The Submission - Amy Waldman [20]
“We know who the enemy is!” Sarge was saying, or rather exclaiming. “Let’s stop walking around like the emperor has clothes! He’s naked! Radical Islam—naked radical Islam—is the enemy.”
Mo got up from the sofa, switched off the television—knowing that, in the sedate precincts he and Yuki inhabited, this amounted to declaring war—and went into the kitchen for a beer. A Muslim drinking to cope with the stress of being a Muslim: he wasn’t sure who would get the joke.
“I think we’re on the same side,” Yuki said when he returned from the kitchen.
“And what side is that?”
“The right side. What’s the problem here, Mo?” What was the problem? He knew he was being deliberately contrarian, but something in the easy comfort of her outrage made him bristle.
“You’re a hypocrite, to start,” he said. “After accusing me of presuming to know how the black man on the train felt, you’re presuming that because I’m Muslim I’ll feel a certain way about how Muslims should be treated.”
“I’m not presuming anything except that you don’t want some security agent’s hand down your pants because your name’s Mohammad. Am I wrong?”
She wasn’t, which made him argue all the harder. “It’s patronizing, that attitude. You can’t pretend Islam isn’t a threat.”
“If I thought Islam was a threat, I wouldn’t be dating you,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means what it sounds like it means.”
“What—that your dating me is conditional on your approval of my religion?”
“That’s not what I said, but for the record I happen to think Islam is a very cool religion.”
“Oh, so dating a Muslim turns you on?”
“Mo! What’s gotten into you?”
They fought on, or rather Mo threw verbal punches and Yuki put up her hands until her arms tired.
“I don’t care that you’re Muslim, Mo, but I do care that you’re an asshole,” she said, and he knew they had reached their end.
The animated characters beetled around a plaza outside an office building until the camera zoomed in on a dark-skinned cartoon man with a beard and backpack, and—
BOOM! The sound of the bomb blast was so loud and sudden that a few people jerked in their seats. The screen went black and when it came back up, the figures were animated no longer because they were dead. The lights came on, revealing the banner DESIGN AGAINST TERRORISM along one wall and a roomful of architects, Mo among them.
“So how do you think we could reduce the risk?” asked the British counterterrorism expert leading the seminar. His name was Henry Moore, which had evoked sad, wry smiles from some of his pupils. His skin was the texture of a shepherd’s-pie crust, his teeth surprisingly excellent.
“Stop invading other countries,” one man muttered.
“Search everyone—that’s what they do in Israel.”
“Ban backpacks.”
“But those aren’t really … architectural solutions,” Henry said.
“Shatterproof glass,” said a brownnoser. “And truck barriers, obviously.”
“Great. Anything a little more … creative?”
Silence. Henry began with history—Crusader castles, high atop plateaus; moated cities—then moved to modern times: mammoth planters and giant benches artfully arrayed; a Richard Serra sculpture (“defensive art”); serpentining access roads with subtle security checkpoints; schools whose baffled windows made them look like prisons; false windows. Beauty and safety were not incompatible, he lectured, although he showed few examples to prove it. Which only goaded Mo to prove it himself. He worked best with design constraints. ROI had won multiple awards for a museum for the disabled, showing the history of their experience in America, that Mo had largely designed. As with many architects, his empathy was selective. Put him behind a man navigating a Manhattan sidewalk in a wheelchair, and Mo would curse the obstruction. But pose a paraplegic’s plight as a design problem, and Mo would climb into his wheelchair, feel the deadweight of his limbs. For the museum, he had taken inspiration from mountain switchbacks, their giddy sense of ascension, to create a series of ramps