The Submission - Amy Waldman [87]
The shoot had taken place at ROI early on a weekend morning, when Mo was sure no one else would be there. The art director and photographer together demanded that Mo remove his glasses, insisting that the reflected light would make him look ominous. Against his better instincts, Mo complied, although he felt not just blind but naked without them. They seated Mo in front of the drafting table, even though he tried to explain how essential computer-aided design was to modern architecture, and that he didn’t want to trigger a snide reaction from CAD aficionados, especially when he so often used CAD himself, albeit with reservations. But they were hearing none of it: they wanted the cliché or, as the art director put it, the “archetypal architect image.”
The discomfort of that day paled next to what was roiling Mo now. The tagline on the ad read, in bold type meant to be eye-catching, “An Architect, Not a Terrorist.” In smaller print beneath it said: “Muslims like Mohammad Khan are proud to be American. Let’s earn their pride. Brought to you by the Muslim American Coordinating Council.”
Without describing the campaign, Malik had made vague assurances that it would “humanize” Mo. Just the opposite: he felt like a new product being rolled out to market, a product he suspected had significant fund-raising potential for the council. But objectification wasn’t his main concern. Didn’t people skim over little words as they read—verbal joints like “an” or, more to the point, “not”? At a long-ago party hosted by a girlfriend’s parents, an eccentric emeritus professor had given him a card stating FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS and asked him to count the f’s. He had missed three, all of them in the word “of.” He hadn’t liked being shown up—the professor seemed to take a little too much delight in Mo’s blind spots, as if he had single-handedly shattered some stereotype of the smart Indian—and Mo had kept the card for years, in part to have the satisfaction of watching his friends make the same mistake and in part to remind himself always to pay more careful attention.
The point being, if you stripped the little words—the articles, the negative—from the ad’s tagline, only two nouns remained. Architect. Terrorist. Architect-Terrorist: he might as well print new business cards. And he had worried about other architects thinking him a Luddite.
Mo caught Laila’s eye, tried to signal his unease. “What do you think?” he asked in an unhappy voice. She was leaning against the window ledge, her arms folded, watching him.
“I think it will get a lot of attention,” she said reassuringly. “And I think it positions you exactly right—as an American, a proud American.”
How much, at this moment, he regretted having gone to the council for help. Issam Malik had never seemed more of an unctuous phony. Mo faulted Laila for failing to see this, or for ignoring it if she did. And yet when he opened his mouth all that came out was, “I guess I’m still getting used to being a public figure.”
Malik shrugged. “I didn’t find there was much to get used to.”
Laila had a busy afternoon, then a working dinner, so she returned home only late that night. She was asleep before Mo could raise the ad with her.
He barely slept himself. Instead he memorized the fan of her dark hair, the fullness of her mouth,