The Submission - Amy Waldman [94]
Never had he been shakier. That rally, the hatred there, gave off a heat as intense as if he had been standing next to the man igniting his face. Mo had tired of the bellicose, lachrymose religion the attack had birthed, was sickened by the fundamentalists who defended it by declaring the day sacred, the place sacred, the victims sacred, the feelings of their survivors sacred—so much sacredness, no limit to the profanity justified to preserve it. But he also wondered if not practicing the religion made him an unsuitable architect for its temple. For the memorial.
He was angry that Paul Rubin wouldn’t give up trying to make him give up; angry at the governor’s impugning of the jury; angry at the jury’s certain cowardice. But mostly he was bone-achingly sad. After fighting with Laila, he packed his suitcase, left her keys on the table, and went to a hotel. Soon after a colleague offered use of her newly vacated, and completely vacant, apartment in Chelsea. It was the baldest possible refuge. Mo’s life had compressed to suitcase, laptop, air mattress, the trinity less of a man hunted than of one being slowly erased.
At work, food, not buildings, was all anyone around him seemed to be discussing: what they’d had for dinner (“Have you ever tried a raw bay scallop? The small ones? Like fucking candy”), where they would go for lunch. It was like discovering sex as an adolescent, his horny mind finding it in every smell and swell, every conversation. He had not realized the degree to which food—planning for it, obtaining it, preparing it, eating it, talking about it, wasting it, fetishizing it, creating it, selling it—made the twenty-first-century American. Before he began the fast, it had seemed magical, even noble, to willfully shun all of that. His rhythm was ever contrapuntal, and he knew fasting would suit him less well in a Muslim country, where it meant conforming, not defying. But it was harder than he expected to be among people who not only weren’t sharing his sacrifice but took no consideration of it.
Throughout the morning his body yowled, his irritability rising as his blood sugar plunged. His piss was the chemical yellow of a traffic signal, so concentrated it almost looked solid. Fearful that his breath stank, he kept covering his mouth with his hand to check it, avoided getting too close to anyone. He could brush his teeth, if he didn’t swallow, but the fasting sent a smell up from his stomach—the acids working on nothing—or from his tongue that brought to mind a dead animal trapped beneath a house.
Thomas stopped by his desk. A group was heading out for sushi. Did Mo want to come?
“No, I’ve got to meet someone,” he said, only to see Thomas’s eyes flicker with doubt: Mo keeping secrets, again. “Laila,” Mo added, a lie to defuse the mistrust. Saying her name out loud was like cutting himself, but he said it again. “Laila.” Pleasure rimmed the pain. His “assistant” listened, as if he didn’t trust Mo, either.
The day’s headache set in soon after, a squatting brute as disinclined to move as Mo’s listless tongue was from the roof of his parched mouth. He went for a walk. Students took exams, soldiers fought wars, presidents ran countries during Ramadan—surely he could handle a walk. He canvassed food trucks as if they were targets, the halal food trucks the worst. It was unthinkable that the proprietors would likely be fasting, too. The smell of grilling meat and spices, the savory smoke pummeled up his nose, as if furious that his mouth was barred. But more than food, he wanted drink—water, a sugary orange soda, anything to lubricate his dry