The Submission - Amy Waldman [19]
“Of course,” Mo muttered. “Sorry.”
Without saying goodbye he walked out. The envious eyes of his colleagues, sure he had been promoted, tracked him as he headed for the office exit. Their misperception, so soon to be corrected, tightened the clammy grip of humiliation around his throat. Outside his body shivered out of proportion to the temperature, and there was no plane above to account for the roar in his ears.
The memory of the airport interrogation was unpacked, shaken out, stuffed full of straw to make it lifelike once again. There was no evidence Roi hadn’t elevated Mo because he was a Muslim but none against it, either. If he had been singled out once, why not again? Paranoia, no less than plasticine, could be molded.
Crushed into the corner of a subway car one rush hour soon after his non-promotion, Mo watched four black teenagers enter the car and begin tossing unfurled, though thankfully unused, condoms onto the heads of sardined commuters. They withstood their torment with bowed heads until a short African American man in a suit delivered a sharp reprimand—“Stop it, stop it now!”—earning for his trouble only an extra round of rubbers. He left the train soon after but lingered in Mo’s mind. The man had intervened, a sympathetic Mo was convinced, because he felt tainted by the behavior of other blacks.
“But how do you know that’s why he got involved?” Yuki, his girlfriend of the past two months, asked when he told her the story that evening. She was shaving limpid slices of pear with a mandoline. “Maybe he was just being a good citizen.” Mo clutched his foul temper to his chest as if Yuki, with her prettiness and sober wisdom, was trying to take it away.
She had long hair and precision-cut bangs, and favored, in all seasons, miniskirts and expensive trench coats. An architect who had branched into designing architectonic, extremely high-end baby clothes, she confessed on their first date that she didn’t particularly like children. They ate, drank, made love, argued about buildings, and watched television, which was what they were doing later that night when Yuki, in possession of the remote, paused on Fox News.
A studio audience was watching a debate on, as the caption put it, “Should Muslims be singled out for searches at airports?”
“How could anyone defend that?” she asked.
Mo, still peeved, declined to engage. The debate was between Issam Malik, the executive director of the Muslim American Coordinating Council, and Lou Sarge, New York’s most popular right-wing radio host. In the months after the attack he had added the tagline “I Slam Islam” to his show.
“Profiling is illegal, immoral, and ineffective,” said Malik. He resembled George Clooney with darker skin and a neatly trimmed beard.
“Ridiculous!” shouted Sarge. His hair had a black Cadillac’s sheen, his face a stark, powdered pallor. “We should have separate security lines for Muslims to be searched at the airport.”
“The police used to stop African Americans solely for ‘driving while black.’ Now it’s acceptable to single us out for ‘flying while Muslim’?” Malik asked. “And how will you identify the Muslims? Are you going to tattoo us? I am a peaceful, law-abiding American. Why should I get singled out when I have done absolutely nothing wrong?”
“You want us to search little old ladies waiting to board their planes just so Muslims won’t feel bad?” Sarge asked. “Ridiculous!”
“You’re ridiculous,” Yuki said to the screen.
“He’s right,” Mo said.
“What?” Her posy of a mouth parted a little.
“He’s right. We can’t pretend that everyone’s equally dangerous.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying that!” Yuki sputtered. “That means you’d be one of those singled out.”
“So be it—I have nothing to hide. I’m not going to pretend that all Muslims can be trusted. If Muslims are the reason they’re doing