The Submission - Amy Waldman [93]
Sean had no answer. She went on: “But for me, no architect can create paradise. Only God can. When Muslims think about paradise, the hope we feel about getting there, the exhilaration at the possibility—it’s not about trees, or silks, or jewels, or beautiful women or boys or whatever you’ve been led to believe. It’s about God. God. The description of paradise in the Quran is just a way to convey to our limited imaginations the ecstasy we will feel in God’s presence. That’s what should inspire us to live correctly.”
Sean retraced her words as if he were walking a path trying to find something he had lost. He said the only thing he could think to say, which was, “I’m sorry. Really sorry.”
“You mean it?” she asked warily, suddenly small behind the desk. They were like two children pretending to be adults in their father’s office, although Frank, a firefighter, had never had an office. Zahira’s must have: she was at Columbia.
“I mean it. I’m sorry I pulled your scarf.”
She measured him with pretty, distrusting eyes, then said, “You should say it publicly, then, to send a message to all the people copying you.”
“That’s what Issam Malik wants,” Sean said. She flushed and said quietly, “It’s what I want.”
He chewed his bottom lip for a bit, nodded his assent, then pushed up out of his chair. In their absence, Malik had packed the conference room with reporters, and Sean tried not to be annoyed. He stepped, with Zahira, to a spot ringed with microphones. She smelled of bubble gum, or maybe that was a scent relic of the Dawson girls. Malik planted himself on Sean’s other side.
Sean put his gym bag at his feet and cleared his throat. “I am really sorry I pulled Zahira Hussain’s headscarf, and I told her so,” he said, giving the reporters time to take down his words. “What I did was wrong. If anyone else does it, it’s wrong. My brother, Patrick, he would have been ashamed of me, and I wish I could apologize to him, too.” He had said his brother’s name hundreds, maybe thousands of times since Patrick’s death—“You talk about him more now that he’s gone than you talked to him when he was alive,” his mother once accused—but saying it this time seemed to lift, finally, the weight of that last drunken night.
But almost immediately, a new weight landed. Maybe it was Patrick’s name that spirited Sean to his parents’ living room, where, lacking a home of his own, he would soon return. Seeing himself framed in their television, sandwiched by Muslims, he tried to reconstruct how he had wandered here, to the other side, and he tried to scramble back. “But Patrick also died trying to save people from Islamic terrorists,” he said, “and we will never apologize for not wanting anything Islamic connected to this memorial—not a person, not a design. It’s not personal, not prejudice. Just fact.”
Delight flared in the reporters’ eyes. Outrage fluttered from Malik’s lips. The room convulsed with the rearranging of bodies, furniture, air. Sean heard shouts, then felt rough, unforgiving hands propel him out the door, as if he’d been discovered with a bomb after all. The gym bag came after him. Through it all he kept his mind with his parents. Only at home with them later, watching the replay on television, did he see Zahira Hussain’s anguished face.
16
At 3:00 a.m., Mo woke and reached in the dark for the roast beef sandwich next to his bed. He chewed dutifully, then glugged water and tried to get back to sleep. After a few fitful hours he woke again and dressed for work. Only twelve or so hours until he could eat or drink again.
For five days now, he had been fasting. He was a grain of sand, just one of hundreds of millions of Muslims observing Ramadan—no food, no liquid, no sex from dawn to dusk each day for a month. He made of the period a building, paced from crescent moon to crescent moon; made of each day a room, measured from sunrise to sunset. The predawn meal was a threshold, and for the abstaining hours the mouth a sealed door. But these were an architect’s conceits. The