The Submission: A Novel

by Amy Waldman

  “A lawyer, not a terrorist.” His joke earned only a scowl. “Sorry, but why not get one of those doctors or taxi drivers to do the ad?”

  “You want someone else to do what you’re afraid to do?”

  “I’m not afraid,” he said.

  “Then do the ad. Do it as an American, because you don’t like what’s happening in your country.” There was a mental translucence to Laila. Mo could read in her face, before she spoke, when her thoughts tracked in a new direction. “Let me ask you something,” she said. “Your beard—you started growing it when you were overseas?”

  “Yes …”

  “And then worked on your design for, what, a few weeks when you came back?”

  “Roughly, yes, but I don’t see—”

  “And so by the time you sent off your submission, your beard must have been pretty well grown in, like it is now.”

  He knew her next question before she asked it. “And the photograph you submitted with your entry—beard?”

  A beat of silence. Of shame. Of considering actually lying to her.

  “No beard.” He could claim he’d had no more recent photo, but she was right—that wasn’t the reason he had done it.

  “It makes me sad” was all Laila said. Effortlessly she had nailed his effort to be a “safe” Muslim when it would help him; to be courageous or provocative only when he thought he could afford to, even if he sometimes misjudged. “Next you’ll shave for them.”

  Her pressure was bruising and his mind rebelled, lashed out. Maybe she was sleeping with him only to secure his participation. Maybe she was conspiring with Issam Malik.

  “Who did you have dinner with last night?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, sorry.” His suspicions collapsed; his heart somehow folded. Jealousy clings to love’s underside like bats to a bridge. In pushing Laila away, he grasped what he felt for her.

  She was putting on a navy quilted jacket, bandaging her neck with a white silk scarf.

  “Maybe if I could shape the ad,” he offered.

  “To say what?”

  “Could you stop getting ready?” he said instead of answering. “We need to finish this.”

  “I have an appointment with a woman whose husband has been detained without trial for seven months, Mo. Should I not show up so we can continue talking about how your principles keep you from doing anything that’s actually principled?”

  “Laila, that’s unfair. If this—if what’s between us is actually going to work out, you have to accept me as I am.”

  “How can I, when I’m not sure who that is?” She had paused before the window, as if seeing the view for the first time. When she wheeled around her eyes had an angry flash, not the lively spark of their first meeting. “You know, when you stood up for yourself in front of the whole country, I thought you were so brave, I had never seen that kind of confidence in a man. You put yourself on the line. But now I see that it was about you: your design, your reputation, your place in history. You will put yourself on the line for your own interests but no one else’s.”

  “Laila, it’s just an ad. Don’t murder this, whatever is between us, because of it.”

  “This isn’t about the ad! It’s about whether the same things matter to us. I have to go. I need to think.” She grabbed her attaché case and slammed the door behind her.

  Sorrow swelled in him, seemed to press against his lungs. He knew he couldn’t bend himself to fit her shape. But he didn’t know how he would live with the hollow where hers had been.

  Another headscarf pulling, the victim hospitalized for anxiety, her toddler son, who’d been holding her hand, bawling on the news. The president of the United States, who had avoided taking a position on the memorial, went on television to ask for civility and respect, to say he was ashamed of what was happening in his country. He called what Sean had started “a plague.”

  “A plague of good sense!” Debbie snapped at the screen. She was reading, and marking up, Trisha’s college application essay, which was entitled “My Mother the Firebrand.” Trisha had told Sean that she feared liberal colleges would blackball her when they realized Debbie was her mother. So she had decided to write her essay about how she both respected her mother (“Two years ago she was a just a housewife who spent most of her time watching soap operas. The attack changed everything. She was called to fight for her country. She educated herself …”) and disagreed with her (“Sometimes I think she tries too hard to be provocative. I believe in dialogue”). Debbie was totally on board with this strategy, but she had crossed out “watching soap operas” and replaced it with “taking care of my sisters and me.”

  The bawling son again: the cable channels couldn’t get their fill of him. Sean kneaded his right fist into his left palm and eyed Debbie’s liquor cabinet, to which the girls, he knew, had copied the key. He’d been stone-dry since the attack, but for all the virtue in sobriety, it was harder to blame his mistakes on it. Pulling the woman’s headscarf had done nothing to derail the Muslim memorial, instead drawing attention from the huge crowd he had mustered to protest it.

  “She called, you know,” he told Debbie, who turned toward him, alert.

  “The woman from the protest. Zahira Hussain. Well, she didn’t call: Issam Malik did, from that Muslim council. They said that if I meet with her and apologize, she’ll ask that the charges against me be dropped.” He didn’t say that Malik had talked about wanting to make this a “teachable moment.” He knew how Debbie would take that.

  “No apology,” Debbie said. “Not to those people. Your ex—sure, by all means, apologize to her.” Sean reddened. “But this has symbolic value,” she went on. They’re looking for a propaganda coup—a nice Christian boy, an American, submitting to them. Yet another example of Islam triumphant over the West. I can hear it now: Jerusalem. Constantinople. Cordoba. Morningside Heights—that’s where their office is, right? This is legal jihad—using the criminal justice system to persecute you. We’ll raise money for a good lawyer.”

  “I was just thinking of talking to her,” he said.

  “Don’t you dare apologize,” she said.

  “That’s how she treats us,” Trisha snickered.

  “We’re dhimmi,” Alison sighed.

  “No harm in talking,” Sean said.

  “No harm,” said Debbie, with a musing, canny look.

  The SAFIs were waiting for him when he arrived at the Muslim American Coordinating Council office the next morning. “No Apology! No Submission!” they screamed, with Debbie in the lead. A scrum of reporters and camera crews shouted questions at him. Feminists held signs that said NO AMNESTY FOR WIFE BEATERS.

  His instinct was to flee. He clenched his fists and pushed through.

  Alyssa Spier adhered to him. “Take me inside,” she whispered. “You need a witness to make sure they don’t spin it differently than it happens.” But at the MACC office, Issam Malik gave Alyssa a look of recognition and said, “No, no, no. We’re going to meet privately first. And when we open the doors to the press, she gets no access.”

  “Did you call the press?” Sean asked after Alyssa had sulked off. “I thought this was a private meeting.”

  “You can’t teach to an empty classroom,” Malik said. Sean disliked him instantly. They filed into a conference room. It was filled with men, mostly, along with a few women in headscarves. All shades of brown. He missed pasty Alyssa. For the first time in his life, he was the only Christian and, it appeared, the only white, in the room. Unsettled by this, he was scanning for danger when he heard, from an alarmed voice in the corner, “What’s in the bag?” All eyes went to Sean’s gym bag, which was over his shoulder. When he left Debbie’s that morning, he had packed up all his things except for his suit, which he wore so it wouldn’t crumple. He knew he wouldn’t be welcomed back after going to the council.

  “What?” Sean said.

  “What. Is. In. The. Bag,” Malik said slowly, as if Sean didn’t speak English. Two m
en stood.

  “Fuck!” Sean said. He ran his hands through his hair. He bent down, unzipped the bag, and began dumping its contents on the floor. Jeans, sneakers, T-shirts, sweatshirt, shaving kit, Sports Illustrated, boxer shorts, and, mixed in with the dirty socks, a pair of pink cotton underwear—Trisha’s. He’d lifted it. Excuses crossed his mind. It had gotten mixed up with his clothes in the dryer. She’s legal. Nothing happened anyway. Forget it: they didn’t know anything about where he’d been.

  There was silence. The men were looking at one another. The women were looking down. No one wanted to look at Sean or his stuff.

  He turned his gaze up to the ceiling. “I’m carrying my clothes because I had to leave where I’ve been staying,” he said. His eyes stung. “I left because I was coming here today, and they thought I shouldn’t. I am homeless because I came here today,” he added, exaggerating a bit. “And you think I came in here with a bomb?”

  “A gun,” someone said in a low voice. “I thought you might have a gun.”

  “People—we—are on edge,” Malik said. “The mood is very tense right now. There’s violence in the air, and you bear some responsibility for that. We don’t know you from Adam. You organized a rally where people were making death threats. You yanked a woman’s headscarf. How are we to know what else you’re capable of?”

  I’m not capable, not capable of anything, Sean thought. He pulled his wallet from his pocket, sending a few stray receipts drifting to the floor, and extracted a small photo of Patrick in his dress uniform. He held it up. Everyone peered to see. “This was my brother. My brother who died. Was killed. By Muslims. Jesus! Why is it so hard to do the right thing?”

  “I’m sorry,” a woman said. Sean looked at her. He couldn’t have picked her face out of a lineup, but he knew the red scarf. He had seen, too many times, his hand reaching for it. It couldn’t be an accident she was wearing it today.

  “You only have one scarf?” he said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You’re wearing the same scarf as that day. You think I’m a bull—that I’ll see it and go nuts again?”

  “I didn’t realize—”

  “Did you say you were sorry? Sorry for what? I’m the one who’s supposed to be sorry, remember? Isn’t that why I’m here? So you all can humiliate me, make me bow down, kiss your ring or whatever?”

  “No one made you come,” she said gently. Her face was pumpkin-round; her eyes, striking, hazel, long-lashed. “No one’s making you stay.” She was talking to him like he was the man on the ledge; it surprised him not to mind. He bent to stuff his possessions back in his bag, casting about for his next move as he did so. He was red-faced—he didn’t need a mirror to know it.

  “I want to talk to you in private,” he said to Zahira. “Not so many people.”

  “That’s not appropriate,” Malik said.

  “How so?”

  “Our religion believes in modest interchange between the genders. And her humiliation was public, so the apology needs to be as well.”

  “In private,” Sean repeated.

  “Not possible—” Malik started to say.

  “We’ll go in there,” Zahira said, pointing to Malik’s office, “with the door open.”

  Over Malik’s objections, Sean and Zahira rose, complicitly, to take possession of his office. A desk epic enough to protect her reputation dominated the room. Zahira seated herself behind it, folded her hands atop it. Sean took a chair on the other side. There were three TVs in the room. He tried not to watch.

  “Before an apology, Sean, I’d like an explanation,” she said. Ever since she first spoke he had been trying to pinpoint what struck him as odd in her speech, and now he had it. It was the lack of accent. She sounded as American as he did. “What made you pull my scarf? Had you planned it?”

  “No!” he said. “Your sign made me mad.” Aware how childish this sounded, he borrowed Debbie’s words: “But also, we don’t make women cover their hair in this country.”

  “No, we don’t make women cover their hair.” She put the stress on “we.” It seemed to amuse her. “But women are free to choose to, as I did. No one’s making me do anything. My own father is against me covering. It’s my choice,” she repeated. “No one else’s.”

  Sean’s eye wandered to one of the televisions, on which his passage through the bawdy gauntlet outside was being replayed. He looked tense, even fearful. Less brave than he had felt. He had imagined that moment of deciding to plow ahead as his version of Patrick’s charging into a burning building. Now he saw how foolish that idea was. Patrick was dead.

  Zahira was watching the television sets, too: Sean’s arrival, the screaming SAFIs. After a few moments she picked up the three remote controls, one by one, to switch off the screens. Then she turned to Sean with a new gentleness and said, “So other than protecting women from themselves, Sean, what do you do with yourself? Where do you live—never mind, you said you’re homeless. Not forever, I hope. What kind of work do you do?”

  He thought about his days hanging pictures and caulking tile. About the itchy suit—bought for Patrick’s funeral, repurposed for his speeches—that he was wearing. “I’m in transition,” he said. “You?”

  A Columbia University student double majoring in literature and economics. The sting of “Bigot = Idiot” returned.

  “You called us names,” he said. “Is that what they teach up at Columbia?”

  “No, I thought that up myself. Maybe it was a poor choice. But I do think bigots are idiots. I’m not saying you’re bigoted if you’re against this memorial design. But I’d like to hear why you are against it.”

  “It’s an Islamic garden!” he said. He struggled for words, again pilfered Debbie’s. “It’s a paradise for murderers. A way to take us over, to colonize us.”

  “Really?” Zahira said. “I thought it was just a garden. Honestly, Sean, even if it has elements in common with traditional Islamic gardens, that doesn’t mean it’s a paradise. And if he were consciously trying to invoke the afterlife, how do you know he’s trying to encourage terrorists? For all you know he’s reminding Muslims that we’ll never reach paradise if we do what they did. Why is my theory any more far-fetched than yours?”

  Sean had no answer. She went on: “But for me, no architect can create paradise. Only God can. When Muslims think about paradise, the hope we feel about getting there, the exhilaration at the possibility—it’s not about trees, or silks, or jewels, or beautiful women or boys or whatever you’ve been led to believe. It’s about God. God. The description of paradise in the Quran is just a way to convey to our limited imaginations the ecstasy we will feel in God’s presence. That’s what should inspire us to live correctly.”

  Sean retraced her words as if he were walking a path trying to find something he had lost. He said the only thing he could think to say, which was, “I’m sorry. Really sorry.”

  “You mean it?” she asked warily, suddenly small behind the desk. They were like two children pretending to be adults in their father’s office, although Frank, a firefighter, had never had an office. Zahira’s must have: she was at Columbia.

  “I mean it. I’m sorry I pulled your scarf.”

  She measured him with pretty, distrusting eyes, then said, “You should say it publicly, then, to send a message to all the people copying you.”

  “That’s what Issam Malik wants,” Sean said. She flushed and said quietly, “It’s what I want.”

  He chewed his bottom lip for a bit, nodded his assent, then pushed up out of his chair. In their absence, Malik had packed the conference room with reporters, and Sean tried not to be annoyed. He stepped, with Zahira, to a spot ringed with microphones. She smelled of bubble gum, or maybe that was a scent relic of the Dawson girls. Malik planted himself on Sean’s other side.

  Sean put his gym bag at his feet and cleared his throat. “I am really sorry I pulled Zahira Hussain’s headscarf, and I told her so,” he said, giving the reporters time to take down his
words. “What I did was wrong. If anyone else does it, it’s wrong. My brother, Patrick, he would have been ashamed of me, and I wish I could apologize to him, too.” He had said his brother’s name hundreds, maybe thousands of times since Patrick’s death—“You talk about him more now that he’s gone than you talked to him when he was alive,” his mother once accused—but saying it this time seemed to lift, finally, the weight of that last drunken night.

  But almost immediately, a new weight landed. Maybe it was Patrick’s name that spirited Sean to his parents’ living room, where, lacking a home of his own, he would soon return. Seeing himself framed in their television, sandwiched by Muslims, he tried to reconstruct how he had wandered here, to the other side, and he tried to scramble back. “But Patrick also died trying to save people from Islamic terrorists,” he said, “and we will never apologize for not wanting anything Islamic connected to this memorial—not a person, not a design. It’s not personal, not prejudice. Just fact.”

  Delight flared in the reporters’ eyes. Outrage fluttered from Malik’s lips. The room convulsed with the rearranging of bodies, furniture, air. Sean heard shouts, then felt rough, unforgiving hands propel him out the door, as if he’d been discovered with a bomb after all. The gym bag came after him. Through it all he kept his mind with his parents. Only at home with them later, watching the replay on television, did he see Zahira Hussain’s anguished face.

  16

  At 3:00 a.m., Mo woke and reached in the dark for the roast beef sandwich next to his bed. He chewed dutifully, then glugged water and tried to get back to sleep. After a few fitful hours he woke again and dressed for work. Only twelve or so hours until he could eat or drink again.