by Amy Waldman
“So Alyssa’s right?”
“I didn’t say that. Whether it’s fact or rumor is really irrelevant.”
“That’s not how we see it in the newspaper business.”
“But you haven’t confirmed it?”
“You just did.”
Paul started.
“I’m kidding, Paul, I wouldn’t do that to you. But Alyssa’s a bulldog—she’ll confirm it eventually. Look, I see your position, but please see mine: it’s an explosive exclusive.”
“Explosive is right, Fred. This country can’t handle this right now. I know you have a newspaper to run, and that you feel a … uh … duty to report the news, but there are more important principles at stake. It’s as close to being a national security issue as it can be without being a national security issue. All I’m asking for is time, the chance to manage this in private a bit longer.”
Fred was quiet for a few moments. Out of the corner of his eye, Paul saw Barry Diller peacock into the bar at Diane von Furstenberg’s side. She looked pretty good for her age, those cheekbones protruding like tangerines. Paul crooked a finger, and the waiter refreshed their drinks and the salted almonds, a bowl of which Paul had emptied.
“So how do you rate Bitman’s chances?” Fred asked, and Paul knew, for the time being, he was safe.
5
A year after the attack, news about Muslims arrested or suspected, the constant parsing of Islam’s “true” nature, had become background noise for Mo. Foreground was work, behind which geopolitics, serious romance, even a second chair and a bed frame for his echoing loft receded. All of it could wait until he “made it,” although he was well aware that such success, if it came at all for an architect, came late. “You can’t keep deferring your life,” his mother said. She worried that, as he neared forty, he was no closer to getting married or having children than he had been at twenty. At least now he could tell her that his sacrifices were about to pay off.
The rumor, repeated often enough that it had become an apparent inevitability, was that today Mo would be made one of the firm’s project directors. At four, Emmanuel Roi, the firm’s founder, swept into the office like a leaf blower, scattering everything, everyone in his path. He paused by the desk of an architect working on a model and said, “You know what this looks like? Merde. It looks like a doggy climbed on this desk and took a shit.” He liked to make an impression early in his visits.
An hour later, he summoned Mo to his glassed-in office, meant to “hide nothing, show everything,” in Roi’s famous dictum. See everything, too. Mo had spent the previous half hour rehearsing how he would accept the promotion, so he took a few moments to grasp Roi’s news: not Mo but Percy Storm—the manorexic whom Mo and Thomas Kroll, his best friend at the firm, called Storm Trooper behind his back—was being promoted.
“Storm—?” Mo started to gasp, then stopped himself. He could barely breathe.
Roi’s hands caressed his silver-stubbled head; his eyes were black cloaks. Mo pressed for reasons, without success. Had Roi, he wondered, gotten wind that Mo and Thomas planned, in time, to defect and start their own practice? Thomas, in fact, had already registered its name, K/K Architects. Mo couldn’t ask, for to ask would be to reveal, and so he phrased generic questions about whether Roi was dissatisfied with him, to which Roi offered oleaginous reassurance: “Your turn will come.”
“Any issue with … me? My conduct?”
“Of course not, Mo. I have no problems with you.” This was a lie, of course, since Emmanuel was threatened by anyone with talent and ego, any younger version of himself. But that characteristic had never stopped Emmanuel from giving Mo prime work. As Roi became bigger—an icon, a blimp—he needed better talent around him to cover how thinly his own was spread. He was overseeing sixty-three projects in eleven countries: anyone could do the math—although no one beyond his employees did—and see that his true involvement in any of them must be minimal. Maybe grousing about this had been Mo’s undoing. He couldn’t ask: it was one of those conversations in which words brick over the cons and deceptions taking place.
Emmanuel was droning on about Mo’s bright future and, aggravatingly, Percy’s managerial capabilities, when Mo broke in: “Does this have anything to do with … with me being, you know?”
“No, I do not know,” Emmanuel said, affronted by the interruption, not the insinuation.
“Muslim.”
“To even suggest—” Having judged that fragment of a denial sufficient, Emmanuel sent his ursine hands ranging over the desk in search of distraction. Finding none—the vast glass surface was denuded of papers to shuffle or even a stray paper clip—he began to peck at the computer with his index fingers. Everyone knew he dictated his e-mails, not to mention his designs—he molded paper, or cardboard, or tin from which his young architects generated computer images—so this finger play was a farce. The meeting was over.
“Of course,” Mo muttered. “Sorry.”
Without saying goodbye he walked out. The envious eyes of his colleagues, sure he had been promoted, tracked him as he headed for the office exit. Their misperception, so soon to be corrected, tightened the clammy grip of humiliation around his throat. Outside his body shivered out of proportion to the temperature, and there was no plane above to account for the roar in his ears.
The memory of the airport interrogation was unpacked, shaken out, stuffed full of straw to make it lifelike once again. There was no evidence Roi hadn’t elevated Mo because he was a Muslim but none against it, either. If he had been singled out once, why not again? Paranoia, no less than plasticine, could be molded.
Crushed into the corner of a subway car one rush hour soon after his non-promotion, Mo watched four black teenagers enter the car and begin tossing unfurled, though thankfully unused, condoms onto the heads of sardined commuters. They withstood their torment with bowed heads until a short African American man in a suit delivered a sharp reprimand—”Stop it, stop it now!”—earning for his trouble only an extra round of rubbers. He left the train soon after but lingered in Mo’s mind. The man had intervened, a sympathetic Mo was convinced, because he felt tainted by the behavior of other blacks.
“But how do you know that’s why he got involved?” Yuki, his girlfriend of the past two months, asked when he told her the story that evening. She was shaving limpid slices of pear with a mandoline. “Maybe he was just being a good citizen.” Mo clutched his foul temper to his chest as if Yuki, with her prettiness and sober wisdom, was trying to take it away.
She had long hair and precision-cut bangs, and favored, in all seasons, miniskirts and expensive trench coats. An architect who had branched into designing architectonic, extremely high-end baby clothes, she confessed on their first date that she didn’t particularly like children. They ate, drank, made love, argued about buildings, and watched television, which was what they were doing later that night when Yuki, in possession of the remote, paused on Fox News.
A studio audience was watching a debate on, as the caption put it, “Should Muslims be singled out for searches at airports?”
“How could anyone defend that?” she asked.
Mo, still peeved, declined to engage. The debate was between Issam Malik, the executive director of the Muslim American Coordinating Council, and Lou Sarge, New York’s most popular right-wing radio host. In the months after the attack he had added the tagline “I Slam Islam” to his show.
“Profiling is illegal, immoral, and ineffective,” said Malik. He resembled the actor George Clooney with darker skin and a neatly trimmed beard.
“Ridiculous!” shouted Sarge. His hair had a black Cadillac’s sheen, his face a stark, powdered pallor. “We should have separate security lines for Muslims to be searched at the airport.”
“The police used to stop African Americans solely for ‘driving while black.’ Now it’s acceptable to single us out for ‘flying while Muslim’?” Malik asked. “And how will you identify the Muslims? Are you going to tattoo us? I am a peaceful,
law-abiding American. Why should I get singled out when I have done absolutely nothing wrong?”
“You want us to search little old ladies waiting to board their planes just so Muslims won’t feel bad?” Sarge asked. “Ridiculous!”
“You’re ridiculous,” Yuki said to the screen.
“He’s right,” Mo said.
“What?” Her posy of a mouth parted a little.
“He’s right. We can’t pretend that everyone’s equally dangerous.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying that!” Yuki sputtered. “That means you’d be one of those singled out.”
“So be it—I have nothing to hide. I’m not going to pretend that all Muslims can be trusted. If Muslims are the reason they’re doing searches in the first place, why shouldn’t Muslims be searched?”
“We know who the enemy is!” Sarge was saying, or rather exclaiming. “Let’s stop walking around like the emperor has clothes! He’s naked! Radical Islam—naked radical Islam—is the enemy.”
Mo got up from the sofa, switched off the television—knowing that, in the sedate precincts he and Yuki inhabited, this amounted to declaring war—and went into the kitchen for a beer. A Muslim drinking to cope with the stress of being a Muslim: he wasn’t sure who would get the joke.
“I think we’re on the same side,” Yuki said when he returned from the kitchen.
“And what side is that?”
“The right side. What’s the problem here, Mo?” What was the problem? He knew he was being deliberately contrarian, but something in the easy comfort of her outrage made him bristle.
“You’re a hypocrite, to start,” he said. “After accusing me of presuming to know how the black man on the train felt, you’re presuming that because I’m Muslim I’ll feel a certain way about how Muslims should be treated.”
“I’m not presuming anything except that you don’t want some security agent’s hand down your pants because your name’s Mohammad. Am I wrong?”
She wasn’t, which made him argue all the harder. “It’s patronizing, that attitude. You can’t pretend Islam isn’t a threat.”
“If I thought Islam was a threat, I wouldn’t be dating you,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means what it sounds like it means.”
“What—that your dating me is conditional on your approval of my religion?”
“That’s not what I said, but for the record I happen to think Islam is a very cool religion.”
“Oh, so dating a Muslim turns you on?”
“Mo! What’s gotten into you?”
They fought on, or rather Mo threw verbal punches and Yuki put up her hands until her arms tired.
“I don’t care that you’re Muslim, Mo, but I do care that you’re an asshole,” she said, and he knew they had reached their end.
The animated characters beetled around a plaza outside an office building until the camera zoomed in on a dark-skinned cartoon man with a beard and backpack, and—
BOOM! The sound of the bomb blast was so loud and sudden that a few people jerked in their seats. The screen went black and when it came back up, the figures were animated no longer because they were dead. The lights came on, revealing the banner design against terrorism along one wall and a roomful of architects, Mo among them.
“So how do you think we could reduce the risk?” asked the British counterterrorism expert leading the seminar. His name was Henry Moore, which had evoked sad, wry smiles from some of his pupils. His skin was the texture of a shepherd’s-pie crust, his teeth surprisingly excellent.
“Stop invading other countries,” one man muttered.
“Search everyone—that’s what they do in Israel.”
“Ban backpacks.”
“But those aren’t really … architectural solutions,” Henry said.
“Shatterproof glass,” said a brownnoser. “And truck barriers, obviously.”
“Great. Anything a little more … creative?”
Silence. Henry began with history—Crusader castles, high atop plateaus; moated cities—then moved to modern times: mammoth planters and giant benches artfully arrayed; a Richard Serra sculpture (“defensive art”); serpentining access roads with subtle security checkpoints; schools whose baffled windows made them look like prisons; false windows. Beauty and safety were not incompatible, he lectured, although he showed few examples to prove it. Which only goaded Mo to prove it himself. He worked best with design constraints. ROI had won multiple awards for a museum for the disabled, showing the history of their experience in America, that Mo had largely designed. As with many architects, his empathy was selective. Put him behind a man navigating a Manhattan sidewalk in a wheelchair, and Mo would curse the obstruction. But pose a paraplegic’s plight as a design problem, and Mo would climb into his wheelchair, feel the deadweight of his limbs. For the museum, he had taken inspiration from mountain switchbacks, their giddy sense of ascension, to create a series of ramps that crisscrossed up the building’s interior, offering unexpected vistas inside and out.
Now he played with the problem of urban security: Would you want buildings that advertised how safe they were or that made you forget your fear? It was easy to laugh off Crusader crenellations or moats; harder to see if they possessed anything adaptable. A barrier of water would make for a more pleasing setback than a concrete plaza. A zigzag approach, with views framed within walls, could make arriving a visual adventure. These thoughts he kept to himself.
“Don’t you think if you create more hard targets, they’ll just move on to softer ones?” one of the few women in the room asked. “Are we going to armor everything?”
“It’s not armor,” Henry said. “It’s smart building.”
He flashed a slide of a row of conifers that formed a verdant border between a sterile plaza and a generic office building.
“Cypress trees,” Henry said. “They’re very good at absorbing the kinetic energy of a blast. Strong trunks, leaves like scales—they hold tight. And they don’t look … sinister. Think of them as a line of defense.”
“Is our government going to pay for all this?” The architect spoke aggressively. “I mean, if we have to add barriers and shatterproof glass and cypresses? Unless you can prove there’s going to be a terrorist attack next week, no developer’s going to put money into it.”
“This is about preventive architecture,” Henry said.
“Yes, preventing creativity.” There were chuckles.
“When I think of all the money I pissed away learning how to make buildings inviting …”
“There’re bloody cameras everywhere now—isn’t that enough?”
“Maybe we should just get rid of public spaces,” said the man who had suggested banning backpacks.
“Or get rid of Muslims, for that matter.”
“Now, now,” Henry chided.
Mo stared out the window. The sun, in the gray sky, looked like it had been sunk in dirty water.
From London, Mo was to go on to Kabul, where ROI was competing to design a new American embassy. Over beers, Mo and Thomas had dissected Roi’s decision to dispatch Mo, but they arrived at no conclusion, only a drunkenness harmful to Thomas’s marital harmony. Their theories included the following: Roi was compensating for not promoting Mo by sending him on an international junket that included a free trip to London, where the counterterrorism seminar was meant to buff the firm’s credentials; Roi was punishing Mo by sending him to Kabul; Roi was trying to enhance the firm’s odds of getting to design an embassy in a Muslim country by sending a Muslim, or trying to ensure they wouldn’t get the commission by sending a Muslim.
“He wants to prove he doesn’t consider you a liability,” Thomas said. “Or, more cynically, maybe in this case he thinks you’re an asset.”
“What, with my special insight into the terrorist mind?”
After wondering whether he should tell Roi to fuck himself, Mo decided to take the assignment, mostly to escape smug Storm Tro
oper. But also because he wanted to see, up close, the kind of Muslim he had been treated as at LAX: the pious, primitive, violent kind. In asking, “Been to Afghanistan?” those agents had foretold his future.
Mo dozed off on the flight between Dubai and Kabul. He awoke to see a white woman across the aisle wriggling a long tunic over her fitted T-shirt and draping a scarf over her head. The massive brown drapes and folds of the Hindu Kush were below.
Kabul sat in a valley girdled by mountains, so the plane bounced down onto the runway like a basketball onto a court. Snow dusted the peaks; dust choked the city. As Mo disembarked, the particles and dry air entered his lungs. Shielding his eyes from the sun, he saw American helicopters, American planes, and American soldiers bestriding the runway.
After the disarray of immigration protocols and baggage claim, where grizzled men demanded a few dollars “baksheesh” for his own bags, a car from his hotel collected him. They entered the viscous traffic. Kabul was a minotaur of a city—a vigorous, erect young man above, where billboards advertised Internet cafés and hideous office buildings of blue-and-green glass rose; old, flaccid, depleted below, where raw meat hung exposed in sagging wooden stalls and bent, haggard grandfathers lugged handcarts.
In the city center workers toiled on the construction of a giant mosque, the scaffolding around its dome a spiky bird’s nest. A wooden walkway extended from the dome into the air and then wrapped, in the form of a staircase, around the minaret. Tiny workers made their way up and down the stairs, and in the absence of a crane, of any visible mechanical equipment at all, it was like watching a mosque being built four hundred years in the past.
The Hotel Inter Continental seemed of more recent epoch: it struck Mo, who was checking in, as drably Soviet. The drafty lobby bustled with a mélange of turbans and ties, Westerners and Afghans, all bathed in natural light since, not for the first time that day, the power had gone.
On a hard bed, Mo fell into a deep sleep. He was awakened before dawn by the call to prayer. The plume of the muezzin’s voice drifted into his room and swelled within him. Allah-hu akbar, God is the greatest: the celebratory words, the strangely mournful tone. The call dipped into valleys before climbing mountains and higher than mountains. It trellised up some unseen lattice, twined over Mo, pinned him in place although it was meant to rouse him. Sinuous, cavernous, the voice scaled to the edge of breaking, then firmed. It was lonely. It was masterful. In the darkness men rose, washed, bent to prayer. Mo trailed them in his imagination before slipping back into sleep.
