Chapter 5

A year after the attack Mo is pestered by his mother to get married and have children. He is nearing forty and his mother wants him to have a family.

Mo is expecting to be promoted to project director at his architecture firm. Emmanuel Roi, the firm's founder, calls Mo into his office and tells him Percy Storm, some other architect not important to the story, is being promoted. Mo presses for a reason, but comes up empty handed. He wonders if it has to do with his religion.

On the subway, Mo watches four African-American teens throw condoms at passengers. No one says anything except an older black man who yells at them to stop. Mo views this intervention as the man feeling tainted by the action of other blacks.

At home, Mo tells his girlfriend Yuki about the incident. They start to watch Fox New and get into a fight over the ethics of airport security. The fight leads to the two breaking up.

Mo goes to a lecture by Henry Moore, a defense expert, on how to create building to be defensively sound. He is sent to Kabul, Afghanistan on behalf of ROI to compete for designing the new American embassy. After his flight, Mo notices how drab and sad the architecture is. He takes a nap in his rough hotel room. Once he awakes he heads over to the embassy for a debriefing and a tour of Kabul. For dinner they go to a French restaurant where the other architects comment that it's like a Muslim paradise. When one jokes that he's surprised the Muslims aren't "blowing themselves up to get in" another comments, "'Some don't have to'" while looking at Mo.