The Submission - Amy Waldman [25]
“The Post?” Paul warbled.
“Yes, the New York Post. They’re saying a Muslim has won the memorial competition. You told me—”
“The Post?”
“You told me there wasn’t a winner yet, Paul.” He sounded wounded. “I told the whole press corps that. I look completely out of the loop.”
“How you look is fairly low on my list of priorities right now, Lanny. Let me call you back.”
How had the Post gotten it? he wondered as he threw an overcoat over his pajamas. Didn’t that reporter—Spier—work for the News? Someone else must have leaked, or the original leaker had gone to another paper … he was trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle on its back. Edith replied only with a drowsy grunt when asked if she had seen his glasses, his misplacing and her recovering of them a forty-year routine she was disinclined to enact at this hour. He gave up, pulled on his shoes, and speed-walked to the nearest newsstand, seeing Khan’s face before him. Halfway there it occurred to him he could have just switched on the computer. Old habits die hard, hardly die, but more than that: he needed to hold his calamity in his hands.
He reached the newsstand. There it was and going fast—the paper the Post, the author Alyssa Spier, and the photo of an unidentifiable man in a balaclava, scary as a terrorist. The headline: MYSTERY MUSLIM MEMORIAL MESS.
As usual, the Pakistani news vendor at Mo’s corner was framed by the plush bosoms of a dozen white women and the buttocks of a few black women, all of them blooming from the fronts of glossy magazines. Today the vendor had his feather duster out and was sweeping the city grit from his candy rows. As Mo smiled, half in appreciation, half in amusement, his glance chanced on the stack of New York Posts below. His heart began hammering so audibly, or so he imagined, that he put his hand on his chest to muffle it. The vendor, thinking it a greeting, put his hand on his chest in return and said, “Asalamu alaikum.”
“Alaikum asalam,” Mo replied, the words foreign and rubbery on his lips. He snatched up the paper. Inside, the words ADDING ISLAM TO INJURY? blared over a picture of the rubbled attack site. His trembling hand ransacked his pocket for change, then foisted a five-dollar bill on the vendor. Mo read as he walked, heedless of the sidewalk’s jostle and cuss. An outsider might have wondered what news of the day could be so smiting to render him blind, deaf, mute, and stupid enough to wander into a New York crosswalk, then pause to read, letting the crowd flow around him like water around a boulder.
A Muslim had won. But no one knew who—
A taxi’s blaring horn pitched him from crosswalk to sidewalk. He stood shaking with exhilaration. There were five thousand submissions. Other than a confirmation months back that his entry had been received, he hadn’t heard a word. But a Muslim had won. It had to be him.
He taped the Post cover to his bathroom mirror that night, only to find the man in the balaclava looking back at him with cold, hard eyes. Executioner’s eyes. Mo couldn’t find himself in that picture, which was the point. The next day he enlarged his submission photo and pasted it on top of the Post picture. With the ugliness covered, he could pretend it was gone.
7
There were no buildings, no roads, only burning dunes of debris. His brother, Patrick, was somewhere here and Sean was conscious of wanting, a little too much, to be the one to find him, and of fearing he might not recognize him if he did. They hadn’t seen each other in months, and Sean kept trying to call up Patrick’s face, only to realize, as they came upon damaged bodies, that the faces of memory and death might not match.
Hours passed. Days. He couldn’t breathe well, couldn’t hear well—some new kind of underwater, this. Movie-set lights glared overhead, but the only true light came from the other searchers. Often, obscured by smoke, hidden by piles of rubble, the rescuers were only voices, but that was enough. Every time he put out a hand to take or to give, another was there, waiting.