The Submission (14 page)

Then she regained her senses. Every news outlet stirring this already opposed Khan because he was Muslim. They would do anything to stop him. This was just the latest pretext, a more palatable one for reasonable Americans than his religion alone. Once Khan explained his garden, answered the accusations, the fearmongering would lose its power.

The radio host Lou Sarge had an occasional sidekick, Otto Toner, whose role was to play the professional idiot. “I was just thinking,” he said on-air. “Remember when the Russians bugged our embassy in Moscow? We built it, they bugged it, didn’t the whole thing go to waste—never got used? Am I right?”

“Right off your rocker,” Sarge said.

“Maybe this is like that—the same. Maybe they’re planning to plant bugs.”

“Of course they are, Otto,” Sarge said. “It’s a garden. You plant. And then come the bugs.” The hammy sound of a ba-da-bing!

“But you know,” Sarge said, shadows stealing into his voice, “even Otto’s right twice a day. Maybe there’s something sneaky, maybe they’re planning tunnels underneath. Or planting—putting—something
dangerous in that memorial. I mean, how do we know the danger’s just symbolic here? Maybe this becomes some kind of base for them. I mean, has anyone really checked out this Mohammad Khan? Is he the Manchurian Candidate of Islam?”

The Gallagher clan was gathered in the living room, listening to the radio. Frank and Eileen. The daughters: Hannah, Megan, Lucy, and Maeve, the last two bouncing babies on their knees. The sons-in-law: Brendan, Ellis, and Jim. Sean.

“Bloody hell,” Jim said.

“What the fuck?” This was Brendan. “What the fuck?” Megan put a hand on his knee, as if to physically tame his language.

Frank was watching Eileen. She was watching an invisible point on the wall opposite her. Her hand traced the same small circle on her thigh over and over, as if to burn through the fabric. Screams came from outside, where the youngest generation was playing touch football. The adults, on edge, froze. Sean, who’d been leaning against the wall, went to the window. A touchdown being celebrated. Tara, his four-year-old niece, had been given the ball to score. It always began this way, charitably, before the girls and the little ones were banished to the sidelines so the real play could begin. He, the youngest adult in the room, was momentarily wistful for the sweat and clarity of football in fall air. The rules were known to all.

He was batting away a sense that he had somehow screwed up, that by fighting to expand the memorial’s size, all he’d won was more space for this Muslim to mock them. He’d failed to get on the jury, let alone gain control of it. By habit he raised and lowered the window, checking for stiffness and warp.

“Here’s the governor.” Jim turned off the radio and turned up the television. She was leaving the National Press Club, where she had given a speech on defense policy. “It’s disturbing that a jury of so-called experts could miss that this is an Islamic garden,” she said.

“You picked the jury!” Sean said. “Does she think we’re stupid?”

“If it turns out to be true, it would be unconstitutional to allow
the establishment of any religion on public land,” the governor continued. “I’m going to seek legal advice. Even if the report isn’t true, this may not turn out to be the best design. But I want the public to weigh in on that at the hearing.”

“A hearing won’t stop this,” Ellis said, “not if they’ve let it come this far.”

“It’s too much,” Eileen whispered, “too much.” Frank half stood, leaned toward her slightly, sat back down. Megan, next to her on the couch, took her left hand, and Lucy came and took her right. Eileen took it back so she could rub her leg again.

“It’s not enough to kill us, they have to humiliate us, too,” Brendan said. He’d led a brief protest at his local subway stop after the name Talib Islam was posted under the smiling face on the “Hello, I am your station manager” sign. “They expect us to look at that name every day?” he’d asked. The Transit Authority had posted cops in the station to protect Islam, which made Brendan apoplectic. Then, one day, the manager was gone. Brendan counted it a victory until he learned that Talib Islam had been promoted.

Now Khan’s name, and his paradise, would torment them in a place far more sacred than a subway. Pity for his mother—stronger than his own anger, stronger than his love for her—overwhelmed Sean. Sometimes he thought she wished he, instead of Patrick, had died. And yet thinking that now only enlarged his compassion for her. To save the memorial was a chance to be vigilant as they hadn’t been the first time. Eileen had been cleaning the attic when the planes flew overhead. Sean wanted to lock Khan in a room with his mother to see if he could withstand her pain.

“Please, Sean, don’t let this come to be,” she said. The look in her gray eyes—what was it? He’d never seen it, not from her. Pleading. His hard mother admitting her need. If, at that moment, she had asked him to strap on a bomb and blow up someone or something, he probably would have. But she hadn’t asked. A plan was up to him.

A file clip of Claire Burwell in dark glasses flashed on the TV.

“Some other blood runs in those veins,” his mother said. Maybe money made you feel less, Sean thought, picturing Claire in her mansion, which was bigger than he’d even imagined (and he’d spent a lot of time imagining it), bigger than any he’d seen. Different, too. So much glass. He hoped she’d been watching him, hoped she’d been scared, wished he’d thrown that rock into her house of light.

The threats began soon after Mo’s official anointment. By phone, by letter, by e-mail, his countrymen promised to burn him as the terrorists had incinerated their victims, to stab him in the heart as he was stabbing America. The FBI placed him under watch. Agents much like his interrogators in Los Angeles posed, ineptly, as his assistants. In their presence, Emmanuel Roi wore the look of an ancient Brahman forced to host untouchables.

Next came the picketers. Two, or three, or ten of them, mostly women, foot-darned a circle in the park across from his house. They held signs with by-now familiar slogans—
NO MECCA IN MANHATTAN
or
STOP JI-HIDING
—and at the sight of Mo, they hooted, shouted, and shook rattles. A police officer soon joined to make sure they were targeting the whole neighborhood, as opposed to his residence, which would be illegal harassment. The distinction was lost on Mo. Photographers, drawn by the spectacle and the prospect of confrontation, showed up and drew onlookers, who drew more onlookers, and before long the park had become an encampment laying siege to Mo’s peace.

He found refuge at Laila’s. With Laila. Their relationship had deepened—tentatively, at first: she was his lawyer, she had protested, it was inappropriate; they would be discovered by the council—then
in a rush of surrender, as if the pressure of controversy welded them together. Her Murray Hill studio had been inherited, along with its cheap rent, from a friend. Its lines suggested a hotel room or corporate apartment, but it had built-in bookcases and a long wall of windows. Laila had dressed the room in velvety Persian rugs and a rich red sofa, a small walnut table and two matching straight-backed chairs to eat on, her grandmother’s elegant armoire to hold her serving pieces, and the family’s old phonograph with its amplifier like a giant conch ear. All of it delivered the odd but enchanting effect of a live orchestra playing a Viennese waltz in a dentist’s office. She had walled off her bed with a screen inlaid with mother-of-pearl, but in the morning, she would reach up to fold it aside, turning the cello of her back toward Mo. The first thing he saw out her window was the Chrysler Building, which he had loved as a child, and a circle he hadn’t known to be incomplete closed.

On the single occasion that Laila stayed a night at Mo’s loft, she had spent the entire next day trapped inside for fear that the photographers would expose their relationship. From now on, she told Mo once she had snuck out under cover of dark, he had to come to her place to see her. “And I’m not so sure your apartment is safe for you now, either,” she said.

He took a suitcase full of clothes to her studio, where she gave him a corner of the closet and told him to keep to it. His stays without returning home stretched longer—three days, then five, until he stopped running the shrill gauntlet into his building at all. To his surprise, he was at Laila’s studio more than she was. She had meetings, working dinners, cases, causes. Mo, out of sync with ROI’s rhythms, was adrift between projects. Sometimes she let him know when she would be home, sometimes she forgot. By the time she returned, the apartment would be immaculate. It amused Mo that she didn’t notice. She entered and warmed the room like a small sun, and in her absence both he and the furniture seemed to be waiting to be brought to life.

“Mohammad Khan has absolutely, unequivocally every right to proceed with his memorial,” read
The New Yorker’s
weekly Comment, penned by its editor. “The question is whether he
should
proceed.” Mo’s stomach contracted. He had been taking comfort, to a degree, in the predictability of the opposition to him: hostile family members; conservative publications; opportunistic politicians like Governor Bitman, who had been speaking about “stealth jihad” in the early primary and caucus states.
The New Yorker
fit none of these categories.

Mo set down the magazine and flipped through his stack of unread
New Yorker
s. To be written about this way in its pages was like being called shifty by a roomful of people he had thought were his friends. The rhetorical switchbacks couldn’t camouflage the demand that he address the suspicions he provoked. It barely consoled Mo when some of the editor’s liberal peers denounced the piece’s equivocation in their own publications, or when Susan Sarandon and Tim Rob-bins wore green ribbons—garden green, Islamic green—to a movie premiere to show solidarity with him. The Comment had made ambivalence respectable, and it began to pour forth.

Manhattanites who had always prided themselves on their liberalism confessed that they were talking to their therapists about their discomfort with Mohammad Khan as the memorial’s designer. “It’s awful,” a thirty-two-year-old music executive who declined to give her name told
The New York Observer
, which accompanied the article with a color drawing showing an ominous-looking Mo looming over a shrunken Manhattan. “There’s this primal feeling in my gut saying ‘No’ to it, even though my brain is saying ‘Yes’—sort of like when you think you want to have sex with someone and your body won’t cooperate; or you think you don’t and your body cooperates
too much
—and I don’t get where it’s coming from. It’s like I’ve been invaded. But what can I say? I don’t have good reasons. It just makes me uncomfortable, and being uncomfortable makes me even more uncomfortable.”

Mo began to put psychological distance between himself and the Mohammad Khan who was written and talked about, as if that were another man altogether. It often was. Facts were not found but made, and once made, alive, defying anyone to tell them from truth. Strangers analyzed, judged, and invented him. Mo read that he was Pakistani, Saudi, and Qatari; that he was not an American citizen; that he had donated to organizations backing terrorism; that he had dated half the female architects in New York; that as a Muslim he didn’t date at all; that his father ran a shady Islamic charity; that his brother—how badly Mo, as an only child, had wanted a brother!—had started
a radical Muslim students’ association at his university. He was called, besides decadent, abstinent, deviant, violent, insolent, abhorrent, aberrant, and typical. Neutering his unhappiness allowed him to read, with the floaty interest he would feel toward a dental drill penetrating a numbed molar, that green ribbons were sprouting like seedlings from the lapels of those who supported his right to design the memorial, that in response a member of Save America from Islam had created an anti-Garden sticker—a green foursquare gouged by a red slash, which began appearing on car bumpers and hard hats and T-shirts; that both sides had begun wearing American flag pins to prove their patriotism, and that arguments were breaking out on subways and in the streets between the beribboned and the stickered, with at least one clash turning violent, leaving a stickered man with a bruised shin, although it turned out that a dispute over a parking space had also factored in. By training his face not to show feeling, he could receive the attention of the strangers who stopped him on the street to tell him to withdraw from the competition, or not to withdraw, or, most often, only that they recognized him, as if he were some B-movie actor they couldn’t quite place.

“So,” Paul Rubin said, “what can I do for you?”

It was eight-fifteen in a coffee shop on Madison Avenue. Sean had spent two weeks trying to get a meeting with Rubin; he wanted to impress on him his committee’s, and his family’s, opposition to the Garden. In frustration—and perhaps in competition with the anti-Islam group picketing Khan’s home, which was where Sean got the idea—he had his committee members set up their own picket on Rubin’s block.
SAVE THE MEMORIAL,
their signs said.
NO VICTORY GARDEN.
Along with pressuring Rubin, the picket offered a useful outlet for Sean’s growing and increasingly agitated membership. He now had nearly 250 family members and retired firefighters dropping by his parents’ house or sitting around, all amped up and waiting for deployment. Making calls to elected officials wasn’t exactly red meat. So he
had the picket manned around the clock, other than a furlough between midnight and 6:00 a.m. Some of the guys told him it reminded them of working down at the site, although Sean didn’t see how hoisting a sign on an Upper East Side sidewalk could compare.

At last Rubin’s smarmy assistant called to say that the chairman would squeeze him in for breakfast, but Sean shouldn’t be late. He arrived on time, settled into a booth, then waited fifteen minutes for Rubin, who peremptorily relocated them to a window table for more privacy.

The place looked ordinary to Sean, but the prices weren’t: five bucks for half a grapefruit, twelve for a bagel and cream cheese. Lots of men in fancy tracksuits, women who appeared to subsist on grapefruit halves alone.

“Isn’t that—”

“Yes,” Rubin said. He was, even at this hour, in his bow tie. “Politicians love this place. So what can I do for you?”

“What you can do for me—”

“The usual,” Rubin said. The waiter had come for their order.

“Uh, three eggs, bacon, coffee, juice,” Sean said. “White toast. So, what you can do for me—”

A busboy, with water.

“What you can do for me—”

“Let me rephrase that,” Rubin said, as their coffee was poured. “I’m always eager for the families’ input, as you know, but there’s a formal process in place now, and there will be a hearing for you to express your sentiments on the design. So what did you feel couldn’t be conveyed—”

A silver-haired man stopped by the table to shake Paul’s hand. “I have great confidence in the outcome because you’re handling this, Paul. I wouldn’t want anyone else in charge.”

“Thanks, Bruce, I appreciate that.” Sean was not introduced. He felt himself in the camp of the enemy—not Muslims but the people born with silver sticks up their asses, the people who had made Manhattan a woman too good to give Sean her phone number.

Bruce gone, Sean tilted across the table. “How the hell did this happen?”

“And you’re referring to what, exactly?”

“Come on. Mohammad Khan. His Islamic garden.”

“That’s not how he refers to it.”

“No, it’s how I’m referring to it. Don’t play games with me, with us.”

“How did it happen? Was that what you asked? As I recall, people like you—you, the families—you wanted a competition, a democratic exercise everyone could participate in. And so everyone did.”

“That’s not who we meant by everyone.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“But it should. You think we’ll stand for a Muslim memorial? I should have been on the jury. This never would have happened.”

“We have a family member on the jury, as you well know, Sean, and we’re not open to new members at this time.” He made it sound like a country club.

“She’s not representing us—Claire,” Sean said.

“You mean she’s not taking dictation from you? That’s not her role. Does your congressman do everything you want? She’s on the jury to convey your desires—and those of many other relatives, who may or may not agree with you—to the jurors. Not as a puppet. She’s her own woman.”

“Yeah, well, the governor’s ours.”

“Then you should have nothing to worry about. But politics are rarely as simple as they look, Sean, and the bylaws written for this process are quite complicated as well: the governor can’t simply decide she doesn’t like a design. There have to be supportable grounds for her pronouncing it unsuitable. The whole idea was to respect the jury’s work.”

“The jury’s fuck-up, is what you mean.”

“The jury didn’t know whose design it was picking, as you know, so you can’t pin this on them. And please watch your language, Sean. There are children here.” As if the whole coffee shop was in service of his reprimand, a young man carrying a strapping blond toddler approached. Rubin gave the boy a pro forma chuck on the cheek.

“Sounds like you’ve got a mess on your hands,” the man said.

“Probably less of one than you’ve got, Phil,” Rubin said; the boy had loosed a waterfall of chewed-up cracker from his mouth.

Phil smiled and said, “If anyone knows about cleaning up messes, it’s you.” He turned to Sean: “If you’d seen how Paul dealt with the Asian crisis …” He shook his head in admiration. “People were losing their … losing their cool all over, but Chairman Rubin here was so steady, never broke a sweat.”

As he seamlessly interwove ass-kissing and financial-speak, Sean saw himself too clearly: A no-name worthy of addressing but not worthy of knowing. An audience, not a player, unshaven in his Windbreaker because he hadn’t wanted to be late.

Rubin tapped his fingers with impatience, then dismissed the distraction. “Thanks, Phil, that’s much appreciated, good to see you.” Interloper and child gone, he lowered and toughened his voice at the same time. “There will be a public hearing. You can speak your mind there, Sean. But you might want to make your opposition a little less crude.”