The Submission - Amy Waldman [108]
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