The Submission - Amy Waldman [13]
But when they returned, dragging their heels and cracking their jokes, he told them nothing. His boast of irreligion stayed on his tongue, for what reasons he couldn’t say, any more than he could say why words long unuttered floated unbidden into his mind: La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammad rasulullah. The Kalima, the Word of Purity, the declaration of faith. It almost made him laugh: at the moment he planned to disavow his Muslim identity, his subconscious had unearthed its kernel.
The “interview” ended as capriciously as it had begun. Without explanation, they asked to photograph and fingerprint him. Instead of refusing, as he believed was his right, he allowed them to press down his fingers as if he were a paralytic, an acquiescence that marked off the man who left the room from the one who had entered. At the agent’s physical touch—the hand lifting his—there was a brief flare of fury, an impulse toward violence, then the almost instantaneous checking of it. Returning home, he found that they had pillaged his suitcase: crumpled his precisely folded shirts, unpaired his socks, uncapped his shampoo and toothpaste so that a nebulous ooze coated his toiletries. He upended the suitcase on the bed, dumped the toiletry kit in the trash, kicked the wastebasket to the wall.
But his bitterness was overwhelmed by the magnitude of mourning around him. The city reeled—the air ashy, the people ashen, the attack site a suppurating wound you felt even when you didn’t see it. One night, soon after his return, Mo walked toward the zone of destruction. The moonlight picked out a strange fine dust clinging to leaves and branches; his toe rested on a paper scrap with charred edges. The eternal lights were off in the nearby office towers, as if the city’s animal appetites had been quelled. A quilt of the missing—bright portraits of tuxedoed men and lipsticked women—had been pasted on fences and construction plywood, but the streets were empty, and for the first time in memory, he heard his own footsteps in New York City.
He imagined, couldn’t avoid it, the shaking hands that must have placed each of these photos on a photocopy machine, that roll of blue light, cold, mechanical hope. False hope. The centers of hundreds upon hundreds of webs of family, friends, work had been torn out. It staggered Mo, shamed him. These men who had given vent to their homicidal sanctimony had nothing to do with him, yet weren’t entirely apart. They represented Islam no more than his own extended family did, but did they represent it less? He didn’t know enough about his own religion to say. He was the middle-class Muslim son of an engineer, a profile not all that different from some of the terrorists. Raised in another society, raised religious, could he have become one of them? The question shuddered through him and left an uneasy residue.
Behind a police sawhorse an Indian man in a bedraggled white jacket and black bow tie held a sign: WE ARE OPEN. The man motioned to a tiny restaurant down the block, and although Mo wasn’t hungry, he followed and ordered a sympathy chola. The waiter left him to the cook, who also served, and alone, Mo picked at his chickpeas and naan. Here he could hear himself chew.
What was it he was trying to see? He had been indifferent to the buildings when they stood, preferring more fluid forms to their stark brutality, their self-conscious monumentalism. But he had never felt violent toward them, as he sometimes had toward that awful Verizon building on Pearl Street. Now he wanted to fix their image, their worth, their place. They were living rebukes to nostalgia, these Goliaths that had crushed small businesses, vibrant streetscapes, generational continuities, and other romantic notions beneath their giant feet. Yet it was nostalgia he felt for them. A skyline was a collaboration, if an inadvertent one, between generations, seeming no less natural than a mountain range that had shuddered up from the earth. This new gap in space reversed time.
4
Claire jackknifed into the water, pinned her arms to her sides, and kicked