Friday Black

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2018

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“Zimmer Land”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“Zimmer Land” Summary

Content Warning: This story discusses anti-Black violence.

Isaiah, a Black man, works at Zimmer Land, a theme park specializing in interactive justice, where he roleplays as an antagonist in life-and-death scenarios. While the scenarios are intended to tackle issues in meaningful ways, patrons typically choose violent approaches to resolve the scenarios. The story begins with Isaiah working through one such module called Cassidy Lane, where he is killed by a patron who perceives him as a dangerous neighborhood intruder. Leaving the park for the day, Isaiah finds his car covered in protest flyers.

Isaiah, who understands the moral conflict surrounding his work but appreciates the job security, goes to his first meeting as a member of the creative development team. Arriving late, he listens as the company’s CEO, Heland Zimmer, and the Park Operations President, Doug, introduce a new module to the park that will enable children to participate as patrons. After the meeting, Isaiah speaks privately with Heland and Doug to share his concerns about the way the modules frame violence, suggesting that his module, Cassidy Lane, should go on to show what happens to Isaiah’s family if the patron chooses to kill him. Doug dismisses the idea, spinning it as an attempt to remove the entertainment and emotional impact of the module. Isaiah argues that the existing module teaches the patron to equate killing with justice.

Isaiah encounters his ex-girlfriend, Melanie, who is now dating Heland and endorsed Isaiah for the creative team. When she asks him how his participation in the meeting went, he lies that it went well. That night, Isaiah dreams of his disembodied soul after being killed.

The new youth-centered module is launched at Zimmer Land. Isaiah and his friend, Saleh, a half-Indian player who is often given the role of a Muslim ambiguously associated with terror plots, talk about leaving their jobs. Saleh encourages him to leave, but Isaiah is reluctant to quit considering his new role in creative development. The story ends with Isaiah enacting another run of the Cassidy Lane module. This time, the patron, a regular visitor of the module, is accompanied by his young son. When Isaiah defends against the patron in the scenario, the patron pulls out his gun, telling his son to “[s]tay behind [him] (103).

“Zimmer Land” Analysis

The setting of Adjei-Brenyah’s “Zimmer Land” is a critical element for discussing The Normalization of Violence as one of the collection’s central themes. Notably, the Zimmer Land modules almost always depict high-stakes, life-or-death situations; a new youth-centric module involves finding a terrorist bomb on the campus while Saleh’s module involves stopping a terror plot on a moving train. Isaiah’s module, Cassidy Lane, is the only one that doesn’t present an active threat to the participants, yet it is framed like one: The briefing tells participants to investigate the presence of a stranger who has been wandering the neighborhood more than once. This scenario and the story’s title allude to the real-life killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012. Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old Black teen was walking to a family member’s house when he was accosted and shot by Zimmerman, who viewed Martin as a threat and claimed the shooting was self-defense. Zimmerman was acquitted in 2013, which sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. The hyperbolic and dystopic elements in this story—creating a theme park that allows white patrons to reenact vigilante justice on BIPOC actors—critique the American justice system and white supremacist violence.

The narrative framing of these modules plants biases of varying subtlety in the participants’ minds. Cassidy Lane tells its participants that people passing through the neighborhood are inherently distrustful. What lends further nuance to this bias is the race of the workers who perform the modules at Zimmer Land. Isaiah suggests that Saleh’s module is designed in such a way that the Muslim characters on the train are the most likely suspects of the terror plot. When Isaiah suggests changes to Cassidy Lane, his ideas introduce a sense of consequence to the module so that participants are incentivized to explore options other than killing. Since Isaiah is Black and is the only worker who performs the Cassidy Lane module, the prioritization of killing as an option frames neighborhood justice as something that can only be achieved when outsiders, especially BIPOC individuals, are eliminated. This added dimension to the setting resonates with another major theme of the collection: The Plight of Retail Workers. In another exaggeration, the poor working conditions of retail workers are illuminated by Zimmer Land’s workers’ daily exposure to violence.

Although Isaiah remains in his job because it is steady work, his continued participation in the modules makes him directly involved in the normalization of systemic racial violence. In the eyes of the participants who come back again and again, Isaiah is equivalent to the everyday threats that surround them. Although he wants to change the system from within, he is continually dismissed from the process of shaping the park’s definition of justice—when he is added to the creative team, he is told the wrong meeting time, essentially preventing his active participation. Even when he resists the patron at the end of the story, all it really does is reinforce the patron’s racist belief that people like Isaiah need to be killed.