The Submission (6 page)

There were no buildings, no roads, only burning dunes of debris. His brother, Patrick, was somewhere here and Sean was conscious of wanting, a little too much, to be the one to find him, and of fearing he might not recognize him if he did. They hadn’t seen each other in months, and Sean kept trying to call up Patrick’s face, only to realize, as they came upon damaged bodies, that the faces of memory and death might not match.

Hours passed. Days. He couldn’t breathe well, couldn’t hear well—some new kind of underwater, this. Movie-set lights glared overhead, but the only true light came from the other searchers. Often, obscured by smoke, hidden by piles of rubble, the rescuers were only voices, but that was enough. Every time he put out a hand to take or to give, another was there, waiting. With time came a mappable order: the remains here, the personal effects there, the demolished cars beyond, the red sifters and the yellow ones, the tents and roster areas and messes and medics, the assembly line, a world more real to Sean than the city outside. Returning to Brooklyn each night was like coming home from war, except that it no longer felt like home. It amazed him what people talked about and what they didn’t, how clean their fingernails were, how pristine their routines. His wife told him he smelled like death, and he couldn’t believe this repulsed her. The dust he brought home was holy—he shook out his shoes and his shirt over newspapers to save it.

Nearly two years later, the attack site was a clean-swept plain. Across the river in Brooklyn, the Gallagher house prickled with the energy of a campaign. Ten members of Sean’s family and as many of his Memorial Support Committee were crammed around the table, all its Thanksgiving leaves in use. Copies of the
Post
splayed under legal pads and two laptop computers. The poster board had been hauled out, the Marks-A-Lot marshaled for duty. Sean’s mother, Eileen, and his four sisters cleared empty plates and refilled coffee cups with grim efficiency.

Frank, Sean’s father, was on the phone with a reporter: “Yes, we plan to fight this until our last breath. What? No, sir, this is not Islamophobia. Because phobia means fear and I’m not afraid of them. You can print my address in your newspaper so they can come find me.” A pause. “They killed my son. Is that reason enough for you? And I don’t want one of their names over his grave.” Another pause. “Yes, we found his body. Yes, we buried him in a graveyard. Jeez, you’re really splitting hairs here. It’s the spot where he died, okay? It’s supposed to be his memorial, not theirs. Is there anything else? I’ve got a long line of calls to take …”

A voice from below: “You heard anything, Sean?” Mike Crandall was stretched out on the floor, his back having given out again. Retired from the fire department, he never missed a meeting, although sometimes Sean wished he would. His committee was a motley crew of former firefighters, along with the fathers of dead ones.

“Nothing,” Sean said. He hated to say it. He was supposed to be the one with the lines into the governor’s office, to Claire Burwell. That those lines had gone dead convinced him, suspicious of power by nature, that the story was true, and to his shame this relieved him. A Muslim gaining control of the memorial was the worst possible thing that could happen—and exactly the rudder Sean, lately lacking one, needed. Catastrophe, he had learned, summoned his best self. In its absence he faltered.

The decade prior to the attack had been a herky-jerky improvisation,
a man lurching wildly through the white space of adult life. Each bad choice fed off the last. He cut up in school, dropped out of junior college. Absent other options, he started a handyman business. He drank because he hated bending beneath the sinks of people he’d grown up with. And because he liked to drink. He married because he was too tanked to think straight, then fell out with his parents over his marriage.

Five months before the attack, Sean got a little sloppy, a little loud, over dinner at Patrick’s, or maybe he was lit when he arrived. He roared about their parents’ dislike of his wife, Irina; he cursed profusely, creatively, when he dropped a bowl of soup. A stony Patrick pocketed his car keys and drove him home, and when Sean went to retrieve his beat-up Grand Am the next day, Patrick intercepted him outside and told him not to come around for a while. “You can’t just expect people’s respect,” Patrick said, by way of saying Sean had lost his. To this day Patrick’s three children treated him with the politeness of fear.

On that insultingly beautiful morning, though, Sean’s first thought was of Patrick, whose engine company wasn’t far from the site. Sean raced to his parents’ house, trying not to be hurt that they seemed surprised to see him, then went with his father to look for Patrick. Someone else found him, which was probably just as well, but Sean didn’t leave. Not that day, not for the next seven months. When he was kicked off the actual recovery crews because he wasn’t police or fire or construction, he worked around the edges, helping organize a protest to keep the firefighters working in the hole; forming a committee to agitate for more space for the memorial. He got the acreage doubled. His “trouble with authority,” as parents and teachers had always termed it, had become an official advantage. Soon he was giving speeches all over the country—most often in the small towns no one else wanted to visit—to Rotary Clubs and Kiwanis Clubs and police and firefighter and veterans’ organizations, all of them eager for a firsthand account of the rescue and recovery. In his head as in his speeches, even his derelictions became proof of devotion. “For seven months, every single day, I went to the hole,” he told the crowds who
gathered to hear him. “I lost my marriage”—always murmurs at this point—”I lost my career, I lost my home, but that’s nothing.” A pause. “My brother—my only brother—lost his life.” Sometimes people would break into inadvertent applause at this, which was awkward. Sean learned to lower his eyes until it stopped.

Even returning home to live with his parents after he and Irina split seemed right. Their modest Brooklyn Victorian had always been carefully tended—Eileen knew how to husband scarce resources—but by the time Sean moved in, the paint was peeling, the doors squeaking, a mouse leaving brazen shit. Sean, without asking, fixed, cleaned, cleared, painted, sanded, oiled, caulked, trapped. Put his hands to good use. Took down all the family pictures in the hall and replaced them with pictures of Patrick. Eileen, who’d always given Sean, the youngest of six, a threadbare mothering, warmed.

But then he was left off the memorial jury. The requests for him to speak tapered off, as if the country was moving on without him. In the movies Sean watched, redemption was a possession never lost once obtained. In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid. The old him kept popping up, often in his mother’s eyes. In recent months she’d reverted to her brusque self, telling him to make his bed, which grated doubly because it was the twin of his childhood. His father kept calling him by Patrick’s name, and Sean didn’t have the heart to correct him, though Eileen, acidly, did. And Sean’s “contracting” business, which he’d tried of late to restart, felt like a suit he’d outgrown without money for a new one. Two days earlier, he had stalked off a job installing IKEA shelves after the housewife who hired him asked if he would carry her garbage down to the street at the end of the day. “Do you know who I am?” he had wanted to scream at her, but the true answer burned. He was a handyman living with his parents.

Alyssa Spier watched, transfixed, as her Mystery Muslim scoop entered the news cycle and rolled forward, crushing every other minor
story before it. By noon she was booked on three television news programs and had done four radio interviews.

She sat in a chair, waiting to be made up, next to a local anchorman who was complaining that the foundation color being applied diluted his tan. As the makeup artist turned her attentions to Alyssa, who had no tan to dilute, the anchor began to practice saying “Muslim”—”the
New York Post
is reporting that a Muslim has been selected”—with just the right note of ironic surprise on the first syllable. “The jury’s not talking, but stay tuned,” he continued in a confiding tone that masked that he had nothing to confide. The TV lights glinted off the gel in his tight curls like sunlight on a river.

Every politician was talking about her news, or avoiding talking about it. “I’m not going to comment on unconfirmed reports,” the mayor said on NY1. He’d been a brawler of a politician in his youth but had mellowed into a civic paterfamilias. “Right now I’m more concerned about unauthorized leaks—which may not even be true—from what’s supposed to be a closed process. The last thing we need is the press anointing itself a juror.”

Even as he insisted he wouldn’t comment on hypotheticals, he couldn’t help adding: “There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a Muslim. It all depends what kind of Muslim we’re talking about. Islam is a religion of peace, as I’ve said many times. The problem is that some people haven’t gotten that message …” It wasn’t clear whether “some people” referred to the violent Muslims or to people who slandered the peaceful ones.

Alyssa returned to the newsroom between interviews and found herself mobbed by happy editors and ignored by dour reporters. “This story has more legs than the Rockettes!” Chaz, her new editor, crowed, flipping channels and announcing drinks in her honor. She couldn’t quite believe her change in fortune. Two days earlier she had been a
Daily News
reporter with a radioactive scoop her boss didn’t want to run. Now she was a
New York Post
reporter whose reporting was the talk of the town, maybe even the country.

Fred, her editor at the
News
, had blocked the story. She needed a
second source, he said, then before she could find one he deployed her to investigate cost overruns on repairs to the George Washington Bridge. His newfound editorial probity irked her—he never asked for a second source, which was why the paper’s reputation had declined during his tenure. Her whiny first source kept calling to ask when the story was coming out. She kept stalling, fearful he would give it to someone else, unsure how to hold him off. She’d already bought him dinner at Balthazar, complete with the seafood tower. That alone was enough to get her expenses flagged. “They’ll pick someone else and then it will be too late,” he kept warning. “You won’t have a story.”

She cajoled, she flattered, all the while thinking, What’s his agenda? She needed motives to test for untruths, vulnerabilities to extract the next nugget. Had he gotten a kickback from another applicant? Did he have a thing against Muslims? Did the chairman shit on him, and he wanted revenge? Or did he relish the drama he would cause? Everyone liked to give history a little twist when they could.

“I’m going to lose the story,” she told Fred. “We’re going to lose it. My source is getting impatient.”

“Manage him,” Fred said. He swallowed his words with the banana he was eating. It sounded like he had said “Massage him.” He went on: “Handling sources is an art.” He made her feel it was her own failure.

When she called her source to stall yet again, he said, “This is ridiculous. I’m going to the
Post
with it.” No, she thought, I am. She asked Sarah Lubella, an old acquaintance there, to broker a meeting with the paper’s editor.

“I’ve got a great story—I promise,” Alyssa said.

“So why won’t your paper run it?” Sarah asked, miffed at not knowing the story she didn’t have and not having the story she didn’t know.

“They’re scared,” Alyssa said. “Under pressure.”

“But if you do this you can’t go back to the
News.
Can you handle coming to work for the lowly
Post
?” Her cracked-leather voice testified to thirty years of overflowing ashtrays in the overcrowded press rooms of a pre-smoke-free New York.

Alyssa had always looked down on the
Post
, just as she knew the
Times
reporters looked down on her. But this wasn’t the first time that Fred had screwed her. His newfound caution wasn’t an asset for a tabloid editor, but it was his clubbishness that she couldn’t stand. He and Paul Rubin were friends, she knew. Alyssa had made her way from a depressed river town upstate. She didn’t have those kinds of friends.

It had taken her a long time to get to New York City, which was where she had always imagined herself. During her exile in the wilderness of nowhere America—Brattleboro, Duluth, Syracuse, backwaters too much like her birthplace—she had the strange, horrible sense that things were not going as planned, even though she told everyone they were exactly what she had planned. By the time she got to the
Daily News
, eleven years and eight rungs later, she had her own measure. She wasn’t a good enough writer for the blue-blood papers, nor was she interested in their stodgy, mincing version of news. A tabby all the way—that’s what she was. She had no ideology, believed only in information, which she obtained, traded, peddled, packaged, and published, and she opposed any effort to doctor her product. The thrill every time she unearthed a scrap of news and held it up for the public’s inspection was as fresh as the first time, when she’d confronted her high-school principal with the rumor—she played it like fact—that a teacher was being investigated for pocketing bake-sale money. Shock, fear, appeasement moved like clouds across his face, and she saw that she could make the weather. She also could get larcenous geometry teachers transferred to other school districts.

The editor, the chairman, their whole titled, entitled tribe were different, faithful to the truth only until it inconvenienced their clique. So she had defected, and the consequences of that defection were raining down upon the city. Relatives’ Rumination, a journalistic genre that had evolved over the preceding two years, was in full gear. Every reporter had a digital Rolodex of widows and widowers, parents and siblings of the dead, who could be called for a quote on the issue of the day: the state of the site, the capture of an attack suspect, the torture of said suspect, compensation, conspiracy theories, the anniversaries of the attack (first one month, then six months,
then yearly), the selling of offensive knickknacks depicting the destruction. Somehow the relatives always found something to say.