”

Wilson didn’t seem to need to practice ahead of time. He was able to rattle his confessions off the top of his head. Solomon, on the other hand, had to laboriously memorize his in advance. Ever since Wilson had realized something was wrong with Solomon, he’d been patient, feeding Solomon one line at a time to learn. Every morning, he gave him something to say for the evening’s confession circle. “Repeat after me. As a male assigned to male at birth, I am complicit in our cisheterosexist patriarchal society.”

Solomon tried to. “As a male assigned to male at birth, I am… um… complicit in our hetero… heterosexist patriarchal society.”

Wilson corrected him. “You forgot the cis. Cisheterosexist. Say it again. I am complicit in…”

“Remember,” he added, after Solomon tried again, and got it wrong again, “The trick is to be detailed, but not specific. Pack in as much jargon as you can about how you’re an insufficiently zealous ally without actually admitting to doing anything to any actual person, because they will punish you for that.”

Over and over again he told Solomon that they would escape, that of everyone in this camp, they had the best chance of it. When Solomon was able to think about it, he thought Wilson was right. Solomon thought he remembered reading about escapes from communist camps, and the only ones who were able to were soldiers, like them, in the prime of their lives, and in their first year of imprisonment.

But lately Solomon wasn’t able to hold many thoughts together in his head.

“Add details,” a counselor was saying to his circle. “Show us that you mean it by sharing more about how you were complicit.” Nobody argued back. Which was good. The other confession circles on the baseball field were near enough that you could hear the girl screaming over by the home plate, as the butt of another counselor’s rifle came down on her body again and again. What a waste of a good rifle. Solomon had to stop himself from staring at every single one that came into his view. His fingers were hungry for lock, stock and barrel.

Maybe that was because he knew that without Wilson feeding him lines, it would be his face and back and arms being struck. Even so, Solomon hoped the counselor would never ask him to elaborate on what he was saying, because he had no idea what the words cisheterosexist patriarchal society meant –