The Submission: A Novel

by Amy Waldman

  “You think that will solve this problem?” Paul wanted to bark. He was angry. “You think it’s fair to Americans to buy your way around a democratic process?” But all he said was, “Let’s wait until the selection is finalized, then I’ll hold you to that pledge.”

  As if the endless blare of news—a car alarm that wouldn’t turn off—weren’t enough, Paul couldn’t turn on the television without confronting dark advertisements against the Garden. One showed frothing Iranians chanting “Death to America,” stone-throwing Palestinians, burka-wearing women, RPG-toting Taliban, terrorist leaders in highthread-count beards, nuclear bombs exploding, Muslims praying en masse, and of course Mohammad Khan, glowering beneath the words “Save the Memorial.” No one knew who was paying for the ads—reporters could trace the group putatively behind them only as far as a post office box in Delaware.

  “Have We Forgotten?” another began, the words white on black. Then came a montage of the attack’s most harrowing sights and sounds: the jumpers swimming through air; the desperate messages on answering machines; the panicked voices of emergency dispatchers; the first fulminating collapse, and the second; the tsunami of smoke chasing terrified New Yorkers down narrow, rumbling streets; the aghast faces of witnesses, the distraught ones of orphans. Then, “The Jury Forgot”—and a faint, but unmistakable, image, almost a holograph, of Mohammad Khan—“But the Rest of Us Haven’t.”

  But the worst for Paul, although he hated to admit it, was being singled out for personal attack. The Weekly Standard had castigated “the heretofore respected chairman of the memorial selection jury” for failing to speak out against Khan’s “martyrs’ paradise.”

  “Does Rubin’s acquiescence suggest a lack of commitment to fighting the Islamofascist threat; does it imply sympathy for that movement’s goals? Is he, in short, with us or with them?” the magazine asked. “We would remind him what 1938 taught, that neutrality in the face of an existential threat is nothing more than appeasement. We would like to see from Mr. Rubin some indication of where he stands. The moment for Churchillian clarity is now.” Reading this, Paul had slumped in his chair, his drooping head giving him only a Churchillian chin. Ever since, he had found it hard to eat.

  “I’m sure that Weekly Standard column was unpleasant to read,” Claire said now.

  Surprised she had seen it—she was hardly the conservative magazine’s standard reader—he gave her a curious glance.

  “What else do I have to do at night but read up on this?” she asked with a self-mocking smile.

  If she was seeking pity, she had won it. Paul often thought of her alone—the children didn’t count, not in the way he meant—in her house. It made him shudder. Like many long-married men, he couldn’t abide even the thought of being alone, let alone the actual aloneness. His imagination occasionally tangoed him to a younger, more beautiful wife, almost identical to the woman sitting across from him, before he scurried back to the safe ground of Edith. But if Edith, God forbid, were to die before him, his bereavement, by necessity, would be brief. He would have to remarry. Yet here was Claire, two whole years on her own. He didn’t know whether to admire or suspect her toughness.

  “Not fun, is it, this whole thing,” she said. “Sometimes I just wish it were over.”

  Again he was surprised. “But, Claire, if you get what you want—if the Garden is the memorial, it will never be over. Partly because someone or other may keep agitating against Khan, and the Garden, forever. But also: that will be the memorial. This isn’t some hypothetical exercise where you pronounce a victory for tolerance and go home. The Garden, Khan’s design—that’s what we will build. That’s what you have to want.”

  “I know that,” she said irritably. “I want the Garden as much as I ever did.”

  He didn’t believe her, but he didn’t push.

  15

  The self-defense squads began to appear sometime after the third or fourth headscarf pulling. Across the country, young Muslim men roamed the streets of their neighborhoods, baseball bats in hand, to menace and sometimes beat outsiders who came too near hijab-wearing women. Even the Orthodox Jews living adjacent to Kensington began detouring around it, although with their own women bewigged and well smocked, they were unlikely denuders.

  One night Asma and the Mahmouds watched a special news report called “The Headscarf Crisis.” Mr. Mahmoud, as always, translated for both women. Someone named Debbie from Save America from Islam (“I am starting to think it is we who need saving from America,” Mr. Mahmoud said, with uncharacteristic wit) was criticizing the self-defense squads. “It’s dhimmitude: non-Muslims aren’t allowed in Muslim neighborhoods anymore. Whose country is this?” The headscarf pulling itself she defended: “In Iran, Saudi Arabia, they force women to wear headscarves, to submit. This is America. What these men pulling off the headscarves are doing—it’s an act of liberation.”

  Mr. Mahmoud snorted at this. “Yes, our women feel so liberated they’ve stopped going outside.”

  Asma lay awake that night, thinking about what Mr. Mahmoud had said. He was only slightly exaggerating: most of the women in Kensington who covered their heads had stopped leaving the neighborhood, if not their homes. The fear of exposure, of violence was too strong. They were all becoming as invisible as Hasina, her next-door neighbor, which had to please the Kabirs of the world.

  The next morning Asma put on her parrot-green salwar kameez and wrapped, more tightly than usual, a matching chunni around her head. She asked Mrs. Mahmoud to watch Abdul. Mrs. Mahmoud’s mouth made a small involuntary smile as it always did when she saw news in the offing.

  “I’m running to the pharmacy,” Asma said. In truth her plan was to walk beyond Kensington to see what would happen. Or maybe ride the subway all the way to Manhattan and test the air there. She descended the four flights and made her way confidently down the street.

  A block later she sensed someone behind her, too close. Her body clenched in apprehension. Then, seeing that it was only some young men from the neighborhood, she exhaled in relief. She paused to let them cross her path, then realized they were walking with her. Shadowing her.

  “Asalamu alaikum,” she said.

  “Alaikum asalam,” they all murmured politely.

  They said nothing more to her, she nothing to them. They walked on together; together they traced a jagged shape around the neighborhood. The boys—there were six or seven—were trailing a foot behind her. She glimpsed them reflected in shop windows: their green headbands, the sticks two of them swung. They were good boys, some of them even students at the city’s special schools, where you had to take a test to enter. Did their parents know they were absconding from school for this? She turned. They turned. Even if she walked all the way to Manhattan they would be glued to her. She no longer knew who was imprisoning her, only that the prison was well sealed. At last she circled back to her apartment building. The boys gathered behind her, waiting for her to let herself in.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, without turning back to meet their eyes.

  With an excessive flourish Issam Malik fanned mock-ups of the council’s new ad campaign across the conference table in MACC’s office suite. “Et voilà!” he said. “They’ve done a stellar job. We’re putting a buy in sixteen papers and six magazines—or was it seven? And we’re putting together a press release; possibly a press conference, too. They need to be news. If the ads get coverage, it’s like getting ten dollars of free advertising for every one you pay for. Buzz, buzz, buzz.”

  “Can you get it in the Post?” asked Laila. “It’s hardly fair we have to pay to answer their vitriol, but we want to reach those readers, not just liberals.”

  “No point in doing da’wah among the converted, you mean,” Malik chuckled.

  Their chatter faded to background as Mo stared at his own image. The full-page ads had been pasted onto newspaper, tabloid, and magazinesize poster boards, reminding him, for some reason, of his parents spreading his elementary-school photographs (ei
ght-by-ten, four-by-six, wallet size) across their dining-room table. In the ad, Mo was bent over a drafting table in a crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He looked faux-serious, as if he were advertising an expensive watch or a credit card, and he was drawing, or pretending to draw, on a blank page. Behind him loomed a model of an investment bank headquarters ROI had designed. To Mo, it looked like he was taking credit for collective work.

  The shoot had taken place at ROI early on a weekend morning, when Mo was sure no one else would be there. The art director and photographer together demanded that Mo remove his glasses, insisting that the reflected light would make him look ominous. Against his better instincts, Mo complied, although he felt not just blind but naked without them. They seated Mo in front of the drafting table, even though he tried to explain how essential computer-aided design was to modern architecture, and that he didn’t want to trigger a snide reaction from CAD aficionados, especially when he so often used CAD himself, albeit with reservations. But they were hearing none of it: they wanted the cliché or, as the art director put it, the “archetypal architect image.”

  The discomfort of that day paled next to what was roiling Mo now. The tagline on the ad read, in bold type meant to be eye-catching, “An Architect, Not a Terrorist.” In smaller print beneath it said: “Muslims like Mohammad Khan are proud to be American. Let’s earn their pride. Brought to you by the Muslim American Coordinating Council.”

  Without describing the campaign, Malik had made vague assurances that it would “humanize” Mo. Just the opposite: he felt like a new product being rolled out to market, a product he suspected had significant fund-raising potential for the council. But objectification wasn’t his main concern. Didn’t people skim over little words as they read—verbal joints like “an” or, more to the point, “not”? At a long-ago party hosted by a girlfriend’s parents, an eccentric emeritus professor had given him a card stating FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS and asked him to count the f’s. He had missed three, all of them in the word “of.” He hadn’t liked being shown up—the professor seemed to take a little too much delight in Mo’s blind spots, as if he had single-handedly shattered some stereotype of the smart Indian—and Mo had kept the card for years, in part to have the satisfaction of watching his friends make the same mistake and in part to remind himself always to pay more careful attention.

  The point being, if you stripped the little words—the articles, the negative—from the ad’s tagline, only two nouns remained. Architect. Terrorist. Architect-Terrorist: he might as well print new business cards. And he had worried about other architects thinking him a Luddite.

  Mo caught Laila’s eye, tried to signal his unease. “What do you think?” he asked in an unhappy voice. She was leaning against the window ledge, her arms folded, watching him.

  “I think it will get a lot of attention,” she said reassuringly. “And I think it positions you exactly right—as an American, a proud American.”

  How much, at this moment, he regretted having gone to the council for help. Issam Malik had never seemed more of an unctuous phony. Mo faulted Laila for failing to see this, or for ignoring it if she did. And yet when he opened his mouth all that came out was, “I guess I’m still getting used to being a public figure.”

  Malik shrugged. “I didn’t find there was much to get used to.”

  Laila had a busy afternoon, then a working dinner, so she returned home only late that night. She was asleep before Mo could raise the ad with her.

  He barely slept himself. Instead he memorized the fan of her dark hair, the fullness of her mouth, the voluptuousness of even her bones. He knew he couldn’t go through with the ad, and he knew she wouldn’t understand. And so as the morning light crept up outside, he cast a harsher light onto Laila. She became, with each hour, a little less miraculous in his eyes, a little more unyielding.

  Her apartment was on the eighth floor, so the roofs of the neighboring buildings appeared to float above land. The street below sent up, at all times, the noise of sirens and horns and motors, but their sources were unseen, like a river that roars far beneath canyon walls. The roar grew louder; Laila’s eyes opened; she smiled. He twisted his mouth, all he could manage, in return. In the shower he sponged her back and held her to him, cupping her breasts from behind. With the water raining down on them, blocking all sound but its own, they were safe. But she wrestled free.

  “Mo, I’ll be late for work.”

  Only when she had dressed and was sipping tea and reading a case file did he find his courage.

  “Laila, can we talk about the ad campaign?”

  “Mmmm?” she said, not putting her papers aside until he said bluntly: “I don’t want to do it.”

  Now her attention was on him, intensely so.

  “The language makes me uncomfortable—to say I’m ‘not a terrorist’ has the result of connecting me to terrorism.”

  “You’re being connected to terrorism already, Mo—every time one of those commercials runs on TV. We can’t even find out who’s paying for them. We’re powerless—the networks laugh off our threat of a boycott because they know we don’t have the numbers. So you need to counter them. At least the MACC ad shows you as an architect, and that’s a visual image that will stay with people.”

  “The damage from those commercials has been done,” Mo said. “MACC putting me in a few newspapers isn’t going to undo it. More than that, it’s just not me. I have my way of doing things—there’s a reason I entered the memorial competition instead of making big political statements. And—I know I should have thought of this before I agreed to the ad—but to be out there as part of a MACC campaign identifies me so thoroughly as a Muslim when I’ve been arguing I shouldn’t be defined as one. It looks like I’m trying to have it both ways.”

  “Aren’t you?” she said. She got up from the table, knelt beside him, and looked into his face. “Are you ashamed?”

  Her grave gaze was hard to meet. “Of course not,” he said, “although I’m not thrilled at becoming a prop in a propaganda war.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? The propaganda’s coming from the people who want to make you a bogeyman. They are creating a climate where dangerous things can happen. The rhetoric is the first step; it coarsens attitudes. Look at the history of Nazi Germany. The Jews thought they were German, until they weren’t. Here they’re already talking about us as less American. Then they’ll say we need containment, and next thing you know we’ll be interned.”

  Mo’s mind wandered off for a moment, to photographs he had seen of gardens at Manzanar, the Japanese American internment camp. Its internees had laid rocks, dug pools, even sculpted faux-wood limbs and logs from concrete. Would he have had the same tenacity of spirit? He pictured himself within the confines of a wire-fenced camp, marking off the borders of a small garden, digging its canals, planting its trees—

  “Mo!” Laila could tell, even after their brief time together, when he had gone off into what she called his dream space.

  “I think you’re exaggerating the threat. I don’t like what all these people are saying, but they have a right to say it. It’s not fair to them to suggest that they’re looking to put us in camps.”

  “Not fair to them?” She rose and began to walk a square within the studio. Her boot heels clacked on the floor, vanished into the carpet, then clacked again, as if she were disappearing into a tunnel, then reemerging. “Your mind operates like a kaleidoscope: just shift the view and suddenly everything looks completely different. You’re so frustratingly rational, Mo. Where’s your passion?”

  “I have passion for you,” he said haltingly. There was a net in his throat through which only small, inadequate words could pass.

  She stared at him, then carried his French press and her teapot to the sink and began washing while she talked. Her back was to him, the water on. He strained to hear. “Not long after my family came here the American hostages we
re taken in Iran. My mother told us to lie about where we were from—not to tell anyone. And we still had to change schools because my brother got bullied. I had just turned eight, but I understood that people who didn’t know me hated me just for where I came from, and the only way to avoid it was to make myself invisible to them. For a little while I stopped eating—I thought I really could make it so no one could see me. So they couldn’t judge me, or punish me for something I couldn’t control.”

  Mo had pictured Laila as the girl on the playground rushing in, fists balled up, to save the picked-on kid from the bully. Not as the picked-on girl herself, trying to disappear. “Stop cleaning,” he said, in a low, urgent voice. “This is too important.”

  She dried her hands, stepped out of the tiny kitchenette, and began looking for a pair of small gold hoop earrings she had left on the table the night before. “So what’s going on in this country isn’t so new for me,” she continued. “But I decided that this time I wasn’t going to make myself invisible and let others define me. And I certainly wasn’t going to let them detain or deport people just because they were Muslim. I was making a lot more money at the law firm, obviously. But career didn’t matter as much as—those were my grandmother’s, I hope I didn’t lose them—”

  He had put the earrings away in her jewelry box. He retrieved them and handed them to her. The way she tilted her head left, then right to put them on, shaking her hair away from her ear, reminded him of his mother. “But in a way your career has come out better,” he said. “Before you were just an associate in a law firm. Now your profile—it’s so much higher.”

  She shot him a disgusted look. “Yes, high enough for people to call me a traitor. You’re missing my point, Mo.” She began to put papers in her attaché case. “I was willing to give something up even though I thought it might hurt me. Maybe the ad won’t help your career, but other things matter more. With this ad you’re defining yourself. You’re saying that you won’t let other people caricature you or other Muslims, whether they’re doctors, or taxi drivers, or accountants.”