The Submission - Amy Waldman [149]
His submission, which had seemed so monumental at the time, had turned out to be only a small fragment of the mosaic of his life. From catastrophe—from failure—had come his true path, his life calling, as if all was meant to happen this way. Even as he was still unsure about God’s existence, he counted this God’s will. Or perhaps this was how he made uneasy peace with what had happened.
He looked away from the camera, resting his eyes on a sixteenth-century ceramic bowl from Iznik. The artistry of exquisite objects like these—and his apartment was full of them—had come to express his faith more than any ritual or text, including the text of Islam. He had stumbled into sacrilege all those years ago and found he belonged there. He barely prayed. Months could pass without the urge. His uncertainty had abided all these years and most days barred the way to faith. Only rarely did it seem like faith itself.
Yet these objects were reflections of faith, meant to express divine principles visibly, and so suggest the invisible. Sometimes, studying them, or the complex geometry he spun from computer algorithms, he would sense himself on the edge of something vast, awesome, infinite. Then the feeling would be gone. He didn’t know whether the makers of these objects were merely executing their patrons’ wishes, or had found their way to God, or were looking with their hands, their minds. He wondered the same about himself. If he was ever to find his way to belief, it would not be through fasting, or even through prayer, but through his craft. In the meantime his creations served the belief of others.
“Looking back now, is there anything you would have done differently?” Molly asked.
He kept his eyes on the bowl, its lustrous green glaze. His chest tightened. Over the years he had revisited this question hundreds of times in his head, never arriving at a satisfactory answer.
“I would not have entered,” he said to the camera now. “That was the original mistake—the original sin, perhaps.”
He sounded bitter despite himself. I am bitter, he thought, and, sensing that the words were on the verge of escaping his lips, pressed them shut.
“Everyone’s full of regrets,” Molly said elliptically. Then, as if reading his mind: “Who do you blame?”
“It’s not as if I’ve been tending some enemies list all these years,” Mo said. In fact he had. There were the obvious candidates—Debbie Dawson and Lou Sarge; Governor Bitman; the headscarf puller; that reporter, now a Web doyenne, who from time to time messaged Mo—“Just checking in! Anything new? Alyssa Spier”—as if they were old friends or collaborators.
But more painful were those who should have been on his side, or who began there. Malik and MACC. Rubin. Claire Burwell. All these years later, she was still disappointing and provoking and mystifying to him. Her turn against him had a kind of logic; he could trace the steps, including his own, that had led her there. He had taken her support for granted; he had pushed her too hard. Her turn against the Garden, when absolutely nothing in the design she loved had changed, still defied belief.
“Claire Burwell,” he said, surprised they hadn’t brought her up. “What became of her?”
Her head was covered with a silk scarf the color of one of the sea’s blues, and for half a second Mo saw her as a Muslim. Then he registered her gray skin, the face devastated like the ruins of Kabul. She was sick.
Claire’s voice filled the room. “What did I think of him? I thought he was sanctimonious. Rigid. I guess that made it harder—he wasn