The Submission - Amy Waldman [127]
“If it will ease your worries, I’ll find it unsuitable without saying why. I’m the governor,” she added. “I’m allowed to pronounce.”
“Queens pronounce,” Paul said. “Governors explain.”
A black look came at him. “Fine. The plants will die, and that will be depressing. Is that reason enough for you?”
“The reasoning has to be defensible in court,” Harold said. He held his polished glasses up to the light to scrutinize them for scratches. This allowed him to avoid Bitman’s eyes. “The state and city will be responsible for maintaining the memorial, so if the plants die, it will be our fault, not the design’s—”
Her smile chilled him into silence. She examined the faces around the room, then, as if disappointed, stared at her outstretched hands. She looked up with a glance that seemed to swallow all of them at once. “So it’s a lawsuit we’re worried about, correct? Being sued by Khan?”
“Absolutely,” said Harold. “If we deny him his memorial and he sues—”
“I will have to testify about why I vetoed his design—”
“Yes, and—”
“Remind me why that’s so terrible?” She winked at Paul, and he could see her imagining herself on the stand, in a trial covered by every news outlet in the country, defending her defense of the memorial site, of America itself, from the Islamist threat. Even if the state lost, she would win. Every time she had gone on the offensive against Khan she had risen in the polls. He was her oxygen.
22
Asma awoke before the sun. The darkness flowed around her like water, filling every hole and crevice of her body: her nostrils, the indent between her lips, the dip between her breasts, the concavity of her belly, the gap between her legs, the cracks between her toes. Her mind flew to Bangladesh, as if to prepare. With dawn the call to prayer would vibrate through her. Inam’s mother would rise to make tea for his father, or more likely Asma would be making the tea for both of them, listening for the roosters and the rickshaws, and in monsoon season, the pounding of the rain, dancing feet on the roof.
Here she heard only an occasional car and her own breath: in out in out. She focused on it until she became only breath, felt that she could just float away. Her bones alone held her down, pinned her in place. They and the boy next to her. His breath—softer, shallower—sounded, too. For a few seconds she held her own breath, silencing the dirge of her life to hear the song of his.
She was almost packed. She had only to place Abdul’s clothes and toys in the carry-on bag. Her suitcases and boxes were lined up by the door. Her expensive new pots and pans. Her television and DVD player and video camera. She had tried to fit a whole country, the idea of a country, in her luggage: Nike shoes; T-shirts with Disneyland and the White House and all the places she had never been; glossy magazines and American flags; history books; tourist brochures. MetroCards she would never use, children’s books she could not read. DVDs of American movies and television shows, even though the pirated versions in Bangladesh would be cheaper. As Bangladeshis had created a Little Bangladesh here, she would create for herself and Abdul a Little America back home.
It was her choice to go, and yet not. In the days since her exposure as an alien, politicians had whipped the public into a frenzy of fear over the thousands of untracked Bangladeshi Muslims in New York, starting with Asma’s own dead husband. “I’ll ask it, even if no one else will,” Lou Sarge proclaimed on his show. “What was her husband doing in those buildings, anyway?” The governor invoked the attack: “I feel for Asma Anwar, but she represents a serious problem. When we don’t watch who’s coming through our open door, thousands of Americans die. I won’t let that happen again while I’m leading this state.” She demanded that the federal government comb the Bangladeshi community for illegals and for terrorist links.
“Next door, upstairs, there are illegals everywhere,” Nasruddin said. “The whole building could go. Half the neighborhood.