The Submission - Amy Waldman [11]
“Where were you during the attack?”
“Here. Los Angeles.” Naked beneath the sheets in his hotel room, the attack a collage of sound—panicky sirens, fissuring broadcasters’ voices, rescue helicopters pureeing the air, the muffle and crush of implosion—from his hotel clock radio. Only when the buildings were gone did he think to turn on the television.
“Here,” he said again. “Working on the theater.” Working and longing for New York. Southern California was the white dress at the funeral, ill-suited to national tragedy. Its sun and BriteSmiles still gleamed; its deprived bodies and contrived breasts strutted. Even the sunset’s glorious mottle seemed a cinematic mock-up of the fires burning back home.
Each day brought more proof that the attackers were Muslims, seeking the martyr’s straight shot to paradise—and so Mo braced for suspicion as he returned to the theater under construction. A few days later, as he heard himself say to the contractor, “Would you mind if I suggested an alternate location for that wall chase? Only if it would help,” he realized that the difference wasn’t in how he was being treated but in how he was behaving. Customarily brusque on work sites, he had become gingerly, polite, careful to give no cause for alarm or criticism. He didn’t like this new, more cautious avatar, whose efforts at accommodation hinted at some feeling of guilt, yet he couldn’t quite shake him.
Cloistered at the airport, he struggled to maintain his self-respect even as the avatar encouraged obsequiousness. The agents’ questions were broad, trifling, and insinuating; his replies laconic. When they asked where he lived, he told them; when they asked his business in Los Angeles, for the second time, he told them that, too. He regretted, as soon as he made it, his suggestion that they call the client, the chair of the theater’s board of directors. But they didn’t seem interested anyway.
“There are probably a lot of people we could call about you,” said the agent Mo had labeled Pinball for the way his hands jittered at his thighs. He smiled as he said it, as if to suggest, but not definitively, that he might be joking.
They asked about his travels in the past few months; asked where he was born.
“Virginia. Which is in America. Which means I’m a citizen.”
“Didn’t say you weren’t.” Pinball popped his gum.
“Do you love this country, Mohammad?”
“As much as you do.” The answer appeared to displease them.
“What are your thoughts on jihad?”
“I don’t have any.”
“Well, perhaps you could tell us what it means. My colleague here isn’t good with the foreign languages.”
“I don’t know what it means. I’ve never had cause to use the word.”
“Aren’t you a practicing Muslim?”
“Practicing? No.”
“No?”
“Yes.”
“Yes? Yes or no? You’re confusing me.”
Abbott and Costello in suits. “No. I said no.”
“Know any Muslims who want to do harm to America?”
“None. I don’t know any Communists, either.”
“We didn’t ask about Communists. Do you believe you’d go to your heaven if you blew yourself up?”
“I would never blow myself up.”
“But if you did …”
Mo didn’t answer.
“Been to Afghanistan?”
“Why would I go there?”
They exchanged glances, as if a question as answer was evasion.
“Coffee?” Pinball asked.
“Please,” Mo said crisply. “One sugar and a little milk.” The agent standing by the door vanished through it.
Mo checked his watch: only half an hour until his flight.
“I do have a plane to catch,” he told the room, which didn’t answer.
The coffee came black; it was unsweetened. Mo drank it anyway, pausing his answers to take careful sips. He hid his disdain for the bland cuts of their jackets;