by Amy Waldman
“In this country, I do. Khan’s the underdog. He won, fair and square, and you want to take it away from him.”
His inability to grasp the complications was making her, for the first time, judge him to be stupid. “I don’t want to take anything away, I just want to know what he’s given us—”
He interrupted: “Promise me you won’t renege on Khan.”
“Renege? It’s not a contract, Jack. You’re as bad as the people who want me to promise to stop him. It’s my decision, and I’ll make it, thank you. Let me ask you a question. You, with your liberal causes, how do you reconcile your support for Islam with your support for gay rights, for feminism, when you look at how women, or gays, or minorities get treated in so many Muslim countries?”
“That’s not the kind of Muslim Khan is.”
“But then it’s your own litmus test—the ‘acceptable’ Muslims are the ones who agree with you.”
He downed his drink, seemed peeved. To her surprise, she was enjoying flustering him as much as she once had enjoyed pleasing him.
“You’ve changed,” he said.
“I’m sure I have,” she said, refilling his glass and her own, even though the cognac’s warmth was already leadening her muscles and her tongue. “I can’t imagine that anyone who lost someone that day didn’t.” What she wanted to say was that maybe it wasn’t a change but a becoming—a coming into herself. But she could sense his judgment. “Try to understand, Jack. It’s been—there aren’t words for how painful it has been to lose Cal this way.”
She looked at the tableau she had constructed on the ottoman, an artful display of family pictures and branched coral and stacked art books, its maintenance in the face of childish sabotage a constant struggle. Her glance caught on the picture of Cal, grinning, then his arm was around her, or so she imagined until she looked up to see that it was Jack moving closer, encircling her, pulling her to him, saying, “Hey, hey, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He cradled her head against his chest, as if she were his daughter, and stroked her hair with his hand, undoing its coil, stroked, stroked, until she relaxed, tingled. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m sorry.” He turned her face up and leaned down to put his mouth on hers and they were twenty again, panting, nervous, the charge between them now almost stronger for their friction. His other hand began deftly pulling open her blouse and rubbing her breast in little circles that made every dormant part of her surge to life. Then he gave her nipple a hard twist as if to say “I know you, I know what you are.”
The idea of luring him to her house only to spurn him had come to her on the drive home from the restaurant. Yet here she was leaning up so he could pull off her shirt and unhook her bra, here she was letting him pull up her skirt and slide his hand into her underwear, inside her, so that she gasped, almost shouted, at the shot of pleasure and pain.
“Easy,” he said, laughing. “You’ll wake the children.”
“Their rooms are too far away,” she said, irritated to have them invoked at this moment. Yet still she couldn’t bring herself to remove his hand, until memories of their dinner conversation intruded and her desire clicked off. She twisted away from him and tried to look bored. “I’m just—not ready,” she said. He seemed unperturbed, as if he didn’t care how far they went. She pulled her shirt on and her skirt down, and saw him out, turning her cheek to him when he bent to kiss her.
“Be strong, Claire, and don’t forget to put on the alarm.” A half sob nearly escaped her. It was the first protective gesture from him, from anyone.
The motion sensors did their work, making him cross a field of light as he walked to his car. He disappeared down the driveway. She had been shaped, was being shaped, not only by those she met on her journey but also by how she lost them.
18
Fourteen headscarf pullings across the country; twenty-five Muslim self-defense squads patrolling in response. Eleven mosque desecrations in eight states, not counting a protest pig roast organized outside a mosque in Tennessee, but including the dog feces left at the door of a mosque in Massachusetts. Twenty-two Muslim countries expressing concern about America’s treatment of Muslims and its media’s portrayal of Islam. Six serious threats to American interests abroad by Islamic extremists vowing retaliation for the persecution of Khan. And, most worrying for a country previously free of indigenous jihadist terrorism, three thwarted plots at home.
These bulletins, these confounding facts, came to Paul at all hours, from all quarters. So did the opinions they fostered. The FBI and NYPD, in rare harmony, suggested that Paul cancel, or at least postpone, the public hearing because it might inflame passions further. A member of the president’s National Security Council argued the opposite—canceling the hearing “would not play well in Peshawar.” State Department officials agreed that the hearing might help the global campaign for Muslim “hearts and minds,” unless the hearing’s ugly tenor damaged it. The governor insisted that the public needed the catharsis of tension that a hearing could provide. “Some conflicts have to be fought out, rather than papered over,” she said, which prompted New York’s mayor to accuse her of sanctioning violence. The president, who had once owned a baseball team, suggested trading Khan (“He withdraws, then we make him a goodwill ambassador to the Muslim world”) or sending him to the minor leagues (“His memorial gets built, just in some other town or city”).
Paul’s trusted yellow legal pad was proving useless against these competing claims. Both canceling and proceeding with the hearing were perilous, unpredictably so. Stress, having already diminished his appetite, now stole his sleep, shortened his fuse, and prompted Edith and the household staff to speak in uncharacteristic hushed tones. His home took on the quality of a deathbed watch, an ominous ambience for a man newly feeling his age.
In his study at midnight, Paul flipped through his files on the memorial and came across the paper that had first revealed Khan’s name. Ever since he had pulled it from the envelope, he had been unsuccessfully trying, in one form or another, to stuff it back in. His efforts at containment had bred only more chaos. Maybe the answer, he thought now, was to let chaos, let chance, be history’s architect. He was, by profession, a gambler, albeit one who operated with society’s respect. The young love of risk, which had drawn him to his banking life—it was resurgent now. He took a quarter from his pocket, assigned heads and tails, and flipped. George Washington gazed into the distance, as if to see how the nation he founded would manage this pass. To start, by allowing the public to vent its spleen.
The strain on Mo, which had built by the week, then the day, now seemed to intensify by the hour. As the hearing approached, rumors pulsed in malevolent syncopation: the United Arab Emirates had “bought” rights to the memorial; Islamic extremists were going to sabotage the attack site; Mo’s opponents were going to blow it up and blame it on Muslims; Mo was going to pretend to accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior to get his paradise built.
In truth he was looking for salvation only from his new lawyer, but this, too, fed new rumors. Scott Reiss was confident, droll, professional, and expensive. As soon as word of his retention leaked—was leaked by Scott’s firm, which believed all publicity good—the Post ran a nasty story questioning how Mo was paying for such a high-powered firm and insinuating that the Saudis were underwriting him. The article noted how low architects’ salaries were in New York, even quoted anonymous sources at ROI. Mo’s take was slightly higher than their estimate, but the paper was right: not high enough to finance a five-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer-cum-PR firm. The truth was that Mo’s father had tapped into his retirement account, four decades of savings dripping like an IV into Reiss’s Armani-suited arm. This could have been publicly documented with a single 401(k) statement, but Mo wanted to shelter his parents. Even more, he refused to prove his innocence. He knew this position was right, but it was like keeping his arms in stocks with no padlock. His muscles ached.
Reiss’s first plan was for a public relations offensive.
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br /> “We need you holding up pictures of your children,” he said, and, when Mo reminded him he had none, “Borrow some. We’ve got to humanize you. No, Americanize you. We want your family albums. Your Boy Scout medals. We want to run ads in advance of the public hearing. You have a lot of supporters out there willing to pay for commercials.”
Mo was ashamed to imagine Laila watching an ad campaign after he had said no to MACC’s. But also he didn’t want to hawk himself; he wouldn’t reassure his own compatriots that he wasn’t to be feared.
“No ads,” he told Reiss, who rolled his eyes.
Ramadan stretched on. Mo still fasted from dawn to dusk each day, still ate alone most nights, despite his father’s admonition. The memory of the mayor’s Iftar seared, left him sure that he would upset any gathering of Muslims he entered. But the solitude wore at him, especially as the hearing approached. Four nights before it, he went to Brooklyn to dine with five Protestants: Thomas, Alice, and their children.
Alice still dolloped out anger for Mo’s having, as she regularly put it, “screwed over Thomas and endangered our family,” but mostly she doled out new conditions for forgiveness. The latest was the construction of a Lego Seattle Space Needle for Petey. Once dinner was finished and the children tucked in, Mo worked on the living-room floor, happy to lose himself in the relative mindlessness of miniature construction. Alice was stretched out on the sofa, her feet in Thomas’s lap, and Mo tried to block out the memory of Laila arching her dainty feet like cats’ backs and settling them in his.
Channel surfing, Alice paused on Mo’s face. Mo automatically shifted, as he always did now when watching himself, from the first person to the third. Issam Malik and Lou Sarge were debating the memorial, and seeing them jolted Mo back to that night with Yuki less than a year ago. These two men had been strangers, cartoons to him then, and he nonexistent to them. Now they were all characters, cast members in some sinister opera, unable to leave its stage or, in the case of Malik and Sarge, its TV screen.
Some of their exchanges were so perfectly turned Mo wondered if they practiced off camera.
“You, with this rhetoric, you’re putting up walls of suspicion,” Malik said.
“No,” Sarge said. “Mohammad Khan is putting up suspicious walls.”
Malik smiled involuntarily, and Thomas, Alice, and Mo looked, as one, at the Space Needle. Sarge continued: “He’s created the perfect bind. If we build it, it’s a martyrs’ paradise, which will only embolden the enemy. If we don’t, the enemy comes after us for discriminating against a Muslim.”
“It’s you who’s created the bind, Lou. If Khan fights for his rights he’s an aggressive, angry Muslim waging stealth jihad. If he gives in, he’s conceding they weren’t his rights to begin with.” Mo harbored the secret hope that Malik continued to take his side because of Laila’s influence. More likely, he knew, was that Malik still saw maximum capital in Mo’s cause.
“That’s ridiculous!” Sarge roared. “They’re his rights—we all agree. But he can have the decency to choose not to exercise them.”
Mo wasn’t sure why hearing this in the presence of Thomas and Alice made him uncomfortable. Thomas, from friendship, from intrinsic loyalty, would never admit even to himself that he thought Mo should withdraw. Alice was a different case.
“Do you think he’s right, Alice?” Mo asked.
“Honestly?” Alice said.
“From you I’d expect no less.”
“If I were talking about anyone but you—any other Muslim, let’s say—yes, I do think he’s right. I also think he’s an asshole who wouldn’t know decency if it pissed on him, but that’s irrelevant. I know you want your design to heal, and I respect that. But it’s not healing, at least right now.”
“Alice,” Thomas said.
“He asked!”
“I did,” Mo said. “And if I were any other Muslim I might agree with her.”
The exchange twanged dissonantly in the air even after the talk turned elsewhere. Half an hour later Mo stood, his legs cramped, the Space Needle unfinished, and said he needed to get home. The word burned his mouth.
“Good luck at the hearing,” Alice said, hugging him before he got in the elevator. “And I meant what I said: my opinion only holds for any other Muslim, which you’re not. You’re ours.”
“Alice!” Thomas exclaimed.
She rolled her eyes at him. “Mo knows what I mean. He doesn’t need you to protect him from me.”
Mo had been desperate to escape his solitude; now he wanted only to reclaim it. He gave an exhausted half wave and let the doors close. Avoiding the subway, as had become his habit—he didn’t want to be recognized, applauded, or confronted in its close quarters—he had called a livery cab.
“Mohammad Khan,” the driver, one Faisal Rahman, said without emotion when Mo climbed in the car.
“That’s me,” said Mo, grimly resigned to a long, interrogatory ride home.
But Faisal was quiet most of the way. Only when they swung onto the Brooklyn Bridge and saw the Empire State Building lit up red and white, like a parfait, did he speak. “The first two years I lived here,” Faisal said, “whenever I saw green lighting on the Empire State Building, I thought it was for Islam. I told everybody back home; half of Matlab still thinks it’s true. Then I found out it was for the Jets!” He started laughing, and despite his mood, Mo did, too. “But for those two years, I couldn’t believe how much this country loved Islam.”
When they reached Mo’s destination, Faisal refused to accept payment. “I wish you luck and blessings from Allah,” the driver said. “You will need them.”
Three nights before the hearing, Mo dreamed of drought, the dry ground hard. He dreamed of floods, his garden turned to swamp. He dreamed of locusts devouring plants and swarming him, and from this dream he rose, twitching, groped to the kitchen, took the orange juice carton from the refrigerator, and drank, drank with the same sickening weakness he suspected a relapsing addict must feel, but also the same sordid relief: this is who I am, now I can stop pretending otherwise. Orange juice first thing, an American routine, but with it he had ended his Ramadan fast. He didn’t even know why, only that he had woken with the sudden, abrupt sense that strength wouldn’t come from this kind of sacrifice, that his abstention would never be anything but hollow. If he couldn’t say he believed in the paradise fasting was meant to obtain, how could he believe in the fast? This Ramadan would test him even without it.
Once, about a year earlier, Mo, curious about his father’s newfound piety, accompanied him to Friday prayers. From the moment they pulled into the parking lot, Mo began critiquing the mosque’s architecture. The cartoon dome and minaret, the gaudy, chilly interior spaces: “No one’s going to find God in there,” he said when they left.
“I know buildings are your religion,” Salman had answered, with something like bemusement. “But they shouldn’t keep you from God, and they can’t bring you to Him.”
The barbershop was tiny and nondescript, just four chairs and a newspaper rack, one barber to do the fourteen-dollar cuts and sweep up, an old-school place, an unbrilliantined patch of Manhattan. Mo stood outside for a moment, then ducked in and approached the white-shirted proprietor, face hidden behind his newspaper. The man folded his paper, revealing chalk-white hair and matching mustache, then folded his arms.
“Cut it short,” Mo said. “Neat.”
The barber directed him to a chair and necklaced him with the black bib. He lined up his tools with a surgeon’s precision and began to work. Dark locks sank to the floor. The barber whistled. Mo registered every clip as a concession. The hearing was two days off. He was cutting his hair—grown shoulder-length in the wake of his Afghanistan trip—at his mother’s behest, or so he told himself. His image, she had argued, was diverting attention from his design; perhaps a more conservative look would sap some of the opposition, allay fears. His answer had been that he shouldn’t tailor himself to prejudice. Yet here he was, tailoring.
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p; “Shave?” the barber asked, hesitating before he removed the bib.
Mo shook his head.
The morning of the hearing, Mo woke early, his boxers sweaty, despite the cool fall air, and his sheets tangled. He palmed his face, its softness and bristle, showered, wiped a hole in the mirror fog, and leaned over the sink. His image, with its short hair, caught him off guard, as if someone else had slipped into the medicine cabinet. He locked eyes with himself and began the next argument. Doing this was practical. No, it was cowardly. It would grow back. It wouldn’t be the same. He was in control; he was caving. To do this was smart; no, shameful. “Next you’ll shave for them.” Laila’s words echoed.
He had grown the beard to play with perceptions and misconceptions, to argue against the attempt to define him. If he shaved, would he be losing the argument or ending it? Was he betraying his religion? No, but it would look that way. Was he betraying himself? That question shook the hand holding the razor.
In a bold swoop, he began clear-cutting, watching strips of paler skin emerge beneath the hair. When he finished, his countenance looked younger, wan, weak, just as his shorn head looked smaller, boyish. He was humbling himself, maybe only to rob others of the chance to do so. He opened his suitcase, took out his old, plainer titanium glasses, and folded up his tinted ones. He felt like he was putting himself away in the case.
The deodorant went on double, beneath his best-cut dark gray suit, a white shirt, a silk tie striped diagonally with dark gray and subtle silver. Not bad, he thought, studying his image, sedate and foreign, in the mirror. But this wasn’t a beauty contest.
The sky was an expressionless face. Mo took a cab to the city council chambers where the hearing was to be held. The police were setting up barricades in anticipation of the crowds. Bomb-sniffing dogs patrolled City Hall Park.
Mo entered through a side door, as Paul Rubin had instructed. A police officer checked his name, “Khan, Mohammad,” off a list, then instructed him to empty his pockets and pass through the metal detector blocking his path. He shoveled his coins, keys, and phone into the small plastic bin, slipped off his shoes, walked through, and heard a loud series of beeps.
