Summary
More and more men at Anders’s gym are changing; it is no longer the essentially whites-only space it was. Rather than make things better, as Anders hoped, there is increasing tension and overt violence in the lifts. More self-induced injuries follow. One night a pale man and a dark man get into a fight in the locker room that moves out to the parking lot. No one intervenes; everyone remains silent. When Anders hears the crack of a hand on a face, he is so disturbed by the sound that he leaves, not waiting to see which man wins.
Oona spends the night with Anders. In the morning she asks how afraid of dying he is; she has been thinking a lot lately about people dying and has realized how much she wants to continue living. Anders cooks breakfast and Oona gets pleasure from watching the methodical way he prepares the food. He is focused in everything he does.
Oona is at work when the rumored riots finally begin in earnest. Her colleagues rush to get out and lock the doors. Oona can smell the smoky smell of anarchy or revolution in the distance. A colleague urges Oona to her car and to not bother trying to help a brown family running past. On her drive, no one is following traffic rules, lights, or signage. She listens for sirens and is disturbed not to hear them. Her street is peaceful. In her home, she checks her phone to see Anders has tried calling her throughout the day, but she must not have heard or felt the phone, as if something is wrong with it.
Anders’s boss closes the gym temporarily. Without income coming in, Anders counts his savings and supplies. It occurs to him to phone the cleaner from the gym to see if he is safe, but doesn’t have the man’s number or even know his last name. Anders goes online to learn that though the riots are subsiding, the militants are becoming more aggressive; bodies are being found in fields. The bodies are rumored to be dark. Anders keeps his rifle close to him. He wonders how much he really wants to live and thinks about other dark people ending their own lives with “drinks and pipes and pills.”
After the riots, Oona argues with her mother about her new ideas, which revolve around the idea that the militants are not the aggressors but the dark people. She claims that the question isn’t whether the dark people or the pale people are better; the important thing is separating the dark people from the pale people, who need protection from being changed. Oona misses her father, “who could talk sense into anyone.” She wonders if her father and brother had both somehow seen what was coming and decided they wanted no part of it.
Anders isn’t surprised when militants pull up outside his house; he has heard about militants running dark people out of town. As prepared as he can be, Anders opens the door with his rifle drawn. He knows one of the three armed white men. Trying to seem brave, Anders asks what he can do for them. The men say he had better not be there when they come back. He says they’ll have to find out for themselves. However, Anders knows he will leave town; his home no longer his.
Anders takes refuge at his father’s house. Their rifles at their sides, both men await the arrival of someone coming for Anders, but, at least on the first night, no one comes. Anders’s father isn’t used to the dark man his son has become, and feels some sympathy for the people who feel threatened by Anders. But regardless of what his son has become, Anders’s father will defend him as best he can.
In the morning, the power goes out. Anders uses half his battery on his phone to call Oona, who confirms their power went out too. At the end of the call, Anders sees there is no service either. The power comes back at midnight, and cell service along with it. Days pass with sounds of distant violence. Anders gets a sense of how much pain his father is in as the old man struggles to survive.
Oona, after ignoring her social media accounts for so long, goes online and looks through old photos of herself. In previous summers, her skin was darker from sun. She finds she likes how she looks and begins using applications to darken her skin further, even changing her features.
The experiments lead her to order makeup. She and her mother never go out, but you can still order pretty much anything. The delivery men work in teams, one watching with a pistol at the ready. She applies the dark makeup in her room and is pleased with the result. She wears it to dinner and her mother tells her she should be ashamed. Oona says she is ashamed. Her mother insists Oona isn’t, but she should be. Oona washes the heavy makeup off after eating.
Analysis
Hamid returns to the theme of societal collapse in Chapter Seven. As more people spontaneously change color, Anders observes a change in the mood at his gym. As people react to the change with confusion, grief, and anger, tensions among members of the gym increase, leading to eruptions of violence. Anders witnesses a fight between a white man and a dark man; he is among the group of spectators who do nothing to intervene, as if they have collectively accepted their powerlessness against the increasing chaos.
The fistfight outside Anders’s gym proves to be a precursor to greater unrest. In a scene that parallels Anders’s uncomfortable experience at the gym, amid the riots Oona feels inclined to help a dark-skinned family running together—presumably away from white militants who have driven them out of their home. As with Anders, Oona succumbs to the bystander effect, frozen in inaction along with her yoga studio colleagues. In an instance of situational irony, Oona is alarmed by the absolute lack of police, fire, or ambulance sirens. The lack of institutional support confirms that society has descended into anarchy.
The theme of mortality arises again as Anders and Oona take refuge in their homes, afraid to go out and risk getting killed in the civil war–like conditions. While the riots subside, the dissolution of state power gives rise to greater violence at the hands of the white militants. Knowing that the militants have amped up their tactics and begun murdering dark people, Anders keeps his father’s rifle nearby. As Anders contemplates how far he is willing to go to continue living, the gun becomes a memento mori—a symbolic reminder of the inevitability of death.
Building further on the themes of societal collapse and racial prejudice, Hamid depicts a trio of white militants arriving at Anders’s home to intimidate him into fleeing. While he stands up to the men by holding his own firearm, he nonetheless knows he must leave his home before they return, outnumbered as he is. Once Anders takes refuge at his father’s, there is a power outage—another sign that society as they know it is crumbling.
The theme of white privilege comes up again during the lockdown when Oona flirts with changing her skin color. Continuing to oscillate between an attraction toward darker skin and an ingrained aversion, Oona applies brown makeup to her face to see how she might look if she were changed. While she is happy with how she looks, her racist mother shames her. No longer pleased with the experiment, Oona returns to her privileged position as a white person by washing off the makeup.
