The Submission: A Novel

by Amy Waldman

  Claire reached for the Times Arts section, wondering if anyone had weighed in on the design itself. With so much else to report after Khan’s press conference, the papers had made only generic references to his garden. But today she saw, stripped across the top of the Arts section, “A Lovely Garden—and an Islamic One?” A cavity opened within her. According to the paper’s architecture critic, the elements of Khan’s garden she loved—the geometry, the walls, the four quadrants, the water, even the pavilion—paralleled gardens that had been built across the Islamic world, from Spain to Iran to India to Afghanistan, over a dozen or more centuries. There were pictures of the Alhambra in Spain, Humayun’s tomb in India, and a diagram of the typical chahar bagh, or foursquare garden, next to the diagram of Khan’s design from the press packet. They were remarkably similar. The critic called the gardens one of many rich art forms produced by the Islamic world. He wrote: “One does not know, of course, if these parallels are exact, or even intentional—only Mr. Khan can answer that, and perhaps even he was unaware of the influences that acted upon him. But the possible allusions may be controversial. Some might say the designer is mocking us, or playing with his religious heritage. Yet could he be trying to say something larger about the relationship between Islam and the West? Would these questions, this possible influence, even be raised if he were not a Muslim?”

  None of the jurors—not the artists, not the experts—had thought to raise it when Khan’s identity was unknown, Claire thought, and his elegant, anodyne submission essay had given no hint.

  He deserved the benefit of the doubt, she quickly decided. The benefit of a lack of doubt. The similarities could be coincidental. Or perhaps he had taken inspiration from these beautiful forms. He had every right to. Fearing a garden with Islamic elements—and she had to admit her first reaction had been, if not fear, anxiety—was no different from opposing a Muslim designer. She steeled herself to read on.

  The gardens, the article said, had likely taken their characteristics from agricultural, not theological, imperatives, especially the need to water large tracts of land. In the first centuries of Islam, the gardens provided sensual pleasures—the scent of orange blossoms; the water burbling and cooling the baking air; shade—to rulers. Once the gardens became resting places for some of those rulers, their tombs began to transform the verdant settings into earthly representations of the paradise of the Quran—its “gardens beneath which rivers flow.”

  Claire turned on the television, wanting to know what the shouting classes would make of this. “In a potentially explosive development, the memorial design may actually be a martyrs’ paradise,” a Fox News anchor reported soberly, before turning to a panel of experts on radical Islam. One intoned: “As we all know by now, the terrorists who carried this out believed their act would get them to paradise, with the silks and wine, the pretty young boys and the dark-eyed virgins, and now it seems it has.”

  A second affirmed: “Their remains are in that ground, too. He’s made a tomb, a graveyard, for them, not the victims. He would know that the Arabic word for tomb and garden are the same.”

  “He’s trying to encourage new martyrs—see, here’s a taste of where you’ll get if you blow yourself up,” a third chimed in.

  Claire snapped off the television, not wanting to hear more. On edge all day, she slept poorly that night and came ragged to the next day’s papers. “VICTORY GARDEN!” screamed the Post. A Wall Street Journal oped called Khan’s design “an assault on America’s Judeo-Christian heritage, an attempt to change its cultural landscape. It would appear to be a covert attempt at Islamization,” the paper intoned. “Two decades of multicultural appeasement have led to this: we’ve invited the enemy into our home to decorate.” The members of Save America from Islam dominated cable news with well-lathed lines—their leader, Debbie Dawson, saying, “Muslims believe it is okay to lie to convert people to their truth.” And “Look at the history: Muslims build mosques wherever they’ve conquered. They could never get away with putting a mosque at this site, so they’ve come up with something sneakier: an Islamic garden, this martyrs’ paradise, it’s like a code to jihadis. And they’ve smuggled it in our memorial—it’s the Trojan horse.”

  Bile burned up Claire’s esophagus, rose in the back of her throat, and stayed there, corroding her ability to speak or swallow. Focus on the design, not the designer, she had insisted, even as the governor told the families, if you don’t like the designer, you probably won’t like the design. Khan had played right into Bitman’s hands, or had the jury played into his by choosing, and in Claire’s case defending, him?

  If the reports were to be believed, Khan had given life and form to an idea so powerful Muslims were willing to die and kill for it. Islamic extremists would fatten their fantasies of eternity beneath the same trees, along the same paths, that she and other family members walked for consolation. The possibility that his garden was meant to eloquently, wordlessly bolster believers lapped with oceanic insistence at the edge of her thinking.

  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 onair. “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, Miranda, and Lucy, 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?” Miranda 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. Miranda, 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.

  12

  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.

  Khan’s opponents judge him by his fellow Muslims—not just those who brought down the towers but the significant numbers who believe that America brought the attack on itself, or that it was an inside job by the American government. This is unfair, even reprehensible. We should judge him only by his design. But this is where matters get tricky. In venturing into public space, the private imagination contracts to serve the nation and should necessarily abandon its own ideologies and beliefs. This memorial is not an exercise in self-expression, nor should it be a display of religious symbolism, however benign. The memorials lining the Mall in Washington reflect only our admiration of classical architecture and the reason and harmony that it, like our democracy, was meant to embody … Khan has refused to say, on the grounds that such a question would never be asked of a non-Muslim, whether he has created a martyrs’ paradise. But to insist that any questions about his influences or motives are offensive is to answer the anguish of the victims’ families with coyness.

  His opponents claim, absurdly, that Muslims can’t be trusted because they have religious sanction to lie. This is a bald misrepresentation of the concept of Taqiya, by which Shiites who live under Sunni rule are allowed to disguise their beliefs to protect themselves. But doesn’t Mohammad Khan see that by refusing to discuss the possible meanings of his memorial, he fuels those stereotypes?

  Mo set down the magazine and flipped through his stack of unread New Yorkers. 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 Robbins wore green ribbons—garden green, Islamic g
reen—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.