The Submission - Amy Waldman [122]
“Claire needs time to sort through her confusion,” he said.
Heat filled her face at the word, but she didn’t disown it.
Mo slept for eleven dreamless hours, then woke disoriented and famished. Only after he scavenged a breakfast of three-day-old Chinese beef-and-broccoli from the fridge did he feel strong enough to turn on his phone. Both mail and text boxes were full. “Call me,” Reiss had messaged, too many times. “Where the fk r u. Call. Call.”
“Good news, bad news,” Reiss spit without greeting. Mo waited, strangely calm.
“Good news: your Bangladeshi cheerleader”—an unlikely image of the woman in short skirt and pom-poms came into Mo’s mind—“dominated the news cycle last night, and that’s created a surge of support for you. The quick polls—keep in mind the small sample size and the large margin of error—show your support has doubled from pre-hearing levels.”
“And the bad news?”
“Apparently you blasphemed at the hearing.”
Blasphemed? The word had a virgin, untested sound.
“I don’t know if you meant to, but you suggested that a man wrote the Quran, not God. It’s spreading over the Internet, and imams from the Netherlands to Nigeria are lining up to denounce you, even though I’m sure most of them have no idea what you actually said.”
“And what did I say?”
“The money line—maybe ‘bankruptcy line’ would be the better phrase here—was: ‘So perhaps the gardens we read about in the Quran were based on what existed at the time, maybe the gardens Mohammad saw when he traveled to Damascus. Maybe man wrote the Quran in response to his context.’ You outed yourself as a nonbeliever. Some asshole in Iran has already issued a fatwa against you. You’re a blasphemer, a godless blasphemer,” Reiss reiterated with a little too much enthusiasm. “Even worse, a beardless one.” Mo put his hand to his face and began to laugh as if it were the most natural response to being in the crosshairs of nations, religions. He laughed until tears streamed down his cheeks; he laughed as if he were stoned. “Maybe I should have shaved half my face,” he gasped.
“I’m missing the humor here.”
“I can’t win, in such a ridiculous way that it’s funny. I’m like a child in a custody battle, or, or, the Falkland Islands or something. Whichever way I turn, I’ll have my back to somebody, and so they’ll be offended. People read my face like a text, but the text I wrote, I couldn’t even read.” He was laughing so hard he could barely speak. “I’m laughing because I’m stressed and I’m pissed off and I’m probably on the edge of a fucking nervous breakdown. Is that good enough for you?”
“The Falkland Islands?”
“Never mind, Scott,” Mo sighed. “What do we do?”
The Internet was full of references to him in languages he couldn’t read: Arabic, Urdu, Farsi. What he could read told him that he deserved the death penalty. CNN showed snippets of indignant clerics, marching children, and in Pakistan, a mob burning him in effigy. It wasn’t even a flattering picture.
The crazies he was supposed to keep watch for had broadened beyond Muslim-haters to Muslims who hated him for not being Muslim enough. His mother, on the phone, made no effort to keep the worry from her voice. She wished, she said, that Mo had never entered the competition. “I worked so hard to convince you of your specialness,” she said. “It would have been better to let you think you were ordinary.”
Laila understood Islamist politics, but he hesitated to reach out to her; they hadn’t spoken since the argument at her studio. From pride, from failure to see past the abiding difference between them, he had been unable to apologize. Yet he wanted nothing more than the reassurance of her voice, which would return him, even briefly, to her clear, totalizing presence.
But that voice was behind a scrim now. A mashrabiya. Laila spoke intently, politely, as if he were a client.
“How can I help?