The Submission Read Online Free PDF Page B

wasn’t in how he was being treated but in how he was behaving. Customarily brusque on work sites, he had become gingerly, polite, careful to give no cause for alarm or criticism. He didn’t like this new, more cautious avatar, whose efforts at accommodation hinted at some feeling of guilt, yet he couldn’t quite shake him.
    Cloistered at the airport, he struggled to maintain his self-respect even as the avatar encouraged obsequiousness. The agents’ questions were broad, trifling, and insinuating; his replies laconic. When they asked where he lived, he told them; when they asked his business in Los Angeles, for the second time, he told them that, too. He regretted, as soon as he made it, his suggestion that they call the client, the chair of the theater’s board of directors. But they didn’t seem interested anyway.
    “There are probably a lot of people we could call about you,” said the agent Mo had labeled Pinball for the way his hands jittered at histhighs. He smiled as he said it, as if to suggest, but not definitively, that he might be joking.
    They asked about his travels in the past few months; asked where he was born.
    “Virginia. Which is in America. Which means I’m a citizen.”
    “Didn’t say you weren’t.” Pinball popped his gum.
    “Do you love this country, Mohammad?”
    “As much as you do.” The answer appeared to displease them.
    “What are your thoughts on jihad?”
    “I don’t have any.”
    “Well, perhaps you could tell us what it means. My colleague here isn’t good with the foreign languages.”
    “I don’t know what it means. I’ve never had cause to use the word.”
    “Aren’t you a practicing Muslim?”
    “Practicing? No.”
    “No?”
    “Yes.”
    “Yes? Yes or no? You’re confusing me.”
    Abbott and Costello in suits. “No. I said no.”
    “Know any Muslims who want to do harm to America?”
    “None. I don’t know any Communists, either.”
    “We didn’t ask about Communists. Do you believe you’d go to your heaven if you blew yourself up?”
    “I would never blow myself up.”
    “But if you did …”
    Mo didn’t answer.
    “Been to Afghanistan?”
    “Why would I go there?”
    They exchanged glances, as if a question as answer was evasion.
    “Coffee?” Pinball asked.
    “Please,” Mo said crisply. “One sugar and a little milk.” The agent standing by the door vanished through it.
    Mo checked his watch: only half an hour until his flight.
    “I do have a plane to catch,” he told the room, which didn’t answer.
    The coffee came black; it was unsweetened. Mo drank it anyway, pausing his answers to take careful sips. He hid his disdain for the bland cuts of their jackets; the openness of their faces, so unquestioning despite all their questions. The artlessness of their interrogation. But when Pinball asked point-blank “Do you know any Islamic terrorists?” Mo couldn’t help but snort in derision.
    “Is that a yes or a no?” Pinball said.
    “What do you think?” Mo snapped, his anger crowning.
    “If I had thoughts I wouldn’t have asked the question,” Pinball said neutrally, and tipped so far back in his chair that only his fingertips, anchored lightly to the desk, saved him from falling. Then, without warning, he rocked forward. The legs of the chair slammed the floor, his hands the desk. His face—the pale fuzz between his eyebrows, the dot of dark blood afloat in his iris—was close enough for Mo to smell the faint cinnamon on his breath. The move, so carefully calibrated, so casually executed, must have been practiced. Here was the art, and Mo could have done without it.
Pop pop pop
went the gum. Mo’s legs quivered as if he had dodged three bullets.
    “No,” he said with forced politeness. “No, I don’t.”
    “Try harder, Mohammad.”
    “I’ve done nothing,” he told himself. “I’ve done nothing.”
    “Excuse me?”
    Had he murmured aloud? “Nothing,” he said. “I said nothing.”
    No one spoke. They waited. In