Read Online The Submission by Amy Waldman - Free Book Online

disabled, showing the history of their experience in America, that Mo had largely designed. As with many architects, his empathy was selective. Put him behind a man navigating a Manhattan sidewalk in a wheelchair, and Mo would curse the obstruction. But pose a paraplegic’s plight as a design problem, and Mo would climb into his wheelchair, feel the deadweight of his limbs. For the museum, he had taken inspiration from mountain switchbacks, their giddy sense of ascension, to create a series of ramps that crisscrossed up the building’s interior, offering unexpected vistas inside and out.
    Now he played with the problem of urban security: Would you want buildings that advertised how safe they were or that made you forget your fear? It was easy to laugh off Crusader crenellations or moats; harder to see if they possessed anything adaptable. A barrier of water would make for a more pleasing setback than a concrete plaza. A zigzag approach, with views framed within walls, could make arriving a visual adventure. These thoughts he kept to himself.
    “Don’t you think if you create more hard targets, they’ll just move on to softer ones?” one of the few women in the room asked. “Are we going to armor everything?”
    “It’s not armor,” Henry said. “It’s smart building.”
    He flashed a slide of a row of conifers that formed a verdant border between a sterile plaza and a generic office building.
    “Cypress trees,” Henry said. “They’re very good at absorbing the kinetic energy of a blast. Strong trunks, leaves like scales—they hold tight. And they don’t look … sinister. Think of them as a line of defense.”
    “Is our government going to pay for all this?” The architect spoke aggressively. “I mean, if we have to add barriers and shatterproof glass and cypresses? Unless you can prove there’s going to be a terrorist attack next week, no developer’s going to put money into it.”
    “This is about
preventive
architecture,” Henry said.
    “Yes, preventing creativity.” There were chuckles.
    “When I think of all the money I pissed away learning how to make buildings inviting …”
    “There’re bloody cameras everywhere now—isn’t that enough?”
    “Maybe we should just get rid of public spaces,” said the man who had suggested banning backpacks.
    “Or get rid of Muslims, for that matter.”
    “Now, now,” Henry chided.
    Mo stared out the window. The sun, in the gray sky, looked like it had been sunk in dirty water.
    From London, Mo was to go on to Kabul, where ROI was competing to design a new American embassy. Over beers, Mo and Thomas had dissected Roi’s decision to dispatch Mo, but they arrived at no conclusion, only a drunkenness harmful to Thomas’s marital harmony. Their theories included the following: Roi was compensating for not promoting Mo by sending him on an international junket that included a free trip to London, where the counterterrorism seminar was meant to buff the firm’s credentials; Roi was punishing Mo by sending him to Kabul; Roi was trying to enhance the firm’s odds of getting to design an embassy in a Muslim country by sending a Muslim, or trying to ensure they wouldn’t get the commission by sending a Muslim.
    “He wants to prove he doesn’t consider you a liability,” Thomas said. “Or, more cynically, maybe in this case he thinks you’re an asset.”
    “What, with my special insight into the terrorist mind?”
    After wondering whether he should tell Roi to fuck himself, Mo decided to take the assignment, mostly to escape smug Storm Trooper. But also because he wanted to see, up close, the kind of Muslim he had been treated as at LAX: the pious, primitive, violent kind. In asking, “Been to Afghanistan?” those agents had foretold his future.
    Mo dozed off on the flight between Dubai and Kabul. He awoke to see a white woman across the aisle wriggling a long tunic over her fitted T-shirt and draping a scarf over her head. The massive brown