by Amy Waldman
It was eight-fifteen in a coffee shop on Madison Avenue. Sean had spent two weeks trying to get a meeting with Rubin; he wanted to impress on him his committee’s, and his family’s, opposition to the Garden. In frustration—and perhaps in competition with the anti-Islam group picketing Khan’s home, which was where Sean got the idea—he had his committee members set up their own picket on Rubin’s block. SAVE THE MEMORIAL, their signs said. NO VICTORY GARDEN. Along with pressuring Rubin, the picket offered a useful outlet for Sean’s growing and increasingly agitated membership. He now had nearly 250 family members and retired firefighters dropping by his parents’ house or sitting around, all amped up and waiting for deployment. Making calls to elected officials wasn’t exactly red meat. So he had the picket manned around the clock, other than a furlough between midnight and 6:00 a.m. Some of the guys told him it reminded them of working down at the site, although Sean didn’t see how hoisting a sign on an Upper East Side sidewalk could compare.
At last Rubin’s smarmy assistant called to say that the chairman would squeeze him in for breakfast, but Sean shouldn’t be late. He arrived on time, settled into a booth, then waited fifteen minutes for Rubin, who peremptorily relocated them to a window table for more privacy.
The place looked ordinary to Sean, but the prices weren’t: five bucks for half a grapefruit, twelve for a bagel and cream cheese. Lots of men in fancy tracksuits, women who appeared to subsist on grapefruit halves alone.
“Isn’t that—”
“Yes,” Rubin said. He was, even at this hour, in his bow tie. “Politicians love this place. So what can I do for you?”
“What you can do for me—”
“The usual,” Rubin said. The waiter had come for their order.
“Uh, three eggs, bacon, coffee, juice,” Sean said. “White toast. So, what you can do for me—”
A busboy, with water.
“What you can do for me—”
“Let me rephrase that,” Rubin said, as their coffee was poured. “I’m always eager for the families’ input, as you know, but there’s a formal process in place now, and there will be a hearing for you to express your sentiments on the design. So what did you feel couldn’t be conveyed—”
A silver-haired man stopped by the table to shake Paul’s hand. “I have great confidence in the outcome because you’re handling this, Paul. I wouldn’t want anyone else in charge.”
“Thanks, Bruce, I appreciate that.” Sean was not introduced. He felt himself in the camp of the enemy—not Muslims but the people born with silver sticks up their asses, the people who had made Manhattan a woman too good to give Sean her phone number.
Bruce gone, Sean tilted across the table. “How the hell did this happen?”
“And you’re referring to what, exactly?”
“Come on. Mohammad Khan. His Islamic garden.”
“That’s not how he refers to it.”
“No, it’s how I’m referring to it. Don’t play games with me, with us.”
“How did it happen? Was that what you asked? As I recall, people like you—you, the families—you wanted a competition, a democratic exercise everyone could participate in. And so everyone did.”
“That’s not who we meant by everyone.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“But it should. You think we’ll stand for a Muslim memorial? I should have been on the jury. This never would have happened.”
“We have a family member on the jury, as you well know, Sean, and we’re not open to new members at this time.” He made it sound like a country club.
“She’s not representing us—Claire,” Sean said.
“You mean she’s not taking dictation from you? That’s not her role. Does your congressman do everything you want? She’s on the jury to convey your desires—and those of many other relatives, who may or may not agree with you—to the jurors. Not as a puppet. She’s her own woman.”
“Yeah, well, the governor’s ours.”
“Then you should have nothing to worry about. But politics are rarely as simple as they look, Sean, and the bylaws written for this process are quite complicated as well: the governor can’t simply decide she doesn’t like a design. There have to be supportable grounds for her pronouncing it unsuitable. The whole idea was to respect the jury’s work.”
“The jury’s fuck-up, is what you mean.”
“The jury didn’t know whose design it was picking, as you know, so you can’t pin this on them. And please watch your language, Sean. There are children here.” As if the whole coffee shop was in service of his reprimand, a young man carrying a strapping blond toddler approached. Rubin gave the boy a pro forma chuck on the cheek.
“Sounds like you’ve got a mess on your hands,” the man said.
“Probably less of one than you’ve got, Phil,” Rubin said; the boy had loosed a waterfall of chewed-up cracker from his mouth.
Phil smiled and said, “If anyone knows about cleaning up messes, it’s you.” He turned to Sean: “If you’d seen how Paul dealt with the Asian crisis …” He shook his head in admiration. “People were losing their … losing their cool all over, but Chairman Rubin here was so steady, never broke a sweat.”
As he seamlessly interwove ass-kissing and financial-speak, Sean saw himself too clearly: A no-name worthy of addressing but not worthy of knowing. An audience, not a player, unshaven in his Windbreaker because he hadn’t wanted to be late.
Rubin tapped his fingers with impatience, then dismissed the distraction. “Thanks, Phil, that’s much appreciated, good to see you.” Interloper and child gone, he lowered and toughened his voice at the same time. “There will be a public hearing. You can speak your mind there, Sean. But you might want to make your opposition a little less crude.”
“Honest, you mean? We need to be more crude, not less. What’s the point of a hearing if we can’t speak our minds?”
“You can speak, but in a civilized manner, a manner befitting the fact that Khan is as American as you are. He has rights, including the right not to be denigrated for his religion.”
“What about my rights? The families’ rights? The victims’ rights? Don’t they count for anything?” Sean raised his voice. Customers turned. Let there be witnesses. “My parents’ rights. Do you know what this is doing to them?”
“Emotions are not legal rights.”
“I tell you this is tearing up my parents and you lecture me about legal rights?” Sean exploded. In a code that could mean either “Call the cops” or “Check, please,” Paul raised a single finger to the man at the cash register.
“What about right and wrong?” Sean barely tempered his volume. “Whatever happened to that? If you’re going to police what we say at that hearing, then we’ll find our own way to say what we want.”
“Be my guest,” Rubin said. His even tone made Sean’s yelling ridiculous. His look whittled Sean to boy-size. “Go lie down on the site if it will make you feel better. But the hearing will stay within appropriate bounds.”
Sean stood and tossed a twenty-dollar bill onto the table, and the small smile this triggered from Rubin, whose net worth exceeded Sean’s by a factor of roughly four hundred thousand, sent him stumbling in unseeing rage out of the restaurant and down Madison Avenue. He stopped only to scowl at his image in a shop window, to confirm that every unkempt aspect of him called out for disrespect. His hair, smacked into order before he left the house, was now a melee; Sean had his father’s habit of running his hands through it when stressed. If he tried to enter the shop, he suspected that the owlish, suited store clerk staring at him through the glass would refuse to buzz him in.
In the window, long white gloves were laid out like prone bodies, a display that brought to mind Rubin’s mockery—”Go lie down on the site if it will make you feel better”—then, unexpectedly, an idea. Sean mustered his most lunatic smile, pressed the buzzer until he saw panic on the smug owl’s face, and moved on.
The first joint meeting of Save Ame
rica from Islam and the newly renamed Memorial Defense Committee came to order a few days later at a Brooklyn church borrowed for the occasion. The SAFIs, as they called themselves, like some lost Judaic tribe, were mostly from Staten Island, Queens, and Long Island, and they were mostly women. As far as Sean knew, most of them hadn’t lost anyone in the attack. Radical Islam was their freelance obsession. His mother’s rage, most of the time, was so quiet you could forget it was there. Not so with the SAFIs. They were the professional wrestlers of activists.
Their leader, Debbie Dawson, looked like a poorly weathered Angelina Jolie. She had to be close to fifty, but her blog, The American Way, showed her in a see-through burka with only a bikini beneath. Today she was wearing a custom-stitched T-shirt that said “Infidel” and a rhinestone-encrusted PEACE around her neck.
It was Debbie who had called Sean to propose that their groups collaborate. “They’re trying to colonize this hallowed ground,” she said. “This is what they’ve done all over the world, all through history: they destroy something, then build an Islamic symbol of conquest in the same place. Babur tore down Ram’s temple in India and put up a mosque. The Ottomans conquered Constantinople and made the Hagia Sophia—what else?—a mosque. Here, one set of Muslims destroys the buildings and now another comes along to put a paradise there for his dead brothers. For all we know this was part of the plan all along.”
Sean didn’t get her and didn’t want her—he was having enough trouble managing his own crew. But her membership was growing, too—there were now five hundred SAFIs, if you counted the satellite chapters in thirteen states—and given Sean’s inspiration after his meeting with Paul, these numbers held new appeal. He agreed they should join forces.
Fifteen minutes into the meeting, though, he was deep in regret. He had imagined himself leading an even larger crusade against Khan’s memorial, but nothing about these women—Christians, Jews; housewives, retirees, real estate agents—suggested that they would be easily led. They would barely shut up for one another. Their knowledge of the Islamist threat far outclassed his. They told anyone who would listen about how Quranic chapters from Mohammad’s time in Mecca gave the illusion of tolerance by praising the “People of the Book,” while the chapters set in Medina showed Islam’s true, harsh nature: “Kill them wherever you find them.” Some of them toted copies of the book marked up with orange highlighter. The best of them had memorized the offending parts. They tossed around terms like “dhimmitude” as if they’d learned them on the high-school cheerleading squad: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, dhimmitude has got to go!” three women were chanting in the pews.
When Sean asked what dhimmitude was, Debbie, dismayed, called out to a chanter: “Shirley, please educate Sean—all these boys—on dhimmitude.”
Shirley’s gray curls, glasses, and fuzzy cheeks invoked Sean’s elementary-school librarian; he wondered if she also smelled of menthol and stale books. “It’s the voluntary submission to being second-class citizens under Sharia law,” she called out. This didn’t exactly clear things up, but Sean kept quiet. “It’s being stupid,” she added. “Letting our own way of life be destroyed by liberal idiots as much as by Muslims.”
Debbie and Sean were standing in front of the altar. Their members, together, filled most of the pews. Debbie’s honk of a voice carried effortlessly down the nave. “What we have here, although it may not look that way, is a stroke of unimaginable luck,” she said. “Two years after the attack, Americans were getting complacent. This attempt to claim our most sacred space—it’s a wake-up call. This is what I’ve been trying to tell people: You think the violent Muslims are dangerous? Wait until you see what the nonviolent ones do! What’s next? The crescent over the Capitol? They’re trying to make this piece of land Dar al-Islam!”
“The House of Islam,” she said, with exasperation, at Sean’s blank look. “Make a cheat sheet, Sean. You can’t fight this threat if you’re not versed in the vocabulary.”
“Words aren’t the way to fight this,” he shot back, to applause from his members, who also seemed to have tired of Debbie’s schooling. “They want to police what we say about Khan at the public hearing. They call us un-American, then take away our free speech. So we’re going to take back the site, literally—we’ll lay our bodies down on it, and not leave until they agree to hold a new memorial competition. We’ll turn Martin Luther King’s techniques right back at them. Who’s up for getting arrested?”
Hands shot in the air like they were doing the wave. There were cheers and whoops and cries of “Take it back! Take it back!” Sean passed around a sign-up sheet for the protest and scheduled a practice session.
“Don’t forget to keep the pressure on Claire Burwell—she’s the most important backer Khan’s got,” Debbie said when the church had emptied. Her hands were on her slim hips; PEACE glittered from her neck. She eyed the Virgin Mary as if sizing up a potential recruit.
“Asma!” Mrs. Mahmoud called, clapping her hands. “Come out for tea. I’ve bought gulab jamun.”
Asma sat very still on her bed and wondered if she could get away with pretending she wasn’t home. Ever since her pregnancy, she had hated gulab jamun—sticky, sweet, sickening. All she wanted was to curl up with the latest newspapers and read while Abdul played quietly. She was in the middle of a column translated from the English papers: “Islam means submission—it makes slaves of its followers, and demands that people of other religions submit to it, too. Their goal is to impose Sharia, Islamic law, wherever they can, including the United States. They will tell you this isn’t true, but the problem is that Islam also sanctions lying—the Islamic term for this is taqiya—to help the faith spread or to wage jihad. The Muslim who entered this memorial competition practiced taqiya by concealing his identity …”
Asma paused to think about this. Because she didn’t read or speak Arabic, her knowledge of the Quran came in pieces, through memorized prayers, through the sermons at Friday prayers, through bits quoted and discussed by her grandfather, her father, the imams. None of those people had ever told her to wage war against non-Muslims or try to impose Sharia, although they probably wouldn’t rely on the women to do that. Certainly no one had told her to lie. This didn’t mean she never had. She lied to come to America, putting “honeymoon” as the purpose of her visit on the visa application, when she knew she was coming to America to live. But people from all over the world, from every religion, told that lie. She lied when she told Inam that it didn’t hurt the first time they made love, but after that the pain had become pleasure, so deep she couldn’t find words, so it wasn’t a bad lie, and also she guessed that lie, too, wasn’t told only by Muslim women. She lied, was lying still, to the Mahmouds by not telling them about her money …
“Gulab jamun!” Abdul sang out. Now there was no pretending.
“We’ll be right out,” Asma called, heaving a sigh that she hoped released all of her resistance.
She opened the door from her room and saw Mrs. Mahmoud inching her buttocks into her sofa, as if anchoring herself for a long chat. Setting Abdul loose to roam, Asma took a seat next to her. Mrs. Mahmoud held out the plate of gulab jamun, and Asma managed a very small bite.
Tea with Mrs. Mahmoud was never just tea, rather it was a lubricant for the gossip that would be disseminated or collected, the measuring of everyone else’s situation and the landlady’s own.
“They say the rains in Sandwip are going to be terrible this year,” she began, with authority. “But my husband’s parents don’t have to worry: they have a new roof because of the money he sent. They say it is the best roof for kilometers around …”
Mrs. Mahmoud slurped her tea and belched politely. She had twenty years, forty pounds, and several hundred gray hairs on Asma. Her talk was a solid object that filled the room, confining Asma to a tiny space.
“Salima Ahmed thinks she is special these days because she has found a match for her son,” Mrs. Mahmoud said of her sworn enemy and sometime best friend. “She snuck into line in
front of me at the butcher. She thought I didn’t see, but I did. She took the cut of goat I wanted, not so much as an apology, barely even a Salaam.”
Often these little dramas, revealing how Mrs. Mahmoud’s feelings, her pride, were so easily hurt, almost as a child’s might be, brought Asma’s affection for her to the surface. In her pushy way, Mrs. Mahmoud had been very kind to Asma, serving along with her husband as surrogate parents. But today Asma wasn’t in the mood, and the boasting, the envy made her feel the prisoner of this petty woman who was as dishonest with herself as she so often was with others. Always at moments like this the little matter of the call-waiting returned to Asma, and the bitterness eddied inside her.
Sometime after Abdul’s birth—two weeks? a month?—Mrs. Mahmoud came to see Asma with a confession. She had told Asma that Inam had not called the morning of the attack. The truth was that she didn’t know. All that morning she had been on the phone, gossiping with her niece. Her call-waiting had clicked repeatedly but—now she looked down at her prematurely arthritic fingers—the truth was that for all her boasting about her call-waiting, she could never remember how to use it. It was entirely possible that it had been Nasruddin, calling to reach Asma. But it was also possible—this had troubled her ever since—that it was Inam. She hadn’t wanted to upset Asma before the baby came. Now she could no longer keep such a torment to herself.
To share a secret, Asma understood then, was to shift a burden. She wished that day, as she often would after, that Mrs. Mahmoud had never told her, so unbearable was the thought of Inam calling and calling but never connecting, perhaps the last sound he heard the ringing of an unanswered phone. For a long time afterward Asma couldn’t hear that sound herself without a sharp chill, as if she were watching his last moments through glass. Asma had pretended, that day, to forgive Mrs. Mahmoud. On days like today, she knew she never really had.
On the pretense of retrieving the remote control from Abdul, but really so she could breathe freer air, she went to him. In her own hands she took his, which were sticky with sugar syrup and softly scented with rose water. Looking into his wondering mischievous eyes, she tried to lose herself in the black dots of his pupils. He shrieked a laugh, threw his head back, nearly knocked her with his chin.