The Submission - Amy Waldman [88]
Her apartment was on the eighth floor, so the roofs of the neighboring buildings appeared to float above land. The street below sent up, at all times, the noise of sirens and horns and motors, but their sources were unseen, like a river that roars far beneath canyon walls. The roar grew louder; Laila’s eyes opened; she smiled. He twisted his mouth, all he could manage, in return. In the shower he sponged her back and held her to him, cupping her breasts from behind. With the water raining down on them, blocking all sound but its own, they were safe. But she wrestled free.
“Mo, I’ll be late for work.”
Only when she had dressed and was sipping tea and reading a case file did he find his courage.
“Laila, can we talk about the ad campaign?”
“Mmmm?” she said, not putting her papers aside until he said bluntly: “I don’t want to do it.”
Now her attention was on him, intensely so.
“The language makes me uncomfortable—to say I’m ‘not a terrorist’ has the result of connecting me to terrorism.”
“You’re being connected to terrorism already, Mo—every time one of those commercials runs on TV. We can’t even find out who’s paying for them. We’re powerless—the networks laugh off our threat of a boycott because they know we don’t have the numbers. So you need to counter them. At least the MACC ad shows you as an architect, and that’s a visual image that will stay with people.”
“The damage from those commercials has been done,” Mo said. “MACC putting me in a few newspapers isn’t going to undo it. More than that, it’s just not me. I have my way of doing things—there’s a reason I entered the memorial competition instead of making big political statements. And—I know I should have thought of this before I agreed to the ad—but to be out there as part of a MACC campaign identifies me so thoroughly as a Muslim when I’ve been arguing I shouldn’t be defined as one. It looks like I’m trying to have it both ways.”
“Aren’t you?” she said. She got up from the table, knelt beside him, and looked into his face. “Are you ashamed?”
Her grave gaze was hard to meet. “Of course not,” he said, “although I’m not thrilled at becoming a prop in a propaganda war.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? The propaganda’s coming from the people who want to make you a bogeyman. They are creating a climate where dangerous things can happen. The rhetoric is the first step; it coarsens attitudes. Look at the history of Nazi Germany. The Jews thought they were German, until they weren’t. Here they’re already talking about us as less American. Then they’ll say we need containment, and next thing you know we’ll be interned.”
Mo’s mind wandered off for a moment, to photographs he had seen of gardens at Manzanar, the Japanese American internment camp. Its internees had laid rocks, dug pools, even sculpted faux-wood limbs and logs from concrete. Would he have had the same tenacity of spirit? He pictured himself within the confines of a wire-fenced camp, marking off the borders of a small garden, digging its canals, planting its trees—
“Mo!” Laila could tell, even after their brief time together, when he had gone off into what she called his dream space.
“I think you’re exaggerating the threat. I don’t like what all these people are saying, but they have a right to say it. It’s not fair to them to suggest that they’re looking to put us in camps.”
“Not fair to them?” She rose and began to walk a square within the studio. Her boot heels clacked on the floor, vanished into the carpet, then clacked again, as if she were disappearing into a tunnel, then reemerging. “Your mind operates like a kaleidoscope: just shift the view and suddenly everything looks completely different. You’re so frustratingly rational, Mo. Where’s your passion?”
“I have passion for you,” he said haltingly. There