The Submission - Amy Waldman [109]
“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 would 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