The Submission - Amy Waldman [112]
Rubin gave his bow tie a sharp tug and said, “Be aware, Ms. Dawson, that your supporters’ contributions are being counted against your time.”
“She can have my time—I’m on the list,” someone yelled out.
“Time cannot be donated, or sold, or otherwise disposed of,” Rubin said. “If there are speakers who do not want to use their time, we will conclude earlier.”
Dawson waved a merry hand in the air, as if conducting a fanfare to its end, then returned to her remarks. “When the ringleader of this massacre told the others ‘We’ll meet in paradise,’ I bet even he didn’t imagine it would be right in the heart of Manhattan. People who say this is benign probably also believe jihad means merely ‘inner struggle,’ and if they believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell them in Brooklyn. American Muslims need to be condemning the actions of their brethren, not encouraging them. And—”
Suddenly Mohammad Khan stood, pushed out of his row, strode up the aisle and out the door. As he passed, Alyssa glimpsed the squall in his face. A man in a suit, his lawyer, hurried after him. Dawson paused with a smile. “I assume this interruption won’t be counted against my time, Mr. Chairman,” she said. Rubin ignored her.
Alyssa stood, thinking to go after Khan, but, as if they were handcuffed together, the other reporters in her section instantly stood, too. Fuming, she sat. They did, too. Khan didn’t return until another speaker had taken the stage.
“Arlo Eisenmann.” Lost his wife. “I happen to think the design is very beautiful. Very powerful. My concern is not with the shape of the garden, not with what it may or may not resemble, but with the idea of a garden itself—its impermanence. Its nature, if you will. It’s inherently a fragile form—a risk, and I’m not sure we want to take a risk here. Gardens require a tremendous commitment of resources, of attention, through generations. Put up a stone or granite memorial and you can neglect it all you want. But what if we run out of money for maintenance, or climate change gets so bad that everything planted goes awry? The symbolism of a garden destroyed, returned to nature, by man’s heedlessness or neglect would be devastating.”
Alyssa had a sudden, uncharacteristic vision of an untamed garden taking over the middle of Manhattan, with trees poking from buildings, roots rampaging beneath sidewalks. It made her shiver, this imagining, partly in delight.
“Florence Garvey. My brother-in-law died that day, but I’m also a historian of early America.” She listed, at tedious length, her credentials, then said, “I don’t mind a garden, but I don’t understand why it’s a walled garden. Walled gardens are un-American or—I dislike that phrase—perhaps ‘not American’ would be better. We have no tradition of them. It privileges some spaces over others. The Puritans called nature ‘God’s second book,’ and to select, as a memorial, a walled garden is to tear off a single page. This memorial is like importing an exotic species, when today we understand the beauty of native plants. Don’t we want a more indigenous symbol?”
An hour passed. Alyssa, desperate for nourishment, discreetly slipped some gummy bears into her mouth.
“David Albon.” A professor of Middle Eastern studies, complete with professorial beard. “Islam is an expansionist religion, and where Islam has gone, gardens have often followed, which is why we see them in India and Spain and Morocco and elsewhere, and now we’ll see one in New York. As the saying goes, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s going to taste like a duck, too. So here we have, right in Manhattan, an Islamic paradise, and achieving that paradise through martyrdom—murder, suicide—has become the obsession of Islamic extremists, the ultimate submission to God. We toy with that idée fixe at our peril.”
Winnie called a fifteen-minute recess. Alyssa, ruing her morning coffee consumption, spent the entire time in line for the bathroom.
“Maxwell Franklin.” Ex-CIA, now a consultant tracking the jihadist threat. An Arabic speaker. “Other than the president of Iran, who