The Submission - Amy Waldman [30]
Paul hesitated. “Nothing is final yet. We’re doing the due diligence required for any selection.”
“So this is part of that?”
“Yes, yes, this meeting is part of that,” Paul said. Khan’s question gave him room to maneuver.
“But I won.” He picked up his pen and began doodling. No, doodling was what Paul did. Khan was drawing. With great discomfort, Paul saw the bare outlines of the Garden materialize before him; even upside down, there was no mistaking it, the four quadrants, the canals, the walls, the trees—
“There’s no winner until the end of the process. Until the governor signs off.”
Coolly, Khan studied Paul’s face. “But the jury picked my design. It picked the Garden.”
Paul folded. He had to. “It did.”
That shimmer in Khan’s eyes: joy. It vanished behind steel gates. “So what do you need to finalize it?” he asked.
“Well, once the due diligence is complete, the public will weigh in. In fact, as you may have noticed, it already is weighing in.”
Khan didn’t take the bait. “The public,” Paul said again. “Look, we are living in difficult times, strange times—” He broke off. “Why did you enter?” he asked, surprised to be genuinely curious.
Khan looked at him as if he were a feeble old woman. “Because I could.”
“The public,” Paul said, newly fond of this vague, insistent entity, “will want a little more eloquence.”
“Of course,” Mo said, struggling—Paul could see it—to bring accommodation into his face. “My idea felt like it had the right balance between remembering and recovering. I wanted to contribute,” he added, stiffly.
Paul nodded. “As I was saying, the public is already expressing a certain amount of … agitation. Which suggests that I may have a very difficult time raising the funds to get the Garden built. Which would leave you with only a titular victory, and me with no memorial to speak of. Hardly a desirable outcome for either of us. So I’m wondering if we should come at this a little more indirectly. You work for Emmanuel Roi, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps this could proceed under his name. Which would mean you would still be working on it. You would be instrumental. Isn’t that how these practices work anyway?”
Astonishment crossed Khan’s face; anger followed, and stayed. He set down his pen, the gesture all the more unsettling for its deliberateness, and said quietly, “That’s exactly how they work, which is why I entered the fucking competition on my own.”
“So this is about your career,” Paul said.
“I must have missed the question about motives on the competition’s entry form. I want the same credit for my design as any other winner.”
“As I said, there’s no ‘winner,’ per se,” Paul said. “Not until after the public has weighed in. For now there is only the jury’s selection.”
“Fine. The same credit as any selection would get.”
“If what we’ve seen so far is a foretaste of the reaction to come, I’m not sure you’ll want credit. You may come to wish you were still anonymous.”
Khan put his long, tapered fingers to his temples and seemed to swell with irritation. “That’s my problem, isn’t it? Or is that some kind of threat?”
Paul didn’t answer. Instead he tried to summon the list of questions Lanny, after an all-night crash course in Islam, had put together for him: Sunni or Shia? Self-described moderate? Jewish girlfriend? If they had to present a Muslim as the designer, it was critical to probe what kind of Muslim he was.
“Your background … it seems fairly secular,” Paul said. “Is that correct?”
“Why does it matter?”
“Just exploring things. If not secular, I’m sure you would describe yourself as moderate?” The fan overhead twirled in miniature in the bowl of Paul’s spoon.
“I don’t traffic in labels,” Mo said.
“Moderate’s not really a label,” Paul said. “More of an outlook. I’m a moderate myself.”
“Congratulations,” Mo said. His tone had soured. Then he seemed to reconsider. “I’m a Shia Wahhabi, if you must know,” he said.
“I see,” Paul said, taking out a pen. “Do you mind if I write that—”
Khan pushed over a blank piece of paper, waited for Paul to finish writing, then said,