The Submission - Amy Waldman [96]
“That sounds pretty bad,” Sarge said. “It must have been like finding out your brother is the Unabomber.”
“No, that’s not what I meant.”
“And so you came up with this memorial, which has attracted a fair bit of controversy. Tell me, where’d you get the idea?”
Mo was still stuck on the Unabomber comment, wondering if he should try again to rebut it. Too late. “From my imagination,” he said. “I thought a garden would be symbolically resonant as a memorial, given its interplay of life and death and—”
“Got it. So is it, actually, an Islamic garden?”
“It’s just a garden.”
“A martyrs’ paradise?”
“It’s a garden.”
“A jihadi playground?”
“It’s a garden.”
“A joke on the American people?”
“Excuse me? The American people include me.”
“I mean, if I were a Muslim—it hasn’t been an easy couple of years for you, I’m guessing, you know, maybe you’re a little bit peeved, maybe you’re thinking, let’s just slip this in under the radar.”
Mo was so furious at the assertion, and at the kernel of truth it contained, that he couldn’t speak for a moment.
“Mohammad? Oh Mo-ham-mad, are you in there?” Sarge had lowered his voice and leaned in close, as if the two of them were alone in this dark universe, their only audience distant stars. His tone had a soft sympathy, more powerful for being unexpected, and Mo felt strong emotions pressing for expression. What a gift this man had to spin the cotton candy of trust from the sugar of his voice. And yet Mohammad, not Mo—the full name a way for Sarge to remind his listeners that Mo-hammad was everything they feared.
“I wanted to do something for my country,” Mo said. The words came thick, slow, as if they marched in tar. “It’s as simple as that.”
At the commercial break, Sarge downed a Red Bull. Mo turned away. “The honest truth,” Sarge told him, “is that I barely felt a thing the day of the attack, not a fucking thing, although you wouldn’t have known it to listen to the show. You know when you sit too long and your foot goes to sleep? It was like my soul had gone to sleep. I felt like the walking dead, the walking fucking dead. You know what I mean, Mo?” He tilted his head back to stare at the ceiling. “Maybe you should design a memorial to me.”
The show resumed for the callers’ questions, all of them politely parried by a battered Mo, who only later would comprehend the distrust they conveyed.
Mildred in Manhasset: “If you testify in court, will you swear an oath on the Quran?”
“I will do what any American does in court.”
Warren in Basking Ridge, New Jersey: “Do Muslims pray to the same God as we do?”
“Muslims, Jews, Christians, they all pray to one God.”
Ricky in Staten Island: “I just don’t get why you won’t withdraw when it’s clear so many families want you to.”
“The process should be allowed to work as it was meant to.”
“I was just thinking, Mo,” Sarge said when the show was over. They were alone in the studio. The sun, Mo was sure, had set, but the assistant who had brought Sarge an odd fizzy, creamy orange drink had offered nothing to Mo, who was too proud, too wary of this strange chameleon, to ask for anything. “Isn’t it possible,” Sarge continued, “that your subconscious did something with this design that you didn’t intend for it to do? It happens to me all the time. Half the stuff I say on this show shocks me—it comes out and I think, ‘Well, Lou, that’s kind of appalling. ’ But I don’t disown it, do I?”
“Which half?” Mo asked, but Sarge, deep into another soliloquy, didn’t answer.
Claire’s fortieth birthday began with hot chocolate and croissants, brought into the room by William and Penelope after being carried upstairs by Margarita, who hovered in the hall. The children climbed into the bed, snuggled up to her, jabbed her with their small bony limbs. They had made her cards; William’s showed her with a birthday hat like a traffic cone on her head. And there were, for the first time since the Circle Line cruise, drawings of the Garden. Claire had hoped the attachment might fade.
“Are those lollipops?” she asked, pointing to a