The Submission: A Novel

by Amy Waldman

  For five days now, he had been fasting. He was a grain of sand, just one of hundreds of millions of Muslims observing Ramadan—no food, no liquid, no sex from dawn to dusk each day for a month. He made of the period a building, paced from crescent moon to crescent moon; made of each day a room, measured from sunrise to sunset. The predawn meal was a threshold, and for the abstaining hours the mouth a sealed door. But these were an architect’s conceits. The truth was he didn’t know why he was doing it, why his first act each day now was abstention, and this uncertainty harbored so many others, even as it was born from them: uncertainty about whether he was right to pursue his memorial, whatever the cost, or right to refuse to explain it. He bore no responsibility for the headscarf pullings. His position was an immovable object that moved everything around him. He wondered how the God he didn’t believe in would judge him.

  Never had he been shakier. That rally, the hatred there, gave off a heat as intense as if he had been standing next to the man igniting his face. Mo had tired of the bellicose, lachrymose religion the attack had birthed, was sickened by the fundamentalists who defended it by declaring the day sacred, the place sacred, the victims sacred, the feelings of their survivors sacred—so much sacredness, no limit to the profanity justified to preserve it. But he also wondered if not practicing the religion made him an unsuitable architect for its temple. For the memorial.

  He was angry that Paul Rubin wouldn’t give up trying to make him give up; angry at the governor’s impugning of the jury; angry at the jury’s certain cowardice. But mostly he was bone-achingly sad. After fighting with Laila, he packed his suitcase, left her keys on the table, and went to a hotel. Soon after a colleague offered use of her newly vacated, and completely vacant, apartment in Chelsea. It was the baldest possible refuge. Mo’s life had compressed to suitcase, laptop, air mattress, the trinity less of a man hunted than of one being slowly erased.

  At work, food, not buildings, was all anyone around him seemed to be discussing: what they’d had for dinner (“Have you ever tried a raw bay scallop? The small ones? Like fucking candy”), where they would go for lunch. It was like discovering sex as an adolescent, his horny mind finding it in every smell and swell, every conversation. He had not realized the degree to which food—planning for it, obtaining it, preparing it, eating it, talking about it, wasting it, fetishizing it, creating it, selling it—made the twenty-first-century American. Before he began the fast, it had seemed magical, even noble, to willfully shun all of that. His rhythm was ever contrapuntal, and he knew fasting would suit him less well in a Muslim country, where it meant conforming, not defying. But it was harder than he expected to be among people who not only weren’t sharing his sacrifice but took no consideration of it.

  Throughout the morning his body yowled, his irritability rising as his blood sugar plunged. His piss was the chemical yellow of a traffic signal, so concentrated it almost looked solid. Fearful that his breath stank, he kept covering his mouth with his hand to check it, avoided getting too close to anyone. He could brush his teeth, if he didn’t swallow, but the fasting sent a smell up from his stomach—the acids working on nothing—or from his tongue that brought to mind a dead animal trapped beneath a house.

  Thomas stopped by his desk. A group was heading out for sushi. Did Mo want to come?

  “No, I’ve got to meet someone,” he said, only to see Thomas’s eyes flicker with doubt: Mo keeping secrets, again. “Laila,” Mo added, a lie to defuse the mistrust. Saying her name out loud was like cutting himself, but he said it again. “Laila.” Pleasure rimmed the pain. His “assistant” listened, as if he didn’t trust Mo, either.

  The day’s headache set in soon after, a squatting brute as disinclined to move as Mo’s listless tongue was from the roof of his parched mouth. He went for a walk. Students took exams, soldiers fought wars, presidents ran countries during Ramadan—surely he could handle a walk. He canvassed food trucks as if they were targets, the halal food trucks the worst. It was unthinkable that the proprietors would likely be fasting, too. The smell of grilling meat and spices, the savory smoke pummeled up his nose, as if furious that his mouth was barred. But more than food, he wanted drink—water, a sugary orange soda, anything to lubricate his dry and papery mouth, which felt as if it had been vacuumed out at the dentist. More than a drink, it was coffee he craved, to free his head from its vise. He talked to himself: he was weak. No, he wasn’t. Feeling weak meant he was strong, meant he was persisting.

  Late in the afternoon, Mo took a cab to the studios of WARU, where a young man of jaundiced affect led him into an anteroom and asked if he wanted tea, coffee, or a soda.

  “Nothing, thanks,” he said.

  “Water? It helps if you have a bit of nerves.”

  “Why would I have”—nerves, Mo started to protest, then, embarrassed at the rasp of his voice, the taffy quality of his speech—“No thanks. Really, I’m fine.”

  “Well, well, well, are you well?” It was Lou Sarge, and without preparation he guided Mo into the studio. They sat in facing chairs. The microphone hung between them like a reverse periscope, an eye tunneling down in search of something. The studio was dark, a paling salon: a place that sucked out the color.

  Agreeing to the interview was not Mo’s idea but Paul’s, yet another demand masquerading as a request. “You’ve got to go into the heart of the opposition,” Paul insisted. “Show them you’re nothing to fear. Get Sarge on your side and you neutralize a lot of the craziness out there.” He offered no tips on how Mo was supposed to get a man who routinely described Muslims as “raging ragheads” on his side.

  Sarge put on earphones so he would know when the commercial break was over and seemed to sink so deep within himself that he forgot Mo was there. In the soundproof studio, a hostile womb, Mo heard only his own breath.

  “So, Mohammad—may I call you Mohammad?” Sarge asked at last.

  “I prefer Mo. That’s what everyone calls me.”

  “So, Mo, here’s how it’s going to work. Come a little closer—I don’t bite. We’re going to chat for a few minutes, and then we’ll take some calls. You won’t be able to hear the calls—we find it’s too confusing to guests to be trying to track what’s going on outside the studio—so I’ll relay the questions. Just talk into the mic, but no need to tongue it. That’s it. We’re glad you came on. Did they offer you anything to drink?”

  Mo, not having expected Sarge to be so charming, so friendly, was disarmed. They had a few minutes while the commercials ran, and Sarge began talking about his background, how he’d briefly dabbled in architecture—“Buckminster Fuller—type stuff”—before becoming a radio host. “My designs were straight out of the future,” he said, “but that’s a hard sell in the present. It’s hard to be an architect on your own—you must know what I mean. You can’t just sit in your room and draw, it’s like trying to make children through masturbation. You need someone who wants to build the things, which really just means they believe in them. I couldn’t get people to believe. I know what you’re thinking: I’m pretty good at getting people to believe now. But that’s just it—I was selling the wrong thing. People didn’t want my designs, they wanted my voice. They wanted my courage. I’m not scared, and everyone else is—scared to speak because they’ll be called anti or phobic or racist or whatever. You have to attune yourself to the historical moment, sense the current of time, where it is”—he held his hands up as if he were parceling the air—“and then adapt to it. Spoon with it.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” Mo said, tired of the monologue, wanting to conserve his energy for the show.

  “All right, time to suck up to the sponsors. Three new ones today alone. We put the word out you were coming on and everyone wanted in.”

  Having sucked up, Sarge addressed his listeners. “We’ve heard a fair bit about Mohammad Khan on this show, if you know what I mean, and today I’m pleased to tell you we have the man himself. We can talk to him instead of about him, get answers straight from his
mouth. He’s an architect and, well, we all know his religious background, and he’s a New Yorker—born and raised?”

  “Uh, Virginia originally. But a longtime New Yorker.”

  “So what did you feel, really feel, the day of the attack?”

  “I felt devastated, like all of us. Like a hole had been blasted in me.”

  “That sounds pretty bad,” Sarge said. “It must have been like finding out your brother is the Unabomber.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant.”

  “And so you came up with this memorial, which has attracted a fair bit of controversy. Tell me, where’d you get the idea?”

  Mo was still stuck on the Unabomber comment, wondering if he should try again to rebut it. Too late. “From my imagination,” he said. “I thought a garden would be symbolically resonant as a memorial, given its interplay of life and death and—”

  “Got it. So is it, actually, an Islamic garden?”

  “It’s just a garden.”

  “A martyrs’ paradise?”

  “It’s a garden.”

  “A jihadi playground?”

  “It’s a garden.”

  “A joke on the American people?”

  “Excuse me? The American people include me.”

  “I mean, if I were a Muslim—it hasn’t been an easy couple of years for you, I’m guessing, you know, maybe you’re a little bit peeved, maybe you’re thinking, let’s just slip this in under the radar.”

  Mo was so furious at the assertion, and at the kernel of truth it contained, that he couldn’t speak for a moment.

  “Mohammad? Oh Mo-ham-mad, are you in there?” Sarge had lowered his voice and leaned in close, as if the two of them were alone in this dark universe, their only audience distant stars. His tone had a soft sympathy, more powerful for being unexpected, and Mo felt strong emotions pressing for expression. What a gift this man had to spin the cotton candy of trust from the sugar of his voice. And yet Mohammad, not Mo—the full name a way for Sarge to remind his listeners that Mo-hammad was everything they feared.

  “I wanted to do something for my country,” Mo said. The words came thick, slow, as if they marched in tar. “It’s as simple as that.”

  At the commercial break, Sarge downed a Red Bull. Mo turned away. “The honest truth,” Sarge told him, “is that I barely felt a thing the day of the attack, not a fucking thing, although you wouldn’t have known it to listen to the show. You know when you sit too long and your foot goes to sleep? It was like my soul had gone to sleep. I felt like the walking dead, the walking fucking dead. You know what I mean, Mo?” He tilted his head back to stare at the ceiling. “Maybe you should design a memorial to me.”

  The show resumed for the callers’ questions, all of them politely parried by a battered Mo, who only later would comprehend the distrust they conveyed.

  Mildred in Manhasset: “If you testify in court, will you swear an oath on the Quran?”

  “I will do what any American does in court.”

  Warren in Basking Ridge, New Jersey: “Do Muslims pray to the same God as we do?”

  “Muslims, Jews, Christians, they all pray to one God.”

  Ricky in Staten Island: “I just don’t get why you won’t withdraw when it’s clear so many families want you to.”

  “The process should be allowed to work as it was meant to.”

  “I was just thinking, Mo,” Sarge said when the show was over. They were alone in the studio. The sun, Mo was sure, had set, but the assistant who had brought Sarge an odd fizzy, creamy orange drink had offered nothing to Mo, who was too proud, too wary of this strange chameleon, to ask for anything. “Isn’t it possible,” Sarge continued, “that your subconscious did something with this design that you didn’t intend for it to do? It happens to me all the time. Half the stuff I say on this show shocks me—it comes out and I think, ‘Well, Lou, that’s kind of appalling. ’ But I don’t disown it, do I?”

  “Which half?” Mo asked, but Sarge, deep into another soliloquy, didn’t answer.

  Claire’s fortieth birthday began with hot chocolate and croissants, brought into the room by William and Penelope after being carried upstairs by Margarita, who hovered in the hall. The children climbed into the bed, snuggled up to her, jabbed her with their small bony limbs. They had made her cards; William’s showed her with a birthday hat like a traffic cone on her head. And there were, for the first time since the Circle Line cruise, drawings of the Garden. Claire had hoped the attachment might fade.

  “Are those lollipops?” she asked, pointing to a mass of red dots on green lines.

  “Tulips,” he said, giggling. “Red tulips.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want a bed of lollipops?” She tickled him. “A candy garden?”

  “Daddy didn’t like candy,” he said, and something flipped inside her. William’s reminding her of this reinforced the sense that Cal’s absence was alive today. Alive and painful. He had always promised to soften the blow of her fortieth birthday—he was three years younger—and it had become a running joke in the months before his death. His plans had grown epically, comically, more elaborate—scuba diving in the Maldives discarded for a trip to Galápagos, which ceded to a month on a yacht in the Mediterranean, which was deemed insufficient, too, until Cal settled on a round-the-world trip (children, and presumably nanny, in tow) that would have taken Claire all the way to her forty-first birthday, thus making her nostalgic for her fortieth.

  Instead the day would unfold drearily in Chappaqua. There would be calls—her mother from California, her sister from Wisconsin, a few friends, Cal’s parents. There would be random, computer-generated e-mails from the spas and clothing boutiques that always “remembered” her special day. At dinner the children would surprise her with the cake they had baked with Margarita; sing to her, probably more than once; and go to bed, after which she would nurse a glass of wine and hurry the night to its end. And always in the background now, today, every day, the insistent whine of the memorial controversy. The encounter with Alyssa Spier was just a few days past, and for all Claire’s resistance, Spier’s insinuations about Khan had slithered inside to coil around Claire’s own doubts. This repulsive, reptilian distrust—it never left her now.

  The morning was spent receiving a massage and giving the complaisant gardener imperious commands on the fall planting, for which she had succumbed, once again, to the tyranny of mums. When the delivery van arrived at noon bearing an oversize flower box, Claire’s gratitude for the surprise alone almost overwhelmed her. She held the small envelope containing the card and thought, with almost childlike wishing, please don’t let it be from some smitten fogy (Paul Rubin; the family financial adviser). Let it be from—she didn’t even know the word she was looking for, only the longing inside her, the sudden, acute despair at her isolation. Her ossification.

  “Some dates, like some people, are hard to forget,” the card read. “I hope the day brings more pleasures. With fondness, Jack.”

  Wish granted—it almost defied believing. Jack Worth, two years ahead of her at Dartmouth, had been her boyfriend, on and off, until she met Cal. Jack had accused her of throwing him over for Cal’s wealth, a misconception that saved her from saying she preferred Cal’s temperament. They hadn’t spoken for years after the breakup, until they ran into each other, with spouses, and enacted an awkward truce. After Cal’s death Jack had sent a note: “I know it’s hard to see yourself as lucky now, but it sounds like you found that rare thing that has eluded most of us—an enduring love.” That was the last she had heard from him, until now.

  The gift, less venturesome than the card, was a miniature garden of sorts, herbs and buffalo grass and clover nestled in a beautiful aged-wood planter. Smart, she thought, not to send something overtly romantic when he didn’t know if she was single. Still, he must have softened with age. In college they had argued, more than once, over his disdain for the niceties—he forgot her birthday, the date they met, even her sister’s name. The only flower
s he ever gave were in a bouquet picked near his parents’ place in Maine.

  The card included his phone number. She called to thank him. He invited her for a birthday dinner, saying her partner was welcome if she had one.

  “No, but if you do …”

  “No, good, just the two of us.”

  The corset of marriage, her mourner’s garb, burst open all at once, leaving her naked with desire. Sex with Jack had been so intense that she would barely be dressed before she was imagining the next time—where, when, how, as if the life between was merely filler. Giving that up had been the hardest thing about leaving him. Lovemaking with Cal had been less consuming; she had convinced herself this made it deeper.

  The mayor had decided, as he put it, “to stand with my Muslim friends,” telling anyone who would listen that he could afford to, since he was being term-limited out. “So if he were running again, would you no longer be his friend?” Thomas, who had become Mo’s sole source of levity, asked wryly.

  Mo was invited, along with various Muslim leaders, notables, and activists, to an Iftar at Gracie Mansion—a dinner to break the day’s Ramadan fast. He invited his parents to come up from Virginia, figuring it might mean more to them than to him, and also hoping that they would buffer him against the MACC members, who were sure to be there. Mo hadn’t seen any of them since he’d pulled out of the ad campaign, which had gone ahead with taxi drivers, teachers, and a stand-up comic in his place.

  His parents knew he was not living at home; he had arranged a hotel room for them. Now he wished they had planned to meet there. Their footfalls echoed in the empty space. Their faces were full of horror.

  “My goodness, Mo,” his mother said. “This is …” She walked into the bedroom and back, then perched on the edge of Mo’s suitcase, which was in a corner. “Can’t you stay with a friend? With Thomas?” She loved Thomas, Alice, and their children, not least because they reassured her that an architect could have a family, too.