by Amy Waldman
“Shave?” the barber asked, hesitating before he removed the bib.
Mo shook his head.
The morning of the hearing, Mo woke early, his boxers sweaty, despite the cool fall air, and his sheets tangled. He palmed his face, its softness and bristle, showered, wiped a hole in the mirror fog, and leaned over the sink. His image, with its short hair, caught him off guard, as if someone else had slipped into the medicine cabinet. He locked eyes with himself and began the next argument. Doing this was practical. No, it was cowardly. It would grow back. It wouldn’t be the same. He was in control; he was caving. To do this was smart; no, shameful. “Next you’ll shave for them.” Laila’s words echoed.
He had grown the beard to play with perceptions and misconceptions, to argue against the attempt to define him. If he shaved, would he be losing the argument or ending it? Was he betraying his religion? No, but it would look that way. Was he betraying himself? That question shook the hand holding the razor.
In a bold swoop, he began clear-cutting, watching strips of paler skin emerge beneath the hair. When he finished, his countenance looked younger, wan, weak, just as his shorn head looked smaller, boyish. He was humbling himself, maybe only to rob others of the chance to do so. He opened his suitcase, took out his old, plainer titanium glasses, and folded up his tinted ones. He felt like he was putting himself away in the case.
The deodorant went on double, beneath his best-cut dark gray suit, a white shirt, a silk tie striped diagonally with dark gray and subtle silver. Not bad, he thought, studying his image, sedate and foreign, in the mirror. But this wasn’t a beauty contest.
The sky was an expressionless face. Mo took a cab to the city council chambers where the hearing was to be held. The police were setting up barricades in anticipation of the crowds. Bomb-sniffing dogs patrolled City Hall Park.
Mo entered through a side door, as Paul Rubin had instructed. A police officer checked his name, “Khan, Mohammad,” off a list, then instructed him to empty his pockets and pass through the metal detector blocking his path. He shoveled his coins, keys, and phone into the small plastic bin, slipped off his shoes, walked through, and heard a loud series of beeps.
“Belt,” the cop said, looking at Mo’s waist.
Mo removed the belt. He had been eating little, even apart from the fast, and the pounds had dropped off his already thin frame. That morning he had cinched his belt an extra hole. Now the suit pants gaped at the waist.
“Again,” the cop said, nodding toward the metal detector. Mo passed through again; again the alarm sounded. The cop eyed him with suspicion.
“Glasses?” Mo said, wondering if the titanium frames could be the problem. The officer snorted and mumbled something into his radio, remembered to turn it on, repeated the mumble, held it to his ear for the reply, then said gruffly to Mo: “Arms out, legs spread.” At Mo’s panicked expression, he added, in a milder tone, “Search.”
Dizzy, Mo felt the beginnings of shock at this indignity on this day. His body, against his will, began to tremble, and he worried this would suggest a guilty conscience. The guard strafed Mo’s outstretched arms and, with almost tender intimacy, slipped his fingers inside Mo’s sleeves and beneath the back of his jacket. Just then Paul appeared, a bit breathless, from inside the building, accompanied by an officer who had unholstered his authority.
“Captain,” Mo’s man greeted him.
“Oh,” Paul said, when he saw Mo. “Oh.” Then, to Mo’s officer: “It’s okay—let him through.”
The officer looked uncertain, began to shake his head.
“Please,” Paul said with impatience, turning to the captain. “I take full responsibility. He’s the, he’s the—”
Everyone waited politely, as if he were a stutterer, while Paul grasped for the correct term.
“Guest of honor!” he finally trumpeted, as if they had gathered for Mo’s surprise party.
The captain nodded. After a moment’s more hesitation, like a dog unwilling to release a bird, the officer lifted his hand from Mo’s back, where it had come to rest without Mo realizing it. Mo gave the detector a wary berth, feeling like a child allowed back into the classroom or a prisoner randomly granted clemency. He was embarrassed at having to be rescued. His feet went into his shoes, his miscellany in his pockets, and he began to walk, eager to move on, only to realize that Paul Rubin was not beside him. Hearing a polite cough, he turned back.
“Your belt,” Paul said, averting his eyes.
A model of the Garden sat onstage beneath a spotlight and a field-size American flag. The model had been on display for two weeks now, along with Mo’s drawings, for the public to view. “That has to be the most heavily guarded architectural model in history,” Thomas reported back after a visit. “The Hope Diamond of architectural models.”
Mo had made half a dozen visits to the model shop while the miniature garden was under construction, but still—seeing it displayed made him swell with pride. Its white wall, with the date of the attack imprinted on the exterior, glowed like exposed bone beneath the light. A tiny battery-powered pump pushed water through the canals. For tact’s sake, the names on the inside of the wall were random amalgamations of letters meant to stand for the dead, but their patterning did evoke, to Mo’s satisfaction, the exterior of the destroyed buildings. Steel trees twisted from tin and green trees made of wire and paper towered over the walls.
The audience, invisible to him from backstage, gave off a hornet buzz. At the last possible moment he descended to the front row and took his seat. The buzz deafened now. Breathe, breathe, he told himself. He glanced down his row to the right and saw Robert Wilner, the governor’s man, looking at him and idly stroking his chin. A few seats to the left he saw Claire Burwell staring. Her gaze darted away when he caught her eye, and this unnerved him. He had seen the Post story about her wavering but assumed that, like most of what that paper reported, it was exaggerated or untrue. Her support had been so effusive, seemed so solid, with her talk of her son. He hadn’t thought to doubt it.
A high-school student stepped up to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” its strained, fragile last note hanging in the air like a teetering vase. Paul Rubin ambled onto the stage, took his seat, tapped his mic, thanked everyone for coming, and asked for a moment of silence for the victims of the attack. Mo remembered to bow his head just in time, kicking himself for the near-mistake; he could imagine the pictures, the reprobation if he alone had continued staring into space. The cameras clicked like emptied guns.
“To the families,” Rubin said, “I just want to say, what we’re doing here is about your lost loved ones. You’ve really been the conscience of this process, and I want to thank you for that.” Then, like a man used to running meetings, he briskly explained how things would work. Mohammad Khan would make a statement first. Then a sampling of the public would speak, with priority given to family members. He asked for civility. “This is the beauty of our democracy,” he said, “that we give everyone a chance to speak, to be heard. The jury’s decision was only guidance, only one step in this process. We want as democratic a process as possible, and so it is you, the people, who will have the final word.” It took Mo half a minute to grasp that Rubin was stripping his own jury of its power and putting the decision in the public’s hands. His eyes itched; he looked down to regain himself.
“Mr. Khan?” Paul said. “Mr. Khan.”
Despite giving up fasting, Mo had forgotten, with all his attention on shaving, to eat that morning. He stood and walked, foal-wobbly, to his left. He looked down at Claire, who looked down at her notebook, leaving visible only her coiled blond chignon and long slender legs. Ariana at least gave an encouraging nod—compassion from an unexpected quarter, the small humanity of a window opening in a skyscraper.
From the stage, the audience passed in and out of focus, one minute a pale, undifferentiated blur, the next every scowl and squint registering in high definition. He had told his parents not to come, even though he knew they w
ould watch on television. His father’s doubts rattled his certainty; his mother he wanted to spare the visceral atmosphere in the room. But now he wished they were here. He scanned for Laila but did not see her. No reason he should. Reiss he spotted punching away on his BlackBerry.
The room finally quieted. Mo set his text, its words in an eighteen-point font, on the table and leaned into the microphone. He took in the faces before him and imagined all the others who would watch. With the hearing to be broadcast globally, it was the largest audience he would ever have for a discussion of his work. And he was reduced to explaining why a religion he barely practiced hadn’t contaminated it. Seated at the small speakers’ table onstage, he felt like a foolish hand puppet behind which gargantuan shadows wrestled. He tried to remember his life’s most trying experiences—the charettes and crits of architecture school; the difficult meetings with clients and Roi. His best preparation for this moment had been the interrogation after the attack.
“I’d like to thank you for having me here today,” he began, his voice confident, steady. “I was honored to have my design selected for the memorial. I want nothing more than to do justice to all the lives that were taken on that terrible day.” Never mind justice for me or my design, he thought petulantly, before a seep of regret at his own anger, its polluting, distorting force, began. He took a breath.
“I’d like to talk about the design a little. To me, the wall framing the garden, the wall with the names, is an allegory for the way grief frames the aftermath of this tragedy. Life goes on, the spirit rejuvenates—this is what the garden represents. But whereas the garden grows, and evolves, and changes with the seasons, the wall around it changes not at all. It is as eternal, as unalterable, as our mourning—”
He heard a series of low hisses, slow leaks of poisonous air. For a moment it seemed as if the glare of the crowd’s hostility was blinding him. It was the spotlight on him, which had been turned up. He squinted. A dull pain, from the light or the hunger or the strain, roosted in the right side of his head. He shifted in his seat, sat up straighter, skipped ahead in his text. “The design’s influences are many, from Japanese gardens, which use structures, like the pavilion in this design, as anchors through the seasons—”
“No one’s blowing themselves up to get into a Japanese garden!” a man yelled from the audience.
“They don’t have seventy-two virgins spreading their legs!” another voice shouted.
Paul Rubin stirred and moved to turn on his microphone with all the haste he would bring to a mildly contentious board meeting. “We will not have such interruptions,” he said. “We will let the speaker finish. Anyone unable to control himself—or herself—will be removed.”
Rubin’s lack of urgency puzzled Mo; he seemed to have no interest in controlling the situation. As the spectators settled themselves, Mo scanned his statement. He had not so much lost his place as forgotten it for a moment: he couldn’t remember what he had just said. The large type loomed up like a foreign alphabet. He extemporized.
“—from Japanese gardens, to modern artists and architects like Mondrian and Mies van der Rohe, to the gardens we now call Islamic—”
The stunned silence in the room translated to a roar in Mo’s ears. He had intended to emphasize all the non-Islamic influences on the Garden, to show that if critics were evaluating the same design by anyone not named Mohammad, they would have seen its ranging roots. But the heckling suckled his rage, and he decided, in that moment, that to downplay any Islamic influence was to concede the stigma attached to it.
Boos reverberated, chants of “Save America from Islam!” and “No Muslim memorial!”
“Quiet!” Rubin rapped the hecklers in vain. “Quiet!”
Mo kept on. “The gardens we now call Islamic,” he repeated, “although they predate Islam by at least a millennium, because agriculture, not religion, shaped their structure—”
“Taqiya!” one woman shouted.
“He’s lying about everything! Taqiya!” shrieked another.
“Order!” Rubin bellowed, finally alive. He had gone pale; sweat gleamed from the half-moon of his pate, which he was dabbing furiously with a handkerchief. “Order!” Rubin boomed again. “Or we will end the hearing. Order!”
Mo stopped trying to speak, and after a few minutes, the room went quiet. “If you—the public—can’t conduct yourself with decency,” Rubin said sternly, “you don’t deserve to have your viewpoint weighed.”
“We’re not the public, we’re the families,” a voice called out. “You can’t say we don’t count.” Righteous applause rippled.
Rubin, perspiring still, but composed, held up a hand. “Of course the families count. But the families also have respect for this process, so I’m confident that they’re not doing the interrupting. The families deserve dignity as they seek the right memorial, so anyone disrupting these proceedings clearly has no respect for them.”
The logic, however convoluted, seemed to work; the audience calmed. Paul nodded at Mo to continue. Double deodorant or not, he was perspiring, too. He tried to pick up where he had left off. “The gardens predate Islam, so perhaps the gardens we read about in the Quran were based on what existed at the time, maybe the gardens Mohammad saw when he traveled to Damascus. Maybe man wrote the Quran in response to his context: compared to the desert, gardens seemed heavenly, and so that’s the heaven they created. That became their model for paradise.”
The worry that he had said something unwise licked at him, but like a football player who has fumbled, he could only keep after the ball. “My point”—what was his point?—“my point, my point is that the Garden, with all of these influences—this mix of influences is what makes it American.” With the light shining he could see only Rubin’s face, and Rubin looked confused. He should wrap up.
The virgins, the seventy-two virgins, should he address that … seventy-two versions of the truth. No, it would only make things worse. The flaw, the setup, in the process—he saw it now: he wouldn’t have a chance to answer the speakers who came after him. How to personalize it, make them see what they were doing to him. They wouldn’t care, he couldn’t count on that. Make them see what they were doing to themselves. But hurry: the sweat staging on his forehead soon would sting his eyes.
“What history do you want to write with this memorial?” he asked, then, still unable to recover his prepared remarks, unable to remember what, after his influences, he planned to discuss, he could think of nothing more to say, so his speech ended abruptly, like a sentence without a period, and because no one realized that he was done, or because he had no support, or because this restive crowd was suddenly heedful of Paul’s admonition against outbursts, there was no applause.
A firm named U.S.PEAK had been hired to run the public-response portion of the hearing. Alyssa, penned in the press section, perused their glossy brochure, which had been included in her media packet, and guffawed. The company described its mission as “fulfilling the Jeffersonian ideal for every American to have his or her fifteen minutes” and offering a voice to time-pressed “citizen-generalists,” who were contrasted with “specialists” like politicians and lobbyists. Their slogan was “Even Democracies Need a Little Viagra Now and Then.” If the response to Mohammad Khan’s remarks was any indication, a lack of testosterone was not the problem of this audience, the SAFI women least of all.
U.S.PEAK’s emcee was a woman named Winnie whose smile looked like it had been surgically fixed. She was explaining that she would call speakers from the list of ninety names she held in her hand. Other than to say that family members of the dead had been given precedence, Winnie gave no indication of how the list had been assembled, and Alyssa wondered who—U.S.PEAK, Paul Rubin, the governor?—had composed it and with what criteria. It irked her a little, as if the story had been edited before she got to write it.
The speakers began.
“Alan Bolton. I lost my son, Jason. I don’t find the prospect of a Muslim designing this memorial, or
even that it has Islamic elements, insulting. I find it insensitive, which is different.” Alyssa looked at Rubin, wondering if he would rule references to Khan’s religion out of bounds. He didn’t. “We, who have carried the weight of loss, are now being asked to carry the weight of proving America’s tolerance, and it … well, it’s a lot to ask. Back when the Carmelite nuns wanted to put a convent at Auschwitz, the pope decided to respect the sensitivities of Jews and move it. He wasn’t saying the nuns had no right to be there; he wasn’t saying they were in any way responsible for what happened to the Jews. He was saying: rights do not make right, that feelings matter, too. I have nothing against Mr. Khan. But if even one member of his religion is out there gloating over his selection, or what this design might represent, that would be incredibly painful to me.”
As Bolton left the stage, Alyssa looked at her notes. “Insensitive,” she had written. “Families prove tolerance=unfair. Pope to nuns: move convent b/c Jews mad. Rights≠right. Feelings. Muslims gloat.” It evoked Bolton’s testimony as much as a bloodless specimen afloat in formaldehyde did a working liver. After checking that her tape recorder was on, she created a quick shorthand to track the comments: FQ meant “For Khan and Quotable,” FB “For Khan but Boring”; the same with against: AQ, AB. N for “Neutral,” R for “Random,” CR for “Comic Relief.” Now she could just listen.
“Arthur Chang.” The dean of the Yale School of Art and Architecture, and Mo’s former professor. He was Chinese American, a refined, silver-haired man in his late sixties. He praised the cleanness and elegance of the design, its tension between form and freedom, between the natural and inorganic.
“If I may speak to another matter: I have known Mr. Khan for fifteen years. His character is as strong as his talent. And he is as American as I am.”