by Amy Waldman
On that insultingly beautiful morning, though, Sean’s first thought was of Patrick, whose engine company wasn’t far from the site. Sean raced to his parents’ house, trying not to be hurt that they seemed surprised to see him, then went with his father to look for Patrick. Someone else found him, which was probably just as well, but Sean didn’t leave. Not that day, not for the next seven months. When he was kicked off the actual recovery crews because he wasn’t police or fire or construction, he worked around the edges, helping organize a protest to keep the firefighters working in the hole; forming a committee to agitate for more space for the memorial. He got the acreage doubled. His “trouble with authority,” as parents and teachers had always termed it, had become an official advantage. Soon he was giving speeches all over the country—most often in the small towns no one else wanted to visit—to Rotary Clubs and Kiwanis Clubs and police and firefighter and veterans’ organizations, all of them eager for a firsthand account of the rescue and recovery. In his head as in his speeches, even his derelictions became proof of devotion. “For seven months, every single day, I went to the hole,” he told the crowds who gathered to hear him. “I lost my marriage”—always murmurs at this point—”I lost my career, I lost my home, but that’s nothing.” A pause. “My brother—my only brother—lost his life.” Sometimes people would break into inadvertent applause at this, which was awkward. Sean learned to lower his eyes until it stopped.
Even returning home to live with his parents after he and Irina split seemed right. Their modest Brooklyn Victorian had always been carefully tended—Eileen knew how to husband scarce resources—but by the time Sean moved in, the paint was peeling, the doors squeaking, a mouse leaving brazen shit. Sean, without asking, fixed, cleaned, cleared, painted, sanded, oiled, caulked, trapped. Put his hands to good use. Took down all the family pictures in the hall and replaced them with pictures of Patrick. Eileen, who’d always given Sean, the youngest of six, a threadbare mothering, warmed.
But then he was left off the memorial jury. The requests for him to speak tapered off, as if the country was moving on without him. In the movies Sean watched, redemption was a possession never lost once obtained. In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid. The old him kept popping up, often in his mother’s eyes. In recent months she’d reverted to her brusque self, telling him to make his bed, which grated doubly because it was the twin of his childhood. His father kept calling him by Patrick’s name, and Sean didn’t have the heart to correct him, though Eileen, acidly, did. And Sean’s “contracting” business, which he’d tried of late to restart, felt like a suit he’d outgrown without money for a new one. Two days earlier, he had stalked off a job installing IKEA shelves after the housewife who hired him asked if he would carry her garbage down to the street at the end of the day. “Do you know who I am?” he had wanted to scream at her, but the true answer burned. He was a handyman living with his parents.
Alyssa Spier watched, transfixed, as her Mystery Muslim scoop entered the news cycle and rolled forward, crushing every other minor story before it. By noon she was booked on three television news programs and had done four radio interviews.
She sat in a chair, waiting to be made up, next to a local anchorman who was complaining that the foundation color being applied diluted his tan. As the makeup artist turned her attentions to Alyssa, who had no tan to dilute, the anchor began to practice saying “Muslim”—”the New York Post is reporting that a Muslim has been selected”—with just the right note of ironic surprise on the first syllable. “The jury’s not talking, but stay tuned,” he continued in a confiding tone that masked that he had nothing to confide. The TV lights glinted off the gel in his tight curls like sunlight on a river.
Every politician was talking about her news, or avoiding talking about it. “I’m not going to comment on unconfirmed reports,” the mayor said on NY1. He’d been a brawler of a politician in his youth but had mellowed into a civic paterfamilias. “Right now I’m more concerned about unauthorized leaks—which may not even be true—from what’s supposed to be a closed process. The last thing we need is the press anointing itself a juror.”
Even as he insisted he wouldn’t comment on hypotheticals, he couldn’t help adding: “There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a Muslim. It all depends what kind of Muslim we’re talking about. Islam is a religion of peace, as I’ve said many times. The problem is that some people haven’t gotten that message …” It wasn’t clear whether “some people” referred to the violent Muslims or to people who slandered the peaceful ones.
Alyssa returned to the newsroom between interviews and found herself mobbed by happy editors and ignored by dour reporters. “This story has more legs than the Rockettes!” Chaz, her new editor, crowed, flipping channels and announcing drinks in her honor. She couldn’t quite believe her change in fortune. Two days earlier she had been a Daily News reporter with a radioactive scoop her boss didn’t want to run. Now she was a New York Post reporter whose reporting was the talk of the town, maybe even the country.
Fred, her editor at the News, had blocked the story. She needed a second source, he said, then before she could find one he deployed her to investigate cost overruns on repairs to the George Washington Bridge. His newfound editorial probity irked her—he never asked for a second source, which was why the paper’s reputation had declined during his tenure. Her whiny first source kept calling to ask when the story was coming out. She kept stalling, fearful he would give it to someone else, unsure how to hold him off. She’d already bought him dinner at Balthazar, complete with the seafood tower. That alone was enough to get her expenses flagged. “They’ll pick someone else and then it will be too late,” he kept warning. “You won’t have a story.”
She cajoled, she flattered, all the while thinking, What’s his agenda? She needed motives to test for untruths, vulnerabilities to extract the next nugget. Had he gotten a kickback from another applicant? Did he have a thing against Muslims? Did the chairman shit on him, and he wanted revenge? Or did he relish the drama he would cause? Everyone liked to give history a little twist when they could.
“I’m going to lose the story,” she told Fred. “We’re going to lose it. My source is getting impatient.”
“Manage him,” Fred said. He swallowed his words with the banana he was eating. It sounded like he had said “Massage him.” He went on: “Handling sources is an art.” He made her feel it was her own failure.
When she called her source to stall yet again, he said, “This is ridiculous. I’m going to the Post with it.” No, she thought, I am. She asked Sarah Lubella, an old acquaintance there, to broker a meeting with the paper’s editor.
“I’ve got a great story—I promise,” Alyssa said.
“So why won’t your paper run it?” Sarah asked, miffed at not knowing the story she didn’t have and not having the story she didn’t know.
“They’re scared,” Alyssa said. “Under pressure.”
“But if you do this you can’t go back to the News. Can you handle coming to work for the lowly Post?” Her cracked-leather voice testified to thirty years of overflowing ashtrays in the overcrowded press rooms of a pre-smoke-free New York.
Alyssa had always looked down on the Post, just as she knew the Times reporters looked down on her. But this wasn’t the first time that Fred had screwed her. His newfound caution wasn’t an asset for a tabloid editor, but it was his clubbishness that she couldn’t stand. He and Paul Rubin were friends, she knew. Alyssa had made her way from a depressed river town upstate. She didn’t have those kinds of friends.
It had taken her a long time to get to New York City, which was where she had always imagined herself. During her exile in the wilderness of nowhere America—Brattleboro, Duluth, Syracuse, backwaters too much like her birthplace—she had the strange, horrible sense that things were not going as planned, even though she told everyone they were exactly what she had planned. By the time she got
to the Daily News, eleven years and eight rungs later, she had her own measure. She wasn’t a good enough writer for the blue-blood papers, nor was she interested in their stodgy, mincing version of news. A tabby all the way—that’s what she was. She had no ideology, believed only in information, which she obtained, traded, peddled, packaged, and published, and she opposed any effort to doctor her product. The thrill every time she unearthed a scrap of news and held it up for the public’s inspection was as fresh as the first time, when she’d confronted her high-school principal with the rumor—she played it like fact—that a teacher was being investigated for pocketing bake-sale money. Shock, fear, appeasement moved like clouds across his face, and she saw that she could make the weather. She also could get larcenous geometry teachers transferred to other school districts.
The editor, the chairman, their whole titled, entitled tribe were different, faithful to the truth only until it inconvenienced their clique. So she had defected, and the consequences of that defection were raining down upon the city. Relatives’ Rumination, a journalistic genre that had evolved over the preceding two years, was in full gear. Every reporter had a digital Rolodex of widows and widowers, parents and siblings of the dead, who could be called for a quote on the issue of the day: the state of the site, the capture of an attack suspect, the torture of said suspect, compensation, conspiracy theories, the anniversaries of the attack (first one month, then six months, then yearly), the selling of offensive knickknacks depicting the destruction. Somehow the relatives always found something to say.
The governor, mysteriously absent at the onset of the controversy—awaiting the instant polls, Alyssa was sure—emerged to express “grave concern” about the possibility of a Muslim memorial-builder, not bothering with any of the mayor’s palliative liberal sentiments. Governor Bitman had the glow of a woman in love, or one who has just found an issue that could catapult her to national prominence. Alyssa, her ambitions rhyming with the governor’s, began to imagine trailing a presidential campaign from state to state.
Paul Rubin scanned the restaurant, an Upper East Side bistro he had chosen because no one he knew patronized it. All but empty, as he had hoped, except for a few matrons pickling at the dark-wood bar. Disoriented by the light-spangled mirrors on the mustard walls, he didn’t see Mohammad Khan in the long, narrow room. Then he spotted a dark-bearded man watching him from a table at the back. Paul recalled the photo that had accompanied the Garden’s submission. This couldn’t possibly be Khan. He was—Paul scrambled for the words as he approached the table—”funked up,” his wavy black hair grown longer and swept back, his jawline blurred by a neatly trimmed beard, his eyes by lightly tinted amber rectangles.
Khan stood. He had a good three inches on Paul. He had taken the seat with the view of the restaurant and the door, which was Paul’s preferred seat; sitting with his back to a room unsettled him. Once they sat, Paul sipped water, hoping to imbibe a sense of equilibrium. He noted that Khan was drinking creamed coffee the shade of his skin, then disavowed the comparison for fear it was racist.
“You look different,” he began. “From your picture.”
Khan shrugged. “It was an old picture.” He wore an uncreased white shirt of a fine fabric, the cuffs turned up, a tasteful tuft of dark hair visible at the neck. He looked like Paul’s idea of a Bollywood star. In his bow tie, Paul felt like he had overdressed for the school dance.
A moment of silence. Then another. Even in the restaurant’s dimness, even through the glasses, Khan’s eyes were—and Paul had never said this, even thought this, about a man—beautiful. Beautiful in the way marbles had been to him as a child. Beautiful in a way that women must fall hard for.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” Paul began.
“Of course, but I’m curious why I learned this from the Post,” Khan said. There was sketch paper in front of him, a few lines scratched on it.
Paul hesitated. “Nothing is final yet. We’re doing the due diligence required for any selection.”
“So this is part of that?”
“Yes, yes, this meeting is part of that,” Paul said. Khan’s question gave him room to maneuver.
“But I won.” He picked up his pen and began doodling. No, doodling was what Paul did. Khan was drawing. With great discomfort, Paul saw the bare outlines of the Garden materialize before him; even upside down, there was no mistaking it, the four quadrants, the canals, the walls, the trees—
“There’s no winner until the end of the process. Until the governor signs off.”
Coolly, Khan studied Paul’s face. “But the jury picked my design. It picked the Garden.”
Paul folded. He had to. “It did.”
That shimmer in Khan’s eyes: joy. It vanished behind steel gates. “So what do you need to finalize it?” he asked.
“Well, once the due diligence is complete, the public will weigh in. In fact, as you may have noticed, it already is weighing in.”
Khan didn’t take the bait. “The public,” Paul said again. “Look, we are living in difficult times, strange times—” He broke off. “Why did you enter?” he asked, surprised to be genuinely curious.
Khan looked at him as if he were a feeble old woman. “Because I could.”
“The public,” Paul said, newly fond of this vague, insistent entity, “will want a little more eloquence.”
“Of course,” Khan said, struggling—Paul could see it—to bring accommodation into his face. “My idea felt like it had the right balance between remembering and recovering. I wanted to contribute,” he added, stiffly.
Paul nodded. “As I was saying, the public is already expressing a certain amount of … agitation. Which suggests that I may have a very difficult time raising the funds to get the Garden built. Which would leave you with only a titular victory, and me with no memorial to speak of. Hardly a desirable outcome for either of us. So I’m wondering if we should come at this a little more indirectly. You work for Emmanuel Roi, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps this could proceed under his name. Which would mean you would still be working on it. You would be instrumental. Isn’t that how these practices work anyway?”
Astonishment crossed Khan’s face; anger followed, and stayed. He set down his pen, the gesture all the more unsettling for its deliberateness, and said quietly, “That’s exactly how they work, which is why I entered the fucking competition on my own.”
“So this is about your career,” Paul said.
“I must have missed the question about motives on the competition’s entry form. I want the same credit for my design as any other winner.”
“As I said, there’s no ‘winner,’ per se,” Paul said. “Not until after the public has weighed in. For now there is only the jury’s selection.”
“Fine. The same credit as any selection would get.”
“If what we’ve seen so far is a foretaste of the reaction to come, I’m not sure you’ll want credit. You may come to wish you were still anonymous.”
Khan put his long, tapered fingers to his temples and seemed to swell with irritation. “That’s my problem, isn’t it? Or is that some kind of threat?”
Paul didn’t answer. Instead he tried to summon the list of questions Lanny, after an all-night crash course in Islam, had put together for him: Sunni or Shia? Self-described moderate? Jewish girlfriend? If they had to present a Muslim as the designer, it was critical to probe what kind of Muslim he was.
“Your background … it seems fairly secular,” Paul said. “Is that correct?”
“Why does it matter?”
“Just exploring things. If not secular, I’m sure you would describe yourself as moderate?” The fan overhead twirled in miniature in the bowl of Paul’s spoon.
“I don’t traffic in labels,” Khan said.
“Moderate’s not really a label,” Paul said. “More of an outlook. I’m a moderate myself.”
“Congratulations,” Khan said. His tone had soured. Then
he seemed to reconsider. “I’m a Shia Wahhabi, if you must know,” he said.
“I see,” Paul said, taking out a pen. “Do you mind if I write that—”
Khan pushed over a blank piece of paper, waited for Paul to finish writing, then said, “I wouldn’t run to the press with that. Shias and Wahhabis are trying to kill each other, from what I know. Which isn’t much.”
Paul’s face burned as it hadn’t in a very long time. With his age, his stature, he had thought himself beyond such humiliation. He was taken back to an incident he had once revisited almost daily. He was twenty-four, a summer associate at a law firm. He had gotten there on brains and determination: always the best student in the class, awkward and shy without a book, fearful of failure or missteps. A senior partner had taken him to lunch. At the stiff, elegant restaurant, where the waiters draped white napkins over their arms, Paul toppled his glass of cranberry juice, a poor order to begin with. The partner did not ignore it, or make a kindly joke. Instead he watched the stain’s migration across the tablecloth as if menstrual blood were on the move. Then he looked straight into Paul’s eyes. To his great surprise—to this day it still surprised him—Paul looked back at the man without squirming or blushing or bothering to blot the stain. He made no eye contact with the waiter who soon rushed over to change the tablecloth in what struck Paul as an unnecessarily billowing flurry. That endless, wordless moment taught Paul what nearly two decades of school, college, and law school had not. Brains were only half of success, maybe less; the other half was a nameless game whose coin was psychological. To win, you had to intimidate or bluff. Over the next few years, this revelation slowly freed him from himself and from a life buried in law books. He never practiced, went straight to an investment bank as a junior associate, making baby deals. He liked the game of risk. Learning that disaster could be survived, even manipulated, freed him. Khan appeared to have learned this, too. Or maybe Paul was teaching him. He wasn’t sure, today, if Paul’s humiliation of Khan or Khan’s of Paul had evoked the memory.
