The Submission - Amy Waldman [150]
“Do you go to the memorial?”
“Never. I went to the dedication, then never returned. A Garden of Flags? Hideous. As ugly as the whole process. And with all the infighting, picking a whole new jury, soliciting new designs—by the time it got built I’m not sure anyone cared. I was so sick of the whole thing, and it was my husband’s memorial! And so many more Americans ended up dying in the wars the attack prompted than in the attack itself that by the time they finished this memorial it seemed wrong to have expended so much effort and money. But it’s almost like we fight over what we can’t settle in real life through these symbols. They’re our nation’s afterlife.”
“Have you ever told Mohammad Khan how you feel?”
“No, no, I haven’t. It was just too, too—”
He leaned forward in his seat, awaiting her next words, then realized he was still being filmed. “Please, turn that off,” he told the cameraman, who started in surprise, as if he had imagined himself invisible.
“Why not?” Molly was asking Claire. “Why did you never contact him?”
“Oh, I don’t know. His design would have been so much better than what we ended up with, and I did come to believe that we were in the grip of some frenzy, possessed almost, at that time. I felt like little by little I was pushed—by him among others—until I found myself on the other side of a line I hadn’t wanted to cross. But then he went abroad and began working for whichever Muslim ruler would pay him, and again—I didn’t know what he was about. So even though I wanted to apologize, I must have felt conflicted because whenever I would start to write to him, I could never find the right words.”
“How about ‘I’m sorry’?”
Mo laughed aloud at Molly’s assertiveness. On-screen, Claire laughed, too. “Yes, you’re right. Sometimes simpler is better, right? I’m sorry. Not sure why I felt I needed more than that. Except for never being entirely sure I was sorry. There were times, I’ll admit it, when I still thought he should apologize to me, to all the families for asking them to operate on trust when he refused to give us any reason to trust him. It was the hardest part of all for me, really discerning what I felt. So many people—the dead, the living—were telling me what to do. I thought—I thought I finally knew myself, that I was casting off what I was supposed to be. I guess I haven’t lost all of that confusion.” She looked off into the distance, at what he couldn’t see. The screen went to black.
They sat in silence for a few moments. Molly asked if they could turn the camera back on, finish the interview. He nodded, although he wasn’t in the mood for much more.
“Do you still think about the Garden? Did you keep the design in your head?”
Mo smiled. “You could say I never stopped thinking about it.”
“We have something to show you,” Molly told Claire.
Mohammad Khan ghosted on the giant screen on her living room wall. Gray threaded his hair; the high white wall he was approaching dwarfed him. He passed through a towering steel door cut with elaborate fretwork, then bent to pick a stray leaf off the path. Before him spread a garden, governed by strict geometry.
Claire had seen it only on paper, only in miniature. Yet she had no doubt about what was before her.
“I don’t understand,” she said to Molly. “The Garden. But how? I don’t understand.”
“It’s the private pleasure garden of some rich Muslim