The Submission - Amy Waldman [12]
“Is that a yes or a no?” Pinball said.
“What do you think?” Mo snapped, his anger crowning.
“If I had thoughts I wouldn’t have asked the question,” Pinball said neutrally, and tipped so far back in his chair that only his fingertips, anchored lightly to the desk, saved him from falling. Then, without warning, he rocked forward. The legs of the chair slammed the floor, his hands the desk. His face—the pale fuzz between his eyebrows, the dot of dark blood afloat in his iris—was close enough for Mo to smell the faint cinnamon on his breath. The move, so carefully calibrated, so casually executed, must have been practiced. Here was the art, and Mo could have done without it. Pop pop pop went the gum. Mo’s legs quivered as if he had dodged three bullets.
“No,” he said with forced politeness. “No, I don’t.”
“Try harder, Mohammad.”
“I’ve done nothing,” he told himself. “I’ve done nothing.”
“Excuse me?”
Had he murmured aloud? “Nothing,” he said. “I said nothing.”
No one spoke. They waited. In architecture, space was a material to be shaped, even created. For these men, the material was silence. Silence like water in which you could drown, the absence of talk as constricting as the absence of air. Silence that sucked at your will until you came spluttering to the surface confessing your sins or inventing them. There were no accidents here. For Pinball to hold out a pack of Big Red was an act as deliberate as Mo’s decision to bend the walkway at the theater to conceal the lobby for a visitor’s approach. The agents, who now seemed to think it strategic to demonstrate their friendliness, were asking him if he “minded” spending a little more time with them while they retrieved another colleague. When they left the room he surveyed it. They had used a partition with the texture of a gray, moldy bulletin board to shrink the room’s dimensions and maximize its oppressiveness. The room wasn’t windowless after all: the partition blocked the natural light to create the ambience of a cell. Someone among them understood the manipulation of space.
Removing the gum, he spotted a trash can in the far corner, but as he rose he imagined them watching him and sat back down. He didn’t want to provide grounds for suspicion. Perhaps the gum was a trick to get his DNA; he’d read about that happening in criminal or paternity cases, or maybe seen it on a Law & Order episode. He put the gum back in his mouth, gave it a final roll, and swallowed it while swatting away the irrational fear that he had just destroyed evidence. Down went the rubbery nub to join the knot of nerves in his stomach.
His effort to avoid being seen as a criminal was making him act like one, feel like one. And yet he had been, with a few merited exceptions, a good kid and was a good man, legally speaking. Being an occasional asshole—shedding girlfriends, firing contractors—didn’t count. The law itself he had rarely broken. He ignored speed limits and perhaps over-deducted on his taxes, but that was as much his accountant’s fault as his own. As a teenager, he had shoplifted a Three Musketeers bar simply to see if he could. That was the sum total of his crimes, and he was prepared to confess them all to show the absurdity of accusing him of anything grander. Really, he wanted to say, this is absurd! You have not just the wrong man but the wrong kind of man. The wrong kind of Muslim: he’d barely been to a mosque in his life.
His parents, immigrants to America in the 1960s, made modernity their religion, became almost puritanical in their secularism. As a boy he had no religious education. He ate pork, although he hadn’t grown up doing so. He dated Jews, not to mention Catholics and atheists. He was, if not an atheist himself, certainly agnostic, which perhaps made him not a Muslim at all. When the agents came back in the room he would tell them this.