by Amy Waldman
To get to the American embassy, Mo endured three pat-downs, four checks of his identification, and a long wait before he received clearance. Across the street from the main building, rows of white trailers—housing for the embassy staff—gleamed like bathroom tiles in the sun. The official who was briefing the architects from the twelve firms competing for the bid explained that the new embassy would dwarf the current structure. It would squat along both sides of the road, which would be forever closed to “outsiders,” as the Afghans were defined.
Before Mo left New York, Roi, on speakerphone from Paris, had bloviated about the glory days of embassy architecture, when great modernists—Saarinen, Gropius, Breuer (all immigrants, Mo had noted to himself)—were sought out to design buildings that embodied American values like democracy and openness. But those days were long gone, despite the pretense of inviting top architects to compete. The only design value that mattered now was security: making sure the embassy didn’t get blown up. Public diplomacy would be conducted from behind nine-foot blast walls. Architecture, once an ambassador, was now a DynCorp guard menacing anyone who came too close.
In place of glass walls or sculptural buildings—the gestures, or follies, of a more innocent time—there was Standard Embassy Design: a build-by-numbers box that came in small, medium, and large. Fortresses on the cheap. Hardly how ROI had earned its reputation, yet Mo knew he wasn’t here for the artistic challenge. More than a hundred embassies and consulates around the globe were to be replaced, mostly for security reasons. Even a small piece of that work would be lucrative for ROI.
But the firm, Mo quickly concluded, had no chance of winning the embassy commission. ROI specialized in highly insecure buildings known for their transparency (“hide nothing, show everything”). Its rivals for the commission specialized in the quick and generic. So he daydreamed through monotonous talk of “defensive perimeters” and “pre-engineered design solutions” and imagined defying the guidelines to submit an embassy design copied from a Crusader castle. The location lacked height, but he could suggest building a hill, a promontory—a true “Design Against Terrorism” right in the middle of the city …
At the day’s end the architects were piled into a caravan of SUVs for a tour of Kabul, their “local context.” Along the way the driver pointed out the Russian Cultural Center, a decaying, pockmarked wreck that now sheltered refugees and drug addicts.
“The way of all empires,” Mo murmured. “That’s how our embassy’s going to end up.”
“How about a little team spirit?” asked the plump, middle-aged architect seated next to Mo. He looked like he’d been on a few too many of these driving tours.
“We’re not on the same team, remember?” Mo said.
After a while they entered a roundabout lined with the jagged dun-colored crusts of bombed-out buildings, visual rhymes to the seismograph of the mountains behind. The barren craters were the work of shells lobbed during the civil war in the 1990s, the driver was saying. To Mo the ruins had a timeless quality.
“The way of all fucked-up third world countries,” his seatmate said.
They were dropped off for dinner at a French restaurant hidden behind high earthen walls. There was a garden draped with grapevines, a small apple orchard, and a swimming pool full of Europeans and Americans dive-bombing one another. Chlorine and marjoram and marijuana and frying butter mingled in an unfamiliar, heady mix.
“Wonder what the Afghans think of this,” one of the architects said, waving his hand to take in the bikinied women and beery men.
“They’re not allowed in,” said Mo’s seatmate from the van. “Why do you think they checked our passports? It’s better if they don’t know what they’re missing.”
“Hot chicks and fruit trees: they’re missing their own paradise,” said someone else at the table—Mo hadn’t bothered to remember most of their names. “I’m surprised they’re not blowing themselves up to get in here.”
“Some of them don’t have to,” his seatmate from the van said, his eyes on Mo.
6
At Paul’s request, the security consultants had expanded their initial report on Mohammad Khan to include more detail about what Paul called his “identity.” A messenger delivered the revised report well after dark. Paul clutched the envelope and hurried from the foyer’s marble and mirrors into his voluptuously tweedy study, seated himself at his Louis XV desk, and began to read. Khan’s résumé, first: stellar, and thus unremarkable. He was thirty-seven years old, educated at the University of Virginia and the Yale School of Art and Architecture. Four years at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill; six at ROI. Khan had been the project architect for a museum in Cleveland, a residential tower in Dallas, and a library in San Francisco that had won enough acclaim for Paul to have read about it. He had been featured, along with Emmanuel Roi, in some of the press clippings. Khan was on the ascent, and this made Paul remember the time in his own life when his appetite and ability to climb had seemed limitless. In retrospect the anticipation, that hunger, was almost as rewarding as the success it brought.
Khan, the report said, had been raised in Alexandria, Virginia. His parents had emigrated from India in 1966, which, Paul reckoned, would have been soon after the United States had lifted its quotas on Asian immigrants, a policy decision that, nearly four decades later, had translated into an Indian American, albeit a Hindu one, running his old investment bank. Khan’s father, according to the report, was a senior engineer at Verizon, his mother an artist who taught at a local community college. They had bought their house in 1973 and owed $60,000 on their mortgage. Khan himself owned no property; he lived in Chinatown, which struck Paul, the uptowner, as an odd place for an Indian American. He had no criminal record, no lawsuits pending against him, no tax liens.
The website of a mosque in Arlington, Virginia, recorded two donations from Khan’s father, Salman, both made after the attack; this, along with inquiries to the mosque as well as the family’s neighbors and colleagues, had confirmed that the family was, indeed, Muslim.
The mosque, which had opened in 1970 and moved to its current building in 1995, had “no known radical ties,” although the cousin of the son of one former board member had gone to school with some Virginia youths recently accused of training for terror through paint-ball games (“I used to see them hanging out in the parking lot,” this cousin had told The Washington Post). Sixteen, not six, degrees of separation.
On ROI’s behalf, Khan had made a trip to Afghanistan earlier in the year, but he had no known or identifiable link to any organization on the terrorist watch list. He had made no political contributions to fringe candidates or, for that matter, to mainstream ones. His only membership appeared to be in the American Institute of Architects. There was nothing to suggest he was an extremist. Anything but: he seemed all-American, even in his ambition.
Paul took out a yellow legal pad, his favorite reasoning tool, and set it on the desk before him. He drew a line down the middle and titled the columns “For Khan” and “Against Khan.” There were in life rarely, if ever, “right” decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances. It came down to weighing the predictable consequences of each choice, and trying to foresee the unpredictable—those remote contingencies.
In Khan’s favor he wrote:
principle—he won!
statement of tolerance
appeal of design
jurors—resistance: Claire
reporter has—story out?
From that last entry, he drew a line to the “Against” column and wrote “Fred,” who served to neutralize the reporter. Paul was grateful for the hierarchy of newspapers, even as he knew it was giving way to the democracy, or rather, anarchy, of blogs and the Internet. For now, at least, reporters still answered to editors who controlled their jobs.
But though he had dammed the leak, another could open, a threat that called for swift and decisive action. No gain in too much reflection. In the “Against” column,
his pen scratched vigorously:
backlash
Distraction
families divided
raising $$$ harder
governor/politics
It was unlikely that the governor, whose national ambitions dangled like a watch chain, would take a stand for a Muslim now. He kept on. Opposite “statement of tolerance,” he wrote:
statement of appeasement/weakness
Under both columns, with the heading “Unpredictable,” he wrote:
VIOLENCE
From the legal pad, he took a visual tally. The arguments for Khan looked paltry, not just in number, as if the “For” column had been written in paler ink. Perhaps “principle—he won!” should have ended the argument before it began, but Paul’s job was to get a memorial built, and he wouldn’t sacrifice that goal for a man named Mohammad.
So the decision was clear, the mechanism for killing Khan’s design less so. Their only choice was to pronounce Khan unsuitable, but on what grounds? Paul looked up “unsuitable” in the dictionary: “Not appropriate.” He looked up “appropriate”: “Suitable for a particular person, condition, occasion, or place; fitting.” He looked up “fitting”: “Being in keeping with a situation; appropriate.” This was why he was a banker, not a wordsmith. Could they say Khan was not “fitting”? As a jury behind closed doors they could say whatever they wanted, so the answer was to eliminate Khan as unsuitable before his name became public. There was the Claire problem, of course, but Paul suspected that she could be brought around by considering the outraged sentiments of the families she was meant to represent. Not that he shared those sentiments. For him, Khan was a problem to solve.
As required, the architect had provided a photograph with his entry. He appeared a handsome young man, his skin pale brown, his hair black, curly, and short, his brows dark and paintbrush thick over a wide, strong nose. His eyes, pale, greenish, were masked somewhat by the reflection in his glasses, which, unobtrusive and rimless, raised his estimation by Paul, who couldn’t stand the primary-colored rectangles so many prominent architects favored. Khan wasn’t smiling, but he didn’t look unhappy. Seeing the face made it plain how much Khan was about to lose, what Paul was about to take. He turned the page over on his desk.
“The Post, have you seen it?”
It was 6:00 a.m., and Paul had seen nothing beyond the blinking light of his cell phone. He struggled to place the voice. Lanny, the jury’s chief assistant.
“The Post?” Paul warbled.
“Yes, the New York Post. They’re saying a Muslim has won the memorial competition. You told me—”
“The Post?”
“You told me there wasn’t a winner yet, Paul.” He sounded wounded. “I told the whole press corps that. I look completely out of the loop.”
“How you look is fairly low on my list of priorities right now, Lanny. Let me call you back.”
How had the Post gotten it? he wondered as he threw an overcoat over his pajamas. Didn’t that reporter—Spier—work for the News? Someone else must have leaked, or the original leaker had gone to another paper … he was trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle on its back. Edith replied only with a drowsy grunt when asked if she had seen his glasses, his misplacing and her recovering of them a forty-year routine she was disinclined to enact at this hour. He gave up, pulled on his shoes, and speed-walked to the nearest newsstand, seeing Khan’s face before him. Halfway there it occurred to him he could have just switched on the computer. Old habits die hard, hardly die, but more than that: he needed to hold his calamity in his hands.
He reached the newsstand. There it was and going fast—the paper the Post, the author Alyssa Spier, and the photo of an unidentifiable man in a balaclava, scary as a terrorist. The headline: mystery MUSLIM MEMORIAL MESS.
As usual, the Pakistani news vendor at Mo’s corner was framed by the plush bosoms of a dozen white women and the buttocks of a few black women, all of them blooming from the fronts of glossy magazines. Today the vendor had his feather duster out and was sweeping the city grit from his candy rows. As Mo smiled, half in appreciation, half in amusement, his glance chanced on the stack of New York Posts below. His heart began hammering so audibly, or so he imagined, that he put his hand on his chest to muffle it. The vendor, thinking it a greeting, put his hand on his chest in return and said, “Asalamu alaikum.”
“Alaikum asalam,” Mo replied, the words foreign and rubbery on his lips. He snatched up the paper. Inside, the words adding islam to injury? blared over a picture of the rubbled attack site. His trembling hand ransacked his pocket for change, then foisted a five-dollar bill on the vendor. Mo read as he walked, heedless of the sidewalk’s jostle and cuss. An outsider might have wondered what news of the day could be so smiting to render him blind, deaf, mute, and stupid enough to wander into a New York crosswalk, then pause to read, letting the crowd flow around him like water around a boulder.
A Muslim had won. But no one knew who—
A taxi’s blaring horn pitched him from crosswalk to sidewalk. He stood shaking with exhilaration. There were five thousand submissions. Other than a confirmation months back that his entry had been received, he hadn’t heard a word. But a Muslim had won. It had to be him.
He taped the Post cover to his bathroom mirror that night, only to find the man in the balaclava looking back at him with cold, hard eyes. Executioner’s eyes. Mo couldn’t find himself in that picture, which was the point. The next day he enlarged his submission photo and pasted it on top of the Post picture. With the ugliness covered, he could pretend it was gone.
7
There were no buildings, no roads, only burning dunes of debris. His brother, Patrick, was somewhere here and Sean was conscious of wanting, a little too much, to be the one to find him, and of fearing he might not recognize him if he did. They hadn’t seen each other in months, and Sean kept trying to call up Patrick’s face, only to realize, as they came upon damaged bodies, that the faces of memory and death might not match.
Hours passed. Days. He couldn’t breathe well, couldn’t hear well—some new kind of underwater, this. Movie-set lights glared overhead, but the only true light came from the other searchers. Often, obscured by smoke, hidden by piles of rubble, the rescuers were only voices, but that was enough. Every time he put out a hand to take or to give, another was there, waiting. With time came a mappable order: the remains here, the personal effects there, the demolished cars beyond, the red sifters and the yellow ones, the tents and roster areas and messes and medics, the assembly line, a world more real to Sean than the city outside. Returning to Brooklyn each night was like coming home from war, except that it no longer felt like home. It amazed him what people talked about and what they didn’t, how clean their fingernails were, how pristine their routines. His wife told him he smelled like death, and he couldn’t believe this repulsed her. The dust he brought home was holy—he shook out his shoes and his shirt over newspapers to save it.
Nearly two years later, the attack site was a clean-swept plain. Across the river in Brooklyn, the Gallagher house prickled with the energy of a campaign. Ten members of Sean’s family and as many of his Memorial Support Committee were crammed around the table, all its Thanksgiving leaves in use. Copies of the Post splayed under legal pads and two laptop computers. The poster board had been hauled out, the Marks-A-Lot marshaled for duty. Sean’s mother, Eileen, and his four sisters cleared empty plates and refilled coffee cups with grim efficiency.
Frank, Sean’s father, was on the phone with a reporter: “Yes, we plan to fight this until our last breath. What? No, sir, this is not Islamophobia. Because phobia means fear and I’m not afraid of them. You can print my address in your newspaper so they can come find me.” A pause. “They killed my son. Is that reason enough for you? And I don’t want one of their names over his grave.” Another pause. “Yes, we found his body. Yes, we buried him in a graveyard. Jeez, you’re really splitting hairs here. It’s the spot where he died, okay? It’s supposed to be his m
emorial, not theirs. Is there anything else? I’ve got a long line of calls to take …”
A voice from below: “You heard anything, Sean?” Mike Crandall was stretched out on the floor, his back having given out again. Retired from the fire department, he never missed a meeting, although sometimes Sean wished he would. His committee was a motley crew of former firefighters, along with the fathers of dead ones.
“Nothing,” Sean said. He hated to say it. He was supposed to be the one with the lines into the governor’s office, to Claire Burwell. That those lines had gone dead convinced him, suspicious of power by nature, that the story was true, and to his shame this relieved him. A Muslim gaining control of the memorial was the worst possible thing that could happen—and exactly the rudder Sean, lately lacking one, needed. Catastrophe, he had learned, summoned his best self. In its absence he faltered.
The decade prior to the attack had been a herky-jerky improvisation, a man lurching wildly through the white space of adult life. Each bad choice fed off the last. He cut up in school, dropped out of junior college. Absent other options, he started a handyman business. He drank because he hated bending beneath the sinks of people he’d grown up with. And because he liked to drink. He married because he was too tanked to think straight, then fell out with his parents over his marriage.
Five months before the attack, Sean got a little sloppy, a little loud, over dinner at Patrick’s, or maybe he was lit when he arrived. He roared about their parents’ dislike of his wife, Irina; he cursed profusely, creatively, when he dropped a bowl of soup. A stony Patrick pocketed his car keys and drove him home, and when Sean went to retrieve his beat-up Grand Am the next day, Patrick intercepted him outside and told him not to come around for a while. “You can’t just expect people’s respect,” Patrick said, by way of saying Sean had lost his. To this day Patrick’s three children treated him with the politeness of fear.
